Virtual professors won't ask for tenure!

Projects like Typealyzer, that I blogged about, are all heading towards that grander idea of Artificial Intelligence. Soon, we will be able to train computers to think like humans, and do a better job at that than we humans can do. (Will computers then also make movies like The Matrix? Hmmm....!)

Today, I headed to one of my regular sites--The Chronicle of Higher Education, and there is a piece on scientists and business leaders getting together to "plan a new university devoted to the idea that computers will soon become smarter than people."

When I read that, my thought was perhaps you folks would want to know about this. Hence, this post. The piece adds:

The idea that gave the new university its name is championed by Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the "singularity" — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains. His argument is that several technologies that now seem grossly undeveloped —including nanotechnology and artificial-intelligence software — are growing at an exponential rate and thus will mature much faster than most linear-minded people realize. Once they do, computers will take leaps forward that most people can hardly imagine today.

Finally,

Computers will become better at teaching than most human professors are once artificial intelligence exceeds the abilities of people, argues Ben Goertzel, director of research at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, Cal., a private organization promoting Mr. Kurzweil's ideas.

These new computer teachers will have more patience than any human lecturer, and they will be able to offer every student individual attention — which sure beats a 500-person lecture course.

Sure, one-on-one human teaching will always exceed a computer-student experience, Mr. Goertzel acknowledges, but what college undergraduate gets a personal tutor these days?

Virtual professors probably won't ask for tenure. And Mr. Goertzel sees them as key to expanding educational opportunities, by greatly reducing the price of a high-quality education.

Read the entire piece here.

The personality of this blog

The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

That was the result from Typealyzer. I will leave it up to the readers and participants of this blog to determine how much this analysis is correct.

If you are interested in how Typealyzer evaluated my personality in my regular blog, you will be impressed at how quite different the two personalities are :-)

From the mouths of babies ....

So, here is something interesting. And, unlike the previous one, this actually relates to online teaching and learning :-)

Students in my intro class have to blog about something from the class discussions that made them think about for a little more. Well, the topic that we covered in class this week was globalization, and outsourcing. The following is what one student has posted: (Yes, students can address me by my first name if they choose to.) Note her remarks on online classes.

Perhaps the worry that eventually their jobs might be on the line is also an unstated reason for faculty to oppose expansion of online teaching and learning? But, if that is even remotely a point, then all we have to do is look across the industry and see what is happening with the automakers, right? Not being flexible enough to adapt to changes is now threatening the very existence of General Motors, whose CEO once reportedly uttered, "what is good for GM is good for America" ....

outsourcing: when will it stop?
I am not sure how Sriram says that teaching a a job that will not be outsourced, it already has been. I, myself have taken classes online with teachers across the country. I didn't like it very much, so I will not do again, but I know many of people who do like it and have taken alot. It is not like nobody has heard of it either, because universities are constantly advertising online. If something like teaching can be outsourced, where will outsourcing stop? I can just imagine our world turning into something like what was portrayed in the movie Wall-E, where humans don't have to physically do anything anymore. We will eventually advance technology enough that we can do everything from a computer and it won't matter where we actually are at all.

Divorce in "Second Life"

Ok, I agree this is not about online teaching and learning. But, at the same time, it is yet another marker on how much online activities and cyberlife have become complex.
Against such a background, it becomes obvious how much we could come across as the metaphorical dinosaur if we keep resisting online teaching and learning. It is there; deal with it, is the message, I suppose :-)

CNN:

A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

"I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as "avatars" and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars.

Taylor said she had caught Pollard's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: "I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."

The couple's real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities: "He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life."

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

It felt so strange reading this at the CNN website, and not at the Onion's :-) Truth can be stranger than fiction, indeed.

e-Learning: any different from "regular" learning?

Penn State has gone one huge step with online learning: now online classes are increasingly offered as regular alternatives to tradition resident instruction. I.e., as more and more faculty offer courses online, Penn State students will be able to take online classes even though they are right there on campus. Cool, eh!

Naturally, online teaching itself was met with questions and reservations. Here is an excerpt from their report:

Of utmost importance is a concern that the report is framed around a distinction that is increasingly invalid: “e-learning” as distinct from “resident instruction.” Several years ago, e-learning was largely identified with the World Campus, which is directed to offcampus, nontraditional students. However, today, e-learning plays a significant role in teaching traditional students--on campus and inter-campus, as well as at a distance. For every Penn State student, learning is now a blend of curricular and
co-curricular experiences that take place online and face-to-face. The issues need to be framed in this emerging context. The basic questions that we must ask as an institution are: In what ways are the differences between teaching and learning online and in a classroom consequential? How can we ensure that the consequences do not affect quality adversely?

