For their own good, we should force students to physically attend lectures

As parents, most of our time is spent stopping our children from doing things we think are bad for them. We fear that, left to their own devices, they will go astray. So we attempt to get them to eat healthily, get up and go to bed at appropriate hours and leave their screens and go outside – not least, to school.

Going to university, therefore, has always been a rite of passage for the young people who do it. Having reached legal adulthood, they are dropped off by their parents at their halls of residence and left to make all their choices for themselves.

Parents have always driven away from campuses with a sense of nervousness about how capable their offspring really are of making sensible decisions in their own best interests. But the rise of online lectures has only increased the margin for error.

Campus resource: Build community into the curriculum to improve in-person attendance

Post-pandemic, most universities have supposedly returned to mostly in-person teaching. But my research, published on the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies’ website (Occasional Paper 75), suggests that although a great number have genuinely returned to all in-person teaching, with strict attendance policies, many have not.

Why not? Because, it seems, lockdowns gave students a taste for watching lectures at their own convenience online and for attending seminars on Teams. Now some begrudge the obligation to physically attend lectures at a set time and can’t see the problem with watching online instead. And universities have responded to the market pressure. Hence, it is now entirely normal for lectures to be recorded and made available to watch online whenever students choose.

Universities often claim that students who never attend physical lectures will get noticed, but it isn’t at all clear whether anything will actually be done to stop them watching their entire courses online beyond a warning email or two, and perhaps the odd phone call. One English university quoted in my research claims that its online teaching is beneficial for its students because it saves them bus fares. Never mind the £60,000 they will accrue in course fees and maintenance as long as they can save a £2 bus fare and avoid the bother of accessing the full campus experience they have paid for!

We should hardly be surprised that many 18- to 21-year-olds can find themselves corrupted by the availability of online lectures. It is a compelling notion to a generation brought up with 10-hour-a-day screen habits to be able to consume their university courses just like Netflix series. But if – as many students, as well as lecturers, argued at the time – online-only instruction was suboptimal during the pandemic, surely it is still suboptimal?

Young adults should be experiencing the joy of the physical world, with real cycle rides through real parks to real buildings, in which they sit, listen and talk to real people. What do we think we are doing, as parents and as a society, driving our children hundreds of miles across the country to university towns only for them to hardly ever set foot on campus?

While, yes, students are technically adults, I believe it is incumbent on us to do more to force them from their bedrooms and screens and ensure their physical attendance at lectures and seminars. And that requires cooperation between universities and parents.

First, universities must be upfront in their prospectuses about how much online teaching each course entails (stated in a clear, standardised format) so that parents can steer their children away from courses with significant online teaching. Moreover, if lectures and seminars are advertised as being in-person, then they should be just that, and the loophole of allowing students to watch them online instead should be closed. The option of being able to consume teaching from your bedroom is just too corrupting to even the most dedicated of students.

Second, universities should inform parents when students are consistently failing to attend in person. It is true that even the most invested parents have limited influence on 18-year-olds who prefer to stay in bed than get up for lectures, but at least if we know that our children are consistently failing to access the experience they (and we) have paid for, we can try our best to convince them of the error of their ways.

Lecture attendance is, of course, not unconnected to mental health; the detrimental effect of isolation on the latter was aptly demonstrated during the pandemic. Guidance issued by Universities UK last year makes clear that “where there are serious concerns about a student’s safety or mental health, universities can decide to involve trusted contacts [such as parents] without [the students’] agreement”. But how carefully are universities monitoring mental health? Anti-suicide prevention campaigners have their doubts, as do I. Non-attendance at lectures can see students put on a mental health watch list, triggering occasional phone calls, but students’ assurances that online lectures work for them are taken at face value.

During A levels, schools are obliged by funding regulations to provide minimum fixed levels of contact hours and to properly record pupil attendance. Yet, so far, the Office for Students hasn’t exercised any societal control to stop online teaching diminishing the full university experience that our young adults should be benefiting from. It needs to act. It needs to stop this pedagogic free-for-all in its tracks.

Paul Wiltshire is the father of a UK university student.