Recording lectures means that students who are ill (or have a death in the family or some other life event) can miss class and still catch up later. Please share your experiences in the comments!) (In a twitter discussion of this, it seems that some share my experience of not noticing an impact on lecture attendance, while others report that it has impacted it. I think adding in the clickers had a big positive impact on attendance, which much more than offset any dropoff in attendance from recording the lectures. (We have two lectures a week, so that’s 2.5 weeks of class.) But, even with those allowances, students are pretty highly motivated to come to class, hopefully because they find the in class exercises and discussion useful, but I know a lot of it is because of clicker points. The clickers are optional (we calculate the grade two ways, with and without clickers, and use whichever is higher), and students can miss up to five classes without it impacting their clicker score. But, as far as we can tell, this mostly hasn’t happened, probably because we use clickers in class. Recording lectures doesn’t seem to have impacted attendance noticeably.īefore shifting to recording lectures, our main concern was that students might stop coming to class. And, at a time when we really don’t want sick students showing up in lecture halls, there’s a strong public health argument for recording lectures and setting up class structures so that sick students aren’t penalized for staying home. Overall, I think there have been a lot of different benefits - well beyond what I initially anticipated. I’ve been thinking of writing a post about my experiences with recording lectures in Intro Bio for a while, and, with coronavirus spreading, now seems like a good time to finally write it up.

Iwatch record lectures