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 :-)

Taking online to the next level?

Hasn't one of the criticisms about online teaching and learning been the lack of face-to-face interaction?  Here is one solution that is being implemented:

One of San Jose State's most recent additions to that lineup is a videoconferencing system that allows faculty and students to interact in a "face to face" format online.
"We wanted a tool that would help students feel less isolated when taking Web-based classes," explained Debbie Faires, assistant director for distance learning for the School of Library and Information Science. After reviewing the various products available on the market, the institution selected Live and Next, both of which are developed by Elluminate of Pleasanton, CA.
Live enables real-time collaboration between instructors and students and allows for the addition of synchronous content to asynchronous distance learning. The Next suite comprises two different products, Plan for organizing, scripting, and packaging content and activities for live, online sessions; and Publish, for the creation of standalone recordings or industry-standard audio files from session recordings, and the storage of those files on a computer, learning management system (LMS), Web site, or other media.

Creating the Future of Learning

Thanks to RM's email, I knew about this project, whose opening statement should be awfully depressing for us in universities:

Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.

Great, thanks for reminding me that I have not complained enough about the status-quo maintaining traditional institutions that colleges and universities are, even as the world outside thinks that them faculty are way too radical.  Radical, shmadical!!!  Well, my consolation is that the project appears to be focused on K-12 and not on higher education :-)
But, whether it is about K-12 or about higher education, the following paragraphs are wonderfully applicable to both:

Contested Authorities

As the hierarchical structure of education splinters, traditional top-down movements of authority, knowledge, and power will unravel. Before new patterns get established, it will seem as if a host of new species has been introduced into the learning ecosystem. Authority will be a hotly contested resource, and there will be the potential for conflict and distrust.

With measurement strategies and metrics producing mountains of information, we will need to decide what data are important, what they mean, and how we can act upon them. We will also need to explore how we can fairly evaluate performance when we are altering our minds and bodies through environmental hazards and physical experiments. Standardized testing is already surrounded by controversy, but new metrics and measurements will emerge from a variety of places outside education.

It remains to be seen whether new learning agents and traditionally certified teachers will cooperate or compete. While we can expect third-party learning agent certification to emerge, in many cases, the absence of regulation will mean that self-monitoring and reciprocal accountability will be the best methods for ensuring quality.

I know for sure that most of my colleagues do not like their authorities to be contested.  Yes, absolutely firsthand experiences on this.  Good thing none among them reads this blog.  (ed: that's what you think!)

More on virtual professors won't ask for tenure

A follow-up to this post almost a year ago. It was about 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."

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education has an update on Singularity University:

Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.

It's all evidence that the university has touched a cultural nerve, playing on hopes and anxieties about how technology is changing society—and tapping into an urge to more actively shape that future.

Those same forces are leading professors at traditional universities to explore similar questions. A high-profile meeting of computer-science professors this year, for instance, explored the potential long-term dangers of computer technologies, with an eye toward shaping policies to avoid the worst-case scenarios popular in Hollywood movies like The Terminator.

Singularity University is itself an innovative approach to education, bearing more in common with a fast-paced start-up company than an ivory-tower university. Some of the professors here—many of whom teach at traditional colleges during the year—said traditional higher education can learn from the entrepreneurial venture.

I tell you, higher education is changing with all kinds of experiments that was previously beyond our imagination, and is changing rapidly. We are at an inflection point, and are ready to take off. Now, do you really want to be "left behind?" :-)

And in case you thought the founders are nutcases, well, think again:

Mr. Diamandis says he dreamed up the idea for Singularity University while trekking in Chile during a vacation. He had brought along Mr. Kurzweil's hefty book, The Singularity Is Near, which boldly pronounces a timeline for drastic technological change over the next few years. Mr. Diamandis says that he felt it suggested a need to study the many technological areas identified as exhibiting exponential change, and that his first thought was to start a university to do just that.

Mr. Diamandis has created an academic institution before. In 1987 he cofounded the International Space University, which has become a leading training ground for officials in space programs around the world. The university has a campus in France, where it teaches a master's-level program, and holds a summer session here at NASA Ames.

Welcome to the future!

Oregon is no Harvard!

“We are no Harvard.”

Harvard, the country’s oldest university, is managed by the Harvard Corporation. This executive body is formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College and is, according to the university, the “oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Yes, this educational corporation is older than any of the American multinational business corporations that we are familiar with. To phrase it in another way, Harvard is the oldest multinational corporation!

On the other hand, the public university system in Oregon, and in other states as well, reflects a different notion that higher education is a public good. And the idea that citizens should not be deprived of an opportunity to gain higher education simply out of lack of money—the kind of money it would take to attend a private university like Harvard.

In case you are wondering, the tuition, fees, and dormitory expenses for four years at Harvard works out to about $52,000 for 2009-2010. For all practical purposes then, expenses for a year at Harvard can pay for all four years at any campus of the Oregon University System!

But, the commitment to a notion of affordable and accessible higher education has to be followed up with extensive public subsidies because knowledge, like most things in life, has costs associated with it. Unfortunately, we do not have enough loose change in the state’s coffers--yet another consequence of Measure 5, and the decisions of citizens to vote down funding proposals since then.

Thus, it is a no-brainer that when state governments decrease allocation for higher education, universities are then forced to suddenly increase tuition and fees—even if that were not in prior plans, and even if it means disastrous public relations.

The lack of state funding has, therefore, resulted in the shifting of the cost burden on to students and families. This increase over the last thirty years in Oregon is more than three times the increase in inflation over the same time period, mostly because of the decrease in state-support, which has worsened particularly over the last twenty years.


If because of dramatic reductions in state funding we are now making it more expensive for students to attend public universities, what happens then to the original political notion to ensure that Oregonians should not walk away from higher education for lack of money? Or, perhaps worse, what if students are graduating with debts, which is the reality now? The average debt that a graduate of the Oregon University System carries is now more than $20,000!

The current chaotic approach then forces universities to manage their way through uncertainty, when it comes to planning for beyond the biennial budget horizon. In a recent research paper, Professors William Doyle (Vanderbilt University) and Jennifer Delaney (University of Wisconsin, Madison) conclude that "the costs of an increasingly volatile system, with unpredictable finances for institutions and unexpected tuition increases for students and families, are too great to continue to ignore."

