Instead of paternalistic, you could view yourself as an NPC keeping their characters on task by giving them a quest. Gamify other people's lives.
There were definitely a few classes that I pretty much didn't bother to go to much. If a video option had existed.... I don't know if I even would have done that, since the problem was how soporific the presentation was.
I can remember buying photocopied notes to avoid having to go to an 8:00 am class. I learned my lesson there. Never register for an 8:00 am class.
kid watched most of his breadth requirement "earthquakes in our backyard" class on video over the weekends, at x2 (or more?) speed & one of the profs is from germany so we had a german chipmunk nattering on about earthquakes in the bay area for light entertainment. so happy he's managed to complete an insane course load of 18 units this semester & having fun with him sleeping in between hanging out with friends & consuming large quantities of delicious food we are preparing for him.
when I'm doing the pe-ing, I'd rather force everyone to be in person
Well played.
Do they still call geology classes that fill general education requirements "Rocks for Jocks"?
Did I tell you guys I'm lecturing now? Just one intro class, in addition to my regular job. I love it so much.
We're offering a choice of modalities. I'm only willing to do in-person. I'm doing this for the attention and if it isn't the quality of attention I want, then there's no reason for me to be doing it at all. That said, I do try to make it very entertaining.
I'm not strict about anything. There's so little at stake for me that I figure I might as well be the nice teacher.
It's a golden opportunity to shower them with your knowledge.
6: don't know! to this class very specifically about earthquakes in the sf bay area. not rocks in generally but rather the earth in your street cracking open violently and entire region being isolated& without services-supplies for weeks.
I liked the one where Los Angeles had a volcano better.
Honestly, the ending kind of got stupid.
"The LAPD can't be racist if everyone is covered in volcanic ash" seems true enough but it really didn't seem like something to be proud of.
Do you want the students to be in the class because they perform better on exams, or because part of the class demands participation? Most medical school lectures are completely non-participatory, and I went to so few of them that people routinely thought I had dropped out when I showed up again for tests. (Not recommending this, I have almost been kicked out of every school I went to from high school on...) Come to think of it, I am a great supporter of self-sabotage.
I think college age kids would benefit from both getting the warning and the freedom. If you have a seminar class where participation is expected, I can see being fairly strict about physical attendance, because the quality of the conversation will drop off and affect everyone's experience. But for a pure lecture, can't you warn them about what you and others have seen and then let them fail? Isn't that part of the college experience also, that they learn how they function best without so many external controls?
What if you missed the day where they said you had to wash your hands before surgery?
I know a guy who had four kids before he was 20 because he skipped the day in health class where they explained that Saran Wrap can't replace a condom.
It's tough. Here in the land of No Official Guidance, I taught in person with a robust Zoom option in 2020. But it meant functionally that I was teaching a weird sort of hybrid class where I had to stand in a nearly empty classroom (instead of teaching in one that was advertised as virtual.) It is exhausting to teach in two modalities at once. I meant that I had to lecture. This year, in person, I specified that Zoom was *back-up*. I would livestream the lecture (and I wasn't going to require doctor's notes or any reason to use the Zoom), but I was *not* going to run everything as if I had a live and at-home audience. This seemed to work better. I think we are moving back toward in-person only with significantly more online/remote *options* -- rather than trying to make every course maximally great in all settings. I don't mind streaming the class -- better that someone who has car trouble can listen to the class rather than miss it entirely -- but I cannot do double my job with no additional resources.
I would favor Dr. Whoops but all we hear about is student retention, student retention, student retention. I expect the university would be fine with posting the course to Chegg if it improved graduation rates. The administration has doubled down on lawn mowering everything for students and if the mid-career faculty start quitting, well, I guess that solves the budget problem, too.
re the op more particularly, the kid has definitely benefitted from in person classes other than the earthquake requirement class - & ucb students have been pretty great in his departments at masking. this is great bc my better half's kidneys, were he to catch the plague, would probably both preclude his taking paxlovid *&* increase his risk of a v bad outcome. i really hope case rates have come down down down when classes start again in the fall, maybe we might have a nasal vaccine by then???
i agree with dr. whoops about lectures, tho - there is no reason to have required in person attendance at the earthquake lectures & at some point the students actually do need to learn to manage their lives.
yikes appropriate support for both faculty & students in furtherance of reasonable goals obviously pie in the sky per cala so yeesh i have no idea what to do.
