What is the instructor's responsibility when students miss class?
I argue that instructors have multiple responsibilities to support students who miss class
This year, since I’m “on sabbatical,” I’ve enrolled as a student in an introductory physics course at the community college where I normally teach biology. I’m hoping that being a student again will help me become a better educator and a better textbook author.
I just finished studying for the third exam, which covered some content that I missed because of an absence. Studying content I missed in class taught me a lot about how to support students through absences.
Students need substantive resources to learn missed content
The class I missed covered content related to electricity and electrical circuits. I know almost nothing about electricity, so to study for the exam, I read the textbook. Luckily for me, my instructor follows the textbook very closely, so it was easy to learn exactly what I had missed in class. But not all instructors follow the textbook closely, or use a textbook at all — including me.1
Being a student again helped me realize the value of a good textbook for supporting students who miss class. But a good textbook isn’t the only way students can learn missed content! Here are some other resources that instructors can provide to support students when they miss class:
A Good Textbook
A good textbook is very helpful if the course is tightly aligned to the textbook, but it’s not helpful if the course doesn’t use one at all. In cases where the textbook includes more detail or more jargon than the instructor chooses to teach, the textbook can be actively distracting.
Recordings
If audio or video are recorded during class, posting the recording is a huge help for students who miss class.
Slides
Some slides are self-explanatory and thus actually useful for students who miss class, but some are not. My slides tend to be pretty bare bones — I design them to support in-class activities, which means they often include only a diagram or a question for a Think-Pair-Share activity (but not the answer). My students have complained that my slides are unhelpful when they’re studying outside of class. Since my slides don’t include explanatory text, it’s hard for students to decipher the take-home message if they missed hearing me talk about it or missed participating in an active learning activity related to it. But providing all that explanatory text (for example, in the “notes” section on Powerpoint slides), takes a lot of time, which I don’t have.
Last year, I figured out a work around that let me use my bare-bones slides and provide explanatory support for students who missed class. I started using a digital sketch pad to annotate my slides in Powerpoint during class, then I saved the drawings and posted my slides “with scribbles” to the Learning Management System (LMS). Students love these and talk about how helpful they are for their studying.
There are a few other resources students can use when they miss class, like getting notes from a classmate or attending tutoring on campus, but these resources aren’t provided by the instructor. Nevertheless, instructors can still play a role in making these resources accessible for everyone.
Instructors can support students beyond just offering resources
While studying electrical circuits from the physics class I missed, I considered asking a classmate to borrow their notes. However, I know almost none of my classmates’ names, so I didn’t feel comfortable asking the stranger sitting next to me to copy their notes. Maybe if I were more outgoing, or if I already had a friend in the class, I could have gotten notes from a classmate. And look! Right here we can see inequity in action. Students who are more outgoing, or who already have friends in the class, are in a privileged position when they miss class, because it’s easier for them to access the resource of classmates’ notes.
But what if instructors could make classmates’ notes more easily accessible for all students? There is a way to do that, actually!
Create a system for students to share notes with the whole class
In my biology courses, at the beginning of each class period I ask for two volunteers to post their notes to a designated section of our LMS. Posting their notes is one way students can earn points toward “Community Learning Contributions,” which makes up about 3% of the grade, so students actually do it. My students have talked about how much they appreciate having access to other students’ notes, both for when they miss class and for when they don’t! (They also mention how much better their own note-taking is for the days they sign up to post their notes.)
Incentivize students attending ‘office hours’ or using tutoring services
I’ve often heard faculty lament that students don’t take advantage of resources on campus that are available to support students, like ‘office hours’2 with the instructor or freely-available tutoring offered by the institution. These resources are excellent options for students who need to make up missed content! But I’ve found that encouraging students to use these resources verbally only goes so far; students can be intimidated by meeting with the instructor, or they feel there is a stigma about using support services like tutoring.
In my experience, the real barrier is getting students to utilize these resources the first time, because once they’ve experienced how non-threatening (and hopefully helpful!) office hours or tutoring can be, they are much more likely to return.
To incentivize students using student-support services like tutoring, I created a non-grade-associated Sticker Chart that rewards students for engaging in certain behaviors (including, but not limited to, using institutional resources like tutoring, counseling, the food bank, and others). In my courses, not all students are motivated by the sticker system, but for the majority who are, it can help lower the barrier for that first time going to a student-support resource.
Is it the instructor’s responsibility to support students who miss class?
When a student misses class, the responsibility lies with the student to make up what they missed. But, I argue, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make sure every student has equitable access to resources to help them make up what they missed.
What does it mean for every student to have equitable access? It means more than just making sure resources are available — equitable access means:
Lowering barriers to access, like making sure all students have access to classmates’ notes, and
Incentivizing behaviors that help students learn, which especially benefits students who are learning “how to college.”
While the responsibility to make up missed work ultimately falls to the student, I think instructors have an obligation to ensure equitable access to resources that can help students make up what they missed — and ultimately help them succeed.
Not everything you read on the internet was written by a human. For full transparency, here is how I used AI to help me write this post:
I used Claude substantially to help me organize my thoughts for this post. I gave it a draft post (that was very different from the current version) plus some dictated text from thinking out loud. Claude pointed out that I seemed to be making two arguments about instructor responsibility (offering substantive resources and helping students access other resources). All of the text in this post was written by me, except the last sentence, which was written by Claude and significantly modified by me.
Header photo by Seen on Unsplash
A few years ago, I redesigned my Gen Bio course curricula from scratch because I was tired of using textbooks that consistently didn’t meet my or my students’ needs. To support students’ learning outside of class, I assembled freely-available resources online to assign as pre-class homework. These don’t perfectly meet my learning objectives (that’s why I’m writing a textbook!), but they are good enough for students to get exposed to the ideas before class. Then, in class, we dig into learning the core concepts.
To encourage students to attend ‘office hours,’ some have suggested renaming them, among other strategies to improve student attendance.
Students have been missing class in huge numbers the last few years. Sometimes I remember to have classmates post a summary of what we’ve done. (Active learning, all the time.) But your post reminds me that some faculty have students sign up to rotate taking notes, and I will try to remember to do that in my fall classes.