Ykhjuy

In my opinion, yes it is unreasonable.

Disclaimer: I am a student in the Netherlands, different universities and countries might work differently.

In all the courses I've followed I can't remember a single one that expected me to prepare for the first class. Usually the first half of the first lecture of a course is dedicated to explaining how the course works, what is expected of you, and anything else related to organization. Most students, including myself, usually don't even register in the online environment where the teaching material is posted before the first lecture.

You could argue that maybe this shouldn't be the case, and that students should be more diligent. And naturally, it is up to you whether you want to take this view and potentially punish students who didn't prepare. Practically though, most students are probably just going to miss it, or skip it.

If you do decide to have students prepare for the first lecture, make sure to clearly note this in the course guide/emails/online announcements. And also note the potential consequences for students who do not prepare.

I think that it is reasonable to ask that they read the notes. But I suspect that you will get about the same response that you would get to any similar request during the term. Some will do it - most likely those who need it least - and others won't. There are a lot of reasons beyond slacking why they won't. They have other commitments for their time and effort between terms.

So, my advice would be to make the request, but don't assume that it is honored. Find a way in class that you can proceed without disadvantaging some of the students. One way is to start out with pairing in the first exercises. One member of a pair might be able to bring her/his partner up to speed. Another way is to spend part of the first class discussing the notes explicitly. If the scale is reasonable, make this an interactive exercise.

Another way is to provide an ungraded quiz that you use solely to let the students know if they have any gaps that they should fill quickly. Make it clear that if they do well on the quiz they are prepared to continue, but otherwise they need to quickly bring themselves up to speed - via the notes.

Actually, maybe the response would be a bit less than normal, given that this is, to them, an unusual request.

If you are a relatively new teacher, I'll note that your students are not like you, unless this is an advanced graduate course. Very few of them, anyway. You are who and where you are because of certain characteristics and habits that the vast majority of your students don't share. It is always a good idea to remember that. You are not teaching people just like you. They probably don't learn in the same way that you learn. Explore Learning Modalities for a discussion of that. You have succeeded. They haven't (yet). Moreover their success won't be like yours for the most part.

You want the students to read the lecture notes prior to the first meeting of the class, but you do not appear to have a method of communicating this requirement directly to the students. Without a way to ensure that your announcement is read by all of the students in the class you cannot assume that any of them will read it, and thus in my opinion your requirement to spend multiple hours preparing for the class prior to the first meeting is unreasonable.

Yes, it is unreasonable (in the precise, literal meaning of the word “unreasonable”, despite @ZeroTheHero’s wiseguy answer attempting to imply the contrary) to ask and/or expect students to do 1-2 hours of reading work prior to coming to the first class of the semester. It’s not just that, as others point out, your expectations will surely not be met, but, equally importantly, that such a request is unfair to the students.

What’s reasonable is to expect the students to come to the first class knowing the officially advertised prerequisite material (and to have procured a physical or digital copy of the textbook or lecture notes for the course). Requiring more knowledge than that is effectively moving the goalposts, a kind of false advertising, and a (mild) abuse of your authority. In addition to most of the students ignoring your request, even the ones who do the reading may still resent you for this misrepresentation, and for trying to monopolize a part of their time that is not yours to monopolize - the time before the beginning of the class, when students may well be busy with other things they had planned to do.

At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that it is your job to teach the material, and that the time between the start of the class and the end of the semester is precisely the time scheduled by the university for the students to learn that material. Assigning independent reading, while certainly acceptable, is something that should be done sparingly, and not before this official time period. Your intentions seem good and I sympathize with the general idea: I may also wish that if I’m teaching, say, a complex analysis class then students should read at home the basics of contour integration before the course starts so that I can cover more advanced material. But that’s my problem, not the students’.

It is not unreasonable to ask students to be adequately prepared before they attend any lecture: first, second, third etc. What is unreasonable on the part of the instructor is to expect the students will behave reasonably.

Not all your students might have fully enrolled by the first class. They might not have access to the course announcements or the lecture notes, and therefore they can't read the material even if they want to.