The way student loans work means you can't let people fail. But yes failing is part of the college experience. So the whole thing is just a disaster.
I feel like this is a situation where "elite" schools are going to let students do whatever they want, unless it's a seminar, and there will be a recording available somewhere.
Students with less motivated students who are less able to teach themselves the material will have stricter rules about in-person attendance.
If the class starts after 10:00 am, you can make attendance part of the grade for participation.
Dr Whoops' nephew Newt manages college kind of like that, showing up for anything literally as little as is permitted, and he's making it work for him (consistent Dean's List grades in the U Toronto Eng. Sci. program). So it can work (at least for the kind of STEM classes where the value isn't in the interactions with your fellow students), but I do think allowing students to do that greases the skids, for most of them, toward totally losing any contact with the class and ultimately failing. This doesn't mean I know what to do about it -- maybe Newt should have to suffer through showing up for lecture rather than just doing the work independently, on the grounds that having the requirement for physical presence makes students in general better off?
So many of my friends flunked out of college at least once.
I don't take attendance. Students can do whatever they want. I'm just tired of having to be the executive function replacement for undergrads who can't figure out that scheduling a family vacation for three weeks in October is a bad idea.
In general the US is an outlier here in terms of lots of small assessments (including things like attendance) and paternalism compared to other countries, so I expect that in Canada it's easier to do that then it would be in a lot of US universities. (Of course the US is also an outlier in terms of how university funding works.)
At least in math, there's a bit of a problem where faculty were often exactly that kind of student and so want to let students have more freedom like that, but then we have crazy high failure rates.
Wanting to spend three months with their family is probably a student failing you see in Utah and nowhere else. Everyone I knew who flunked out failed because of drinking.
Or being just unable to do the work.
On those rare occasions where I teach a lecture class I give extra credit for attendance, which seems to work better than either requiring it or not. But most of my classes are interactive, and since we don't have the tech to let zoom students hear the others, students on zoom kills the discussion until there's a critical mass and it becomes a zoom class and they can hear each other again. So I stopped offering any sort of zoom option this semester.
The most common statement in my Gen Ed course evals was going to class made things a lot easier and they regretted it when they skipped, so I guess it's working.
I love it when a pedagogy comes together.
29 is confusing me -- Zoom students can hear each other but not in-class students? I expect the problem to be in-class unable to hear the Zoom students.
(a TA on Zoom in the class repeating all the questions for clarity would work? If you have TAs in class. I like having the speaker repeat the questions in general though.)
32: Usually the room mic is bad at capturing questions that people ask in class. The instructor can repeat all the questions (which is good practice anyway), but that really isn't practicable for small group discussions. You can put the Zoomers in a Zoom room and hope that half of them aren't Beuhler bots. But I just don't want people, meaning my administration, to underestimate how much extra work it is to try to make this kind of thing work.
Ah I was thinking of lectures, not of small group discussions. Gotcha.
Did you all read this NY Times "Guest Essay" My College Students are not ok"
I was kind of expecting the OP to link to it.
32: Cala is exactly right. If I need to stop and repeat what's said, or ask the students to come speak into the mic, it kills the discussion and the students give up on talking to each other. All online works. And all in-person works. And there's tech to make half and half work, but it's expensive and my uni didn't spring for it. I suppose they could hire someone to transcribe the discussion for the zoom folks, but there's no way I can do that while also running the discussion. Hy-flex is a LOT of work if you're doing anything other than lecture and answer questions.
Yeah, I was asked to attend a conference session by Zoom which was 2/3 in person, and the interactive portion was completely useless. This was especially painful because it was literally one of the only one of these conferences in which I actually had real questions, and really wanted to know what the other people in the room were saying.
I want to be in the room where it happens.
17: does "lawn mowering" mean "removing obstacles?" What happens when the lawn mowering administrators run into the helicopter parents?
37: those expensive options: way back in the before times we had at least one classroom that was like that - individual mikes at each student station, along with monitors and kind of creepily, if a student spoke a ceiling-mounted camera automatically rotated and focused on them.
I once tried to kill a mouse with a lawn mower. Turns out they are too short.
When I used to teach at Oxford, I'm pretty sure many of my students never attended lectures. I certainly didn't attend any most of the time I was a graduate student, but that was expected, as the vast bulk of the teaching was individual tutorials or small group seminars.
