Communications Technology

The push towards web-based learning at universities has halved student attendance rates in some courses and dramatically increased working hours for lecturers, a survey of academics by this website has found.

Thousands of students will crowd into campuses across the country tomorrow for the first day of the university semester, but lecturers predict that within a few weeks many will stop attending.

Instead these students will stay at home and skim online notes or flick through podcasts and video recordings of classes. A third of students consider this a substitute for attendance, according to a nationwide survey of 2422 first-year students by the centre for the study of higher education at the University of Melbourne.

The survey, published last year, found that the number of students spending more than 20 hours on campus each week has declined from 32 per cent in 1994 to 19 per cent in 2009.

This website canvassed the views of 12 academics from NSW universities, who suggested that in many courses up to half of students regularly skipped class - sometimes because of part-time work commitments, but often because the prevalence of online learning material gave them an excuse to make less effort.

The observations corroborate a 2008 national survey by the Australia Learning and Teaching Council, which found that only 56 per cent of 721 students who used web-based learning attended lectures often.

One senior lecturer in medicine at a Sydney university, who did not want to be named, said that in the past six months ”it was getting to the point where on Fridays you’d look out and see just a handful of students in the lecture theatre. We had to threaten them to make them come. Online learning is very important but it’s only an adjunct to lectures.”

Preparing online material now consumed more of lecturers’ time than they spent in class, the National Tertiary Education Union said.

Jane Mears, an associate professor of social science at the University of Western Sydney, said it took a full day to modify a lecture for use online and two hours to adapt a PowerPoint presentation.

”The beauty of a lecture is that you can actually influence people, drag them in … Clearly you can’t do that online.”

More vexing for some academics was the steady stream of emails from students who expected replies at all hours of the day.

Tim Stephens, a senior lecturer in public international law at the University of Sydney, said his colleagues would sometimes receive hundreds of emails and several mobile phone calls a week.

”We virtually have to be available to students around the clock,” Dr Stephens said.

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Why have more than a quarter of a billion people watched a video of a baby biting his brother’s finger? It’s a good question to begin exploring the weird world of YouTube, as it celebrates it’s 6th birthday.

“Charlie bit my Finger… Again” has accrued a staggering 284 million views. If you exclude official content by the likes of Justin Beiber, it’s the most watched clip of all time on the video sharing site.

Now there’s a lot of statistics to come, so first of all let’s fly back to April 23, 2005 - and the first ever video posted on Youtube. And it’s an inauspicious beginning - co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the zoo, delivering the poetic line: “the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.”

But it was begining nonetheless. He, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen funded the start-up with bonuses from then-employer PayPal’s sale to eBay. Legend has it that the idea was born when Karim failed to find footage of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction online. Don’t worry, it’s all on YouTube now.

So after a legal dispute with utube.com - owned by a rather irate tubing company in Ohio - the ball was rolling and it quickly became the source of the first ‘Rickrolling incident’, one of the most common online practical jokes, whereby a bogus link will send you a video of trenchcoat-sporting 80s singer Rick Astley.

Getting back to the numbers - we’ve established that finger biting Charlie is top of the amateur charts - but top trump overall goes to Bieber’s duet with Ludacris at 472 million views. But that will no doubt be out of date by the time you read this article, such is his popularity.

We can put these crazy numbers in context by remembering that last year the site topped 2 billion views per day. And while we’re watching, we’re uploading 35 hours worth of content per minute. That’s the equivalent of 174,000 Hollywood movies a week. You can’t watch all that on your lunch break.

To handle all this content, the California-based site borrows it’s parents’ car, so to speak - making use of owner Google’s vast cloud infrastructure to process and store all the video. YouTube engineer Vijnan Shastri recently explained that they use “hundreds of thousands of machines” to vastly improve upload speeds.

This is all probably a move to appeal to quality providers; ie Hollywood. And further to that, it’s rumoured that Youtube is preparing to create celebrity designed channels, paying up to $5 million dollars for famous names to write and curate their own sites. Google have struggled to monetise the site they purchased in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and they seem to be pinning their hopes on bespoke content from the likes of Beiber and Lady Gaga. But it’s a gamble - they’d never want to exclude the amateur sensations that have made the site what it is.

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A website that claims Christchurch’s devastating earthquake was an act of God triggered by the tolerance of homosexual behaviour in the city has been denounced as ”despicable and appalling” by New Zealand’s gay and lesbian community.

The website ”Christchurch Quake” - registered on September 20 to an address in Utah in the USA - suggests the destruction was a result of ”lesbians running loose on the South Island as if they own the place” and general ”amoral” behaviour.

Among other inflammatory accusations, the website alleges that the earlier September earthquake, which coincided with the start of Gay Ski Week in Queenstown, was a warning from God to ”End the Evil - or else!”.

The website claims the September earthquake warning had not been heeded, leading to Tuesday’s 6.3-magnitude earthquake, which has killed at least 76 people, with reports of up to 300 still missing.

It also suggests other natural disasters in New Zealand, including the Pike River mine disaster which killed 29 men in November, was triggered by the country’s relaxed attitudes.

Jay Bennie, who runs the Auckland-based gay and lesbian website GayNz.com, said the people of Christchurch were already under enough stress without reading such outrageous comments.
‘‘I think it’s despicable, I think it’s appallingly insensitive, not only to gays and lesbians but to the suggestion that the people of Christchurch, by embracing gays and lesbians to certain degrees in their society, have brought this upon themselves. How cruel,’’ he said.

‘‘I’m originally from Christchurch, I’ve got family and friends down there. They’re all okay, but I know the stress they’re going through. They don’t need people like this trying to heap moral judgments and their own personal neuroses onto them and the others who are suffering in Christchurch.’’

Mr Bennie said he believed religious conservatives were responsible for the website, which says Christchurch was founded by a group of devout Anglicans who built for a purpose a cathedral at its centre.

‘‘They wanted to build a city where God was at the centre of their lives, physically and spiritually. Even the name of the city reflects their intention,’’ it says.

Mr Bennie said many religious conservatives lived in the American mid-west, and felt threatened by changing social attitudes.

‘‘The sort of people who do this, my understanding is that they have a tendency to see the world as a very unsafe place for them and their families because of changing social trends,’’ he said.

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