Reply to Rigor and Absences: New Harvard Policy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's the reality. It's impossible to make students attend lectures of 100 plus without instituting a lot of expensive monitoring. Rather than invest in such monitoring, schools should reduce class sizes to 75 max.  The student experience improves massively, but that's a lot more expensive.

The lecture for 200-400, if not dead, should be.[/quote]

Have them tap on a Kahoot/Blooket during class.

Have students sign in to an signin sheet their TA holds.

Take attendance orally for a random sample of the class.

We had tech for in class live quizzes in my college 30 years ago, with custom hardware before everyone had phones. [/quote]

I'm telling you: I've taught a large lecture in the past two years, and these tech tools are too buggy or annoying to work as effective attendance checks.  Kahoot?  Anyone can have two devices and log on with someone else's name. People can -- and do -- sign others' names on sheets that are passed around the room.  Do you really want me, or the TAs, to become handwriting experts to check those signatures?  Not what I signed up for.  More importantly, it's not efficient or effective. Students in large lectures have also managed to take pop quizzes remotely.

All the new tech is awesome and I use it to enhance learning and engagement, but it's not an effective check for attendance in a large lecture. I've discussed this with the learning tech team at my university (who follow all the recent edtech developments) and they are also stumped. Smart, motivated, experienced people are working on this problem every day. From your answers, it does not appear that you are one of them.

Taking oral attendance for a random sample of the class seems like it would work, but then I need to see the student's features well enough to make sure they match the stamp-sized photo of the student I just called. That's both a waste of precious class time and it introduces a 'gotcha' element (and public shaming) into the classroom. Not worth it.

Students opt not to attend large lectures for various reasons. I'm sure some of them find me boring, but attendance at even the most charismatic professors' lectures is spotty. Refusing to record lectures at all would help, but with Covid and other contagious illnesses, there remains institutional pressure against this.

The best answer to this problem is to reduce class size, which allows the professor to get eyes on individual students.  When students feel seen, they show up. That's better for learning but a lot more expensive.

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