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 . . .
While I have you, can I ask you something? I’ll be quick.
Twenty-five thousand people subscribe to First Things. Why can’t that be fifty thousand? Three million people read First Things online like you are right now. Why can’t that be four million?
Let’s stop saying “can’t.” Because it can. And your year-end gift of just $50, $100, or even $250 or more will make it possible.
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