SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER A CASE STUDY: ARE TRADITIONAL FACE-TO-FACE LECTURES STILL RELEVANT WHEN TEACHING ENGINEERING… A Case Study: Are Traditional Face-To-Face Lectures Still Relevant When Teaching Engineering Courses? http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijep.v3iS4.3161 Shahid Alam and LillAnne Jackson University of Victoria, BC, Canada Abstract—In this rapidly changing age, with virtually all share their educational and research resources with the information available on the Internet including courses, global learning community are: University of Michigan students may not find any reason to physically attend the [6], Yale University [7], University of California Berkeley lectures. In spite of the many benefits the online lectures and [5], Stanford University [4] and Princeton University [3]. materials bring to teaching, this drift from the traditional Similar other initiatives are found in Europe [11], (norm) face-to-face lectures is also creating further barriers, Australia [8], Canada [23], China [1], India [20] and other such as difficulty in communicating and building personal countries. relationships, between students and instructor. In this paper According to the surveys of the Internet use [10], we carry out a study that presents and analyzes factors that conducted by Statistics Canada in the years 2007, 2009 motivate students to attend a (1) face-to-face instruction in- and 2010, almost 50% of the people in Canada use class versus an (2) online class. This study is based on an Internet for education, training and school work, and anonymous and voluntary survey that was conducted in the almost 90% of these people have a University degree School of Engineering at University of Victoria, BC, (higher education). Canada. This paper presents and shares the detailed results and analysis of this survey that also includes some II. STUDENTS' MOTIVATION interesting and useful comments from the students. Based on the results, analysis and comments the paper suggests Rodgers et al. [21] indicates that the student attendance methodologies of how to improve face-to-face in-class at Australian and US Universities is declining. Various instructions to make them more relevant to the current other researches [13, 12, 14, 18] has also indicated that global information age. student attendance at face-to-face lectures in higher education institutions is declining. Many Canadian Index Terms—Engineering education; global information academics have observed the same trend. age; e-learning; students' motivation; face-to-face classes; Bassili [9] carried out an empirical study and made a online classes; case-study case that the choice to attend lectures or watch them online depends on the motivation of the students, and the I. INTRODUCTION actual attendance depends on the cognitive strategies of A decade ago information was available in one form or the students. The survey included a set of questions about another but not in a global form. Due to current motivation such as: goals, intrinsic and extrinsic interests advancements in technology the same information is and feelings of self efficacy, and cognitive strategies such available globally, yielding the current global information as: attention, critical thinking, monitoring and age. organization of information in memory. Based on the The abundance of information can make it difficult to results of the survey the study concluded: filter yielding advantages and disadvantages. A soybean 1. Students who valued the course highly and were farmer in India can check the latest prices of soybean on extrinsically motivated to learn its contents had a the web site [24] of Chicago Board of Trade and hence more positive attitude towards online lectures. make an informed and better decision when to sell his/her 2. Students who like learning with peers and tend to crops. On the other hand this information can make a use cognitive strategies that involve monitoring person addictive to the Internet. As a consequence can tended to attend lectures rather than watch them interfere with his/her daily life, work and relationships. online. Many of the courses in North American universities are To improve lecture attendance we ask ourself two available to public to read, watch or even attend online. questions based on the study carried out by Bassili [9]: For example: Anyone in the world who has access to Internet can attend any of the courses offered by one of Should we train the students and develop their cognitive the top universities in the world [2, 6, 7, 5, 4, 3]. strategies so more students attend lectures? Or should we MIT OpenCourseware [2] publishes online course change and improve the lectures so students are motivated materials for more than 2000 of the same courses offered to attend them? at MIT. As of December 2012 they have more than 125 These two questions motivated us to conduct the study. million visitors. Some of the other North American The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section III universities that enable faculty, students and others to provides a literature review. Section IV describes the iJEP ‒ Volume 3, Special Issue 4: "TALE2013", December 2013 9 SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER A CASE STUDY: ARE TRADITIONAL FACE-TO-FACE LECTURES STILL RELEVANT WHEN TEACHING ENGINEERING… survey in detail including the questionnaire used, the data bad attendees, who found the lectures interesting, did not analysis and the results. Section V analyzes and provides attend more than half of the lectures because they did not discussion about the results of the survey. Section VI lists find intellectual challenge in the lectures. some of the recommendations based on the results of the A study presented by Inglis et al. [16] tried to answer a survey. Section VII finally concludes the paper. specific question: How often students attended face-to- face lectures, online lectures and a mathematical learning III. LITERATURE REVIEW support center during a calculus course. The main In this Section we review recent literature on student motivation for this study was to present the students with motivation and class attendance that relates to the study all the resources and let them choose what they think to be carried out in this paper. the most effective means of achieving their learning The study carried out by Sarah Moore, Claire outcomes. Armstrong and Jill Pearson [19] provides evidence that a 534 students participated in the study. 237 from student performance in a course depends on his/her lecture mathematics and 297 from engineering. Students who attendance. The study also provides the reasons for primarily attended online lectures were not very absenteeism among students in higher education. A survey successful academically. Students who attended both face- was conducted and the students were asked 3 main to-face lectures and the mathematical support center were questions. One of them was to describe the reasons for not more successful academically. As the face-to-face lectures attending the lectures. and the mathematical support center the online lectures The results of the survey show that a large percentage were also provided in a controlled environment. of students do not bother to attend lectures and the reasons It is not clear if the students used other online resources. can be: psychological, emotional and a coping mechanism Such as the group who attended the face-to-face lectures to deal with other problems. There was no mention about and the mathematical support center might have used the whether lectures available online affected attendance. other online resources more than the one's who primarily Gabrielle Kelly [17] also made a case of relating attended the online lectures. performance and retention rates at universities with not A study by Akers et al. [15] asked students why they attending individual courses, and that attendance is related attend lectures despite the availability of abundant online to students’ motivation and satisfaction with their course. materials. This survey was carried out in the School of A survey was conducted of undergraduate students in the Molecular Bioscience at University of Sydney. The School of Mathematics and two of the Science Colleges at authors made a case that presence of the web based University of Dublin, Ireland. The questions include the learning technologies can reduce the attendance of factors for not attending, such as weather, time table etc students at lectures and hence can affect their performance and factors that will improve attendance, such as course in studies. quality etc. The reasons given by the students for attending lectures Based on the results of the survey the authors made were: Discipline, better learning environment, university following recommendations to improve attendance: experience, social aspect, a habit, guilt and financial Provide on-campus housing and flexible class scheduling, concerns. The reasons given by the students for not change student fees, improve lecture qualities, and include attending lectures were: Sickness, inconvenience, large activity based learning. class distraction and timetable clash. The reasons given by The survey was conducted during the midterm exam students for liking the online lectures/materials were: The and the reason given for this in the paper was to include ability to work at their own pace, time and without peer the non-attendees. In our opinion this forced participation distractions. can make the students answer some of the questions under 82% of the students surveyed in this study reported, pressure and hence can produce wrong answers/results. though not verified, that they always or mostly attended Other methods could have been used to include non- lectures. It would have been good to verify attendance by attendees, such as an online survey where the student does some other means as is done in [17]. not have to be present in the class and can freely express None of the studies mentioned above asked directly, for his/her opinion. general comments and suggestions from, the students The study carried out by Krystyna Sawon, Michael about the factors that would influence and improve their Pembroke and Patrick Wille [22] was motivated by the attendance at class lectures.