Beyond that though, what someone considers reasonable and unreasonable will vary from person to person, so I'll sidestep that discussion (the comments to one answer already quotes from dictionaries what this word means) and say, chances are:

• Most students will not read the lecture notes before the first class. Only the most dedicated and diligent of students will.


• Most students will not complain if you make this request. Some won't even be aware of it until the first lecture.


• If you go ahead with this and stick to your guns, the most common reaction will probably be surprise. "Wow, this course / professor is not easy".

Personally, I'd skip the requirements in the first class and impose them beginning in the second class. That way, everyone (those that come to the labs anyway) will know what you expect of them, and ignorance is no longer an excuse.

This is actually a form of blended learning called the flipped classroom. This approach involves studying the material before classes and using the class period for activities and assignments to better understand the content. As such, this is not an unusual request.

The only thing that makes this unreasonable is the timing. If I understand the question correctly, you are trying to have the students read lecture notes before you even met them. Before the very first class is strange in my opinion. However, if you have a prior relationship with these students and have taught them before it may be more reasonable but still unusual. Often the first class is used to explain expectations for the semester and not so much on learning activities.

You don't say what level of students or what any prerequisites are for the course, so my comments are based on the idea of a fairly low level undergraduate course. If it were an honors course for senior majors I might answer differently.

1-2 hours is way too much to expect before the first meeting. At least in the US, students may not even complete registration before the first class and some may not be back to campus until the day of your class meeting.

Also you are using the term lab notes and lecture notes interchangeably, but they are not the same. Are you talking about lab instructions? Or were you planning to lecture for two hours? At most, you might ask them to "skim" instructions but don't count on them doing it.

That said, I do often email students before the first meeting and ask that they do something. For example, send me an email introducing themselves, post a self introduction on a discussion board, complete a short survey or pretest assessment, read a related newspaper article or watch a related video (since you mention data analysis I'll say that for my into stats class I sometimes use one of the Gapminder videos). Or make sure they know how to login to some system. Also remind them to bring anything they need to bring if you are doing a lab. I also post this in the LMS so that students who don't read their email will see it. That makes possible to have a more engaged first class meeting even if only half the class did it, and students can email me with anything I need to know before class. Also students who didn't read the email get a reminder that they need to do that and also can still do it after class.

What are you going to do about the students that didn't do the reading? What about visually impaired students who didn't do the reading? It's already a classroom management problem just thinking about it. There's nothing worse for a course than a chaotic first meeting. It gets the whole thing off on the wrong foot.

I would think that for the first lab you would want to plan it out carefully so that it takes a reasonable amount of time (leaving time to review the structure of the course and expectations) and right away start showing that class time will be used for active learning. That is do not lecture for more than you plan to lecture during the rest of the semester. That means you will have to assume nothing for that first class and plan a lab that does not require student prep and is either very self explanatory that you will actively facilitate. It will be better to have it be too short than too long.

I don't know how much experience you have in teaching or in the flipped model, but I can tell you that it requires meticulous planning. It's definitely worth it to put the planning time in. I have students doing data analysis with real data in R the first day they walk into my room; it is very do-able with good planning and thoughtful approaches.

It is highly unlikely that more than 10% of your students will read the lecture notes prior to the first lecture, and that's being optimistic. The beginning of the semester is fraught with logistical issues. Often, students drop a course after looking over a syllabus. The students then spend a little time registering for new courses. More time is spent purchasing required textbooks at the beginning of the semester, then during. A student may spend a few hours moving their belongings into a dorm room or apartment instead of reading the lecture notes. Once things "calm down" a bit, students will have more time to read such things. However, I would plan for failure. Design your lectures to be effective even if none of the students have read the notes beforehand.

One big problem could be students who add the course late. You can post the assignment on the class management software, but if some student adds the class the day of or the day before or the day after the first lecture, then he won't know about the assignment until it's too late.

If this is a large lecture course, this is guaranteed to be a problem. More so because large courses are usually populated by immature students. If this is a small, graduate course, then it's much less unreasonable.