HALIFAX, NS — Student engagement is at an all-time low at Dalhousie University. A very recent study has shown that 76 per cent of students currently reading this article are doing so during a lecture. While the decision to spend class time reading top-tier journalism is a choice that The Mackerel fully endorses, it is a problem that the university is attempting to address. This comes after a flurry of complaints from hard working professors who spent a lot of time putting a new PowerPoint theme on last year’s slides.
“Student engagement is becoming more and more difficult to gauge over time,” said Bo Ringman, a professor at Dalhousie. “Our research shows that the number one thing students think about during lectures in recent years is the highest paying jobs for dropouts, and we need to fix that. I mentioned this at a meeting with my colleagues, but half of them were on their phones the whole time.”
Inspired by the lack of attention he was given in the aforementioned meeting, Ringman pitched the idea of inserting a feed of Subway Surfers in the corner of slideshow presentations in hopes to trick students into paying attention to the course material surrounding it. This has been doing wonders for classroom engagement in the trial runs and should be ready for campus-wide implementation come second semester. The strategy aims to adopt the same brain-hacking dopamine tactics that TikTok creators use to brainwash youth, taking advantage of the short attention-span of today’s youth.
“It was like a spell had been cast on the students,” said a teaching assistant who was present during a trial run of this concept. “They were all looking at the projector like they were in some kind of trance.” While the effectiveness of how well this allows students to absorb the material is yet to be studied, professors who took part in this experiment claimed “they had never felt more seen and valued in their lives.”
There are a few more tactics that are planned to be tried before the full rollout of this plan in the second semester. One of which includes a 10 minute break during which the professor will ask “Am I the asshole?” about an issue a student is having and how the professor is responding, and the class will vote.
By Jake Waldner