It appears that we are at the metaphorical fork in the road where decisions made could result in lowering the quality of our universities, or making higher education inaccessible, or both. It is quite possible, therefore, that it is only a matter of time before Oregon and, perhaps, the rest of country decide to consciously walk away from the goal of providing quality higher education that is accessible to everyone.

In no way do I mean to suggest that there is an easy way out of the conundrum. But, I would prefer public discussions on our commitment to public higher education, instead of relegating this to backroom budget negotiations at the Capitol.

I suppose we can take comfort in the news that Harvard, too, is having a tough time with the economic downturn. Its endowment has taken a huge hit and has lost $11 billion over the past year. The Harvard Corporation now has an endowment of only $26 billion to manage. Wait a second, $26 billion?

The wild, wild, west: online v. traditional learning

And the fight is not even between a non-profit and a state university.  It is between two state universities.  In the same state!  Read the entire story here; excerpt:

Morgan State University has objected to the creation of a doctoral program for aspiring community college administrators at the University of Maryland, University College, raising questions about how the state will handle competition between traditional universities and their online peers.

Morgan offers a similar degree and has told the Maryland Higher Education Commission, which would have to approve the program, that UMUC could lure students away, in violation of civil rights precedents set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Though the standoff is reminiscent of Morgan's 2005 fight to prevent Towson University and the University of Baltimore from creating a joint MBA program, it's complicated by UMUC's status as a predominantly online institution.

The higher education commission has already said that UMUC can offer the program to students outside Maryland. So if Morgan wins this fight, a state university could offer a doctorate to students from 49 states but not to students from Maryland.

"It doesn't make sense," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. "I'm not aware of another instance in which an online degree has been considered duplicative of a face-to-face program. I think there's an important principle at stake here."

Do GenXes dream of tenure?

This is not directly about online teaching and learning, but bears corollaries. And, my apologies to the late Phillip Dick for deriving the title of this post from the title of one of his wonderful short stories :-)

Academics, who for the most part have supported healthcare reform for the wrong reasons, might be in for trouble if many of their arguments are used against academe. I have blogged about this before, and it turns out that I might be on the correct track after all .... Here is how the first paragraph in an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts:

Is higher education in the same position as health care—ripe for reform by the federal government? Both sectors certainly face similar challenges to the established protocol: higher costs, diminished resources, uneven access, inconsistent quality, inadequate means of defining and evaluating results, greater demands, and expensive technology.
We must voluntarily initiate substantial changes.

Just as a we are way ahead of the rest of the world with respect to innovative medical and surgical techniques, our higher education system is way ahead of most of the rest of the world--here is one small little comparison. There are lots and lots of changes we could and need to implement. But, as much as we look for easy targets in healthcare reform, academia offers an easy target when it comes to critiques. And you know what that easy target is (but, this is NOT my number one issue though): tenure.

The opinion in the Chronicle continues:

One central piece of the puzzle concerns the tenure system, hatched in another era by a generation of mostly white males with stay-at-home wives, who came of age in the 1930s and 40s. Like the work rules of newspaper guilds and auto workers, the tenure system does not fit contemporary economic realities, nor does it accommodate those Generation Xers and Millennials who work within the system under very different, and increasingly complex, conditions.

As a member of the first year cohort of GenXers--yes, I am that young, dammit!--I can easily see that my professional differences with the "majority" have a generational characteristic as well. I agree with the author here:

To cite just a few differences: Generation X prefers collaboration to competition; openness to secrecy; community to autonomy; flexibility to uniformity; diversity to homogeneity; interdisciplinary structures to disciplinary silos; and family-work life balance to 24/7 careers.

When, if ever, will the next generation of scholars have a chance to reconsider, and perhaps rewrite, the rules? Will the canon simply pass unquestioned and unexamined from one generation to the next, even as adherence to dogma reduces the tenured ranks? Will academe adapt to new members, or like some organized religions, will orthodoxy persist even as congregants leave?

In a Harvard Magazine article published in 2002, Richard P. Chait, a research professor of higher education at Harvard, and I proposed a "constitutional convention" at which a representative sample of faculty members, selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires, would convene to rethink tenure policy. We asked, "Would the document that emerges essentially paraphrase or materially depart from the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom?" Based on what I have since heard from hundreds of junior faculty members over the past 15 years, with ever more desperation, I think the rules would be different.

Yes, they would be different. Indeed! The author's conclusion?

Academe cannot continue with business as usual. In fact, inertia has produced, almost indiscernibly, a new status quo where tenured and tenure-track faculty members are an endangered species.

Hmmm ... but, then will tenured faculty then get protection under the federal Endangered Species Act?  :-)

Online courses for $99 a Month

This simply might be the most remarkably innovative product yet in the economic marketplace of higher education and online education: College for $99/month.

Think of it as comparable to an all-you-can-eat menu for a flat charge.  This one allows you to take as many courses you want for only 99 dollars a month.  The company is StraighterLine.
Excerpt from the article:

... StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.

The analytical piece in the article that I like is how such a marketplace competition might parallel the crisis in the print journalism industry, about which I have blogged earlier.  The article notes:

Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter—and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.

What happens when the number of students making that choice reaches a critical mass? Consider the fate of the newspaper industry over the last five years. Like universities, newspapers relied on financial cross-subsidization to stay afloat, using fat profits from local advertising and classifieds to prop up money-losing news bureaus. This worked perfectly well until two things happened: the Internet made opinion and news content from around the world available for nothing, and the free online classified clearinghouse Craigslist obliterated newspapers’ bedrock revenue source, the want ads. Suddenly, people didn’t need to buy a newspaper to read news, and the papers’ ability to subsidize expensive reporting with ad revenue was crippled. The result: plummeting newspaper profits leading to a tidal wave of layoffs and bankruptcies, and the shuttering of bureaus in Washington and abroad.

It is one awesome, and equally challenging future of higher education that we are looking at.

Which is all the more the reason why we seriously need to figure out what higher education means, and ought to mean.  If we erroneously conclude, as we have for some time now, that a four year degree is simply a matter of student successfully completing courses from a range of options, well, we have written our own death warrant.

