Challenging the beliefs that synchronous online lecture attendance correlates to students’ overall grade

This study examined the effects of online (synchronous) engagement in live lectures versus offline (asynchronous) studies on students’ performance of an undergraduate computer science Databases module with a large class size of over 400 students. As a result of COVID-19, significant teaching activities has moved online at short notice. The traditional view that full lecture attendance equates to better students’ performance in assessments, needs to be challenged. We have discovered that attendance at synchronous (live) online-lectures has very little correlation to students’ performance.

Our view is that the change to online learning has caused a considerable shift in study habits. In fact, a significant number of students who had hardly attended any live online-lectures still performed extremely well in the summative assessments, indicating that they were still engaging asynchronously. Using page view data from a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) via CANVAS, we have established correlations to predict students’ performance. Such data can be extremely valuable when monitoring students’ engagement. It can also minimise “false alarms” of students who were perceived to have little commitment due to poor online lecture attendance, but are in fact strongly engaging via other means. To the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first times such a range of data is available for a large class of over 400 students, looking at detailed students’ engagement versus assessment performance. We can conclude that academics need not be overly concerned with low attendance at live online-lectures, as they can use other correlations to predict likely performance in assessments.