What if classes are empty because students dislike faux-interactivity?

At a recent exam board meeting we attended, a familiar chorus of exasperation was expressed about persistent low attendance and general lack of engagement from students. The external examiners noted that the same malaise prevailed at their universities. Across the board, it seems, low student turnout has become a defining feature of the contemporary university.

We know that part of the explanation is the insufficient maintenance support and high cost of living, which drive students towards part-time work. But there is also a sizeable proportion of students who do turn up, yet sit slumped at desks, focused on phones or simply gazing into space. What explains their disconnection?

A common suggestion is that social media have caused concentration thresholds to decline. Yet lecturers have energetically responded to that fear, developing ever more accommodations for the imagined “Gen Z” mind. Today, much course content is delivered via intranet sites, online quizzes, videos and interactive content. During Covid, many universities developed competencies in so-called flipped classrooms, so that much teaching is now delivered across multiple media.

Meanwhile, traditional lectures are dismissed by teaching and learning experts as “didactic” and anachronistic. Since the 1990s, the tendency has been towards interactive teaching and learning, with students routinely organised into discussion groups as soon as they encounter new ideas. In many subjects, those ideas are almost always delivered via PowerPoint slides, with complex concepts reduced to bite-sized, user-friendly bullet points.

Yet digital and online content is often met with even greater levels of uninterest; “Zoom fatigue” is now established vernacular in higher education. The more that university teaching is structured around the idea of the active student, the more disengagement seems to increase.

But maybe that isn’t as surprising as it first appears. After all, the supposed interactivity of modern teaching is not actually geared to (re)direct lecture content. “Learning outcomes” are immutably set by university committees long before the module even takes place; lecturers require students to speak merely for the sake of having them speak, not because their questions and opinions might shift the session in unexpected directions. And, consciously or otherwise, the students pick up on this. Hardly surprising, then, that most prefer to say nothing.

Yet faculty trained in the inherent virtues of interactivity – virtues endorsed as best practice by the UK’s Higher Education Academy – still push on with their digitally enhanced efforts to break this wall of silence, often with painful results. Committee meetings pump out new waves of expensively resourced pedagogical and technological initiatives, complete with staff training, impelled by a largely unexamined and unevidenced credo of “student experience”, “student satisfaction”, “authentic assessment” and “employability”.

UK universities’ absolute commitment to interactivity perhaps stems from the 1997 Dearing Report, which also called for tuition fees and for universities to embed new technologies into teaching. But student disengagement and non-attendance must be read as a glaring error signal in this intensely marketised new reality, in which students are consumers, lecturers are service providers, course content is student experience, and universities are brands that compete against each other.

True, the National Student Survey and Student Experience surveys report generally high levels of student satisfaction. But, for a range of reasons, we do not think that the results of such surveys should be taken at face value. First, and most straightforwardly, the NSS is based on a self-selecting sample, and it is elementary to observe that disengaged students are the least likely to participate and, therefore, probably go underrepresented.

At a more abstract level, we might speculate that the very notion of student-centred pedagogy serves to channel expressions of dissatisfaction towards individual objections about, for example, low grades and away from broader critiques of the university and its social purpose. Historically, student activism stemmed from a “them and us” antagonism between militant students and reactionary faculty management, whereas, today, elected student sabbatical officers are more likely to be regarded as strategic partners and co-creators of the university’s service provision. Accordingly, the reality of the “student experience” is more likely to be observable in the actual behaviour of students, rather than in any survey result.

So rather than despairing about students with bad attitudes and doubling down on fantasies of interactive teaching, we should ask whether our attachment to “interactivity” is less conducive to meaningful exchanges of ideas than the didactic, authority-based model it is geared to replace.

Our intention is not to advocate a return to “sage on the stage” teaching but rather to say that when we encounter low turnout and disengagement we should more critically reflect on the damage being done to learning by the very ideology that interactive pedagogy is part of: the rendering of education into a competitive service economy that persistently displays signs of malfunction.

Mikael Andéhn is a senior lecturer and Alan Bradshaw is a professor in the department of marketing at Royal Holloway, University of London.