Given the technology available to the public, why are students paying to participate in classes that we are already paying thousands of dollars in tuition to take?

An increasing number of classes use Top Hat. It is a paid cloud-based service that engages students in the classroom, according to tophat.com. The platform is similar to iClickers in that they are both systems that measure an audience response.

Gabriella Bedoyan, a lecturer for Communication 105, said she uses Top Hat to keep her large class sizes, upwards of 400 people, engaged and present in the classroom.

“It’s definitely hard to take attendance in classes of that size,” she said. “After the first month, attendance drops pretty significantly.”

One semester of Top Hat costs $24. At first glance, the pricing doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of money given that the average student spends hundreds of dollars on textbooks. However, tuition this year alone was $10,916 for Washington residents and $24,500 for out-of-state students.

Essentially, we are paying money so that our professors can keep track of us, while simultaneously paying hefty tuition fees to enroll in those classes.

While I understand the need to engage students in the classroom, there are plenty of free web-based platforms available to the public in order to track attendance. A quick Google search shows that many websites, such as myattendancetracker.com and webclicker.org, provide classroom engagement services free of cost.

Brandon Waugh, a sophomore social studies teaching major, said Top Hat was a required purchase for his History 120 class. Waugh said that attendance and participation could be free with other applications.

“I don’t think it’s fair to have people pay as much as they do to use something that’s not really useful,” he said.

Alternatively, instructors could also utilize Blackboard, a platform already provided to all WSU faculty and students.

As a Blackboard Instructional Technology Assistant for WSU’s Global Campus, my job requires me to be familiar with all the different tools available on Blackboard.

There is no explicit way to track attendance on Blackboard. But, quizzes and discussion posts can be set by the instructor to only be open for a specific period of time. For example, an in-class quiz can be set as open for an hour during class time.

An instructor can provide the correct word or answer to type into the quiz, thus keeping track of who was in class by seeing which students got the right answer.

Smaller class sizes can use traditional means of attendance. A couple of my classes in the Honors College would simply pass around pieces of paper where students wrote down their name and ID number.

Physical methods of participation are just as effective as web-based ones as long as the class isn’t incredibly large.

There is also the issue of instructors requiring the purchase of Top Hat but barely, or not at all, using the service.

Waugh said his class ended up abandoning Top Hat by midterms.

Students already pay an arm and a leg to enroll at WSU. Required purchases such as textbooks, lab manuals and materials cost additional hundreds of dollars for the average school year.

The usage of paid programs such as Top Hat, do students a disservice by tacking on additional costs to our already expensive undergraduate education.

Geana Javier is a sophomore economics major from Seattle. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of The Office of Student Media.