I’m working on my class policy for next semester. Last semester was rough — I had bent over backwards to provide maximum flexibility, with an online option and no mandatory attendance, and it was fairly typical to have only half, or less, of the class show up. I considered changing the policy mid-semester, but it was written into the syllabus, so I had to stick with it. There will be changes next term, I tell you what.
This little video illustrates my problem.
I really like the prisoner’s dilemma twist in the middle — if only one student shows up, they pass the course and everyone else fails. There was one day fall term where that could have been invoked.
To answer the question in the title: yes, I’m going to take attendance, and it’s going to count. My big class this spring is going to be heavily interactive, and I’ll need people to show up.
When I attended university I was astounded by the amount the class attendance multiplied on exam days. I attended every lecture, aside from sick days or other extenuating circumstances. Probably frat boys and sorority sisters. No mercy. Denzel in Man on Fire or The Equalizer.
I held my exams online! So they didn’t even show up then.
Lab for this class was on Wednesday, and they had to go to lab — so I’d get my best attendance on Wednesday, with second best on Monday, and they would just disappear on Fridays. If we had a 3 day weekend, I could just forget about class the day before.
You have an obligation to provide the best possible learning environment. And science is a group effort, you can’t learn that on your own.
Classes in person are important to not only interact with the lecturer but with other students. I would have hated, and learnt far less, in on online environment.
Two of my favorite professors were no nonsense Cornell guys. Their classes were intense. Comparative Anatomy and Vertebrate Zoology were grueling.
I just read Think Again by organizational psychologist Adam Grant where he pushes active learning over lectures. They excelled at both. But there is no active learning as intense as a field day. The stuff we did in vert zoo I will always cherish. Actually the field stuff was different from the lab stuff which differed from the excellent lectures. But yeah the active learning parts were very collaborative.
I took a 4000 level neuro class from a professor who came from the Miami Project. She was every bit as intense as the Cornell guys. There was no lab component but a 4 person group project. I was a bit of a loner and dead set on my vision so that was jarring. Still wound up being grueling and worthwhile. I chose LTP because Tonegawa. My group went along based on my assertiveness. Maybe I should have followed more than led in retrospect. We did good though. They probably thought I was a nutter. They might have been right.
There is a definite correlation between attendance and grades. Life and unexpected things happen so I give students 3 free unexcused absences for a MWF class that meets about 34 times during the semester. I don’t check roll every day so students don’t know if they are safe once they reach their 3-absence limit. They lose 10 points for every additional unexcused absence. Once that kicks in students tend to show up for class. Absenteeism is not a huge problem but my policy tends to rein in the few chronic absentees I get.
I’m thinking along those lines — I will take attendance every day (class of 11 people, I already know most of them, so a glance will do the job), and then give them 5 freebies. With 45 lectures, that means attendance will count for 40 points total. They can ignore it if they need to, but sustained absence will be enough to sting.
The last couple of years of COVID have been a big long experiment, and I think online learning has failed.
I think COVID produced a set of strong and robust students and a set of fragile students. Starting in Fall 2022 I’ve always had a set of students who were engaged in class and thanked me on their way out of the classroom. I think they were happy to be in class and not wearing a mask. On the other hand, I’ve never had so many students who were sick with something other than COVID or who had personal problems of such magnitude that I’d get a letter from the dean asking to accommodate them if possible.
I’m generally against forcing attendance for adult learners but there are definitely circumstances where it is important, especially if a lot of resources are going into setting up pracs that half the class doesn’t turn up to. I’m more in favour of making it clear that the classes are important to learning and that assessment will be heavily based on it.
There are several ways of doing this, including the obvious one of grading students’ work in class, but there’s also setting exam questions that are much harder to answer if you’ve only read textbooks/checked online videos rather than done the class exercises, for instance asking questions about the technical aspects of the class projects, e.g. the order of reagents, or things that are not obvious from theory but become obvious with practical experience (it’s amazing how often I’ve observed later-year students not able to take a blood pressure reading correctly; I don’t set the rubrics or these would carry much greater weight).
I absolutely agree that online group learning is terrible, acceptable only in circumstances such as a global pandemic.
I only had one class in college for which I only showed up on exam day. That was first-year astronomy, a subject I found fascinating, but fascinating enough that I had already read the textbook along with enough other books to have given myself at least a first-year astronomy education.
It was one of those classes with hundreds of students, and when the professor led off his first lecture with “the earth is like a spinning top, circling a great glowing gasbag we call the sun,” I was ready to be out of there.
Okay, he didn’t actually say “gasbag,” but whatever.
A few minutes later he had to explain to a student how rockets could work in a vacuum “with nothing to push against.” Gah.
I did get a little lax in attending a certain music history class, and nearly paid the price. I failed the mid-term and needed a 90 on the final to pass the class, which I got. I did not want to sit through that one again.
GO TO CLASS, KIDS.
Nemo @8
That doesn’t differ much from my memory. It varied though. Some classes had high attendance across the board. Others seemed recorded for non-attendees maybe by fellow “greeks”.
I recorded those classes too and listened to them multiple times alongside my notes which I revised. I hated that such obsessive attention to school matters detracted from my enjoyment of Smashing Pumpkins and Rush songs but didn’t exhale anyway regardless. My GPA was converging on 4.0 because 420. Just saying. High as shit I broke the curve. Yeah!
