This term I have implemented the computer/lecture policy described in the past, and I am going write about my experience in this blog post.
My thoughts have evolved since then, and it is more appropriate to call it “lecture policy”. To summarize this lecture policy, I set a small percentage (say 7%) as “participation mark”. Everyone automatically gets full mark, but they will lose it if they are disruptive in class, e.g. watching irrelevant videos, online shopping, chatting, not participating, etc.
The main reason for this lecture policy is to minimize disruptive behaviour in class. My hope is that I won’t need to enforce this policy and give any mark penalties. However, if it did come to a point where I have to hand down a participation mark penalty (I haven’t yet), I can always remind the students that they have not been “forced” to come to class. They chose to come to class and chose to be disruptive despite repeated warnings.
What are the effects of this policy on the classes this term? They vary. First, attendance. One class has stably maintained at about 80%, one varies between 50-60%, and one stably below 50%. So the effects on attendance really depend on the students. Different students would take it differently.
Second, (actual) participation. Not surprising, the classes with 80% and 50-60% attendance have been significantly more active than the one below 50%. More observations may be required, but my general impression is that the students in the first two classes have been quite actively and involved in class.
Third, disruptive behaviour. Much less, at least from my perspective. I still see some students doing other things on their computers, and there are still some who didn’t participate in any in-class small group discussions at all. But, first, there are only a handful of them. Second, they often sit at the very back of the classroom so they aren’t too disruptive. (I said at the beginning of the term that if they knew they “couldn’t help doing other things on their computer”, then “at least please sit at the back of the lecture room”.) So I am planning to give them any warning unless the situation gets out of hand.
It would certainly be much more difficult to monitor them in a much bigger lecture, say 100 people, but it is in such big lectures that violations are the most likely. However, courses with such big enrolment would likely have tutor support. I would then ask my tutors to sit at the back of the lecture room and report to me non-compliance. If they don’t need to regularly attend the lecture, then I would ask them to come to a few lectures (randomly picked) and report on those occasions.