As I noted earlier, online means that the focus will be only on learning, and the course objectives. Now, how about we begin to emphasize that for regular face to face instruction too?

Peer to Peer University

If Second Life and World of Warcraft are the beginnings of a future, where an increasing part of daily lives will be spent in a virtual world, restricting teaching and learning only the real world will become increasingly difficult. Yesterday, in one of my real world classes, one student said during discussions: "let me be honest. I am only here because I know that I will need a four-year degree to move up. I find it frustrating that this [he was referring to university education] is the only business where the consumer has no choice at all."

Of course, learning as a "consumer" behavior, as if it is like buying a soy milk latte, does not appeal to me. But, hey, that is the reality we are dealing with, and in the immortal words of a rather hopeless mortal, we can go to war only with the military we have :-(

So, on top of everything else, we can expect more and more of a demand for online learning. Politicians, who are already sold on the business/consumer model, will prefer this even more because then there will be less pressure for constructing new buildings, ....

Have I set the context up enough? Well, the Chronicle of Hr. Ed. has a report on yet another model for online teaching and learning: the Peer to Peer University. According to the Chronicle:

The organizers call it P2P University (for peer-to-peer), and they hope to fill what they see as a gap in online-education efforts by traditional colleges, which often focus more on delivering full degree programs online than on one-off courses. ....
P2P University's two main audiences will be working professionals who want to brush up on a topic for their jobs but don't have time to take a whole degree program, and recent retirees who have plenty of time on their hands and feel comfortable in cyberspace ....
Although the university will not grant credit or seek accreditation of any kind, it will encourage students to seek college credit elsewhere — either by asking a traditional institution to give independent-study credit or by directing students to Western Governors University or other institutions that grant credit to students who can prove they have learned certain material on their own. P2P University might issue some kind of certificate indicating who taught the course and what was learned, however, and in some cases that alone might be enough for students to show a boss or put on their CV

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

If the university is really interested in revising our LACC, and seriously rethinking and restructuring liberal education, then the AACU annual meeting is the place to send a bunch of committed faculty and administrators. While it is not perfect, the AACU has always been one of the go-to places for me when I want to learn more about higher education, innovative pedagogies, etc.

One of the workshops at the annual meeting has a fantastic title: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, written by Don Finkel (Heinemann, 2000), challenges faculty to think of teaching as a practice of designing intellectual experience for a community of students, rather than one of “telling.” Drawing from the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire, Finkel proposes a variety of teaching practices that put the material at the center of students’ experience in the classroom, such as the Conceptual Workshop – a practice that engages students in community dialogue and inquiry and gives them the opportunity to apply ideas to complex situations.

I am sure you have figured out the rationale for posting this in this blog, as opposed to my other blog: when we teach online, don't we teach with our mouths shut? That in the online mode we put learning in the front and center?

As I noted in a posting in my other blog,
In the Chronicle, [former Harvard president] Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview."
They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

Isn't online teaching and learning a part of the process of experimentation, gathering evidence, and fine-tuning our approaches? Or, have we just stopped doing science altogether? I hope not.

So, ready to head to the AACU meeting? It is right up the road in Seattle, in Jan 2009.

Guaranteed employment if working for a term paper mill?

In one of the first ever upper-division classes that I taught--many years ago--one term paper came across like it maybe wasn't the student's. It was on a topic that I did not even remotely discuss in class, and the contents were clearly borrowed from somewhere.

I did not go after the student, however. Instead, I examined my course syllabus and how I had set up the assignments. I found that the instructions for the term paper were not rigorous after all--it was open ended, and students could write on a topic of their choice. I met the problem, and it was me after all!

So, the following term, I changed the structure. I required a 2,500-word paper at the end of the term--but, this time it had to be a response to a specific question that I gave them. And, they still had to search for new materials, cite them, .... all the things we typically require in a term paper. Well, there was no "funny" business that term.

Since then, I don't think I have ever set up a syllabus where students can write papers on topics of their own choosing. More so since the deluge of resources on the web--not only can students be tempted to doing a whole lot of copy/paste, they can do worse things: turn to a term paper mill for help! Now, the only problem I get every once in a while is when a student doesn't think carefully and brings in paragraphs from a source, and pretends that those sentences were his. Even this, I think the last I had such a problem was two (three?) years ago.

