Professor is upset about student comments about her lectures. What should I do?
What should I do?
Honestly? I suggest that you sympathize courteously, but do nothing else:
- She's a grown woman and an experienced academic, she doesn't need you to handle frustrations from student feedback.
- You (likely) no longer work at the same university as her.
- You're not a close personal friend of hers.
- You don't have a good idea of what actually goes on in her classes these days, nor what the student body is like overall.
- It is generally the case that students don't complain repeatedly and en masse about a course just for the sake of complaining and regardless of anything else. There's probably something that's wrong with the course (perhaps not even with her behavior) that you just don't know about.
An alternative to doing nothing would be: Suggest that she ask a relevant question here on academia.stackexchange.com. We could obtain more information which you don't have rather than help her via a third party.
Some comments about the situation first (even though you have not explicitly asked about this):
Let me rephrase what you wrote slightly: if the teacher gives the students all relevant infos beforehand they see no need to come to the lecture anymore; the only way to get students to come to the lecture is by explicitly holding back information, and then the students (rightfully) complain.
There is an uncomfortable truth hidden in these items of feedback - perhaps the lectures as they are given now are useless? Note that this does not necessarily mean that your collaborator does something wrong (although this may be the case), but I have found some materials are just not optimally taught in lectures. If the lectures are perfectly replaceable by podcasts or just reading the slides, then what's wrong with that? Give the students the material in advance, don't do a lecture, use the in-class time for exercises or quizzes, or re-structure the entire course and have less in-class time in general.
I know she's upset + it's directly impacting her medium-term happiness based on what she wrote on social media. However I have not talked to her about it. Should I?
That really depends on how close you are, what your relationship looks like, and if you are in a position to give advice on teaching-related matters. If you only know her situation from social media I would venture that the answer is probably "no".
If so, what can I say? Both problems look generic enough that other lecturers must've dealt with them before. How?
Something based on what I wrote above. However, as I said, this can come across as somewhat patronising and offensive, so I would not suggest giving her any feedback unsolicited, especially if you are not close or already a mentor to her. Especially note that there are a number of people who just like to use social media to vent - don't take a few random social media posts as ground truth that there is something terrible going on in her professional life that you need to help her fix.
This one is a piece of cake.
Have her create two sets of slides.
- Lecture slides - slides with less info so she doesn't read from her slides and with more graphics for the spacial/visual learners out there
- Notes slides - slides with everything that she talks about on them that she can read off in front of the class.