Smartphones, laptops and PowerPoint slides? As if!
For one session this semester, a University of Toronto Mississauga professor hit rewind and took his students back to the 1990s - they traded their laptops for notebooks and pens, swapped high-speed internet for printouts and gave up all reliance on AI.
The result: the class became a more interactive environment where students were highly engaged, with some calling the experience a "breath of fresh air" that helped them better retain information.
"The moment I started talking, I saw students taking out their paper, their notebooks and pencils and pens. It was the first time this was happening in my class and I was elated," says Mustafa Siddiqui, an assistant professor at U of T Mississauga's Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy .
Siddiqui teaches the course ISP100 - Writing for University and Beyond , which is a required course for several programs at U of T Mississauga. He was motivated to deliver his lessons in a different way after noticing less interaction among students in recent months and a lack of originality in their ideas during class brainstorming sessions.
"They would rely on GenAI or ideas already out there on the internet," he says. "So I just thought, why not try this experiment and ask them to generate ideas using human intelligence?"
For the three-hour '90s-themed class, students were asked to leave their technology in their backpacks - including phones, smartwatches and laptops - and only bring out items that university students would have used during that time period.
Sporting '90s threads was optional - and many students embraced the theme. One borrowed clothes from his father, another walked in with a Sony Discman and one came ready to learn with a newspaper under her arm.
Siddiqui also ditched his technology and taught the class as a traditional 1990s-era professor, complete with a tie, jacket and pocket full of pens. He used printouts for the class's learning activities and scrapped his PowerPoint presentations, writing on a whiteboard instead while using a pointer.
The changes posed some challenges for Siddiqui, but there were also some welcome results.
"There was a lot of planning, and I had to print a lot before class. I thought, this is my share of my entire year's printing," he says. "But instead of me being restricted to the podium, I was walking around and I was closer to the students."
At the end of the class, Siddiqui asked his students to fill out a form - with a pen on printed paper - to get their feedback.
Students voiced their enthusiasm, with one saying that the tech-free environment allowed them to have more critical discussions with their peers. Another said that taking handwritten notes improved their focus and helped them absorb more information.
Siddiqui is now looking at ways to build on his idea.
He plans to make one session of his courses every term a '90s-style class for the foreseeable future, adding that the effort is in line with his institute's mission of "innovation in teaching and learning."
He's also set to discuss the experience at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences summit, which will be held in Edmonton in June.
The experiment has also opened the door to a potential research project, in which he and his colleagues would examine how occasional tech-free sessions might be useful for teaching and learning.
He adds that another writing studies professor at the university has already expressed an interest in borrowing the idea for their own class.
While the session wasn't a total throwback- it still included active learning and group work methods used today - Siddiqui says the initiative revealed the advantages of occasionally going screen-free in a learning environment.
"Now we're living with AI, and the internet is common, and technology is common," he says. "Maybe occasional tech-free classes could help by giving students something new, while making sure that learning is still happening."
