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.

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.

Academic Earth, and the future of education?

An excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's column at Slate (read the entire one; it is neat):

I live in San Francisco, but I attended all of these classes without ever leaving my house, often while I was supposed to have been doing something else. Over the last few years, snooty universities across the country have been filming their lectures and putting their course material online. A few months ago, Academic Earth, a startup founded by a young Yale graduate named Richard Ludlow, began collecting these videos and packaging them into full-length courses. The result is a geeky procrastinator's dream.

It's been years since I was in school, and I've got few fond memories of going to class. But Academic Earth is unexpectedly irresistible. It's like Hulu, but for nerds. Many of the professors are great teachers, and, unlike in college, I can go to class on my own time—which ensures that I'm not too sleepy to understand what's going on. Academic Earth achieves something like what Google was trying to pull off with Knol, the messy encyclopedialike project that the search engine launched last year. Both sites let you learn from recognized experts rather than from the anonymous crowds who populate Wikipedia. But Academic Earth bests Knol, because the experts here aren't just throwing up their opinions whenever the mood strikes them. Instead, they're doing their jobs—teaching in actual classrooms, at recognized universities, to real, live, students.

Axis of Evil? :-)

If all we learn is online, then .... writes Nicholas Carr:

Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

It's hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What's much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path - the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

Well, you may want to re-read this posting on whether Google is making us stupid!

Recession and online classes

Ms. Allen also expects the number of students enrolled in online courses, which two-year and private for-profit colleges have embraced, to rise during the recession. Back in November, the Sloan survey asserted that the high cost of gasoline might compel more people to learn from home. Although gas prices have since fallen, Ms. Allen said she still expects the struggling economy to push more students into online courses for other reasons.

“If you don’t have a job, lowering your gas costs is not your primary motivation for going back to school online,” she said. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want. We also see that most of the online learners are older, and there are family issues.” With online programs, she said, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

If the recession does move more adults into cyberclassrooms, it will accelerate a trend that has been happening since the Sloan Consortium began publishing its online-education reports

That is an excerpt from the Chronicle--my go-to site every morning for news and updates on the academic front.

Of course, the Sloan Consortium has an online agenda.  But even otherwise, it is only common sense that people without jobs--and that number is rapidly increasing--would way prefer to upgrade their academic qualifications from their homes as opposed to rushing around to classes.  They would rather rush around to meet with people for possible job openings.  

Not simply a matter of putting the syllabus online

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

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

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

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

Gas prices and online classes

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

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

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

Online courses and intellectual property

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did online trigger higher enrolment?

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

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

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

Online classes: who takes them, and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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