This is a response to Craig Deed's Students walking out on lectures in yesterday's The Australian.
If I had a gringot for every time a colleague has complained in concerned overtones about poor attendence at their lectures, I'd be doing alright. The tone of the complaints I hear is not too dissimilar from clergy-like complaining that so-so didn't come to church or confession. Like it or not, my colleagues are slowly discovering that students aren't as motivated to attend the academic's holy altar as they used to be.
The "problem" (actually, it's an "opportunity") is that students and society have changed faster than teaching staff. There's a generational gap between baby-boomer and gen. X teaching staff, and their largely gen. Y. students. Teaching staff are still fundamentally teaching 20th century style, whilst the students live in the real, 21st century world.
Students have jobs, careers, debts, families, etc. Academics who live in ivory towers struggle to recognise this. Actually, come to think of it, they do recognise this, but they instead choose to discount this when it comes to designing their unit structure and teaching methdology. Students quite understandably need to prioritise their learning activities. Unless a student experiences significant learning during a lecture, why bother? I don't blame them one bit.
I find I don't have the lecture attendence "problem" because I choose not to have a problem. Instead, I care about the availability and accessibility of the lecture content in multiple formats. So, all live lectures also have audio and video recorded and downloadable. Frankly, I don't care when and where a student chooses to engage with lecture content - whether its live, on a portable audio player, or on a computer.
I think students should be able to choose the time, place, and format of engagement with learning content. There are many advantages to the digital formats over attending live lectures, e.g., A student can pause, take a break, look up a concept in a text book or online, and then return to the lecture - all in their own learning space.
Perhaps ludditic staff have some vestigial, egoistic need for live attendence at their academic sermons. Or maybe someone can mount a pedagogical argument for persisting with a 20th century unflexible learning format such as the live lecture. But I haven't yet heard a decent defence of the live lecture and I support the student walk-out.
Students walking out on lectures
I'm afraid we still have a problem even if we choose not to perceive it as such. Digital formats are no substitute to a good lecturer and a live lecture. University lecturers whose students miss lectures, and their students, are never caught out because most university exams measure the ability to regurgitate content rather than test the ability to apply it. For that, digital formats are adequate. However, this is not new and has nothing to do with the X, Y, or Z generation. it was always the case- even before the digital revolution - that there was never a need to attend lectures if the book and lecture notes content were all that one had to demonstrate knowledge of.
Another reason that poor lecturers and their students who skip class can get away with it is that there is virtually no comparative evaluation of student performance. It is not possible to compare the performance of lecturers, and the performance of their cohort of students who skip class, because there is no standard examination, there is almost invariably a single lecturer per class, and the information about lecture attendance and performance in the exam are never available. There is simply no yardstick for comparison.
Is there credible scientific evidence (as opposed to anecdotal evidence or opinions) to categorically conclude that students who do not attend lectures perform as well as those who do? The ultimate question is whether a particular student would perform better had she attended the lecture then she would had she not attended, but unfortunately this is an impossible experiment to conduct. Until then we seem to be stuck with unsubstantiated opinions about the value (or lack of value) of live lectures. My opinion is that there is no substitute to a good live lecture and all the digital formats can do is assist all students - those who attended to a greater extent and those who didn't to a lesser extent.