August 28, 2006
'Digital Natives' May Be Fleeing Lecture Halls
“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
Posted on Monday August 28, 2006 | Permalink |
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Hmmm. Perhaps we’ll need to evolve out of the “butts in the seats” model after all.
— John Finnegan Aug 28, 05:06 PM #
It depends on what the students are doing in lieu of classtime, no? If their concepts of time and space grow more fluid because they’re developing greater self-discipline—all to the good. If it’s an excuse for milkshakes, pot, and a rock show on Tuesday because you can catch up later, then maybe its not so good.
Would this way of doing things make colleges less relevant to large sectors of the workforce? Will graduates increasingly spend their first years out resentfully mastering basic practices of scheduling? Isn’t this already happening now? After all more and more graduates move back home when they’re done.— juniorfaculty Aug 28, 07:31 PM #
This trend may force us to reconsider the concept of “lecture hall”. If a student gains nothing from coming to class that can’t be gained from a digital substitute, my thought is that there is something wrong with the class! Adults learn from discussion, collaborative scenarios and case studies and involvement with the learning process. If that is not happening in class, why would anyone attend?
— Jana Ulrich Aug 28, 08:55 PM #
I agree with Jana above. The reasons students don’t come to lectures is because they don’t learn much there.
I was an undergrad in the early 80s, at a prestigious university that tended towards a lecture model. I rarely attended lectures, and still ended up with a very high A average, Phi Beta Kappa, etc at this very difficult school.
How could I do this? Easy – the lectures were useless. I learned from writing papers, reading the texts, and so forth.
OTOH I always attended seminars, or lecture-format classes in which the instructor actively engaged the students.
Lecturing at the students is inexcusably lazy. How can we blame them if they stop showing up, when we are providing them with an inferior educational product?
— C Kelley Aug 29, 06:41 AM #
More importantly, the academic content that is delivered in a lecture is VERY easily bottled in a podcast and published. As long as the factual information presented doesn’t change, there’s no reason at all for a student – or a professor – to show up for such a lecture, when they could record it once in front of an iMac, publish it, and then use classroom time to foster discussion, creative thought, criticism and critical thinking, or innovation.
I for one hope that this is the trend rather than the exception, for two reasons. First, having lecture-style material captured in an online format means more flexibility for learning for non-traditional students (a podcast can be listened to in a truck cab as a trucker drives his route), and second, it will allow more peer review and more transparency in the higher education process.
Christopher S. Penn
Daily financial aid internet radio on demand, no iPod required
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
— Christopher Penn, Financial Aid Podcast Aug 29, 06:55 AM #
All the observations about the utility of lectures above seem right to me. That kind of learning is easily bottled, but if students start to perceive technology as a substitute for seminar-style interaction in which a question from a student may spark an unplanned, but useful response from a professor, then there is a deeper problem. This trend indicts the lecture format, but NOT all in-person classroom instruction.
— T. Noth Aug 29, 09:37 AM #
And all the observations about the utility of lectures above seem like sweeping generalizations to me. Perhaps most lectures are indeed bad. So are most online discussions and group projects! But I had some superb lecturers during my undergraduate years. Saying we can “indict” the lecture is like saying we can “indict” the book! Let’s be a bit more considered.
— MN Aug 29, 10:09 AM #
Let’s not be naïve; when students are not coming to class, they are NOT spending that same hour (or hour and a half) reading, digesting, engaging, or poring over class material, or otherwise “learning within a more fluid chrono-spatiality” via podcast or the internet. No, they are playing “Grand Theft Auto” and drinking to excess.
Yes, the lecture model is obsolete and horribly inefficient. But it has the single redeeming feature of being sociable—i.e. the physical presence of the professor, the structure of a fixed class time, the pressure of ones’ peers, even the act of focused listening, all nudge even the least-motivated student to come away with a bare minimum of exposure to the subject.
I heartily encourage (and myself use) dynamic and engaging teaching methods (as much as class-size allows). But the reality of the podcast, website, or other “bottled” information is that it often remains uncorked. Flexible attendance might work for highly-motivated students at elite colleges. At large state institutions, however, absenteeism only deprives the student of their primary (albeit inefficient) learning venue. (It would be different if our political culture were willing to pay for seminar-sized classes for all, of course. But that is sadly not the case.)
No one wants to be a disciplinarian, but if we are going to continue to cash their tuition checks, we need to provide not just opportunities for the best, but structures for the rest.
— -David Aug 29, 10:14 AM #
It is very easy to confuse higher education with the entertainment industry because of the current and rising use of technologies intended to present, create, and save information/presentations. The same error has lead to the contemporary news services to spend less time on content and substance and more time on “infomercial” presentations and sound bites. Remote access does not necessarily equate with understanding or intricacies comprehension… subject matter or “breaking news”. Moreover, the discussion is presuming that there is only one style, means or technique associated with “lecture”. And perhaps an additional presumption of the size of the class where lectures takes place (a room of 20 is far different from a room of 50-200) and the availability of or use of teaching assistants in the out-break sessions. So, my suggestion would be that instead of letting the “technologies” assumptions dominate the conversation that we consider what the purpose of lecture, styles and formats, purpose and process are, have been, or could be in various settings. Additionally, let us not forget the impact of policies and logistics that additionally impact the best intentions or desires of any instructor.
