Mathematics Education

It's no secret that student classroom attendance is declining in Europe, North-America and worldwide, during the first semester and throughout the degree, and even in high schools. 50% attendance is already wishful thinking in many academic courses, deeply concerning both lecturers and university administrations.

What is the scope of this phenomenon? How do students who don't attend class actually learn? Do they perform more poorly? And the ultimate question: Should we fight the trend and attract or force students back into classrooms? Should we accept the situation and teach only those who show up? Perhaps there is another, scalable alternative? Serious answers to these questions must rely on data and facts, not just intuition.

In this talk, we will discuss an experimental track called "Guided Online Learning". Flipped classroom? Sort of, but not quite. About 100 students (we may meet a few) from a Calculus 1 course, learned using pre-recorded video lectures, and were required to attend just a single 50 minutes weekly active learning session. Although not the primary focus, we will also reveal how we integrated AI into these sessions.

Throughout the semester, we collected attendance data from the entire course and compared academic achievements of students in this track to those who attended traditional lectures, and to those who did not attend at all. Some of the results were expected, some were surprising.

Implementation in other STEM courses requires significantly less effort than a classic flipped classroom, and enables a choice of learning tracks in the same course without modifying course credits for students or teachers. It's hard to predict if this is where academic instruction could head in the AI era. For now, the track has been offered again in the sequel course, Calculus 2.

For context, the other details on the poster are: the title "Class Attendance: The Elephant (Not) In The Room"; speaker Dr. Aviv Censor, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Friday, October 2, 2026, 4:30 – 5:30pm, Bahen Centre (BA), Room 1200; and a note that "This experimental teaching method was assisted and studied by Dr. Adi Wolf, Dr. Rinat Rosenberg-Kima and Dr. Ilana Ram."