So last week was our final teaching week before the Easter break. For reasons we don’t need to go into here, it’s not the end of our teaching block for the semester, so it’s a bit of a breather.
As such, my usual expectation is that class attendance takes a bit of a hit.
However, my lecture of 120 students only saw 15 turn up, which – even by my standards – isn’t good. At all.
Obviously those who came didn’t have the answers for their fellow students’ absence, so I decided to gather some data.
Using a quick SurveyMonkey poll, I offered students a range of options to choose from. As you can see, I got about 40% of the class (including a couple who had come) to respond, so reasonable enough to make some observations.
The first is that timing does matter. My lecture is 1000 on a Thursday, and the night before had been a big sports night, so there was certainly a bunch of students incapacitated by that. Also, a couple of students noted that Thursdays are solid with classes for them, abetted by some deadlines for other modules due at the same time.
However, while those factors explain part of it, I was also rather curious about whether our experiment in flipping plays a role.
My module is a first-year introduction to European integration, and I’ve been trying out a flipped format. This involves a pre-recorded lecture online, with the conventional lecture time being given over to Q&A on the recording and elaboration of key themes: there’s also a seminar session, which runs on more conventional lines.
So far, that Q&A part has not been running as well as I would like: only a small number of students ask questions and there’s evidently a block who haven’t watched the lecture beforehand, so can’t ask.
Part of my concern in trying out flipping was that students might see it as a way to disengage with the face-to-face element of the module. My efforts to tackle this including highlighting that the recording doesn’t have enough in itself to give all the material and framing students need to do well in the module: the Q&A always includes stuff that relates much more directly to the final exam (and I say as much).
Clearly, the survey highlights that this isn’t resonating with the students.
Even if we allow for a degree of “what might look like the answer least likely to cause offence”, there’s a big block covering the lack of utility of the (Q&A) lecture element.
Certainly, I can see that if you’ve not watched the video, then the lecture isn’t that useful, but I’m more concerned about those who feel that the recording suffices.
All of which leaves me in a quandry.
Part of me wants to rework the remaining sessions after Easter to be much more explicit in leaving material out of the online stuff, with the lecture picking it up instead.
But another part of me wants to stick with my approach to date and then we see how it goes with the exam.
Right now, I don’t have the answers to this one. I need to explore some more to see if attendance was similarly down in other modules, to better triangulate what’s happening here.
Your thoughts are welcome.
I know that you are constrained by an assessment environment that is very different from the one that I operate in, so my initial idea of “start testing them on what they can only get from lecture” isn’t applicable. Also it’s a bit like pulling up the drawbridge after the Visigoths have already crossed the moat. But generally students won’t do anything perceived to offer low returns — even if their perception is incorrect. So maybe explicitly connect lectures to the final paper/exam, perhaps with practice activities in which they apply concepts from lecture?
I run into this problem a lot, as described in my recent data collection efforts with Post-Its. I don’t really have a good solution.