You should just rely on the implants to track their location at any given time.
I dunno if I would say that online learning has failed. I would say it is a lot harder than in person learning, and it really does depend on how one is structuring the online learning (not something that can easily be done, at least from what I have heard).
I am largely saying this as someone who is currently enrolled in an online masters program. I do feel like I am learning stuff, but it is not the easiest thing in the world by any stretch :P
I paid full freight last time I went to college. That meant I wanted my money’s worth. So of course I attended every class.
@14– it’s not online learning itself, it’s online small-group learning. I actually prefer online for lectures, demonstrations, and research papers. Textbooks are a mixed bag. Those that embrace hypertext and UX can be great; those that are just digitised slabs of text are searchable but less readable and usually poorly laid out for screens. The big problem is open discussion in small groups. This is perhaps fixable with future technology but right now video streaming is an awful platform for it and VR is not up to scratch, the big unsolved problem being how to convey multiple overlapping audio streams without the subtle cues that help keep track of conversations.
chrislawson @16
The reflowable ebooks are great in that you can vary font styles and sizes and change color scheme to your preference. I can read those on a smartphone. The etexts are almost worthless on a phone but just right for a tablet.
I didn’t have these tools at my disposal in college, but I think converting class notes to ebook form should be trivial.
VR might work for some undergrad lab applications. Maybe identifying organisms using key characters.
That is fair, if your expectation of small group discussions is that they are a synchronous activity. Thing is, al lot of the classes I am in now all have the forums and a slack channel with often multiple discords floating around so there is the ability to have a free-flowing series of async conversations that can be just as effective.
E textbooks are definitely hit or miss. I think the more recent ones are much easier as they tend to start out as web pages (Barabasi’s network Science text book and Sutton and Barto’s RL book come to mind for those). And often, research papers are just as easy to read from a tablet as they are directly from a paper. Others, you may just need to such it up and buy the text book :D (I’m looking at you: Tom Mitchell’s Machine Learning!)
Graduated with a BS in computer engineering in 1980. Studied it because I was told over and over again by my mother that as long as I was fat, I’d never have a boyfriend, so I was determined to study a somewhat interesting field that would let me support myself comfortably. Mama was wrong, and I married the brilliant guy who sat in the front row of our mutual classes and corrected the instructor during lectures. (We married in 1980. We’re still happily married.) At that university, primarily a research institution, few professors cared if we attended or not. There were remarkable exceptions, who were very helpful and supportive, and I remember them fondly.
Went back to my local California State (teaching-focused) University in my mid-40s for an MS in geology, my first and enduring love. Totally different experience. Even in the upper division classes I took for make-up, there were seldom more than 20 students. Graduate classes had as few as six. The only exception (other than a packed climate change seminar) was the last ever class taught by a retiring professor. Most of us had taken something else from him, and we were determined to have one last class from Cal. Amazing instructor, he lectured and generally explained things in a way such that his words wrote the information into your brain. Thirty of us, the department had to schedule a second lab session, and our then just-seventy instructor took it all in stride. People rarely missed lectures and almost never missed labs. (Cal is still working in his research area and publishing, now over 90. He writes fiction as a side gig.)
Great experience overall. Terrific thesis adviser, who commented to me, after I’d submitted my thesis to the university, that he rarely had a student who’d required only four readings/edits from him before turning the manuscript over to the rest of the thesis committee. His average was ten reading/edit cycles. From my end, I felt I’d scored the world’s best editor, and wondered about how fellow students groused about how “hard” he was. So helpful.
TL:DR: The student makes the experience. Undergrads, especially those coming to university right out of high school, have a lot on their minds and only so much bandwidth to care. Many of my undergrad classmates in the make-up classes were a few years out of high school, some out of the military, and that extra bit of growing-up had made higher ed that much more important to them. Some of my second-round classmates were moving heaven and earth to attend school at all, and there were a few classes where a baby snoozed in a carrier or a young child quietly filled pages of a coloring book in the back of the room so that a parent, whose babysitting had fallen through, could attend the lecture. (Since I graduated, it’s become the norm for several homeless students to effectively live in their cars in the university’s safest parking garage, and the school has opened a food bank. I do contribute.) The people who care will come to class.
I had no problem attending as many lessons as possible myself as a student (later dropout), but the biggest waste of time lecture I went to was one where the teacher just read out her textbook. I’d done prep for the first lecture, bought the book, read up the first chapter, then she just recited it to us almost verbatim.
It was almost insulting, that could’ve been a podcast? I’d like to learn not just have information recited at me? Ugh.
Best class I ever took were biology labs where we went over the non human animals in detail by phylum. I was fascinated and wished I could do the plants as well ( they were in the books) but 24 weeks just wasn’t enough time . The professor had to curve the grades because I was the only one in class who actually got a decent passing grade. I’d always warn freshman not to take biology as their science requirement if they weren’t going to major in it. This was 50 years ago . I don’t think they teach that much anatomical detail in intro classes anymore .
S maltophilia:
At the local community college, for awhile, every student was entitled to one hour of tutoring per class per week, if they simply asked for it. The students I tutored mostly fell into two groups: those who had failed the class previously and needed to pass, and those who said, “Wait, more education, and one-on-one with a subject matter expert, for no additional cost? SIGN ME UP!” I’m still in touch with some people in the latter group, who often went on to be great at what they do.
Grace