To me, higher education has been anything but that.  But, that discussion on outcomes, assessment, and capstone does not belong here.  Further, I have already critiqued enough the bait and switch that colleges currently practice--the bait that a degree will get them jobs, and then the switch that higher education is all about finding oneself and that this is for the long-term. 

So, I am hoping (much against hope) that challenges like this $99/month development will trigger discussions and changes in practice.  But, I think I am older and wiser enough to realize that status quo will continue and one day we will become redundant and out of jobs.

BTW, how does the higher education lobby protect itself from such innovative developments? Again, from the article:

The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors. And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online.

Well, Smith is no ordinary dude--he is, after all, a Harvard grad :-)  So, he worked out a way to get around this--hilarious!!!:

he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become “partner colleges” that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.
One of StraighterLine’s original partner colleges was Fort Hays State University, just off I-70 in Hays, Kansas.

If you read until here, and you have no idea about Fort Hays State U: One of our own here at WOU is a distinguished alum.

Online courses through the NY Times

An interesting aspect of online courses, from the Grey Lady:

Nicholas Kristof, Gail Collins, and Eric Asimov will be teaching courses online and in person through the newspaper's continuing-education program, Knowledge Network, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab. The Times has been developing course material with local universities for nearly two years.

Mr. Kristof's online seminar will discuss "the oppression of women in the developing world." Ms. Collins's course will focus on "changes in the lives and status of American women over the past 50 years," and Mr. Asimov will offer a seminar on wine tasting. The courses will cost between $125 and $185.

I wonder, though, how "wine tasting" can be an online course. But then even now we even have language and PE courses online. Fascinating!

BTW, cheer Kristof on. Not because he is a fantastically qualified fellow--perhaps even more than some research university faculty. Not because of his wonderful columns. Not because of his Pulitzers. But because he is a local guy, who grew up round the corner (well, metaphorically) from our campus :-)

Healthcare, then higher education?

Niraj Choksi notes that "For 27 of the past 30 years, the price of education has grown at a faster rate than that of medical care. Education also grew faster than inflation for 29 of the past 30 years, while medical care beat inflation 27 of those years. Could education be our next health care crisis?"

Too bad it is not already considered a crisis!

Why do I say that? Because I have already blogged enough about it :-)

Peer-to-peer U. open for business

Back in October, I blogged about a fantastically creative initiative: the peer-to-peer university.
I had also registered at that site, and a couple of days ago I got an email from them:

Last week at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, we launched the Peer 2 Peer University pilot phase and opened sign-up to our first set of free and open online
courses:

* Behavioral Economics and Decision Making (Neeru Paharia)
* Copyright for Educators (Andrew Rens, Hauwa Otori)
* Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature (Bekka Kahn)
* Land Restoration and Afforestation (Alison Cole, SongAnh Nguyen)
* Neuroethics and International Biolaw (Ana Rosa Tenório de Amorim)
* Open Creative Nonfiction Writing (Jane Park)
* Poker and Strategic Thinking (Niels Sprong)

Please have a look at our new site (http://www.p2pu.org), consider joining one of the courses, and help us spread the word. We are looking for our first batch of self-learners. Sign-up closes on 26 August 2009!

The Chronicle has a brief report on this, and includes this:

Courses are free, but prospective students do have to fill out a brief application and be accepted to participate, and courses will be capped at about a dozen per course section. "We are not applying the typical selection criteria of course, but are just interested to see that people give good reasons why they want to join a course," said Jan Philipp Schmidt, free-courseware project manager at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, and a leader of P2P University. "We want to make sure that participants are truly committed and won't drop out after they realize that it actually takes a few hours of work every week."

Organizers plan to see how things go this semester and will probably revamp the model for its next term, said Joel Thierstein, one of the leaders of the effort, who is also executive director of Rice University's Connexions project, a free online collection of scholarly materials. "We're trying to keep our minds open," he said. "Success will probably come in a form that we're surprised by."

The project is supported by a $70,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Registration for the new university's courses closes August 26.

I hope this succeeds. We need such experiments to be successful in order to transform how we currently put into practice the idea of "education" and "higher education".
BTW, if you decide to test-drive this, will you please update me?

Sue the college if unemployed?

So, in an earlier post I suggested that we have really reached that fork in the road where we need to clearly articulate to students the value they gain from attending--physically--a university.
Elsewhere, I have even wondered whether higher education itself is almost a scam, if it is already not one. A pyramid scheme of sorts. (Yes, a harsh criticism. But, then ....)

A few months ago, I remember telling a colleague that it is only a matter of time the public sits up and figures out that there is something seriously wrong in higher ed, and then students and their families will even start suing faculty and universities for educational malpractice. The colleague was sure it would not happen. Well, I do not know if it has ever happened before, but it has now:

Trina Thompson, 27, filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court.

She is seeking to recover $70,000 (£42,000) she spent on tuition to get her information technology degree.

Situations like this are what I had in mind when I wrote in a recent op-ed that:

To make things worse, fresh college graduates find that there are few jobs waiting for them, a situation that has grown even worse.

After all the time and money invested, students and their families begin to wonder if college degrees were worth it.

Having seen quite a few students in those circumstances, some, including me, wonder whether higher education is an economic bubble that is waiting to burst, similar to other bubbles that already have burst in this Great Recession.

Anyway, in the Monroe College lawsuit, we can console ourselves that the graduate is not challenging the idea of higher education itself. But, to me this is nothing but the opening shot. Why? Because, as far as I understand it, there are supposedly two reasons for college:

• To enhance the economic productivity of people
• To help them have an enriched life

Yes, education helps with economic performance. With few exceptions, literate people are more productive than illiterates. With few exceptions, high school grads are more productive than those who have completed only six years of schooling. But, division of labor and the increasingly complex society does not mean that everybody needs a college degree--not at all.

When we begin to point out such facts, then the pro-higher education lobby (yes, every single one is a lobbyist, whether registered as one or not) falls back on the much higher value that education delivers but, unfortunately, which economic calculations cannot capture. A neat bait and switch that some student will soon challenge in a court of law.
BTW, if high school graduates do not seem to have an idea of how education is good for their soul, well, how is that magically going to happen in the 13th year of education or the 14th? And, is there anybody who believes that all those partying away as undergraduates went to universities because they believe higher education will lead them to a richer understanding of life?

