This week Steve Pavlina made an interesting (and popular) post in his personal development blog. He claims that people can improve their productivity via speed listening. By increasing the speed on audio material, you can finish a lecture in half the time. Here's a blurb:

"You should have no trouble comprehending spoken audio material at 1.4x speed. And after a few minutes you'll probably be able to handle 2x with no loss of comprehension, which will cut your audio learning down to half the time. Once you get used to 2x, keep nudging the slider to higher speeds until you can no longer handle the distortion. Then try to increase it again after a few minutes. Of course if there are real-time exercises to do, you can always reduce the speed to normal for those portions."

I think this tactic may be helpful to a certain extent (i.e. your audio instructor speaks unbearably slowly and you turn up the speed just a bit). But, in most cases I think that messing with the speed dial can cause trouble.

My husband once tried this speed tactic in an audio economics course. At first, he turned the speed only slightly faster, making a dull course a little more bearable. But, after a few months, I came into his office to hear a completely unintelligible blur of words. After trying to comprehend a few lectures at double speed, he finally decided to slow it down (and also listen to a few of the previous lectures again, at regular speed).

Students need to do more than just hear and understand what an instructor is saying - they need to take the time to process and really digest information.