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In 2017, a\u00a0business lecturer<\/a>\u00a0posted a photo on LinkedIn showing a completely empty university classroom, 15 minutes after the class had been scheduled to start.<\/p>\n This is not an isolated incident. Anecdotally, lecture and tutorial attendance has been\u00a0declining steadily<\/a>\u00a0in Australian universities and faculties for many years.<\/p>\n Declining attendance may\u00a0affect students\u2019 academic performance<\/a>\u00a0and their\u00a0sense of connectedness<\/a>. University doesn\u2019t only teach content but develops attributes such as oral communication and interpersonal skills including teamwork.<\/p>\n Students are less likely to develop these skills if they don\u2019t physically attend class.<\/p>\n We\u00a0conducted a large-scale study<\/a>\u00a0in our law school to uncover whether lecture recordings are responsible for declining student attendance and what motivates students to attend or miss class.<\/p>\n By manually counting how many students were in lectures across sixteen different subjects, we found attendance rates averaged just 38% of total enrolments across the semester.<\/p>\n There was a natural ebb and flow of lecture attendance throughout the semester. There was peak attendance at the beginning (57%), a significant drop in the middle as assessments became due (26%) and a rebound at the end of semester as exam season hit (35%).<\/p>\n We also asked students to self-report their lecture attendance. The most common answer given, by far, was \u201calmost all of the time\u201d and 59% of students said they attended lectures the majority of the time.<\/p>\n Clearly there is a dissonance between this self-perception and reality.<\/p>\n Lecture recording is now common in Australian universities. Anecdotally, it\u2019s often\u00a0held responsible<\/a>\u00a0for declining attendance rates. But there is little research on the relationship between student attendance and lecture recording.<\/p>\n While lectures are usually recorded and available to students in streamed or downloadable format once the class ends, tutorials and other smaller classes are not usually recorded.<\/p>\n Our study found students aren\u2019t ditching tutorials, seminars and workshops as much as they are lectures. Tutorials averaged a whopping 84% attendance rate. This could partly be explained by the fact teachers assess students on their participation in tutorials.<\/p>\n We also surveyed 900 students to find out their reasons for attending and not attending lectures, tutorials and workshops.<\/p>\n Availability of lecture recordings was the most common reason students gave for not attending lectures (18% of students said this). But work commitments were a close second (16%). Then it was timetable conflicts (12%), the time and day of lectures (11%) and assessments being due (8%).<\/p>\nAre recordings to blame?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Students lead complex lives<\/strong><\/h4>\n