University students are less social than in the 1970s  — at least that’s what it seems like to one former student, Lex Tate.

Now as a journalism professor, her students come to class early and sit quietly on their phone instead of talking to one another.

“People (are) sitting around and not having these long conversations into the night. I think has been replaced by a lot of people pouring out their hearts onto a screen,” Tate said.

But Tate is not alone. According to a Journal of Media Education study, students used about one fifth of class time on their devices, doing things completely unrelated to school work. The study also said that students go on their devices at an average of 11.43 times during class.

However some students do take the old-fashioned route. Despite being a staff member at Technology Services, Jackson Turner prefers paper and pen to a phone or laptop when taking notes.

“When you’re on a laptop you try to catch too many words,” Tate said. “You act like a stenographer in a courtroom as opposed to somebody who’s alert and paying attention and then thinking in a very brisk way, ‘What did you hear?’ and then writing that down.”

Although technology has increased distractions and brought a transformation in the social atmosphere, it has also influenced the structure of the standard class setting.

Professor Karle Laska teaches multiple Statistics classes with a total of up to 1,100 students, so grading all homework assignments and quizzes would be nearly impossible for her to do on her own by hand.

“Technology has allowed us to create different tools that help us be successful in teaching so many students,” Laska said. “We are able to do things like make tutorial videos, pre-lecture videos, have discussions on homework questions, display large amounts of data, etc., because of technology.”

Laska considers her classes “blended.” She uses technology, but still likes when some things are done by hand. She and a team of graders all grade her 1,100 students’ exams by hand.

“We do this so that the students can see the exams during the next class and see exactly what they did wrong,” Laska said. “If we used scantrons, it wouldn’t be as personalized and they wouldn’t get any feedback or partial credit.”

Laska also provides a guided workbook for students to take notes by hand. She credited the notebook as one of her favorite teaching tools and thinks it is well-received by students.

Online submission has become a common form for students to turn in their assignments. But, Grace Ikenberry, a freshman in the DGS, said in an email that she dislikes the often “random times” her assignments are due.

“Many times my assignments are due online at midnight the day before my class,” Ikenberry said. “This means I have less time to work on the assignment than if I had to turn in a paper copy during my class.”

However, she acknowledges online homework can be more efficient at the University. She does not have to worry about finding a printer and forgetting physical documents.

Tate notes her experience in the 1970s is completely different because of subsequent advances, especially with the class scheduling system. In a big organization like the University, she said technology makes things much more efficient.

“You’d have big binders full of information and you’d have lots of pieces of paper and you would have students’ names put on these logs,” she said. “And then they’d be erased if they moved you into a different section of the same class — I mean, you’d talk about a nightmare.”

Although change has occurred in classrooms and numerous other places around the University, Tate does not see it as completely negative.

“Learning is not technology-dependent. Learning is putting things in your brain; it’s not putting things in your fingers to put on a screen,” Tate said. “There’s a process of learning that continues and technology makes it available, but the basic principle of learning is not substantially changed.”

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