On reforming education .... Mission Impossible?

The following comment--about K-12--is equally applicable to higher ed:

unfortunately, society does not generally invest enough in innovation—especially in areas where it would help the poor (who aren't an attractive market) and where there isn't an agreed-upon measure of excellence. In the U.S., that means we have not invested nearly what we should in innovation for education. Our education system has been fundamental to our success as a nation, but the way we prepare students has barely changed in 100 years.

So, in case you think it was some nutcase blogger (ahem, present company excluded) who said this, well, think again.  That comment was by Bill Gates, in Newsweek, who goes on to note:

Another crucial innovation in education involves using interactive technology to deliver high-quality materials for teachers and students. Now that watching videos is a standard part of the Internet experience, we can put great lectures online so that everyone can benefit from the best teachers. (Personally, I like the online physics and chemistry courses from MIT.) Alternatively, software can also be used to tailor lessons to individual students, so kids can stop spending time on the things they already know and focus on the areas they are confused about. While it won't replace face-to-face teaching, it could make remedial courses far more effective—helping students move on to the next phase of their education instead of discouraging them into dropping out. That's the kind of innovation that can lead to a brighter future for everyone.

Hmmm .... but does he know about the resistance from higher education faculty to distance and online education?  Yes, I too love those online and video materials from MIT and other places that are all active members of the OperCourseWare Consortium, and use those materials in my classes too.  Oh, yes, not to forget the fantastic lectures through TED.com .... well, I wonder when higher education will change, for the better!

Virtual classrooms, and the teacherless classroom

As this NY Times report observes:

Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

If only it can happen easily :-)  A typical reason why this is not happening, given the level of technology we already have:

Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.
Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”

I have always believed that my online classes are strictly about education in that grander sense of it being something way above and beyond "producing workers."  So are my "regular" classes.  If anybody took a look at, say, the syllabus for this course, the work that I ask students to complete in order to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas, the kind of feedback I give them, I cannot imagine anybody even remotely thinking that this undermines the grand idea of what education is all about. 


Now, I don't want to give any impression that my work is under criticism--far from that.  It is just that I always prefer using my personal examples; this way I do not then unintentionally insult/hurt others.

Demand for online grows, but supply shrinks? Depressing!

Ever since MIT made its curriculum freely available online, its philanthropic feat has become a global trend. Colleges compete to add new classes to the Web's ever-growing free catalog. The result is a world where content and credentials no longer need to come from the same source. A freshman at Podunk U. can study with the world's top professors on YouTube.

I have nothing to disagree with the excerpt from this report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  I have streamed in more than a couple of videos from the MIT site.  One of those videos was Tom Friedman's talk at MIT on the "World is Flat"--it was the closest to having Friedman on campus to talk to my students.  One of the students was so impressed with his talk that she said she even talked with her church pastor about Friedman's observations.  (Elsewhere I have recorded my own reservations about Friedman and his penchant for metaphors, but that is not the focus of this blog!)

But, thanks to the Great Recession, OpenCourseWare is probably the last line item a resource-constrained university would pay for--after all, it means spending money on something that gets PR for the university but is to essentially hand things for free.  The Chronicle adds:

"I think the economics of open courseware the way we've been doing it for the last almost decade have been sort of wrong," Mr. Wiley tells The Chronicle. Projects aimed for "the world," not bread-and-butter clientele like alumni and students. "Because it's not connected to any of our core constituencies, those programs haven't been funded with core funding. And so, in a climate where the economy gets bad and foundation funding slows, then that's a critical juncture for the movement."

Yep, it is a dog-eat-dog world and, to paraphrase Norm from the TV show Cheers, OCW is wearing a milkbone underwear :-(

I think this is only a temporary setback, however.  it is only a matter of time before we accept that forcing students to do time in a classroom does not necessarily mean that gain the desired competencies.  On the other hand, a competency-based education means that it can be in any mode the students want, and at any pace the students desire.  This stupid factory model of mass production will end soon, and I will celebrate like crazy :-)  Finally:

Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
"And then, ultimately, I think there will be increasing opportunities in the digital space for certification as well," Mr. Carson says. "And that those three things will be able to be flexibly combined by savvy learners, to achieve their educational goals at relatively low cost."
And social life? Don't we need college to tailgate and mate?
"Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."

Let us go one additional step and clarify something here: it is NOT the role of a university to provide for social life for students. That is an awful waste of time and resources.

Econ prof teaches online while serving in Iraq. Awesome!

When Cheryl J. Wachenheim, an associate professor of agribusiness and applied economics at North Dakota State University, says she taught her courses last year from a remote location, she means a desert nearly 7,000 miles away from her Fargo campus.
A captain in the Minnesota Army National Guard, Ms. Wachenheim deployed to Balad, Iraq, just north of Baghdad, in August 2008, for a 10-and-a-half-month stay. She continued teaching courses in micro- and macroeconomics online, from a fortified trailer crammed with medical supplies, body armor, the M-16 rifle she was required to carry wherever she went, and a computer.

