Liam Delaney has some interesting thoughts on this post I wrote earlier on this week. One of Liam's points concerns increased flexibility of degree offerings, the idea being students will work full time and take modularised 'for credit' courses along the American model which will add up to a degree as and when the students decide to complete their course.
Liam puts it better than I could:
Modularisation will resolve some of this as students can stagger their degree more and, in many cases, embed evening courses and so on. If attendances are declining at traditional lecture formats, more flexibility of this nature seems a likely route. As someone who took a distance masters in philosophy (still completing some) while i was working on a very hectic job, I was extremely grateful for the flexibility of the format and it mellowed me out from thinking that such courses lowered the standards in higher education. They simply provide more choice and we should think more about these as options where students are clearly signalling that they do not want the traditional format. The market will then decide how much they value the qualifications.
I've no issue with the modular degree format, but I don't think it's the answer to why student attendance is dropping.
Increased choice will result in more students showing up to take their classes, but the problem will persist, in my opinion, because even if you offer the students lectures at times which suits them better, there will still be a cohort of student who haven't bought into the idea of the degree.
One way to increase the level of 'buy in' is to make students financially liable for each module they take, again on the American model. When I taught in the US, each module cost close to 5 grand per student. If you missed a lecture, it was costing you 250 dollars, so you'd want a pretty good reason not to show up.
Professors knew the students were expecting a good lecture from them---you can't go into an MBA class costing the students that much money and waffle for 40 minutes and leave, they'll rip your head off---and so put in a better effort, again in my opinion, because of that.
This did also lead to rampant grade inflation, but even hyper inflated, the grades produced a ranking of students, which is all that mattered.
So perhaps one way to encourage attendance is to create financial incentives and disincentives to showing up and not showing up.
Behavioural economics has something to say about that, I think, see: "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein)
Update: here's a piece of software to help stop online cheating. Sounds cool.