A cyber-UC campus? Please, NO :-(

It is time for an 11th University of California campus: a cyber-campus devoted to awarding online degrees to UC-eligible students.

That wasn't me calling for a cyber-campus. It is the opening line from a LA Times op-ed by Christopher Edley, Jr., who is the dean of the law school at UC-Berkeley. He writes:

The UC XI cyber-campus could be a way to put high-quality higher education within reach of tens of thousands more students, including part-timers, and eventually provide a revenue boost for higher education.

A new California master plan should define and deliver state-of-the-art online education. There are scores of tough questions to be answered, and business plans to be drafted and redrafted. But every cliche about a crisis tells us that the best offense is often innovation.

I don't know what to make of this response he has in the Q/A with the Chronicle:

Q. Have you ever taught in an online setting? Would you teach in the online campus?

A. I have not but would love to. Look, if you have pride in your teaching and you get satisfaction out of reading papers and final exams that demonstrate how much progress your students have made, then … technology that allows you to multiply your impact beyond the four walls of your classroom can be an exciting prospect, especially if you don't have to grade all of the exams yourself.

"especially if you don't have to grade all of the exams yourself"? This research-university system of the professor only to "lecture" and then graduate assistants grading papers is all screwed up. It will be a shame to carry that screwed-up format into online teaching and learning also.

Edley adds:

I would expect that the best faculty would teach regular courses, and that some cybercourses would be included in their course mix. There would have to be an instructor of record and graduate students available for one-on-one contact and for grading purposes.

I do want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt here. But, I think he is looking at it strictly from a dollars perspective. I wonder if the logic here is something along the lines of videotaping those brilliant UC faculty lectures, which is why students attend UCs (yeah, right!), and streaming them online. Student progress would be assessed by TAs. In other words, it is the dull, boring, awful focus on "look at me, I am a brainy faculty"...

BTW, assessing student progress is not merely about "grading" ..... oh well!!!

"Teach Naked"

No, it is not what you think it is about :-)

A couple of years ago, I asked our IT grand poobah whether we have done any kind of cost/benefit analysis on the investments we have made in smart classrooms. The reason for asking that? I had noticed quite a few smart classrooms that were being used merely to project dull and boring sentences-filled PowerPoint slides. I explained to the grand poobah (isn't that your job title, BK? ha ha) that there seemed to be very little usage of the internet connection, or the DVD player, or even the document projector. Are we then ok with charging students tech fees that are used for smart classrooms, which turn out to be nothing but glorified overhead projectors?

The response was immediate, something along the lines of "great idea. Would you like to be the lead?" We both laughed. I suppose I laughed harder because I knew what kind of a "shoot me here sign" I will be walking around with, on top of my bullet holes :-)

It is not that I am a tech-nerd in the classroom either. I tell my students that when they have access to the readings, my slides, and all kinds of information on the web, well, why should they even come to class? At least one student always jumps in with the answer I look for: for discussions. To me, it is great having smart classrooms because I can then pull up appropriate info, data, graphics, videos, and news items on the fly as we discuss. But, it all depends on the eagerness of students to discuss, and my ability to catalyze and lead the discussions. (I hope I am ok in that!)

This article in the Chronicle (available without subscription) is about the smart classroom's value, or lack thereof:

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled "smart" classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to "teach naked" — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He's not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw.

You think all this is irrelevant to the discussions on online teaching and learning? Nope.

Now that so many colleges offer low-cost online alternatives to the traditional campus experience, and some universities give away videos of their best professors' lectures, colleges must make sure their in-person teaching really is superior to those alternatives.

"Schools need to be thinking this way," says Mr. Platt. "It's where they're going to prove they add value to being there in the room, and not being online."

Moving to PowerPoint from transparencies was the easy part of upgrading teaching for the digital age. Now that an entire infrastructure for instant online delivery is widely in place, all that's left is the hard part of changing what happens in the classroom, which might need to stay a low-tech zone to survive.

Yes, I too think that we ought to figure out how to demonstrate the "value added" in a live classroom is somehow superior to the value from online learning. But, removing smart technology from the classroom is a bizarre way to do that. I mean, why not go to the extreme of not having a fancy building, no comfy chairs for students, no climate control, .... after all, wasn't that the case in Socrates' time, whose "socratic method" is what most discussions are modeled after?

Technology is like the kitchen knife--we can use it to cook wonderful dinners, or use it like how OJ did.
ps: If OJ did not have access to a kitchen knife, well, he would have used something else.
pps: Yeah, right, OJ did not kill anybody!

Curriculum spread too thin and, hence, inefficient?

This is not truly about online issues. But, the following excerpt, from a well thought out essay, (which is usually a rarity at insidehighered.com), makes a powerful argument--an argument when I make I am usually in a tiny minority :-) I recommend reading that entire essay.

Many institutions operate on the assumption that a wide selection of undergraduate courses is a core dimension of quality, and furthermore needed to recruit students to the institution. The reality may be much different. The majority of students satisfy their general education requirements by enrolling in relatively few courses. In most institutions, more than half of the lower-division credit hours are generated in 25 or fewer courses. The result is a few high-enrollment courses and a lot of low-enrollment courses.

Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that a more prescribed path through a narrower range of curricular options leads to better retention, since advising is more straightforward, scheduling easier to predict, and students are less likely to get lost in the process. A narrower curriculum is more coherent, can be better focused on learning outcomes, and is actually preferred by many students. So an educationally effective undergraduate curriculum is also the most cost-effective curriculum. Recognizing this opens up opportunities to address costs while improving attention to positive learning outcomes. Higher education doesn’t have to go to Henry Ford’s extreme (“any color you want as long as it’s black”) to take a lesson of sorts from the portions of the automotive industry who have managed to avoid bankruptcy, by bundling options and eliminating product lines to cut production costs without compromising customer satisfaction. In our own industry, well regarded for-profit institutions have satisfied customers who have had few choices in a streamlined, cost-effective curriculum. If quality is measured in terms of outcomes achieved, not appearances and status, attention to the undergraduate curriculum is a place to start looking for improvements.

