Lecture recording and lecture attendance

Should lectures be routinely recorded and made available to students? This is a question that frequently comes up at staff meetings, education or academic committees. Arguments in favour of lecture recording include that it increases flexibility for students, helps with revision, reduces the negative impacts of timetable clashes, allows students to manage their non-study commitments (work, family, etc.), and improves equity for students with disabilities or those studying in a second language. Arguments against lecture recording include negative impacts on class attendance, that students relying on recorded lectures miss participating in important in-class activities and discussions, and (occasionally) that guest lecturers (or the lecturers themselves) do not want their recorded images available online.

I want to focus this post on the impact of recordings on class attendance, prompted by this article in The Conversation last week, by Natalie Skead (University of Western Australia) and co-authors. :

We conducted a large-scale study in our law school to uncover whether lecture recordings are responsible for declining student attendance and what motivates students to attend or miss class.

By manually counting how many students were in lectures across sixteen different subjects, we found attendance rates averaged just 38% of total enrolments across the semester.

There was a natural ebb and flow of lecture attendance throughout the semester. There was peak attendance at the beginning (57%), a significant drop in the middle as assessments became due (26%) and a rebound at the end of semester as exam season hit (35%).

Attendance at 38% is horrifically low. When asked about reasons for non-attendance, Skead et al. note that:

Availability of lecture recordings was the most common reason students gave for not attending lectures (18% of students said this). But work commitments were a close second (16%). Then it was timetable conflicts (12%), the time and day of lectures (11%) and assessments being due (8%).

So, lecture recording is just one factor among many that affects lecture attendance. In my experience (both as a student and as a lecturer) the biggest impact on attendance is value added. If a lecture consists mainly of reading from pre-prepared PowerPoint slides (especially if they are the default textbook slides), then students will rightly question whether attendance is worth it.

I have recorded all of my lectures in both first-year economics papers for at least the last ten years. Attendance at my lectures doesn't appear to be negatively affected by recording. There was no noticeable drop-off in attendance when I started recording, and when I look at the server logs, it tends to be the students who are attending class who are watching the recordings (for revision), rather than the students who are not attending. I guess it is possible that students are not attending and trying to convince themselves that they will watch the recordings, then failing to do so. However, there isn't any data to support that assertion.

So, why would recording my lectures have little (if any) effect on attendance? I try to make attendance at my lectures worthwhile by punctuating the lectures with exercises - opportunities to practice the material immediately. And while students are completing the exercises, I circulate the room talking to them and providing directed assistance. This interactive teaching approach gives me important feedback on what the students are not understanding, but also helps develop students' learning. This is one aspect of my teaching practice that students most agree is helpful to their learning, and if they're not attending class they wouldn't be exposed to it.

Unfortunately, there are trade-offs with any teaching approach, including interactive teaching. The interactive teaching approach doesn't work quite so well for recorded lectures, unless students are willing to pause recordings and work on the problem before proceeding. In my experience, the majority of students who are watching recorded lectures don't do this (again, the server logs show this - in fact, many students watch only portions of the lectures). This makes attendance in my lectures the number one contributor to students' grades. I don't keep this a secret - on the first day of class, I tell my students how important attendance is going to be, and show them the data (from the previous year) to support it. And when a student appeals their failing grade at the end of a semester, invariably if I look, I will see that their attendance was low.

Encouraging attendance is therefore important. A rational student is going to weigh up the costs and benefits of attending class. Given particular opportunity costs of attending, attendance can be increased if the benefits are increased. I began offering extra credit in my ECON110 (now ECONS102) class in 2012, and extended it to ECON100 (now ECONS101) in 2016 (see this post for more details). So, students receive both an extrinsic reward (extra credit) and an intrinsic reward (better learning) by attending class.

The overall effect is that attendance remains fairly high in ECONS101 and ECONS102 throughout the semester. Of course, as with all papers, attendance in my class does drop off over time, but in ECONS101 last A semester we had attendance of 58% in the second-to-last week (that was the lowest attendance for the entire semester).

So, it is possible to maintain high attendance in spite of routinely recording lectures. Lecturers simply need to make it worth students' while to attend.