For big lecture theatre style lectures, though, I think having a streamed/recorded option is great. I did attend most of my undergraduate lectures, because a lot of them were interesting, but the shitty ones, I'd have watched a recording on 3x speed and been happier. For arts and humanities subjects, though, the seminar/tutorial format is where the good stuff happens, and that's really hard to do online well. My company works all-online and has for years, so we are quite practiced at having white-boarding sessions in a virtual environment, and my company tends to select for people who can handle themselves confidently in a Zoom free-for-all, but I think the average undergraduate is not going to do as well.
42: You can probably get bigger wheels for one, even in Pittsburgh.
THAT'S BURR'S LINE!
I think you'd actually want smaller wheels for this use.
45: Listen nerd, I paid $10 for a ticket to your play so now you owe me.
46: Yes, I was trying for the blade.
Now that I think of it, the $10 price was probably some kind of special deal.
Do you want the students to be in the class because they perform better on exams, or because part of the class demands participation?
I'm not sure how to answer this. Both? Any unsprogged would be able to pass my class with a video, but most of my students mostly understand because they work through problems on the board during class, with me looking over their shoulder. But if one student is absent, they're not sabotaging it for anyone else, like in a class discussion where you want sharp kids to move it along. But they'll understand it much better for the exam if they're there.
If they're remote, I can't monitor how well they understand. It's easier for a medium student to coast without engaging and then end up failing the class, where they might have gotten a B on autopilot, in person.
I wouldn't have been able to pass calculus over a video. I can now watch videos and learn new statistical techniques, but there's no way it would have worked for me at 20.
50: I think that's the relevant group. Some students will be fine no matter what. Some will flunk no matter what. The course delivery makes a big difference for the mushy middle though, and there's something to be said for making the default option (come to class, pay attention most of the time) one likely to result in passing. Hi-flex I guess is the new buzzword (just saw it today in a work email) but it is going to be a disaster.
46: Maybe they were rodents of unusual size?
I definitely saw a ton of problems from allowing my students to Zoom into class all semester if they wanted. Also, the teaching experience sucked for me.
For discussions, in classes large enough to have a TA, I send the TA to Zoom to lead a separate discussion there. But my uni is unusual in giving us TAs for all classes over 24 students, so I actually do have class discussions in classes with TAs.
I think that, next semester, I might modify my attendance policy to 1 free absence and 2 free Zoom attendances before the participation grade is effective (up to now, it's been 2 free absences). Beyond that, they have to at least have a discussion with me about why they are missing class.
I definitely saw a ton of problems from allowing my students to Zoom into class all semester if they wanted. Also, the teaching experience sucked for me.
For discussions, in classes large enough to have a TA, I send the TA to Zoom to lead a separate discussion there. But my uni is unusual in giving us TAs for all classes over 24 students, so I actually do have class discussions in classes with TAs.
I think that, next semester, I might modify my attendance policy to 1 free absence and 2 free Zoom attendances before the participation grade is effective (up to now, it's been 2 free absences). Beyond that, they have to at least have a discussion with me about why they are missing class.
50: I remember a fair number of college math classes where I spent most of my time in class trying to transcribe what the professor was writing on the board before it got erased, hoping that I didn't have too many transcription errors, and thinking I sort of understood it until I had occasion to try and struggle through my notes later (a bunch of these covered things that weren't really described well in the textbook, if at all, so the notes were basically it). Reminds me of the old definition of a lecture as a process where the contents of the notebook of the professor are transmitted to the notebook of the student without going through the minds of either. If you have students working problems at the board under supervision, that offers a lot more interaction than what I recall.
Whether to be remote is entirely contingent on the delivering agent and the receptacle. I would rather be present in class, because I presume that the professor has something to offer and, when that is the case, one ought to be there if one can. I work from home whenever I can at present because I am not a student, and interaction with my coworkers does not improve my work product nor gratify in any other way. When speech is not even intended to inform, I do not want it, and will avoid it if I can. Accordingly, I am not going to read any of the above comments.
57:. You can't fool me, text. You obviously read every single Unfogged comment, probably even the stupid ones I write.
Speech not intended to inform is a hobby of mine.
The guy trying to contact me about my car's extended warranty is conducting speech intending to inform.