Improving the quality of lectures to make them attractive to students and how to do it has been the topic of much research and discussion in various forums for a long time. After all, there is little chance of success in this unless the students themselves think it is important to attend lectures. In an area like information technology, new advances are constantly being made resulting in the addition of new material on top of the basic principles which have to be learned. While this may not necessarily be true for every discipline, reduction of course workload and a review of the assessment procedures may be worth looking into. We certainly provide a lot more in the way of handouts or notes on-line than in the past.
Some lecturers provide notes with essential sections missing.
The students have to attend lectures to fill in these gaps. Perhaps there are better ways of encouraging student to attend lectures. In conclusion Despite the tremendous amount of resources being spent after this particular mode of teaching, attendance in lectures has been a problem in our experience. As stated at the outset, this report has raised more questions than answers on this vexed issue. It would be of great interest and usefulness to find out how much of a problem non-attendance in lectures is across the disciplines and how others may be facing and possibly dealing with it.