Capitulation

The course I'm teaching this semester hasn't gone as I've wanted it to go.  I wrote about this in a post yesterday addressed to my students.  I have not required attendance.  I tried to encourage it, but perhaps inadvertently did the opposite.  At this point a majority treat the class as if it is totally online, while there are other students who take the class as if it is blended (hybrid), mixing times where they do attend with other times where they skip class.  There remains a small group of students who attend regularly, the exception to what some years ago was the rule. Among these students, most are quiet by nature, at least as I perceive them in the classroom.  They are each diligent students, getting their coursework done in a timely manner.  Many of the other students are not so diligent.

I had been trying to engage the handful that still do show up in Socratic dialog, but it feels as if they are reluctant participants.  In the past I've always had one or two glib students who evidently would want to respond to my queries, which gave me the sense that my methods were effective.  Not this time.  So I've been wondering why persist in what now seems a fool's errand.  This morning I broke the logjam.

While it goes against my own inclinations, I made a PowerPoint presentation, animated it for on screen viewing, and then made a voice over screen capture video of the slideshow.  This PowerPoint was all text (though sentences, not bullets) and meant to be something like lecture notes for the follow up to the homework that is due tonight.   As some of the students have already completed that homework, I wanted them to have access to the video immediately.  If coming to class is too arduous for most of the students, this is a quicker way to get some of the take aways I'd like students to have.  The video is under 14 minutes, perhaps on the longish side for an on screen presentation, but much shorter than a full class session.

This is more about satisfying my guilty conscience than about anything else.  From a purely utilitarian point of view, I should cater to the students who don't come to class, as they are now the majority.  I do want students to make connections between the homework and other ideas, about how to apply the model to various real-world circumstances as perceived from an economics view.

Indeed, I designed the class with the idea that the homework would be preliminary to class discussion.  Some of (maybe most of) the poor attendance can be attributed to an instrumental mindset.  Since the class discussion is itself is not graded and it is not aimed as preparation for the homework (or the next quiz) why bother coming?  I have no way of measuring how widespread such instrumentalism is outside my course, but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say that it is endemic to the undergraduate economics major and perhaps to many other majors on campus.

So the design, which might make sense if students either feel obligated to come to class no matter what or feel some desire to learn deeply even if it puts their course grade somewhat at risk, has been defeated by the attitudes of the students I do have, who are used to presentation coming first and assessment following that, to test their comprehension of the presentation.  That's the traditional method.  It is ingrained in these students, as near as I can tell.

It remains to be seen whether any of the students will look at this follow up PowerPoint and video.  I can track hits data on the PowerPoint and hits plus minutes viewed on the video.   But I'm now doing this little experiment at a time in the semester where many students are just trying to keep their heads above water. So it is far from a perfect test, and low access doesn't mean this wouldn't have been preferred by students earlier in the semester. 

Nevertheless, it is something.   And if I do get some indication from students that they actually prefer this sort of thing to what I had been doing, will I then consider redesigning the entire class that way?  Hmmm.