Activity trackers are a great way to quantify your life and motivate you to move more, but how would you feel if you were graded based off of that information? Freshman at Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University are about to find out; they will be among the first to have their fitness data tracked by a school – that information will then contribute directly towards their grades. Fitbit fitness trackers will be issued to first year students as part of the school’s required physical fitness course. Besides classroom teachings, the class has a weekly activity minimum that students must meet or exceed. Up until now students were held by the honor code to accurately manually monitor aerobic activities. Using a hand-logged journal not only was that likely tedious, but we would guess students were often a bit “generous” in what they recorded. Using a monitored account, the school will collect information on daily movement, weekly activity, and heart rate (but not weight). The requirements will be 10,000 steps a day and 150 minutes of activity per week at 60 to 80 percent of their range for heart rate. If a student doesn’t accomplish these minimums it will directly influence their grade.
The idea of a school integrating a required amount of movement into a day / week is an interesting concept. Perhaps, much like handing out laptops to every new student 20 years ago, the issuing of Fitbits (or other fitness tracker / smartwatch) to freshman will become a selling point for schools and spur changes in how students behave. While it is interesting that Oral Roberts University would be the first to implement this technology, with a philosophy of whole body education including “body, mind, and spirit,” maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. If the program is successful, I would imagine other universities will follow suit. Wide distribution of a fitness tracker with social integration could prove to be a huge motivator, perhaps making the “Freshman 15” a thing of the past!