One might argue that this severely cramps the free thinking of students. That is exactly why I phrase the question such that there is still enough latitude for them to follow-up on an issue that really revs up their curiosity.

When we faculty give generic term paper tasks like "write a paper on the Chinese economy", we should not be surprised if some students resort to unfair practices. Because, there are plenty of "term paper artists" like this one who has written an interesting, and funny, piece on it. (I don't think he outsourced this one!) He writes:

Term paper work is also extremely easy, once you get the hang of it. It's like an old dance routine buried in one's muscle memory. You hear the tune — say, "Unlike the ancient Greek tragic playwrights, Shakespeare likes to insert humor in his tragedies" — and your body does the rest automatically. I'd just scan Google or databases like Questia.com for a few quotes from primary and secondary sources, create an argument based on whatever popped up from my search, write the introduction and underline the thesis statement, then fill in the empty spaces between quotes with whatever came to mind.

This "inside scoop", so to say, further confirms my view that open-ended term paper guidelines are increasingly disasters waiting to happen. Anyway, the author adds that it takes special skills to be a term paper artist--to never get into writing a "real paper" because that is way too much work!:

The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups

Note: because it is about how term papers can be easily sold to multiple students, well, I have cross posted this on all my three current blogs :-) No, seriously, the cross-post is because of the relevance.

Humans have always been a digital generation!

Given that "digits" are nothing but our fingers, I suppose I can always wisecrack that humans have been nothing but digital for years and years and years .... I mean, was there an analog version that I didn't read about? Ha ha. Just hysterical :-)

So, it is a sheer coincidence that our counting system was based on ten--ten fingers we had. Imagine how different it would have been if we had had a thumb plus seven on each hand--we would have been operating on base-16 instead of base-10. So, digitial, schmigital ....

What is my point? Let us not get carried away with this digital stuff. Ultimately, it is all a question of what is up in our brains. A 19-year old walking around with an iPhone is not necessarily smarter than a ten year old kid riding on a water buffalo in some poor country. It all comes down to how much knowledge we have, and how we put that knowledge to use.

Am I making sense so far? Cool. That is a first time ever!

In such a framework, how about I present to you more arguments on this from another Indian-American (yes, we are lots of us around) who, unlike me, is influential. Writing in the Chronicle, Siva Vaidhyanathan (yes, also with Tamil roots!) is quite forceful when he notes that "College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend." Way to go, Siva--for all I know we may be related too!!!

He further writes:

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital" willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged. It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time, knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender, and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions about digital media.

I bring this up in this blog because we tend to assume that our students might be ready and equipped to easily deal with information--that they are somehow born information literate. Online teaching and learning is increasingly leaning on that assumption. But, I find that it is not the case--many of them are remarkably illiterate, when it comes to dealing with information.

"MB" and I a few years ago worked on a project with two other colleagues on campus to highlight the urgency--on why information literacy is extremely important for students and why, therefore, this ought be implemented via something like writing-intensive courses. Well, without any backing, we worked on this, drafted a one-page report, presented it to the Senate where it died a glorious death :-) May it rest in peace!

Filter registration for online?

A few minutes ago, a student who is in my online class this term swung by to say hi and chat. During the conversation, he remarked that online is not for him. Because he way prefers the schedule of meeting twice a week, having conversations, and asking questions in class. On the other hand, in the online class, he feels that he is keeping things for the last minute, ....

To which I replied, "remember my emails that online classes won't work for everybody?" I told him that this is exactly why I had also included in the class webpages resources on how to be a successful online student. "of course" he said. I know what he means because a couple of terms ago he was a student in one of my "real world" classes--he was always prepared, had questions and wisecracks .....

Maybe one of the things we should do is to develop a gate system--something that makes students read a whole bunch of warnings, then click on a box that indicates that they have read through them, before they can register for the class. You know, something like how when we purchase an airline ticket online, we have to acknowledge that we are ok with the terms and conditions .... (Well, for that matter, even regular classes ought to have such a gate system--we can then avoid students taking naps in the classroom!)

Maybe such models have already been implemented somewhere. We can steal them, eh!

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional?

So, "RM" sends an interesting piece that "an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component."

It is neat that my gut instinct is validated by the results of this survey. "When asked why they prefer courses that offer streaming lectures online, most students cited making up for missed classes, convenience, improving retention of materials covered, improving test scores, and help with material review prior to class."

