Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma has found a novel way to teach physical education: require students to wear Fitbit activity-tracking bracelets and lower their grades if they are not active enough.
The Tulsa-based private school, named after its founder, the late multimillionaire televangelist Oral Roberts, praised the popular tracking hardware in a press release earlier this month, saying the Fitbit program had begun during the fall semester after a pilot during the spring of 2014.
“The marriage of new technology with our physical fitness requirements is something that sets ORU apart,” said the university president, William Wilson. “In fact, when we began this innovative program in the fall of 2015, we were the first university in the world to offer this unique approach to a fitness program.”
A university spokeswoman told student-reported college blog the College Fix that the model ORU uses does not contain a GPS tracker. But the students are still being monitored at all hours of the day: “Our students can be in Africa for spring break and the system will still be recording data,” Mike Matthews, head of the university’s data systems, said in an interview with Tulsa World.
All incoming freshmen’s Fitbits will feed back into “learning management” software licensed to the university by Brightspace, and the students will be able to meet their physical activity requirements automatically.
The school’s war on the freshman 15 has been a long one: in past years, students were required to log their own “aerobics points” manually. Now, though, anyone tempted to sleep through a morning workout session will be bound by more than just the honor system.
ORU calls its devotion to physical fitness as a part of the academic experience “whole person education”, saying on its website that the approach is “grounded in faith and focused on successful student outcomes”.
Personal health and wellbeing was a part of Roberts’ own ministry – the evangelist was renowned for what has come to be known as the “prosperity gospel”, a theological approach that considers individual good fortune proof of God’s favor. Roberts himself was a controversial figure: in 1987, he warned viewers of his TV show that if he did not raise $8m, God would “call me home”. He raised $9.1m.
