Is it unreasonable to expect students to read the lecture notes before attending the first class?

Question

The new semester will be starting in a few weeks, and I will be teaching a course which starts on the first day of the semester.

The goal of the course is to teach students how to use the R programming language to clean and analyze data. I will teach the course using a flipped classroom format:

• To save time (both my own time and students' time), I will record video lectures and write lecture notes, which I expect the students to watch or read before each class. It should take the students about 1–2 hours to watch/read before class.

• The class meets 1 time per week, for 3 hours at a time. During the class time each week, students will be in the computer lab, where they will complete data analysis tasks on the computer. During the class time in the lab, students can ask me to clarify any questions they may have.

Question: From the second class onward, I will be expecting students to watch the lecture videos and read the lecture notes before coming to class. However, is it a good idea to have the same arrangement for the first class? In other words, is it unreasonable to ask and expect students to read the lecture notes for the first class before coming to the first class? My plan is to post the lecture notes online, and to notify students that they should read the lecture notes by making an announcement using the course LMS system. (In my university, students are automatically signed up to the course learning management system when they register for the course.)

Some clarifications:

• What types of students will be taking the course?

  The course is a course for undergraduate students, with most of the students are in their 2nd or 3rd year of study.

• Is the course listed as a lab or as a lecture course?

  The course is listed as a lecture course. I am teaching in the business school, where lab courses are extremely uncommon. I believe that courses which are taught as lab courses, say by teaching them in a computer lab, are still listed officially as lecture courses.

• Will I be giving the students too much work?

  In my university, courses meet once a week, for 3 hours at a time. My plan is to give students either some notes to read and/or videos to watch, which they should do before class each week. This should take about 1-2 hours of time each week, which seems to me to be quite reasonable. Students in my university take 5 courses a semester on average, which is 15 hours of class time each week.

Answer 1

Yes, it is unreasonable to ask and/or expect students to do 1-2 hours of reading work prior to coming to the first class of the semester. It’s not just that, as others point out, your expectations will surely not be met, but, equally importantly, that such a request is unfair to the students.

What’s reasonable is to expect the students to come to the first class knowing the officially advertised prerequisite material. Requiring more knowledge than that is effectively moving the goalposts, a kind of false advertising, and a (mild) abuse of your authority. In addition to most of the students ignoring your request, even the ones who do the reading may still resent you for this misrepresentation, and for trying to monopolize a part of their time that is not yours to monopolize - the time before the beginning of the class, when students may well be busy with other things they had planned to do.

At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that it is your job to teach the material, and that the time between the start of the class and the end of the semester is precisely the time scheduled by the university for the students to learn that material. Assigning independent reading, while certainly acceptable, is something that should be done sparingly, and not before this official time period. Your intentions seem good and I sympathize with the general idea: I may also wish that if I’m teaching, say, a complex analysis class then students should read at home the basics of contour integration before the course starts so that I can cover more advanced material. But that’s my problem, not the students’.

Answer 2

In my opinion, yes it is unreasonable.

Disclaimer: I am a student in the Netherlands, different universities and countries might work differently.

In all the courses I've followed I can't remember a single one that expected me to prepare for the first class. Usually the first half of the first lecture of a course is dedicated to explaining how the course works, what is expected of you, and anything else related to organization. Most students, including myself, usually don't even register in the online environment where the teaching material is posted before the first lecture.

You could argue that maybe this shouldn't be the case, and that students should be more diligent. And naturally, it is up to you whether you want to take this view and potentially punish students who didn't prepare. Practically though, most students are probably just going to miss it, or skip it.

If you do decide to have students prepare for the first lecture, make sure to clearly note this in the course guide/emails/online announcements. And also note the potential consequences for students who do not prepare.

Answer 3

I think that it is reasonable to ask that they read the notes. But I suspect that you will get about the same response that you would get to any similar request during the term. Some will do it - most likely those who need it least - and others won't. There are a lot of reasons beyond slacking why they won't. They have other commitments for their time and effort between terms.

So, my advice would be to make the request, but don't assume that it is honored. Find a way in class that you can proceed without disadvantaging some of the students. One way is to start out with pairing in the first exercises. One member of a pair might be able to bring her/his partner up to speed. Another way is to spend part of the first class discussing the notes explicitly. If the scale is reasonable, make this an interactive exercise.

Another way is to provide an ungraded quiz that you use solely to let the students know if they have any gaps that they should fill quickly. Make it clear that if they do well on the quiz they are prepared to continue, but otherwise they need to quickly bring themselves up to speed - via the notes.

Actually, maybe the response would be a bit less than normal, given that this is, to them, an unusual request.

If you are a relatively new teacher, I'll note that your students are not like you, unless this is an advanced graduate course. Very few of them, anyway. You are who and where you are because of certain characteristics and habits that the vast majority of your students don't share. It is always a good idea to remember that. You are not teaching people just like you. They probably don't learn in the same way that you learn. Explore Learning Modalities for a discussion of that. You have succeeded. They haven't (yet). Moreover their success won't be like yours for the most part.