I suppose my only warning bell here comes from the fact that "The research, it should be noted, was sponsored by Sonic Foundry, a developer of streaming media technologies." Perhaps it is because of what my graduate school professor, Martin Krieger, drilled into my head--to always watch out for who funded the research, or which think-tank sponsored the distribution of the study, .....

In any case, even if turns out the data exaggerated the trends, I am willing to believe that there is a significant percentage of learners who would like to have access to the lecture, online and when the lecturer is usually asleep. I.e., in the regular classroom the lecturer is awake and the students are asleep, which means that it is only a matter of shifting the time curve a tad with lecture capture. No? :-)

BTW, the lead researcher in this was a Professor Raj Veeramani. Guess what? Either he is from Tamil Nadu--the state in India where I am from--or his parents or grandparents came from there. It is a distinctly Tamil name. I tell you, we Indian-Americans are now beginning to show up everywhere. Need proof? Read this.

"Learning"--not the professor--is the focus in online

In the contemporary world where our lives are far more complex than lives fifty years ago, and where there are multiple demands on the few hours we have to spare, online classes make it possible for students to follow-up on the course materials at non-traditional hours--very rarely does their work come in between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm, and it is more often the case that they post them way into the night.

To quite a large extent, online classes once again, after a long time, places the emphasis on "learning" as opposed to "teaching". The teacher is no longer the "star" in the classroom, and is not the center of attention. Which is how it ought to be. The focus shifts to the content we read, study, discuss, and write about. The teacher is more like a guide on the trip, as opposed to being the proverbial "sage on the stage". I am sure that there is a small piece in me that likes being the center of attention in a classroom, which then makes me feel like Norma Desmond in an online setting :-)

Of course, this also means that there is a much greater responsibility on students in the online environment than in the real-world classroom. If they need clarification, then it is up to them to ask those questions or make comments. If they snooze, well, they lose--unlike the real world classroom, a fellow classmate won't be nudging them when they snore instead of paying attention!!!

For students, online learning is not inconsistent with many other activities we pursue: we shop online at what would be non-business hours in the "real world". Same for online banking. We rent from Netflix, and we even watch Netflix online--bypassing the DVD altogether. Things are changing so fast that most of us don't even pause to think about it. When we do--or when professors force people to do so, we realize how much the landscape has changed.

In such a context, you will find this hilarious satire from The Onion quite appropriate and educational--as always, the video is on target, and shows how the nighborhood Blockbuster video store will soon become something of a historical curiosity for the young--as much as a vinyl record player is now history. (nothing lost if you do not to watch this video)

Oddly enough, over the almost ten years that I have been teaching online, I find that my workload for online classes is greater than the workload if I were to teach this same course in the real world. I mean, for starters, I could have easily talked about all these with way less effort than typing them all here!!!

Technology and passion in the service of learning

In earlier posts, I referred to MIT's opencourseware project, and to the president of Blackboard remarking that online learning is not simply about putting a course online. So, it was neat to read in today's Chronicle a commentary that brings these two ideas together. I tell you, it feels great to know that I am not an idiot after all when I wrote those things :-)

Anyway, enough about me, eh! The author writes:

That culture of sharing and participation usually starts with the students themselves, as we see vividly in the complex, multiplayer game worlds and in the power of study groups, whether conducted face-to-face or virtually. Such a culture must also involve content. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was a pioneer when it developed its OpenCourseWare project. Other universities quickly followed MIT's lead, and both the content and the means of accessing class materials and remixing and repurposing them for different audiences grew.
But it's time that we in higher education move beyond considering only content. We must begin to determine how that content can encompass multiple kinds of instructional or learning activities. It is, after all, the combination of things we do with content that creates learning platforms.

As I was reading it, my thought was that today's professors are like the DJs of today's music. DJs are totally unlike the old time disk-jockeys. The current ones mix music, sample them, every once in a while create their own music, and the best of them pretty much set the trends.
The fantastic aspect of Web2.0 is that I am able to sample content and ideas that I could never before, and am able to remix them to create my own music in the classroom. (Well, maybe my students think it is all cacophony!)

