“Something is happening this semester that has never happened to me before,” writes Kristin Luker, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, on a forum for professors. ”[M]ore than half of my lecture class is just not showing up.” Judging by the responses to Ms. Luker’s observation, she’s not alone.
A number of professors at Berkeley say their lecture halls are looking a bit more spacious lately, and most agree that online forums, course-management sites, podcasts, and even e-mail are largely to blame.
If classroom attrition is, as the Berkeley forum suggests, a virtual inevitability, professors will need to decide if it’s a troubling trend or simply a fact of 21st-century life. There is no consensus. Diane Harley, a researcher with Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, tells the Contra Costa Times that professors should embrace technology that makes students’ “concepts of space and time much more fluid.” But another Berkeley professor admits that dwindling class sizes have given him something of “an existential crisis.”
A question for professors: Have you noticed an exodus from the lecture hall? If so, is that cause for concern? —Brock Read