The authors are looking at big research universities when they make these observations. But then even small universities like ours want to behave like the big guys.

A diversified curriculum is fantastic, yes. But, I wonder if that is more from a faculty perspective than a student's. Again, that is where I have found the online environment to be useful again--my class on South Asia did not attract students in the regular format. And I had to cancel the class once because of llllooooowww enrolment. But, as I noted in an earlier post, the same class quickly filled up in the online mode--a win/win for everbody.

Online MAT programs .... us, USC, and ????

Some time ago, perhaps even as much as two years ago, when USC launched the online MAT program and advertised it as the first in the country, I emailed that announcement to a few people in the COE. Naturally, they were surprised with USC's claim--hey, even we have had an online MAT for a while.

Anyway, that experience reminded me of what a professor of mine said in our first ever graduate class at USC--yes, that is where I earned my grad degrees. Martin Krieger wanted us to understand that in this world, it is not a question of what we say, but one of who says it. Thus, it is no surprise to me that nobody cares for my op-eds, even though I might (and I do) provide leading-edge analysis, even before, say, the master manipulator of metaphors does :-(

Similarly, it becomes a big deal when a leading research university does something online, while the online work done at smaller universities, including ours, barely registers a blip anywhere. The harsh reality of life, I guess.

No, I am not simply ranting and raving here. USC's PR announcement from July 9th states:

The MAT@USC cohort, which officially starts this summer, is a strikingly diverse group that reflects the school’s long-running commitment to promoting diversity in education.

One hundred and forty-four students from across the United States have enrolled in MAT@USC, the first online program of its kind to emerge from a major research university. The program creates an interactive online environment based on streaming video, animation and other Web 2.0 technologies.

Despite wide-ranging backgrounds, the incoming MAT@USC cohort shares a commitment to urban education and an enthusiasm for creating positive change.

Notice how they have carefully worked in the fact that it is the first of its kind from a major research university? It is the truth, the whole truth, .... :-)

Online purely for the locals?

When I was at California State University-Bakersfield, in addition to my faculty responsibilities I was also the director of the Environmental Resource Management program. Students could complete this program in the online mode, too, and the logistics of this was handled by the Extended University there. Most (all?) of the students in the online program were outside the local area--within the state, and outside. In fact, that was the prevailing rationale at that time: online was a way to bring in additional dollars.

Now, as has been the case at our own campus here, online teaching and learning is increasingly seen as primarily for the locals. Which is what this report in the Chronicle (free--no subscription required) is about:

"The regional publics, which are finding themselves more and more tuition-dependent, due to shrinking state resources, have found themselves in a very competitive environment where we need to adapt," says Robert J. Hansen, Southern Maine's associate provost for university outreach. "The average student is getting older and older, and they've got busy and very complicated lives."

Blended or hybrid courses that combine online and face time have been around for years. Now universities are surveying regional needs and blending whole programs, sometimes eliminating fully face-to-face options for courses.

Mr. Mayadas lays down a rule for localness money. At least 50 percent of classroom time must be pushed online (at the level of programs, not necessarily individual courses). How they get there varies. Some throw in fully online courses, blended courses that meet weekly, or hybrids that meet even less often.

Less Face Time

Robert J. Kaleta, director of Milwaukee's Learning Technology Center, has little doubt where are all this is going: "Three years ago, all of our degrees would have required this face-to-face contact in all courses. Ten years down the road, you probably won't have a class that requires just face-to-face contact."

I tell you, as I indicated in an earlier post, am all the more convinced that I should jump into offering hybrid classes starting in winter 2010. Try stopping me :-)

Students learn effectively in online settings

[The] U.S. Department of Education released a report that, at least at first glance, carries a strong message about the medium: Students learn more effectively in online settings. Most powerful of all appear to be “blended” courses that offer both face-to-face and online elements. Previous research has generally found that online and offline courses are equally effective.

I had been thinking about testing a blended approach, and this report in the Chronicle, from which I excerpted the above paragraph, gives me that much more of an incentive to do that for the winter term. However, I wonder if the university will be ok with me teaching one class completely online, and another in a blended mode, and only one as a "regular" class. If the university is ok with that, then I am looking at an exciting winter term from this pedagogical attempt ....

The report also notes that:

“This report should not be interpreted as saying that one medium is better than another,” says Barbara Means, a director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, a California research firm that conducted the project under contract with the Education Department. “This should not be interpreted as saying that computers are better than professors.”

Instead, Ms. Means says, the study offers evidence that particular kinds of online instructional techniques are effective—and some of those techniques, she suggests, could theoretically be imported into old-fashioned chalkboard classrooms. For example, the study found that in online courses, students often spend more time directly engaging with the course content than do their counterparts in traditional classrooms. But in theory, there is no reason why traditional courses could not be redesigned to increase students’ “time on task.”

In other words, it’s the instructional technique that matters, not the technology, just as Mr. Clark proposed decades ago.

Or, to put it another way: If online courses are more effective than their face-to-face counterparts, it may be because the new setting forces instructors to break out of stale teaching habits, and not necessarily because computers are an intrinsically superior medium.

Ahem, I don't think I had any "stale" teaching habits that I got rid of. Wait a minute, I don't think I have any stale teaching style even now :-)

Have a fantastic Fourth of July cookout and, if you are like me, well, I bet you too are thankful that you live in the paradise that the Willamette Valley is--except for the four weeks of grass seed pollen!!!

"Cover it live" .... it is so cool!

I was reading a commentary by a medical professional/writer, Abraham Verghese, whose essays I have read and even used in my classes. An example, you ask? How about this one?
Wait, this is about teaching/learning/discussing online.... Just hang in for a few more sentences :-)

So, I was reading Verghese's comments on the health care reform issues, and in that he referred the reader to kevinmd.com for "an excellent discussion". The nerdy reader that I am, I faithfully followed that link.

And, this is where the technological aspect kicks in. At kevinmd.com I noticed an option to replay a live Q&A on health care reform. And at the bottom of that window were the letters "Cover it live". That was enough to trigger my curiosity, and hence this blog post.