Anyway, the author (who is at USC, my PhD school!) then says:

We must think about how technology, content, and knowledge of learning and teaching can be creatively combined to enhance education and ignite students' passion, imagination, and desire to constantly learn about — and make sense of — the world around them. And we need to collect and share good models in which various professors' and students' experiences are commented on and tried out in new contexts. ....
.... Today the Web offers students incredible opportunities to find and join niche communities that ignite their passions. That sets the stage, through productive inquiry and peer-based learning, for such students to acquire both the practice of and knowledge about a field.
In the end, the millions of niche amateur communities — from the Latin word amator, meaning lover of — could provide a powerful learningscape for lifelong learning that is grounded in the learning practices that students acquire on campuses. That would be a major step toward creating a culture of learning for the 21st century.

Hey, maybe online teaching and learning will even revive the learning of Greek and Sanskrit? We currently can't offer them at most universities because if is simply not cost-effective to offer this for a couple of students. This is what happened at USC, when it shut down German. Online? Endless possibilities :-)

Should small colleges offer online instruction?

We typically offer arguments in favor of small colleges, small class sizes, personal interactions, etc. While I personally favor all these, I am not sure whether we truly achieve significantly better outcomes just because, for instance, a class is small size. My colleagues teach intro classes that have between 70 and 100 students each. I always cap my intro classes at 40. Not that we have done any systematic studies that measure how much students learn in these competing formats, but I am tempted to conclude that there is not much difference in the outcomes. If every one of us learns differently, then does it also not mean that some students might prefer the anonymity of a larger classroom for their learning, while some might like smaller classrooms so that they don't feel lost? I mean, that is only one example, right?

We can take it one more step; most students prefer not to come to class at all. Not anything new. I suppose as long as we have had classes, we have also had students who were not thrilled to be in the classroom. So, there could be a demographic group that actually will prefer online education? So, ought we not serve them? Well, that is the question handled in this Q/A with the president of

Brenau University, a small college in Georgia, has a strong focus on distance education. The institution offers 11 online degree programs, most of them career driven, an uncommon focus for a liberal-arts college. Brenau's president, Mr. Schrader, says that about 40 percent of faculty members teach the online courses.
Q. Why did a liberal-arts college like yours decide to start an online program?
A. We did it to meet the communication needs of the current generation of students. If the majority of the world is going to learn online, the liberal-arts schools will have to make a decision. They can't give up on their responsibility saying they don't like online courses; either they participate in them and do it well, or they throw in the towel.
The complete interview is here in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Not simply a matter of putting the syllabus online

I think I taught my first online class about nine years ago. My wife beat me to online teaching by three years, I think. And, she taught calculus, which meant spending hours composing the equations using MS-Word's equation editor. Oh those godawful days with modem connections and slow computers!

Even that many years ago, we clearly understood that online teaching was not simply providing the syllabus and notes online, and then everything being on "autopilot." The reality was quite the contrary and we spent a great deal of time interacting with students and evaluating their work. It took a while for learning management systems to rise up to that reality (I personally don't care for those systems.) The CEO of Blackboard, Michael L. Chasen, says:

When the industry started, it was about how to put a course online. Now it's about how to put the whole educational process online. It's about teaching and learning that take place in the classroom environment as well as outside — people putting their communities online, people putting their student services online. That's just a different problem than people were trying to address back when we started the company in 1997.

Which then opens up immense possibilities for something like Second Life--to become an online learning environment. No wonder then that my wife is exicted about a NSF-funded grant at their college that will underwrite developing and offering courses in Second Life!

Gas prices and online classes

If the stereotype is that most college faculty are left-leaning and environmentalists, then does it mean that online teaching and learning will be a huge environmental asset to a university? The ultimate "green" college is an online college?

Students, particularly at state universities like ours, are not from affluent families to begin with. So, with gas prices high, and with commitments like taking care of kids, online education might appeal to them quite a bit, right? Well, that is what we found out when gas prices went up sharply. The following is an excerpt from a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of months ago:

Many institutions say that their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly compared with last summer's and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase.
The Tennessee Board of Regents, for instance, reports that summer enrollment in online courses is up 29 percent over last year. At Brevard Community College, in Cocoa, Fla., summer enrollment in online courses is up nearly 25 percent. Harrisburg Area Community College, in Pennsylvania, saw its summer online enrollment rise about 15 percent. And at Northampton, in Bethlehem, Pa., online enrollment is up 18 percent.
New Formats Ahead
"All across the country, community colleges and universities are getting requests for
online programs specifically with students mentioning the price of gas," says Ray Schroeder, director of the office of technology-enhanced learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Some experts say that the rising interest in online programs could lead more colleges to expand their offerings, or experiment with "blended" courses that mix in-person and online meetings.

