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.

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!!!

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!