Are online teaching materials emptying out university classrooms?

In-person attendance proved to be higher in the fall. Alain Herzog 2022 EPFL Live streaming and recorded lectures mean students can easily keep up with a class without ever setting foot in the classroom. But according to a University of Geneva study and three EPFL surveys, most students nevertheless prefer to come to campus. During the five years that Paula Cacault commuted to Argentina's largest public university, where she studied economics, she made sure to take a folding stool in her backpack in case she couldn't find a seat in the crowded lecture hall. This is one of the reasons why the use of distance learning to alleviate the problem of overcrowded university classrooms is a matter of concern for the head of operations at the EPFL's Enterprise for Society Center (E4S). In October 2023, the study that she carried out with Christian Hildebrand, a professor of marketing analytics at the University of St. Gallen, and Jérémy Laurent-Lucchetti and Michele Pellizzari, both economics professors at the University of Geneva, won the Swiss Education Research Prize. In this research, they looked specifically at live streaming and how it can affect both in-person attendance and student achievement.