Lectures in question as paid work pushes attendance even lower

So, Ss not attending lectures nor catching up on them online? But are they doing appropriate reading and attending the seminars related to the lectures? If not even the latter, how do they manage to submit assignments and pass exams? Or is assessment now so dumb-downed? Or can the canny S just ‘game’ the HE ‘teaching & learning’ process such that he/she gets through without attending anything, focusses on the minimum to leap the (minimal?) assessment hurdles, and hey-presto the degree certificate at 2.1 or 1st is in the post? Just hope that some kind of academic standards are being sustained in important subjects such as medicine and engineering…

if schools cared about this, they would require attendance, stop recording lectures, and test them on the material. If they don't care and the kids are able to pass regardless, why are the kids paying so much money for the experience?

Prof Mazur said it all: "The lecture gives the perfect illusion of learning for both students and lecturers, but it just doesn’t intellectually engage students in a meaningful way.” In-person learning is much better for students but the key word is learning. Taking notes in lectures is not learning.

....but they are not turning up for the flipped part either and demanding recordings of everything, even the most interactive (with peers and staff) engagement sessions. These sessions are very highly rated by those that do turn up and, generally, correlate with higher assessment performance (noting correlation not causation here....). This would be marginally better if those sessions were watched at another time to fit around eg paid work - but the statistics on viewing figures tell a very different story. Some of these students are in a terribly conflicted position of having to work to feed/house themselves. In the absence of the wider factors influencing lives of young people being fixed, placing all the onus on changing academic activity is futile; everybody who happily condemns lectures generally doesn't have to actually deliver teaching programmes. I have yet to see an EVIDENCED alternative for increasing engagement in those who have to think about the non-academic elements of their lives - I note that Mazur is at Harvard and inhabits a very different world from one in which large numbers of students are having to be taught, assessed, supported by an ever-decreasing decrease in academic staff!

Maybe just fund students properly so they don't need to work 3 or 4 times a week on top of studying.

"Students experiencing poverty so have to work all the time and cannot attend for teaching" = "scrap lectures to enable their paid shifts" ...OR ***FUND STUDENTS PROPERLY***

It would not be hard to go for a flipped classroom or to increase interactivity, but just as they don't watch video lectures (even with decent quality) they don't read either and struggle to do exercises/homework.

Any course which has practical outcomes (almost all) or leads to work with practical outcomes should be taught not in a banked lecture theatre but in a room with audio visual screens, computers for practical exercises and tables for group discussion/work. That’s the environment the student will be working in when they have finished their degree so that’s how they should be taught. Wherever I have taught in the UK I try and set up the learning environment like this and have had very positive feedback and student outcomes. And high student engagement.