>in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to expect the bulk of students' learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures.
I'm about to graduate a 4-year Computer Science program. It hasn't generally been necessary in any classes so far to get additional information outside the lectures from the textbooks for me, besides in one online class where there were no lectures, or an instance where the specifics of the virtual machine's language you had to write a compiler for were specified in the textbook - written by the teacher, but free digitally from the campus library, so no big objection in that instance aside from that not being mentioned in the syllabus, and that he could've just put all that in the text file where all the lab-section assignments were defined. But back on track, the general learning of the concept of compilation/parsing/etc occurred in class, and you applied it there. Your notes and the task description were enough.
>Expecting students to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.
Posting the notes online is great and often necessary, as it was in my algorithms class last semester where long algorithm pseudocode was in the notes, but the way the class worked was that everything was explained in-class, with the premade notes plus running trough things on the chalk board, and only what was in the notes was what you were responsible for. It was an effective format.
>save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.
People asked questions if they had any, and more explanation would follow, and it wasn't a problem. Taking notes on paper while listening to the lecture in real time has been shown to be very effective compared to alternatives, so using lecture time on that is probably better than leaving any concepts to be learned primarily by textbook reading.
>students can learn at their own pace.
Lecture notes being posted beforehand, as it was in that algorithms class, works for people who feel they're struggling and need to read over the notes before class, and the notes are always there later if you need to review something. Though, the student will have to resist not writing notes just because the notes are already there - aside from the audio-to-paper process's effectiveness in learning, additional explanation/metaphores/comments will be given, especially in response to questions asked. I've almost never seen it be the case that one person holds up a class with questions everyone else knows the answer to - often many others were wondering the same thing, or the answer adds more even if you thought you already knew everything about that specific point. I also think enforcing a certain pace is good - it's happened that I've read on subjects on my own and forgot parts due to going "too fast," but that's never happened in a college class, so it seems like a tradeoff of classes feeling annoyingly slow sometimes.