As an instructor, it is very challenging to help your students meet course objectives if they do not come to class. Of course, whether or not students make it into the classroom is their choice. What you do with the data about who is present and absent is your choice. I recall a statistics professor in college displaying a graph of the relationship between attendance and final exam scores for the previous semester. He pointed out that there were many possible inferences one could draw from the data, but there was no support for the interpretation that multiple absences would make your demonstrable statistical knowledge grow stronger. The room fell silent. And course attendance improved significantly thereafter.
This was such an effective teaching moment because the professor was able to use real attendance data from a past class. Some might suggest that taking attendance in college-level courses seems infantilizing or paternalistic. However, as an instructor, you are not taking attendance for your students; you are taking it for yourself. Taking attendance provides you with the opportunity to deliver a teachable moment next semester about the importance of coming to class, ensures that your records reflect the day’s events in case you need to verify things at a later date, and sets you up to reach out to struggling students or appropriate campus offices on their behalf. Without this data, all you have are your impressions and the potential for conflicting memories.
Taking attendance does not have to take time away from course content. For example, an in-class quiz, student response clickers, asking students to hand in a quick reflection on the day’s lecture or reading before leaving the classroom, or taking attendance while you circulate around the room as the students work on projects or labs are all ways that attendance data can be gathered incidentally.
There are also several low-cost apps that can help you keep track of classroom attendance. In addition, you also have the option to send an individual student’s records to him/her, thereby increasing the transparency of the process and providing the data to the students early enough to facilitate improvements in attendance. Available in the iTunes store for $4.99, Attendance2 allows you to create multiple classes (using contacts or a .csv upload), track customized fields of information (beyond present/absent), and use the app to randomly select students who are present in order to insure equitable classroom participation. Likewise, the Pikme app, free in the iTunes store, offers most of these same features, but has a somewhat more complicated procedure for importing class lists. For Android users, the suite of free apps created by the Android for Academics group includes an attendance app that syncs with Google Docs [site no longer available].
Yet, focusing on who is in the classroom in no way suggests that the classroom itself is the sole location for learning about or applying course content. In addition to internships, practicums, service learning opportunities, and other off-site experiences, technology can bring the world into your classroom.
In particular, the opportunities for virtual field trips have expanded rapidly in the past few years. The Google Art Project is a collection of over 30,000 artworks from over 150 art institutions around the world. Students can search for artworks by museum, artist, or keyword; they can then add artworks to their own virtual gallery and share the gallery online. This is an excellent way to look at representations of a theme across time or have your students assess the impact of world events through the arts. On a related note, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently launched a new digital publications website that offers enhanced searching and full access to the Met’s catalogs, journals, and bulletins. Especially noteworthy about this endeavor is that it also includes information from out-of-print catalogs related to special exhibitions.
If an art-based virtual field trip doesn’t fit your course content, there are other options that take advantage of the internet’s ability to allow users to virtually hop across time and space, picking the best materials for their learning purposes. The Newseum, focusing on the history and current state of news media, has a large collection of online exhibits ranging from photography and editorial cartoons to historical retrospectives and international topics. The Newseum also hosts a daily gallery of newspaper front pages from across the country and around the world. There’s no need for conjecture about how certain stories are presented in foreign media or how images are used in different settings; your students can conduct a compressed version of their own global field research. Likewise, the website YouTube Time Machine [site no longer available] has taken content from YouTube and assembled it in an easy interface that showcases audio/video content by year (1860 – 2012). Items from the selected year play randomly, but it is possible to focus your viewing within seven broad categories (commercials, current events, television, music, sports, video games, and movies).
Last, you might arrange a Skype video chat between your students and the author of a key reading, a practitioner in the field, or some other expert. Students can use their own research and course content to generate questions in advance. This sort of preparation ensures that the time spent on Skype is not merely a generic video lecture but a meaningful exchange of ideas between your students and the Skype guest.
As a complement to the resources listed above, you may also wish to consult the Koehler Center’s discipline-specific list of multimedia teaching tools [site no longer available]. This extensive list contains a wide variety of potential digital experiences for your students. Each entry is accompanied by a short description and information about the cost or advertising associated with the tool.
The classroom is certainly where learning takes place, and there is great value in recording which students are coming to class. But the classroom, the instructor’s office, and class texts need not be the only sites for course knowledge.
In our increasingly digital world, new and exciting virtual destinations and connections abound. Best, it is possible to both take attendance and have your students acquire broader perspectives on course content without spending exorbitant amounts of money on fancy software or expensive international travel.
This article was written by Kate Marshall, Koehler Center for Teaching Excellence, for the Fall 2013 Issue of Insights Magazine.