Telegraph:
Traditional university lectures are being consigned to history because students are accessing professors’ notes online without turning up in person, research suggests.
Undergraduates are skipping almost 10 per cent of teaching time – more than an hour every week – despite a sharp rise in tuition fees, it emerged. The study, by two leading higher education think-tanks, found that large numbers of students who missed timetabled lessons cited “availability of lecture notes online as a reason for non-attendance”.
David Willetts, the Universities Minister, said the findings underlined the need for academics to invest more time in giving students proper feedback. He said the days of an “academic experience” that involved “simply sitting in rows with 500 other people takes notes from slides on a screen” were over.
