Let's not kill the classroom experience
Do we really want to make all our lectures readily available online, thus giving the impression that class attendance is merely optional?
by Donald M. Taylor
I teach a social psychology course to hundreds of students. Over the years the most dramatic change in the classroom auditorium is the dominance of technology. There is, however, one aspect of this technology that bugs me big time: students being able to listen to each lecture through the course website. Students beware: there may be a cyberspace void next semester where the recorded lectures ought to be.
Lectures are the backbone of modern university education. Students must listen attentively to a ranting prof while simultaneously jotting down notes, all the while capturing the intellectual structure to the knowledge being proffered. That is not only an honourable challenge for students; it is the task that human beings must master all day, every day, with all people, in all situations.
That skill is being lost when students can sit at home in their beanbag chair and listen to a recorded lecture online, pausing all the while to take a note or two, or to warm a slice of last night's pizza in the microwave.
So why should students attend lectures? It is a social and intellectual experience. Students shuffle into class, choose where to sit while chatting about everything from the mundane to hopefully something meaningful. In terms of the course, they express their fears and dislikes with each other and generally engage in social comparisons that hopefully provide some direction and motivation to master course material. And since their success in the class involves, to some extent, psychoanalysing their prof, then even sharing thoughts about the sanity of the person in front of the class is a worthwhile endeavor.
Students react to a lecture. Where they look and how, when they sit collectively riveted, laughing or squirming, and the quizzical or unbelieving expressions, all communicate so much. And that communication affects the pace and mood of a lecture. In short, students are major players in the pedagogical experience.
Questions are crucial. There are the clarification questions that signal your failure to clearly explain a point. There are also the penetrating questions that take the lecture in a whole different, but meaningful and important direction. In either case the student is performing a service for the whole class and making an impact on the pedagogical process.
Questions also allow the other students, and indeed the professor, to self-evaluate. Students can reflect on whether or not they understood the thrust of course material. In this sense all questions, good, bad or ugly, serve as informal feedback for all students and for the instructor. Bottom line for the student? Get to class.
There are, of course, a small contingency of students who don't attend class, listen to lectures from their beanbag chair, and still do extremely well. Defensively, the prof might say "Yeah, but you could have done even better by attending class." Perhaps true, but we need to acknowledge that some students can do extremely well without the benefits of class attendance. However, these are precisely the students that a prof wants in class in order to maximize the pedagogical experience for everyone. These students have a responsibility to contribute to the collective experience, and if they are that bright then their input is especially valuable.
Recorded lectures are also a symptom of a bigger issue. The vast majority of students have time-consuming McJobs to avoid massive debt. They also live further and further from campus, necessitating a serious commute. These are structurally powerful forces that reinforce the idea that the university experience is limited to the lectures you attend and the textbooks you read. And now we are even reducing this minimalist experience further with recorded lectures. We risk turning the university experience into an exercise in distance education.
Students sometimes fall ill or face personal crises that make it impossible for them to attend a class. Other students are processing the course through a second or even third language and would benefit greatly by the opportunity to re-listen to a lecture. These are legitimate cases and I am all for making recordings available in these circumstances.
So what to do? Unfortunately, there is only one solution: Stop the default position of making recorded lectures available online. Lesser measures just aren't enough. Let's say goodbye to the one bit of classroom technology that may actually interfere with genuine learning and a meaningful shared pedagogical experience.
Donald Taylor is a professor of psychology at McGill University.
