Raising the (perceived) value of attendance vs accessibility…

This morning, on my walk to my dip and back, I listened to Tom Lowe on Talking Learning & Teaching speaking about student attendance.

A lot of the reasons why students choose to not attend class that he mentions sound very similar to what my colleagues found for students at my faculty — the cost of the commute (in both money and time — is it really worth the investment?), the perceived value of a specific session (depending on the topic, the format, the teacher, and many other factors), the availability of high-quality online materials… One point that he makes is that traditionally, learning could pretty much only happen in person or by going to the library, until fairly recently wiki wasn’t even reliable and not many other resources around. And now, teachers are competing with often good quality videos of themselves, plus now also LLMs that can at least seem like a pretty good alternative to attending classes. So what to do?

Where we typically end up is that we try to make it worth students’ while to attend. Make classes more meaningful and really underscore why they are relevant and meaningful, both to students’ future professions and to the exam. I recently talked with a colleague who told me about the way they make online make-up sessions for missed in-person sessions “more work”. Not to be mean to students, of course, but as a slight deterrant and because learning is more efficient in conversations with others, and engaging with different perspectives on your own just takes more reading and time.

But the one tension that I keep coming back to is making attendance so valuable to students that they absolutely WANT to be there — and accessibility. We absolutely want to make classes accessible for people who cannot attend (even though they might want to), and not give them the second best treatment just to incentivise attending in person. And also, if NOT attending is as valuable as is attending, then why should we still wish for more attendance rather than just be happy that students learn in ways that work for them?

One aspect of in-person classes that I find difficult to reproduce outside of them is building community, though. That is difficult enough when people get together, but doing that in a hybrid way requires even more conscious effort both by the teacher and all the students (attending in person or not) to make sure that there aren’t inner- vs outer circles forming, inner circles that have supportive networks and positive experiences, and outer circles that don’t, or only much more loosely.

Just this morning, I was thinking about the importance of connections again. I met these wonderful ladies that go dipping at the same spot as me early in the morning. Going dipping at that time really conflicts with other things I like to do early in the morning, like either sleeping, or being in the office super early to get stuff done before other people show up, and then going dipping after work. But this morning, I decided that meeting them, investing in my relationship with them, was worth getting up slightly earlier and starting to work slightly later than lazy me would have done. And I am glad that I did, because they were wonderful as always!

Maybe we need to talk with students about the value of relationships in different ways, so that investing in relationships is something they “price in” the calculations about attendance, and that investment into relationships happens whether they choose to attend or not, with people who chose to attend or not. And if students that do not attend are as well connected and feel that they matter just as much as those that attend, then why should they not be able to choose that?

(Of course, then there are issues with room bookings and empty lecture theatres that feel awkward unless you ask students to sit reasonably close to each other etc, but that’s someone else’s problem)

And here are this morning’s wave watching pics.

It definitely felt more like fall today!

But beautiful sunny fall!

And I like it when the sun comes up late enough that the sunrise close to at a reasonable dipping time!

One last pic!