Thursday, January 28, 2016

University forces students to wear Fitbits and punishes them for not exercising enough

University forces students to wear Fitbits and punishes them for not exercising enough - The College Fix:
Big Brother is watching you.
In this case, your footsteps – and the “brother” is a religious authority.
Oral Roberts University, a Christian school in Oklahoma, is taking health to a new level by requiring incoming freshmen and transfer students to walk about five miles per day as measured by Fitbit fitness trackers that they must purchase.
The tech-enabled mandate is an update to a previous policy that required all students to manually log aerobic points in a fitness journal.
...Grades docked if your steps and heart rate fall short
ORU claims the Fitbit mandate – 10,000 steps per day and an unstated heart rate, which get automatically logged into a student’s online “gradebook” – came from the bottom up.
“Students have asked us about wearable devices for the university’s physical fitness initiative. 
So we decided to take the advice of our students,” Provost Kathaleen Reid-Martinez told The College Fix in an phone interview.

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