An interesting topic for research - and thought.
A few years ago at London Met a colleague conducted a very small scale research project on this - and discovered that attendance or not had no effect if the student was working in a field related to the programme of study - but did have an effect if they were not.
Personally I want students to want to attend - because I feel that they are the course. The course consists of the diaolgic interactions between students - and between the students and the ideas, the materials, the activities. This dialogic interaction cannot happen if people are not there. However, perhaps in a more transmissive mode of delivery - attendance per se is not necessary as long as the dialogue happens somewhere.
Perhaps that is the problem. Where are the dialogic spaces? And how do we help students realise that dialogic interaction is learning?
I have just been writing on the ALT jiscmail about 'innovation' - but the answer I think applies just as much to debates about 'attendance' - so here's a brief reprise:
I have always tried to engage students actively in their own learning. When teaching A'levels, rather than 'teach to the test', I would engage in dialogue (Plato, Freire, Bakhtin). I would ask students to give presentations and deliver their own seminars and workshops to make the learning their own...(flipped approach).
Now on both UG and PG courses I ask students to do the same - but include role plays and simulations, Poster Exhibitions, student conferences and 'Digital Me' projects - all of these bring students engagingly and powerfully into the learning process - whilst tackling the emergent problems of the new HE. And this raises another elephant in the room. The context of education changes.
League tables means that pre-university, more people do teach to the test - and students may need to learn how to learn actively - and actively in new and more demanding spaces: intellectually, physically, emotionally, virtually.
Students in the UK have to pay fees and take on loans to survive. They are more and more working at the same time as taking their courses. 'Innovation' here means that I need to help students be in the university and be with their fellow students - otherwise they are taking a 'drive by' degree - rushing into the university as little as possible so they have time for their other commitments. I need to help students build friendship groups and communities of practice - whilst these emerged more naturally in the old system.
Just as we could ask of innovation - of what and for why? I think we need to interrogate attendance. In a model of education that foregrounds process, dialogue and interaction, where we try to bond students into friendship groups and/or communities of practice, attendance is necessary. This learning cannot happen without it.
Best wishes,
Sandra