The demo of how Cover it live works is simply too good to believe. And check out their complete demo library. It seems to be so easy to integrate real-time blogging with chat with Twitter with web-search with youtube .... The more I started exploring it, the more I can see how in a few years I could even have "real time" classes while sitting at home.
I did a quick search for whether it has been adopted in academic contexts. This blog (Classroom 2.0) has some recent (April/May 2009) discussions on it.

The speed at which all these technologies are coming up .... simply mind-boggling!!!

PS: BTW, if you read until here, you will be all the more interested to note that Abraham Verghese is, also, from India. His book on treating HIV patients in a remote corner of Tennessee was way too honest .... A wonderful read. Now, of course, it might seem dated, even though it is about the late eighties!

Using Blogs Instead of Course Management Systems

In my academic life, I have always marched to my own drum beat, and I get knocked down quite a bit for that. Add to this the researcher in me who constantly worries that I might not be correct after all. I tell you, contrary to appearances, there is a lot going on in my head. All the time :-)

My own drum beat in online teaching is perhaps best seen in how I have continued to refine my usage of blogger.com and reliance on emails for class interactions. Ideally I would have liked my students to also be ready and willing to discuss their understanding in an open environment--a transparent classroom. But, at least one student formally requested that our class interactions be private, as much as a "regular" class is behind closed doors. Fair enough, I thought, even though my preference is for openness.

I am, therefore, immensely pleased with this piece in the Chronicle. Way too pleased because it is about a day-long meeting to improve CUNY's online classes, in which a key idea was whether the free blogging software can take the place of course management software:

The meeting's focus was an idea that is catching on at a handful of colleges and universities around the country: Instead of using a course-management system to distribute materials and run class discussions, why not use free blogging software — the same kind that popular gadflies use for entertainment sites?

The approach can save colleges money, for one thing. And true believers like Mr. Groom argue that by using blogs, professors can open their students' work to the public, not just to those in the class who have a login and password to a campus course-management system. Open-source blog software, supporters say, also gives professors more ability to customize their online classrooms than most commercial course-management software does.

So, I am not alone.
You know what a relief that is? More than anything, it is impossible for every faculty to teach the same way--we differ in our teaching styles as much as, or even more than, how we differ in our learning styles. However, it feels good to know that there are at least a few others who are experimenting with, and finding success, in the same kind of things that I am trying. (Here is my blog for the online class that is coming to an end this spring term.)

The Chronicle piece also has an example:

To demonstrate how a blog might be used in a course, Zoë Sheehan-Saldaña, an assistant professor of art at CUNY's Baruch College, showed off the blog for her course "Designing With Computer Animation." Students posted their assignments on the blog so that other students — and people outside the class — could see them. Students were encouraged to post comments on one another's work as well.

Although new versions of Blackboard include a bloglike feature, Ms. Sheehan-Saldaña said there are benefits in teaching students to create blogs using systems they might encounter in future jobs.

Maybe soon I will be able to convince everybody registered in one of my classes about the sheer joy of working in this transparent classroom. But, as long as even one student has reservations about it, well, I need to treat online classes on par with regular classes and cannot impose openness. Once before, I tried partial openness--by including blogging as a requirement, as an assignment. But, that is not the same as a truly open classroom.

Now, I have even less of an incentive to experiment with Moodle :-)

I am not the only one who loves online teaching

I have fallen in love with this method of teaching. I feel more connected to my students than I ever have, and I feel needed and appreciated daily.

That is how the author of this opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education concludes his essay. And, that is how I feel more and more with my online classes and students. So much so that next week I am lunching with a few online students who said "yes" to my suggestion that we meet and eat in the real world :-)

And how did that opinion piece start?

"Impersonal, disconnected, and unfulfilling." That is how I would have answered if you asked me 10 years ago what I thought of online teaching. As a teacher, I feed off the energy of the crowd and thrive on exciting and entertaining my students to the point of drawing even the most resistant into attending class. When the economy and my growing family necessitated that I teach online as well as in the classroom, I couldn't have been more surprised by the satisfaction and joy that could come from a distance-learning program.

Teaching online can be rewarding, but ...

Here is a relatively fair and balanced take on teaching online. Of course, there are a few places where I disagree with the author. But, by and large, a balanced piece.

This term, I am realizing how technological glitches can affect stuff .... (Bill, you do not need to do anything here; things are happening, but a tad slowly. That is all.)

The good news is that I got a new laptop. I asked for a built-in webcam, so that I would not have to use an external camera to record my video clips and, yes, the new laptop has that. The relatively bad news is that ever since I got the new laptop--was it four or five weeks ago--things started unraveling, and finally I lost all access to the network drives, printers and, worst of all, the computer wants to connect to the H: drive even when I am home!

So, the first couple of weeks I did not do videos because I did not want to struggle with the old laptop that was wheezing like it would die any minute. And for almost three weeks now, totally different kinds of problems. Problems that are proving to be quite a challenge to our tech people.

So, this is what I think: I am relatively tech-okay. Perhaps significantly above average tech fluency compared to what might be the norm for a middle-aged university faculty! So, I have been dealing with the problems without harassing the tech people. (I wonder if they think that I am harassing them!!!) On the other hand, imagine if a less than tech-fluent faculty were teaching online, and such problems came up.

Which then makes me wonder whether there should be some kind of 'if you are below this height" metaphor that needs to be in place? What would be an example? When I am on campus, I could not connect to the "P:" drive, which is where my web pages are. So, what was my work around? Using our FTP (Filezilla) to connect to the drive from home. I just did not engage in web page editing when I was on campus. On the other hand, last term when a colleague told me how frustrating it was for him to go back and forth with a USB drive, and how he sometimes forgets it, I told him that he might be better off using Filezilla and demonstrated it. He was impressed, and commented that he wished he had known about it earlier.

Teaching online, the way I understand and practice it, requires a constant learning of new technology. I am all for learning new stuff--if I find something that fits with my teaching style, I use it. But, I don't ever use technology for the sake of using that fancy technology. I am not sure though whether non-users, and maybe even some users, understand how much such constant learning is required ..... or, am I using an incorrect framework?

The Sale of Waldorf--not the NY hotel!