Answer 4

You want the students to read the lecture notes prior to the first meeting of the class, but you do not appear to have a method of communicating this requirement directly to the students. Without a way to ensure that your announcement is read by all of the students in the class you cannot assume that any of them will read it, and thus in my opinion your requirement to spend multiple hours preparing for the class prior to the first meeting is unreasonable.

Answer 5

Not all your students might have fully enrolled by the first class. They might not have access to the course announcements or the lecture notes, and therefore they can't read the material even if they want to.

Beyond that though, what someone considers reasonable and unreasonable will vary from person to person, so I'll sidestep that discussion (the comments to one answer already quotes from dictionaries what this word means) and say, chances are:

• Most students will not read the lecture notes before the first class. Only the most dedicated and diligent of students will.
• Most students will not complain if you make this request. Some won't even be aware of it until the first lecture.
• If you go ahead with this and stick to your guns, the most common reaction will probably be surprise. "Wow, this course / professor is not easy".

Personally, I'd skip the requirements in the first class and impose them beginning in the second class. That way, everyone (those that come to the labs anyway) will know what you expect of them, and ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Answer 6

This is actually a form of blended learning called the flipped classroom. This approach involves studying the material before classes and using the class period for activities and assignments to better understand the content. As such, this is not an unusual request.

The only thing that makes this unreasonable is the timing. If I understand the question correctly, you are trying to have the students read lecture notes before you even met them. Before the very first class is strange in my opinion. However, if you have a prior relationship with these students and have taught them before it may be more reasonable but still unusual. Often the first class is used to explain expectations for the semester and not so much on learning activities.

Answer 7

Everyone is focusing on the fact that you want to have this done before the first class and casually glances over the fact that you are effectively doubling the amount of time necessary for your class.

You don't mention a location, but at every college I know of, course credit values are assigned depending on a loose estimation of the expected number of hours a student puts in before voluntary extra work. The way you want to structure this, the credit score would have to be doubled.

If the credit score isn't doubled, you should either halve the number of classes or abandon the idea of not actually teaching the lecture altogether.

In order to make this an answer to the question as posed: I second all answers that point out that you have no reliable channel to make your expectations known to the students. As such the specific expectation as asked is unreasonable.

Answer 8

You don't say what level of students or what any prerequisites are for the course, so my comments are based on the idea of a fairly low level undergraduate course. If it were an honors course for senior majors I might answer differently.

1-2 hours is way too much to expect before the first meeting. At least in the US, students may not even complete registration before the first class and some may not be back to campus until the day of your class meeting.

Also you are using the term lab notes and lecture notes interchangeably, but they are not the same. Are you talking about lab instructions? Or were you planning to lecture for two hours? At most, you might ask them to "skim" instructions but don't count on them doing it.

That said, I do often email students before the first meeting and ask that they do something. For example, send me an email introducing themselves, post a self introduction on a discussion board, complete a short survey or pretest assessment, read a related newspaper article or watch a related video (since you mention data analysis I'll say that for my into stats class I sometimes use one of the Gapminder videos). Or make sure they know how to login to some system. Also remind them to bring anything they need to bring if you are doing a lab. I also post this in the LMS so that students who don't read their email will see it. That makes possible to have a more engaged first class meeting even if only half the class did it, and students can email me with anything I need to know before class. Also students who didn't read the email get a reminder that they need to do that and also can still do it after class.

What are you going to do about the students that didn't do the reading? What about visually impaired students who didn't do the reading? It's already a classroom management problem just thinking about it. There's nothing worse for a course than a chaotic first meeting. It gets the whole thing off on the wrong foot.

I would think that for the first lab you would want to plan it out carefully so that it takes a reasonable amount of time (leaving time to review the structure of the course and expectations) and right away start showing that class time will be used for active learning. That is do not lecture for more than you plan to lecture during the rest of the semester. That means you will have to assume nothing for that first class and plan a lab that does not require student prep and is either very self explanatory that you will actively facilitate. It will be better to have it be too short than too long.

I don't know how much experience you have in teaching or in the flipped model, but I can tell you that it requires meticulous planning. It's definitely worth it to put the planning time in. I have students doing data analysis with real data in R the first day they walk into my room; it is very do-able with good planning and thoughtful approaches.

Answer 9

One big problem could be students who add the course late. You can post the assignment on the class management software, but if some student adds the class the day of or the day before or the day after the first lecture, then he won't know about the assignment until it's too late.

If this is a large lecture course, this is guaranteed to be a problem. More so because large courses are usually populated by immature students. If this is a small, graduate course, then it's much less unreasonable.

Answer 10

It is highly unlikely that more than 10% of your students will read the lecture notes prior to the first lecture, and that's being optimistic. The beginning of the semester is fraught with logistical issues. Often, students drop a course after looking over a syllabus. The students then spend a little time registering for new courses. More time is spent purchasing required textbooks at the beginning of the semester, then during. A student may spend a few hours moving their belongings into a dorm room or apartment instead of reading the lecture notes. Once things "calm down" a bit, students will have more time to read such things. However, I would plan for failure. Design your lectures to be effective even if none of the students have read the notes beforehand.

