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.

Rating faculty becomes easier in the online mode?

The reports at Maryland remind us that as professors put material online, they are leaving far more of a trace than traditional lecturers ever did. In the old days, once a class ended, the chalkboard was quickly erased by the next group, and the scrawlings were gone forever. Now professors are converting their yellowing lecture notes to text on course-management systems, or posting videos of their lecture performances for students to watch later for review.

All of those materials are preserved on college servers. And such data could easily be used to evaluate the quality of the teaching going on behind closed classroom doors, though the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has no plans to do that.

Though the idea of using technology to rank activity is new to teaching, it has long been a staple of academic research.

For decades, scientists have tracked the number of times their articles are cited by others, and such citation indexes have been important for career advancement.

Teaching has had no similar metric—except, of course, for student evaluations. But many people consider those evaluations imperfect measures because students may rate most favorably those professors who are more generous with their grading rather than those who challenge them.

So in an era when colleges are under more pressure than ever to be accountable for their costs and quality, the question arises: Will colleges begin to use technology to help them measure teaching? And should they?

This excerpt from a report in the Chronicle will not help sell online teaching and learning to the unocnverted.

But, at some time, we will have to recognize the fact that there is no "metric" for teaching.  It is an article of faith that those who teach are good at it.  The reality is though we faculty are far from being good teachers.  

I joke around with my students that they should thank their stars that they were not in my classes even five years ago--I know I sucked then compared to now.  Even two years ago!  In California, the first time I taught a televised class, I got a copy of the first telecast, which I asked my wife and daughter also to watch.  I came home and asked them for their feedback.  As they started listing the different things I was horrible at, I remember how awful I felt.  I stopped them after a while.  

Later, when they were asleep, I played the VCR (yes, that antique item!) and watched my lecture in solitude.  I was awful.  Simply awful.  My hands were flailing all over the place.  Every sentence had ums and ers.  I was asking students for their views, but not putting them together to tell a story.  My PowerPoint slides were awful.  There was nothing that seemed ok.  Bloody depressing it was.

Yet, there was nothing in the system to pull me up for the awful teacher that I was (And, after having observed quite a few, I am sure there are even worse than me!)  Do we run any other service with such profound implications where we care not about the quality of the service?  A simple error at the DMV and we are ready to pounce over the separator and assault the person!

Thinking and reflecting about teaching and learning has made me better, no doubt.  I am not sure if I am anywhere near being a "great teacher"; I am just happy I am not as bad as I used to be :-)

I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that society--maybe the goverment--demands that there is a measure of teaching.  It will be neat if we can preempt that.  But, I doubt it.  After all, I am at a university where even the student evaluation of faculty and courses happens only once a year and not every time!!!!!

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.

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

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!

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

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.