(445a) Would Students Prefer to Watch Lecture Recordings Rather Than Attend Class: A Follow-up Study

Many ChE instructors noticed changes in classroom attendance trends once classes fully returned to in-person delivery upon easing of the COVID-19 pandemic; anecdotally, classes which previously had attendance rates of nearly 100% dropped below 50%. Prior work presented at the 2023 ASEE Conference analyzed open-ended student responses to survey questions using thematic qualitative coding in order to better understand the perceptions of senior undergraduate ChE students in Fall 2022 on factors influencing their classroom attendance and engagement. In that work it was indicated that some students consider watching lecture recordings to be a suitable replacement for in-person attendance (or they even prefer online learning), and that the lack of an attendance policy for the studied course played an important role in students deciding not to attend class in person.

This work provides follow-up analysis regarding application of the findings of this previous work to another course in the undergraduate ChE curriculum. Policies regarding lecture recordings and in-person classroom attendance were adjusted based on findings of the previous work and applied in a core ChE course (numerical methods) in the sophomore year. It was observed that in-person attendance rates exceeded 90%. In order to more deeply understand the factors which encouraged students to attend class, a survey question was included on end-of-semester course evaluations which asked students whether they would have regularly attended class in person if there was no attendance policy but lecture recordings were still available for asynchronous viewing. Student responses to this question were qualitatively coded using a thematic analysis method similar to that employed in the prior work; results from this analysis will be presented.