Class attendance plummets post-Covid

It would be good to do a study on tutorial attendance, since the recording of lectures is not going to cease. At my uni in Australia, the Arts Faculty no longer has synchronous lectures, and they won't be back, apparently. We have pre-recorded lectures and posted them online since the start of the pandemic. I've noticed attendance at tutorials is very good, even though we no longer have attendance requirements. But attendance at online classes has been poor, and online engagement is getting worse and worse.

Is it because online delivery has improved significantly and makes learning more flexible, accessible and engaging ? I'm not underestimating the value or benefits of face to face teaching, but students as customers should get what they want not what we think they should have.

A return of approx 330 and mostly UK students hardly constitutes a 'global survey' Engagement is all about incentives

The comment from kjk is rather depressing. If we do not know more than our students then they really are wasting their money. Pandering to their every demand will produce low-quality degrees and make graduates less employable since companies cannot afford to be so soft on them.

It would be good to get the students perspective on attendance; perhaps we are right in that they are having to juggle work/caring responsibilities around teaching, but there could be more in scope with the students' expectations of lectures and any barriers we may not have identified?

My youngest has dyslexia and is a first year student. She finds recorded lectures essential as she can pause and rewind. It is impossible for her to keep up and take notes in a live lecture. My eldest doing a masters told me of the experience of trying to engage in a lecture (in her UG degree) and it being made clear that student participation was not wanted by either the person giving the lecture or her peers, who saw questions as delaying the end of the class! (So peer pressure needs looking at?) I have heard some students complain about the "reading out of the PowerPoint slides" lectures which they say they could do themselves and they question why they are attending and paying for something so dull. So is the future fewer higher quality lectures when they really matter (e.g. with special industry guests)? This is the norm on many courses where I work, with more focus on workshops and seminars as the key learning opportunities. Perhaps the THE should run a lecture series on the future of lectures?

The recurring comment here of attendance at workshops/seminars being higher than lectures is interesting, as it totally contradicts experience across my institution (colleagues and student interns have just been carrying out research on student attitudes to/motivations for attendance/non-attendance). Attendance at lectures has slumped, but attendance at workshops and seminars has plummeted. Many of the themes identified have shown up in our findings - but an interesting finding indicates that a disincentive to attend may well be the overprovision of online materials (not simply lecture recordings), which is seen to produce a perception that there is no need to attend or engage, since there is more than enough material available to access at will (i.e. just before a deadline). Our students may be 'customers', but they are not OUR customers, they are the institution's customers. The 'product' they purchase is not the knowledge and expertise we present them with as educators, it is the ACCESS to that knowledge and expertise provided by the institution. What they 'want' in their relationship with us is frequently very different to what they need from that relationship.

One issue on my mind is that universities suddenly became distance-learning institutions for around 12+ months. A lot of students got quite used to that and continued to act in a similar way once campus re-opened. Some were working long hours in paid employment, and some appeared to be living in different cities or countries. The problem is, we already have many distance learning / online learning courses and, if we embrace that approach heavily in on-campus degrees too, then we risk trading away the traditional values and advantages of in-person teaching. Of course, both modes can be done well or poorly and both rely on students and academics to engage fully in order to make the courses as engaging as possible.

@ianscott I was thinking the same... having said that, the pandemic has changed how school pupils and then university students access their teaching sessions. A mixture between a genuine need to work to pay bills and eat, but also a small group prioritising anything over lectures to "watch later"- and then realising six weeks later that they need to get through one hell of a boxset quickly, leaving them no time to engage with or digest concepts. The concern here is real, and whilst the sample size is disappointingly small, the same ideas are reflected in the data. As a society, we have increasingly valued convenience- recorded lectures, for many, fall into this category. Students who like to add to their notes or revisit lectures obviously benefit from accessing the recordings after actively engaging in the sessions. I don't like the idea of students passively watching a recording- but is it so different to students who "turn up" but don't actively participate in a physical lecture?

There is a fairly extensive literature generally indicating that attendance at lectures is positively correlated with exam scores. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that students have learned at lectures! It could be that lectures help them form social networks which then support success, or that motivated students both attend lectures AND prepare well for exams in other ways. But the data are hard to reconcile with the idea that lectures are bad for learning.

Shouldn't we be focusing on learner engagement instead of learner attendance? If a lecture is a purely passive transfer of information then is this not better delivered in a format where the viewer can pause, rewind, etc? Supplement lecture recordings with quizzes to reiterate key concepts and check understanding. Better to use face to face campus time for engaging, discussing, collaborating, building a supportive community of learning, and the students will make the effort to turn up

There seems to be a continued focus here on lectures as the key method of delivery. I'm not convinced that sitting in a lecture is necessarily a good way to feel connected with a department or community. There many are other forms of synchronous activity that also contribute and provide deeper interaction, particularly in science and engineering: workshops, practical labs, examples classes and so on. That's not to say we haven't seen a drop in attendance at those.

@ #13 Submitted by John McLachlan “ There is a fairly extensive literature generally indicating that attendance at lectures is positively correlated with exam scores.” Or, is it a case of Motivated students turn up, do additional work, and do well in exams …