— Janet Aug 29, 11:03 AM #
This technological revolution in education would seem to make traditional freshman and sophmore classes, as they are now organized, obsolete. If the move is going to be to asychronous instruction then the next logical step would be to downsize the number of full-time faculty and hire a large staff of graders. Obviously this is scenario that would affect primarily four-year and two-year public instituitiuons. In my red state this would appeal to many state legislators who would love to stretch their academic dollars and clip the wings of institutions perceived to be blue.
— Scott Aug 29, 12:15 PM #
I agree with David and Janet. I don’t think we should revamp higher education to accommodate an “I’ll show up if I feel like it thank you” culture among the students. In some fields; i.e., humanities, the arts, and to some degree the social sciences, the discussion or lecture in class IS the education they are paying for.
— Barb Aug 29, 01:58 PM #
For the record, I would like to say that the Contra Costa times took my comments out of the context of the complete interview. Among the points I made at that time:1) given a choice, students will use strategies and tools best suited to their time and space management needs (including work demands, family emergencies, illness and hangovers). As reported in our in-depth study of the economic and pedagogical implications of webcasting large lecture courses at Berkeley in 2000, we found that 1) students often skip courses, even in classes that do not use webcasting, 2) students appreciated well-delivered engaging lectures, attended them, but just not all of the time, and 3) technologies that archive course content (such as webcasting, power point slides, etc.) are used most frequently immediately before exams, which is no surprise.
A summary of our findings from that study can be found online in two published papers.
An Analysis of Technology Enhancements in a Large Lecture Course.” Diane Harley et al., EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3., 2003 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0335.pdf
Rethinking Space and Time: The Role of Internet Technology in a Large Lecture Course.” Diane Harley, et al., Innovate, Vol. 1, No. 1, October/November 2004.
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=3
I recommend reading the UC Berkeley thread referred to in the CC Times article. It expresses beautifully the diverse views of faculty, and the ways in which they grapple with both age-old and digital-age behaviors of students (at http://teaching.berkeley.edu/disappearingstudents.html).
====================================
Diane Harley, Ph.D., Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project
Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, CA
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/people/dharley.html
— Diane Harley Aug 29, 04:01 PM #
I’ve experienced this trend for years, as I put more and more of my course content for an applied computing course online. It frees students to work according to their schedule and learning style.
— Lynda Williams Aug 29, 07:40 PM #
Diane thank you for the helpful articles. An issue that worries me as we think about the relationship between lecture courses and technology—and I’m no luddite—is that when you say students do not attend the lecture courses you mean 25%-30%, on an extreme maybe 40% (I suspect these highest ranges coincide with holidays). To those critical of lectures I’d ask what about the 75%-70% of students who attend lectures regularly? Aren’t they an argument for the continued relevance of the lecture course in both private and public settings?
I should say, too, that I’m a product of liberal arts colleges, and so until I was a TA had no experience with large lecture courses. Now, especially that I am beginning to teach them, I see their fundamental intellectual value (ditto David and Janet above), particularly if attending lectures is not already part of a school’s intellectual culture (Interestingly, the regular crowd for lectures at my 2,000 member undergraduate college was about the same at my 20,000 member graduate university).— juniorfaculty Aug 29, 08:43 PM #
I’m sure you’ve watched or channel surfed past C-SPAN, and observed members of Congress speaking to an empty chamber. One could compare C-SPAN’s broadcast to technologies in use by your class: webcasting, podcasting, archived powerpoints, e-mail, blogs, etc.
— Brad Spry Aug 30, 09:36 AM #
When I began podcasting my Intro Geology lectures last fall I made a point to monitor whether attendance dropped off as a result. To my pleasant surprise my class attendance actually improved slightly from the previous fall (without podcasting). This trend held up through the spring semester as well. In my experience the podcasting experiment has been an unqualified success, and I have made it a regular part of all of my classes. Read more about my experience here and here
— Ron Schott Aug 30, 09:16 PM #
As an Engineer, Pediatrician and Medical Director of an Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment center, I would suggest that the passion of a great talk, let alone the content is rarely accurately reproduced for the cyber-attendee. Most work in my fields of interest involves team play; groups, not individuals complete engineering projects, surgical procedures, and most residential psychotherapy. I agree with the posting that suggested interactive presentations are the most effective, and also agree that there are few rational reasons for the 400-500 student lectures that I recall from my Princeton undergraduate days. Obviously it would have made great sense to skip the Lectures by Reinhold Niebor on democracy and communism, the talks by Goerge Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, JFK, Mc George Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Goerge Schultz since the texts of all those talks were subsequently published in the NY Times. It would have made little sense as well for the Frosh at Cal Tech to attend Richard Feyhnman’s brilliant series of Quantum physics talks which were later published as’ 6 easy pieces’ and ‘6 not so easy pieces’. the preface of both books state that these lectures were attended by the entire science faculty of not ony Cal Tech but those of USC and UCLA as well. Those faculty members knew a good thing when they saw it, even if the students did not! I remember lecturing to a large group of third year med students at Case Western years ago about Pediatric Oncology. I began by noting that only 5% of the 120 in the room would ever see a child with cancer or leukemia, but that I hoped and prayed that those 5 would not fail to recognize the early signs of Pediatric Malignancy because even a short delay in diagnosis could change the outcome. The next 5 slides were the weddings of childhood cancer survivors. I had them!!!!
— Edmund Doering Aug 30, 11:32 PM #