In an earlier post, I referred to online education degrees being advertised in the Statesman Journal, and noted there that until then I hadn't heard of the provider--Ashford University. That mystery is solved now...when I read that:

It was novel a few years ago when Bridgepoint Education purchased the Franciscan University of the Prairies, also a small, religious Iowa college. Today the renamed Ashford University has both the former institution's campus (since improved), but also new online programs.

The same report notes that:

Many experts have been predicting -- just like Hanson -- that in the next few years more for-profit universities will buy financially struggling nonprofit colleges. And the model that Waldorf and Columbia Southern are following -- where the nonprofit institution retains some identity and a campus, even as it add programs linked to the larger for-profit interest -- appears to be growing.

I am not sure how much the two examples the story cites become a trend that "appears to be growing." Oh well .... :-)

Virus, schmirus! No cancellation of online classes

Yesterday, I commented to my online class students that

So, we realized one of the advantages of an online class: campus closure because of a virus does not affect this class in any way. Maybe you were thinking that is exactly the disadvantage, eh!
If a computer virus shuts down our computing systems down for a day or two, guess what? No class cancellations even then ..... :-)

And then this morning I am recipient of the following emails.
First from a colleague, who included a couple of us in the email to the dean and the division chair:

This is just to let you know that I am making back up plans in case of further WOU closures. I am informing students as to what they will need to do to take part or all of the rest of my courses in an online format. I emphasize that this would happen only in the event of further closures.

If I don't hear from you to the contrary, I will assume that this meets with your tentative approval, given the circumstances.

I would also like to volunteer my services to help out other faculty who may interested in forming such back up plans. While going online entails a tremendous amount of additional work for faculty, I see no other alternative in the scenario of additional closures. I also realize that some subjects are more suited to this form of learning than others. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

I think we would be wise to have alternative plans as this flu has the potential to be extremely disruptive. The sooner such conversations happen, the better.

To which the dean replies:

I’m supportive of your planning…indeed, the more that faculty utilize web-based course management assistance (Moodle, et al.) the more seamless a campus closure/reopening would be.

I am glad that such sentiments are being expressed in different arenas, in support of online teaching and learning. But, and I know I will be repeating this for the gazillionth time, like here, I don't see any systematic campus conversations on online teaching and learning. Our task force has a limited charter, and maybe for all the right reasons. However, at some point though we will have to become obsolete .... I mean the task force, and not the individuals :-)

Happy Cinco de Mayo; isn't it awesome that it always falls on the 5th of May? ha ha ha

Do I overestimate how high-tech students are?

In my introductory class, while explaining how technological changes trigger significant changes to the economic landscape, I used video stores as an example. About how even a few years ago, going to the video stores to rent VHS tapes was the typical way we rented movies, and now those stores are fast disappearing.

It was then I made a comment that perhaps not even five freshmen at WOU own a VCR anymore. And boy was I mistaken when I asked the class to raise their hands if they owned a VCR. It seemed like more than half the class did. And right here in their dorm rooms. "I still watch those VHS movies from when I was a kid" said one girl.

I admitted to them that it was a revelation to me. I told them how it has been almost two years since I canceled my Blockbuster card. Increasingly, I even head to hulu.com, or the respective networks' websites to watch a few TV shows. I told them that maybe the last videotape I ever used in a class was a few terms ago, and that when I donated all my educational VHS tapes to the library, the librarian told me that they too might not use them!

I am, therefore, wondering whether this particular class was an exception, or whether WOU is an exception, or whether the stereotypical representation of the younger generation as into iPods and all-things-mobile is a complete exaggeration that misled me to hypothesizing that our students don't own a VCR anymore.

Do we have any surveyed information on the use/proficiency when it comes to our students and technology? I just think this is so strange a response from my class; I was so convinced that VHS had become prehistoric :-) Even if you folks don't have hard data, any anecdotal information?

Don't Starve the Staff of Online Programs

The excerpts and comments here are triggered by a viewpoint at insidehighered.com. Hey, even the title for this post comes from that same source ...

First, a paragraph that will certainly address one of the leading concerns at our campus here:

[L]aunching an online degree program is not as simple as hiring adjunct professors and teaching courses that have been used in a physical campus setting. To do it right, you need a good learning management system, faculty who are experienced and effective online teachers, training and instructional design support, IT support and online tutors.

So, with the adjunct issue out of the way, now on to the rest of the story, to use the late Paul Harvey's phrase ...

The author makes a case for "coaches" who can appropriately guide students, troubleshoot their support issues, and make the online environment a wonderful learning place for students. I am reminded of a comment made at one of the sessions we attended while at the WCET in Phoenix: student support for online students cannot be located only in the physical world--but that has to be online as well. Which means that the registrar, or the financial aid people extend their services in the online realm too. The author writes:

At Tiffin University, we began using success coaches with our at-risk students on campus in the fall of 2007. In the fall of 2008, we took our best practices for on campus learning and applied them to online learning, when we created Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University , an online associate degree program that offers students mentoring and support and transferability to most four-year colleges and universities.

Whether a student lives in Maine or Oregon, he or she has a success coach to help them make the transition from high school to college, and to keep them on track toward that associate degree and transfer to a four-year college or university.

In the first place, I hope the usage of "Oregon" is rhetorical, and that students from Oregon are not actually ditching the various online programs here in favor of online classes at Tiffin U.

Second, which is the main reason for this posting, are such discussions going on anywhere at WOU? I mean, for instance, when we have a CJ program that is online .....

In the name of efficiency ....

So, when we went to the conference in Phoenix, one of the panelists at a session that I went to was from the Dakotas. He talked about how there is state-wide coordination in order to promote efficient use of tax dollars.

I am a big fan of efficiency, and responsible use of tax dollars. But, there are limits to applying the concept of efficiency when it comes to knowledge and learning. While I have no empirical data to back me up, my hypothesis is that efficiency is not THE bottom line, and should not be THE bottom line.

(An aside: from an evolutionary perspective, our own individual bodies are far from any efficient design; instead, we are built with redundancies. While one kidney will work just fine, we have two, just in case! For all I know, we might be more efficient with three fingers and an opposable thumb, rather than the four-plus-thumb combination, and we would be using base-8 and not a base-10 system. All right, too much of a digression!)

Why all this you ask? Fair enough. Read for yourself this excerpt from Tom Brokaw's op-ed piece in the NY Times:

In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.