Online courses and intellectual property

Almost two years ago (November 11, 2006), I emailed the president of the faculty union in response to a call to boycott expanding online classes. I have no idea whether the administration and the union have figured out anything more on this. Here is most of that email:

... regarding online classes and intellectual property issues, I would argue that course materials belong in the intellectual commons, and not behind walls that prevent access.

Over the past few years, I have been impressed with two important approaches in particular:
1. The idea of "Creative Commons" that Lawrence Lessig champions.
2. MIT's venture into "opencourseware".

I am not sure if it was Lessig who started Creative Commons, but it was from one of his talks a few years ago that I became aware of it. (More info at http://creativecommons.org/)
This approach appeals to me because I think the more we make ideas available for everybody, the more humans progress. I don't think that all our progress has come out of material incentives alone, which is what complex intellectual property rights
regimens attempt to do.

A similar, and in fact related, venture is MIT's OpenCourseWare. (More info at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
When it was launched I remember thinking, hey, this is why the Web is fantastic: we can easily makes things available for free and easy access to people wherever they might be. This is all the more the case when it comes to distributing knowledge to people in resource-constrained countries, which are quite a few in this world.

MIT's approach has catalyzed the development of the "Opencourseware Consortium". (More info at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/) It has now become a world-wide effort to pool together the academic knowledge.

Even at a personal level, most of the stuff I do I post them online. (For that matter, even my work reports are online: http://www.wou.edu/~khes/personal/workreports.htm)
I maintain webpages for the courses I teach and none is password protected. If anybody finds it worthwhile to use it, why not? Every once in a while I get an email from some faculty member somewhere in the world who wants to use some PowerPoint file. Of course, I reply that they can use it. For my classes too I scan for insights from other faculty. Many days in the summer I spend re-educating myself about the courses I am scheduled to teach by simply browsing through the syllabi
on the Web.

... I also hope that the union would urge the OUS campuses to join the OpenCourseware Consortium, if a campus is already not a member.

Did online trigger higher enrolment?

When we offer this class in the "real world", an enrolment of 20 to 25 is typical.
I won't be surprised if we have done a swap of sorts--a few students who might have taken this class may have very well opted out because it was online.
However, those who opted out because of the different modality had a whole bunch of alternatives in the real world. Those students who were searching for online options, however, would not have had that luxury.
So, if we are looking strictly at enrolment in this class alone, we are even. However, institution-wide, I would guess that the online class helped out quite a few.

In terms of filling up fast .... I think that this class did reach 20 quite early. I capped it at 25 only because the online mode is pretty much a writing-intensive environment, and 25 is the WI cap.

BTW, I am experimenting with video clips this term. With the horrible mic and webcam at home, I have already done two video clips that I shared with the class. I route them through YouTube--this way I don't have to worry about how to stream the video.
The second video was a near-disaster because only when I was viewing the video did I realize that the audio is ultra soft. I couldn't be bothered with a "take 2" :-)
I am planning to get a better mic this weekend. I attempted to play a music CD in the background, and that program froze--I think things are getting complicated for my three-plus year old university laptop. Would be neat if they replaced it with a newer one .... oh well.

Online classes: who takes them, and why?

I conducted an online survey, of students in my GEOG 413 class, which is completely online this fall term.
I kept it very simple, because I did not want to bore the students. At the same time, I wanted to get some key information, so that I can correspondingly massage my course structure. The summary of that survey follows.

Note:
I had embedded into the class homepage a survey that was actually through polldaddy.com, where I developed the survey questions.

What I find interesting:
A majority of the students have never had me as an instructor. So, it is not any “familiarity” that drew them to this class.
For ten out of the 25, this is the first online class ever.
Only 13 out of the 25 are confident that they would have taken this class, even if it were not online.

Summary of responses:
What is your current standing?
Sophomore: 1
Junior: 10
Senior: 9
Senior-plus/Grad: 5

Have you taken any introductory geography class?
None 0
One 8
Two 5
All three 3
Yes, at another college 9

Did you take the introductory geography class with Sriram?
Yes 7
No 18

Did you take any upper division courses with Sriram?
GEOG 410: 2
GEOG 418: 1

Have you taken online classes before?
No 10
Yes, only one 1
Yes, two 5
Yes, more than two 9

Would you have taken this course if it were not online?
Yes 13
No way 3
Maybe 9