The worst thing about enrolling in a class with more than fifty students is that the chances of the professor learning your name are pretty slim. Naturally, living in this sort of obscurity is less than ideal for someone prone to missing paper deadlines or messing up on examinations.

With the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, however, professors are taking a far more proactive approach to getting to know their students, and schools are implementing new systems to help them identify and learn about their pupils.

At Northeastern, two professors, Susan Freeman and Beverly Jaegar, recognize the importance of getting to know their students, but they’re shunning Web 2.0 and taking a more traditional approach.

The Boston Globe reports:

Susan Freeman, who teaches first-year engineering students at Northeastern University, takes pictures of her students - and placards with their names - on the first day of class. While they start in on their first assignments, she studies flashcards of about 100 students.

"I carry them around with me," she said. "I look at them on the train." …

 

… At Northeastern this week, Beverly Jaeger asked some 20 students in her freshman engineering design class to write their names on a folded piece of construction paper and display it on their desk…

 

"It's pretty important for me to know who you are," she said. "I don't want you to be just an ID number."

While flashcards and nameplates may be effective memorization techniques, they’re sadly not feasible methods for courses with more than a hundred students in them.

In time, instructors will have no choice but to embrace the post-Facebook world, and students will have to accept seeing friend requests from their teachers.