Answer 11

First day of class? Forget it. Class hasn't started yet. Second (and maybe 3rd) day of class? Depends on when drop/add ends at your school, it is likely the first day of class for some.

But you must hammer on the necessity of coming to class prepared, and you need to have consequences of not being minimally prepared pre-class.

Since you are using the LMS, I recommend the way I operate for a "flipped" classroom.

I have 15% of the final grade coming from "readings quizzes", which are short 5-10 question auto-grading (multiple choice, many choice, matching) quizzes over the materials needed to be prepared for class. These quizzes open 5 minutes after class ends, and they are all due by 5 minutes before the next class starts (1 day per week night course), and have no real time limit. I encourage students to start the quiz, and start reading, and answer the questions as they go.

I teach IT stuff, so by having these quizzes as 15% of the grade even if someone already knows my subject area (Linux & services administration) from hobby use, work experience, etc. they can blow off these quizzes but the highest possible grade is a middle B. Even if they are getting 100% on labs and projects, it means that they must do very on the unit exams (which come from both pre-class prep content and labs/project content) in order to maintain that B. Even the students who know it all already and are just chasing that degree end up taking the quizzes just to give them that extra breathing room on their final grade.

The biggest issue is that some students believe that "Cs earn degrees" - so they do the least possible to maintain that benchmark.

Just remember - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it a duck. Good luck!

Answer 12

Yes, this is unreasonable. However, what I'm not saying is that you definitely shouldn't do it.

Yes, it is unfair. Some people may finish some stressful classes the prior quarter, and went through the effort then to register for this quarter's classes, and then pursued some other activities in life (which might be serious, or not; either way should be at their personal discretion) and then not even think about your class before classtime, except maybe to swing by the bookstore to buy books. That is the standard expectation, and so they may not even know about your additional "requirements" until they show up to your class in order to start learning what your requirements may be.

I read your question carefully enough to see that you may use your LMS system, which may inform students. However, they may not be checking their E-Mail. Even if you sent that E-Mail before the prior class ended, they might not pay attention to E-Mail about upcoming courses. As some other answers mention, there are some boundaries, and they might not believe there is any expectation for them to engage before day number one.

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All that said, perhaps the answer (as to whether you should do this) depends on just what your goals are. Here is a solid example showing the other side of the coin.

I've been a college instructor and I recall a college President telling me (and some other staff) about something he did. In prior years, he was a college instructor who had a Statistics course. One thing this instructor was evaluated on was the course completion rate. The only students who affected the course completion rate were students who registered and remained past the brief initial re-scheduling period (for the first few days, maybe week or so, of the quarter). So, if a student dropped the class during the initial few days, that person was no longer considered a student of the course and didn't affect the course's rate of completion/mid-course withdrawals.

He had a requirement of completed homework due on day number one, and providing a negative grade for those who didn't turn that in.

He got a reputation of being extremely unfairly harsh.

This tactic also resulted in him scaring away the slackers, so the remaining students (who did put up with this "nonsense") were the truly dedicated, or at least the students who wouldn't shy away from some work.

As a result, anyone who was going to drop his class because of workload typically did so during the first three days, or even before his class started, which didn't count against him. By getting his "drop outs" to drop out so early, they didn't count against him, so even in a typically less-popular course, this instructor enjoyed some extremely high course completion rates.

Answer 13

We do a very similar arrangement for the small amount of R teaching we do. Students are asked (via email) to do some preparatory work before the first class. This involves two things:

• a video (and written up notes) on how to install R and R Studio
• a short video and set of exercises on finding their way around the R Studio window, using the console as a calculator, learning what a variable is and assigning values to variables.

I wouldn't expect them to read but they do seem to watch the videos, or at least ~75% of them do. This allows us to concentrate on the others during the class.

I'll note that our class is compulsory for everyone that does it. There is no signing up late or dropping out. And our students are used to being communicated with via email - any student that doesn't check their email at least once a day will have found themselves dropping quite a lot of credit in their first year.

Answer 14

Don't even tell them. Just give them a pop quiz on the first day. This will send the lesson that they need to pre-read the lessons. Try to be like John Houseman in The Paper Chase.

(This answer is not entirely in jest. I think an adversarial teacher is entertaining. And it can drive learning. It's actually a topic that I would enjoy in a question.)

Answer 15

Perfectly reasonable and my default for flipped classes (excluding first year students as I don't expect brand new students to understand what a flipped classroom is). The proviso is that your schedule allows time before the first in-person class for students to do that (so 8am Mondays, not reasonable, 3pm Tuesday reasonable).

This should be clearly communicated to students, and the resources available in plenty of time for students to actively do it. Many will not, focus your time on those who complete their work and follow through on your expectations. It is annoying for students who do their work if you then teach the class as if they haven't.

Answer 16

It is not unreasonable to ask students to be adequately prepared before they attend any lecture: first, second, third etc. What is unreasonable on the part of the instructor is to expect the students will behave reasonably.