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.

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?  :-)

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!!!

Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning

Not so good news about online teaching and learning, according to this report in the Chronicle.  Here is an excerpt from the Chronicle report (The full results from the survey will be available only in April):

Instructors' extra time and effort aren't being rewarded financially or professionally, and what's more, online education doesn't translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in the faculty survey. More than 10,000 faculty members at 67 public campuses responded to the survey.

While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior. Among faculty members who have taught online courses, that figure drops to 48 percent, but that still represents a "substantial minority" holding a negative view, Mr. Seaman said.

The survey also found that a majority of faculty members felt that institutions provided inadequate compensation for those taking on the additional responsibility of teaching online courses. And many respondents said that students needed more discipline before they could benefit from online instruction. Low retention rates among students and the lack of consideration of online teaching experience in tenure-and-promotion decisions were also cited as barriers to faculty interest in online teaching.

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!!!!!

Guaranteed employment if working for a term paper mill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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