University attendance/engagement - it sounds pretty dire

[Suffolker]

Did anyone see this article last week in the Guardian?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/28/i-see-little-point-uk-university-students-on-why-attendance-has-plummeted

It makes for pretty grim reading, and talking to a friend who works at our local university, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration of the current level of attendance and engagement by undergraduates. It sounds very different to how I remember my university days in the 1990s (although I appreciate I’m very much looking through rose-tinted glasses).

I’ve heard from another friend whose daughter is just completing her first year that lots of students are dropping out and are unhappy. Attendance at lectures is very much seen as optional and there is very little by the way of any contact time with staff. Registration codes are apparently shared by WhatsApp so the students can ‘register’ for classes but not actually attend.

It all sounds very isolating, and really makes me question whether all the expense of going (emotional as well as financial) makes it worthwhile. Interested to hear of others’ thoughts and whether it reflects your experience.

It's done on an individual basis, there is the odd student who is allowed to record the lectures for their own use but it's not a common adjustment. I've had a note taker but don't think I've ever had anyone with permission to record.

(I'm not the one who decides on the adjustments for students with disabilities, I just make sure they happen on my own modules, so I have no idea of the logic used to make the decisions.)

The year we had in person lectures that were also recorded, engagement was awful and marks were abysmal - in one module I had a quarter of students back in the summer for the resit session. Unheard of. Things still aren't back where they were but stopping recordings has helped.

Exactly @BurbageBrook! So many complain (or at least their parents do) about lack of contact hours. I'm sure I read in one of these threads that some kids pride themselves on not attending any lectures at all.
My DD is off to uni this Autumn and she cannot understand this attitude. She couldn't care less about 'the uni experience' - she's there to learn as much as possible and expects her course to be rigorous and challenging. She will be attending every lecture.

DD started university in 2019 and graduated 2 years ago, so she experienced going to lectures at the beginning and the end of her degree, and online recordings in the middle due to lockdowns.

She much preferred going to lectures as it meant that she saw her friends, it got her out of her accommodation and the lectures were only an hour long.

That said, the fact that all her lectures were recorded was a life saver for her. She has CFS and had a habit of falling asleep during lectures and being able to go over the lecture later was a massive help.

Her university used to upload the lecture three days later, not straight away.

When we went to an Exeter subject talk last week the guy said they do post the lectures online but not straightway - think they said this reduces the people that think they will just watch it online.

Also, the friends she is still close to are all from her course.

It was a STEM degree so she also had compulsory labs, and would have had more contact time with her fellow students than most.

I've just graduated as a mature student from a RG uni. I only attended lectures if they were on the same day as a seminar because the commute is an hour each way and childcare costs. But very rarely missed seminars and always watched the lecture online, sometimes twice if I was doing an exam or essay on it. I will get either a high 2.1 or a 1st.

The students who rarely attended seminars generally struggled I think. Anxiety was a common reason but like pp said, the option to opt out of anything that makes them uncomfortable is not actually helpful. If you are attending seminars you have to generally do the lecture and the reading as well but I think attending lectures, for humanities subjects at least, needs to be a bit more flexible to allow for jobs, mature students, those with caring responsibilities at least. Doing the lecture online also means I can pause it, repeat bits etc.

I did foundation year completely online and the uni stressed it was as good as physically being there. That's the issue with lots of students wanting to continue with that way of learning, we've been told its a legitimate way to learn so want to continue that way if it makes life easier.

That article is such a depressing read. Makes me sad to think students not going to lectures, as I did years ago.

As most lecturers are recorded it really takes the motivation out of actual physical attendance as they can "Just catch up later" Then you have those courses with very little contact time anyway. We were blown away by one of the University open days we attended this year for economics where they were only expected to attend 5hrs of lectures a week and 4hrs of tutorials. I honestly think the universities are not helping themselves since covid.

I teach in a business school, and that's the sort of contact hours we've always had at undergraduate - 3 modules, each with a 2 hour lecture and 1 hour tutorial. 9 hours a week. They're expected to do plenty of reading and revising outside of the actual contact hours, twas ever thus. Not a covid thing.

And then they drop out or don't do well - there IS a connection between a student's attendance & engagement, and learning.

So there's data showing that distance learning students do significantly worse than students attending in person?

I suspect that students attending a university aren't just there to learn, but to make new friends, socialise, learn how to be independent, and a significant minority - just to party hard.

Distance learning is completely different and will be attractive to students who just want to learn without all the trappings of being at university.

You are comparing apples with pears here.

Proper distance learning through somewhere like OU that is designed for distance learning is a very different prospect to signing up for an in-person programme but choosing not to attend classes and using recordings instead. Pedagogically and socially different beasts.

Our students do better when we don't record and they physically come to class.

Anecdotal but at the open university course I used to teach 50% of students finishing the module was a good year! And that was only one module and not the full degree.

My daughter is just finishing her dance and performing arts degree and has the opposite problem. For 3 years she has been in uni from 8.30am to 6pm and is busy most of the day. She has just handed in her dissertation- and had no time allocated to this so had to do her work solely in the evenings. She also works Saturday and Sunday mornings. She has definitely got her money's worth of teaching hours!

To be honest this doesn't sound all that different from when I was at uni in the late 2000's. There have always been courses with minimal contact time and plenty of students who don't bother with lectures.

No. If there is a clear link between lecture attendance in person and attainment then there should be a clear difference in the attainment of distance learning students and students attending lectures on the same course.

But you don have students attending and students distance learning on the same course, they’d be on different courses, designed differently to meet the different learning environment. As pp said, apples and oranges.

Again, no. My course has a mixture. The recordings I watch are from the lecture hall with students attending in person. It was the same on my previous course.

But what about seminars @LordSnot ? It’s not just lectures, there’s other learning opportunities as well

None of my three degrees have involved seminars.

So you just have lectures and that’s it? What a very strange degree.

It's strange you've never heard of degrees offered on both in-person and distance learning. Almost like your experience isn't universal...

DD had lectures, seminars and lab practicals.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I mean it used to be possible to do a degree in crime scene investigation and theology - that wasn’t a good idea either.
But again, you watch recorded lectures and don’t have any other engagement?

"Either." So arrogant of you.

I have the same course material as the campus students, accessed via the intranet. I watch all the same lectures they have. I can email lecturers to ask any questions. They offer video calls but I've never needed one. It works great for me.