I know this is heresy, but couldn’t the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?

Brokaw's point in that op-ed is that "it’s time to reorganize our state and local government structures for today’s realities rather than cling to the sensibilities of the 20th century. If we demand this from General Motors, we should ask no less of ourselves."

I disagree with that, but let me restrict myself to this education argument of his. The connection to online? Hey, it will not take a rocket scientist, or a journalist, much time to figure out that they don't need even satellite campuses--instead, every home with a computer and high-speed connection becomes a personalized campus with its own cafeteria and student center! Ultimate decentralization of higher education. And then somebody else comes along and proposes that we should outsource it all to the University of Phoenix, or worse--to the University of Madras, from where I earned my undergraduate degree :-)

God is dead!

Oregon needs framework for online education

Yes, that is the subheading in the main editorial in the Register Guard (April 8th issue); the heading itself is "Adapt to virtual schools."

Like people in other fields, educators have been caught off balance by a migration of their profession into the online world. But there’s no stopping it — thousands of Oregon students already are receiving a public education through virtual schools, and their number will grow. Oregon needs to adapt to this new form of education by putting in place policies to see that its promise is fulfilled while ensuring full accountability both in terms of cost and results.

Maybe you are thinking, "really?" First a clarification: the editorial is not about higher education, but about the K-12 system. Well, I don't think it is about the "K" .... ha ha ha
The editorial notes that:

The distinction between classroom and online learning already is blurring as information technology is incorporated at all levels of education. The growth of online learning will accelerate as the technology supporting it grows steadily more powerful and less expensive. This expansion, in turn, will bring into being broader and more robust networks of social, technical and academic support.

Notice how similar the points are--I mean, this paragraph could easily be written in the context of higher education and online learning.
What was even more impressive? The editorial refers to online "learning" and not online "teaching". That is cool. It is not semantics at all--I am convinced that for way too long we have only focused on "teaching" and "teachers", and it is way past time to focus on what really matters in education: "learning" and "learners".

For the record: I am a learner, and am proud of being one :-)

Online grows at community colleges, and so does Angel?

Because of their mission, community colleges are a lot more responsive to changes in the "real world" and accordingly modify their courses and pedagogy. They have also jumped in big time with online learning. Arizona's Rio Salado is, of course, a huge symbol of this, though an outlier of sorts.

Therefore, it was not anything that was that new when I read in the Chronicle that:

Among other results, the survey found that:

• Seventy-four percent of colleges offered at least one “online degree,” meaning at least 70 percent of the course work required for the degree was offered online. That's up 10 percent from last year.
• Sixty-four percent of colleges plan to increase the number of "blended" courses, for which 30 to 79 percent of course content is delivered online, with some face-to-face meetings.
• Completion rates for online work continues to lag behind traditional courses. The retention rate for online courses was 65 percent, compared to 72 percent in face-to-face courses.
• Full-time faculty members continue to teach the majority of distance-education courses. Sixty-four percent of online courses are taught by full-time faculty members, with part-time faculty members handling the rest.
• The top challenge administrators said they faced in running distance-education programs was hiring the support personnel needed for technical assistance and staff training. That has been the No. 1 challenge identified by administrators since the survey's beginning.
• The primary challenge for faculty members was workload, also unchanged in four years. The greatest challenge for students was assessing learning and performance.

BTW, the same report also refers to "Angel":

One noteworthy departure was in the decline in the use of Blackboard and WebCT as learning-management systems. Fifty-nine percent of respondents indicated they use Blackboard or WebCT, down from 77 percent in 2007 (Blackboard took over WebCT in 2006). The biggest beneficiary of this decline seems to be Angel, which grew in usage from just under 10 percent of respondents in 2007 to over 20 percent last year.

Angel?

Ad for online degree

So, I was doing my typical morning ritual--no, not that!!!--of reading the newspapers online, and I was at the Statesman Journal site where I saw an ad for .... yes, online degree programs.

It was from some outfit ARALifestyle.com, and it said "Top universities partner to offer online teaching credentials." Well, it does not take me much to become curious, and clicking that ad took me to this site. Here is an excerpt:

"The partnership between Ashford University and Rio Salado College Online offers aspiring teachers an accelerated opportunity to fulfill their dreams," said Ashford University Chancellor Jane McAuliffe. "By combining a bachelor's degree and a teacher preparation program, Ashford and Rio Salado are providing students with a truly unique opportunity."

I hadn't heard of Ashford until this ad. Even more curiosity. Turns out that it is located in Iowa. So, this university in Iowa is partnering with Rio Salado, which is in Arizona, for an online degree program. Of course, Rio Salado is quite well known in the online world, and the team that went to the conference also got to see that college's president in person, when she was a panelist.

Hmmm .... wait a minute. Isn't the teacher ed program a major part of our business here? I suppose we can always adopt a Alfred E. Neuman philosophy: "What, me worry?" :-)

Newspapers are dying. Regional universities next?

A couple of weeks ago, Mary B. sent me a link to an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, where the author, a professor of history and education at NYU. He made a good argument for how academics can rescue the dying newspaper industry.

I suppose newspapers and higher-education is now a trending topic; the latest Chronicle has a neat opinion piece that explores some of the underlying similarities between these two industries:

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

Of course, my first thought was, well, hey I blogged about this a couple of months ago! If only people listened to me :-)
Anyway, he then warns about how regional public universities (hey, isn't ours one?!!!) might be in trouble if they did not look ahead:

Institutions that specialize in their mission and customer base are still well positioned in this new environment, much as The Chronicle is doing a lot better than the Rocky Mountain News (RIP). Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.

Less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast — the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper — are in real danger. Some are more forward-looking than others. Lamar University, a public institution in Beaumont, Tex., recently began offering graduate courses in education administration — another traditional cash cow — through a for-profit online provider, with the two organizations splitting the profits. It's an innovative move and probably a sign of things to come. But the public university still looks like something of a middleman here — and in the long run, the Internet doesn't treat middlemen kindly. To survive and prosper, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of lower prices.

I wonder what a typical faculty (other than the ones in this group) at WOU thinks about such issues, and how much they see or do not see online teaching/learning at least as an important hedge against that same deathly fate that even the mighty NY Times is struggling with.