Let Me Get This Straight (or: The Decline of the West)

If I make my course materials availabe to students on their wireless devices, they’ll study a whole 40 minutes more a week!  While they’re working out!  While they’re standing in line!  While they’re in the bathroom!  And if this extra 40 minutes a week wears them out, they’ll take breaks by texting one another, reading email, or Facebooking.

Call me old-fashioned (my students do), but I’d almost rather have them study less in a less distracting environment.  Indeed, I suspect that with mobile access to course information, students probably do a higher proportion of their, er, homework on the go.

I’d bet, in other words, that this marginally greater amount of study time is spent less productively.  And yet grades keep going up . . .