When I saw the headline for this recent opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald by Shaneel Lal, I expected it to make me quite angry: "Forcing students to attend lectures in person creates barriers". In-class attendance has been a hot topic of conversation among academics the last few years, as COVID decimated in-person teaching and created a new norm of students not attending. However, the new norm doesn't appear to include students substituting their in-class attendance for other effective forms of learning, and so the impact on grades has been quite negative (especially for students in the bottom half of the ability distribution). Or, the impact on grades would have been negative, if universities hadn't engaged in a systematic policy of grade inflation relative to pre-COVID norms. At least, that has been my experience, and the experience of many others that I have discussed this with.
So, I expected Lal to engage in a general beat-up on whining academics who offer little in the way of value-added in their classes and yet still expect attendance. However, Lal is much more even-handed in their article:
Last year, Victoria University of Wellington announced all second-year law students would have to attend lectures in person. Students who could not attend lectures could apply for hardship grants to access lecture recordings...
Not all students come from wealthy families. Many cannot afford to be at university without taking on additional work to cover rent, bills, food, fees, technology and the many other costs that come with being alive and at university. Students are justified to prioritise work over lectures when there are clashes.
Some may argue students facing such hardship should seek hardship grants to access lectures. VUWSA president Jessica Ye labelled the hardship application process “bureaucratic”. It creates unnecessary and additional barriers for students who are already stretched thin and disproportionately disadvantages marginalised students.
For me, the primary consideration would not be whether a student suffers hardship - it would be whether the student is keeping on top of course work. If I were a lecturer, I would have no qualms about a student not attending a lecture so long as they made time to catch up.
It would be obstructive of me to withhold a recording, punishing a student who is ready and willing to catch up.
There may also be students who are not facing any hardship and attend lectures in person but require the lecture recordings anyway because they couldn’t note all the important parts during the live lecture. This is particularly the case for content-heavy lectures where lecturers race through the material or lectures in which lecturers do not use or share their slides.
Some students learn best by pausing the lecture recording every five minutes and noting everything a lecturer says...
I am not saying there aren’t valid concerns about students not attending lectures in person. I understand the genuine concern about students not keeping up with lecture content. Watching lectures live is often the best way to keep on track. The snowball effect of not watching lectures for some students is debilitating. I also accept there are some activities a student may only benefit from if they participate in the live lecture.
Like with many things, we have to do a balancing exercise. The premise for requiring students to attend lectures is to ensure students are on top of lectures, but withholding lecture recordings creates additional barriers and is counterintuitive.
I can find very little to argue with here. Withholding lecture recordings from students does create an unnecessary barrier to student learning. As I noted in this post in 2020 (ironically, just days before we went into the first COVID lockdown), over ten-plus years of recording lectures, I have seen little evidence that offering lecture recordings affects student attendance. There are much more important factors affecting attendance, such as students having to work in order to live because the loans and allowances system is not generous enough (as I've noted here and here), and lecturers not making their classes sufficiently engaging or offering enough value-add to incentivise students to attend.
However, one aspect that Lal fails to note is the negative spillover effects of a student not attending one class on attendance in their other classes. Based on conversations that I have had with students, some students do not attend lectures when they only have one in-person class on a particular day. I can appreciate that position. When weighing up the costs and benefits of travelling to university, the costs (parking or public transport costs, opportunity costs of time, and inconvenience) are more likely to exceed the benefits (learning) if the student has only one class on a particular day, than when they have many. With many classes shifted online now, the cost-benefit calculation is more weighted against in-person attendance. This is even the case for classes where attendance is expected (or encouraged). Similarly, when a lecturer simply reads from lecture slides, uses the default textbook slides, or otherwise offers very little value-added to students, the benefits of in-person attendance are low and this may spill over onto other classes where the lecturers are more engaging.
The lack of value-added and the impact of online classes have, in my experience, become much more important factors in the post-COVID teaching environment. That has meant that I have had to double-down on how I incentivise student attendance. Aside from generally trying to make my lectures engaging, I use extra credit for this purpose (as I noted here and here). I also try to make explicit the trade-off between attendance and grades early in the trimester (we have years of data showing the difference in pass rates and grades between students who attend and students who don't attend). This year, I increased the amount of extra credit on offer, and was even more enthusiastic than usual about pointing out the impact of non-attendance on grades.
Attendance in my classes has held up well, in spite of the challenges. I know that others are adopting similar approaches, and as more do, the negative spillovers start to reduce. If we want students to attend our classes, like-minded lecturers need to work together towards that goal. In fact, as Lal's article notes, we don't need to withhold lecture recordings and create barriers for students. In fact, we should be making it easier for students to engage with our classes, not more difficult.
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