How cool is that, eh!  The entire article in the Chronicle is a must read.  

But, I don't understand this part:

To get Internet access, she and nine other soldiers on her base in Iraq chipped in for a satellite dish and dug holes in the sand all over the base so they could run wires underground and into each of their trailers.

They had to pay for internet access?  WTF!

My sincere salute to her:

She worked out of Joint Base Balad, one of the largest American military bases in Iraq, dubbed "Mortaritaville" because of its location in the line of fire. Ms. Wachenheim says that when she walked around the base after hours, C-RAM (counter rocket, artillery, and mortar) weapons would light up the night sky.
In that kind of environment, running her classes was more like rest and recreation than work, Ms. Wachenheim says. Without the teaching duties, she would have felt like an economist at loose ends.
"Some people like to read on the base, some like to watch movies," she said in a telephone interview from Fargo, where she returned to teach this semester. "I like to interact with students. People in the unit didn't want to discuss the idiosyncrasies of the economy. This gave me that outlet."

Hey, thanks Professor Wachenheim.

So, how about the online classes at high schools?

When I was in California, every once in a while I would come across high school students who were taking online classes at community colleges primarily because their small schools,or their homeschools, did not offer advanced courses. Well, that was before the Web as we know it today.  Naturally, I would expect a lot more highschoolers learning online; but, the data simply beats my estimates:

online education is spreading rapidly among secondary schools, a trend that raises many questions for admissions officials.

On Friday, Brian Lekander, program manager for Star Schools, a distance-education initiative in the U.S. Education Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement, described the rise of virtual learning in elementary and secondary schools. Thirty-two states have virtual-school programs, and 70 percent of all school districts offer online and distance-learning programs, according to the Education Department. In 2008, two million secondary students were enrolled in online-learning programs or in "blended" programs, which include face-to-face and online instruction. In 2000, that enrollment was only 50,000 students.

"It's going to drastically change over time what classroom education looks like," Mr. Lekander said.

Sure,evaluating their work for admissions is one task.  But, there is another aspect--these students will be quite comfortable in the online environment and could even favor the online classes over the regular ones.  I mean, this is a demand to which I had not quite given a lot of thought ....

More on the Peer-to-Peer University

A follow-up to my earlier note on the P2PU.  Their broadcast email reports quite a success for the first attempt:

227 people completed the sign-up form for our 7 pilot courses. A little more than half are based in the US, but we have had sign-ups from 35 different countries.

Not bad at all. 
The icing on the cake?  This one:

The first P2PU student managed to get official credit. Tom Caswell writes: "I am a lifelong learner, but I am also a full-time PhD student at Utah State University. (BTW, I was able to get independent study credit for this course through USU.)". And participants in the land restoration course are taking the course as part of their formal studies.

Good going :-)

Reaching Out to the Skeptics

I can't recall ever disagreeing with Thomas Benton; his columns almost always echo my thoughts and sentiments--in ways that I could not have articulated myself.  He clearly comes across as a dedicated professional, a great teacher, and a genuine researcher.  Hey, good work, man.  (I liked the early days when he maintained only his Benton identity--a pseudonym ....)

Benton's latest column is about online teaching and learning.  Of course, there is not much for me to disagree there.  He writes:

Ultimately, the quality of the teacher and the effort put forth by the individual student are more important than any specific method. A method that fails for one person can succeed for another, and so I want to keep the chalkboard, the overhead projector, and the cross-legged conversation under the trees just as much as I'd like to see more faculty members supplement their traditional teaching with a variety of new-media and online projects.

Yes, sir.  This is exactly what I keep talking and writing about too. 

Benton suggests:

I think there are increasing numbers of teachers who, while mildly skeptical, are at least open to the idea of experimentation. Persuading them to recognize the possibilities of new technologies has at least seven interlocking components:
1. Move away from a dichotomous view of teaching as online or face to face, and toward the idea that all courses can potentially involve both methods.
2. Create opportunities for consultation and collaboration among faculty members, librarians, and technologists.
3. Eliminate most of the uncertainties and technical problems faced by faculty members who would like to try new methods but don't know how and lack the equipment.
4. Provide continuing support to faculty members who experiment with new teaching methods, not just during the development phase of a course but throughout its implementation, so that teachers can learn and adapt "on the ground."
5. Find new ways to streamline the process of developing online content and managing courses to protect the time of faculty members.
6. Reduce the isolation of teachers by promoting the development of collaborative new-media projects—with students as well as other faculty members—as a legitimate and recognized supplement to traditional, solitary research production.
7. Show the effectiveness and complementarity of different approaches to teaching, taking care that assessment instruments do not skew the results.

This assumes though that the naysayers are willing to listen to arguments, look over the evidence, and, most of all, believe in assessment.  Not in my world.  Hey, I found something to disagree with Benton :-)