A Mixed Blessing? Students’ and Instructors’ Perspectives about Off-Task Technology Use in the Academic Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The widespread use of technological devices in an academic classroom brought with it many learning opportunities, but also posed a challenge of handling the off-task technology use in class. The literature on this topic is growing, but we still know relatively little about students’ and instructors’ perceptions regarding the off-task technology use in class. This paper addressed this gap by examining (1) how do students and instructors perceive technology in the classroom, and (2) who do they believe should be responsible for minimizing off-task technology use in class? Analyzing data from a mixed-method study with students and instructors in a Canadian university, we show that while students acknowledged that the off-task technology use can be distracting, they considered it a matter of personal autonomy, which can only be regulated when it creates distractions for others. The instructors had a more complex view and posed some challenging questions about the relationship between student engagement and technological distractions, the impact of technology on learning process, and the responsibility of educators in higher education. In conclusion, we reflect on some of the questions that ought to be considered when handling the off-task technology in an academic classroom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".