e-Learning: any different from "regular" learning?

Penn State has gone one huge step with online learning: now online classes are increasingly offered as regular alternatives to tradition resident instruction. I.e., as more and more faculty offer courses online, Penn State students will be able to take online classes even though they are right there on campus. Cool, eh!

Naturally, online teaching itself was met with questions and reservations. Here is an excerpt from their report:

Of utmost importance is a concern that the report is framed around a distinction that is increasingly invalid: “e-learning” as distinct from “resident instruction.” Several years ago, e-learning was largely identified with the World Campus, which is directed to offcampus, nontraditional students. However, today, e-learning plays a significant role in teaching traditional students--on campus and inter-campus, as well as at a distance. For every Penn State student, learning is now a blend of curricular and
co-curricular experiences that take place online and face-to-face. The issues need to be framed in this emerging context. The basic questions that we must ask as an institution are: In what ways are the differences between teaching and learning online and in a classroom consequential? How can we ensure that the consequences do not affect quality adversely?

As I noted earlier, online means that the focus will be only on learning, and the course objectives. Now, how about we begin to emphasize that for regular face to face instruction too?

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

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

If the university is really interested in revising our LACC, and seriously rethinking and restructuring liberal education, then the AACU annual meeting is the place to send a bunch of committed faculty and administrators. While it is not perfect, the AACU has always been one of the go-to places for me when I want to learn more about higher education, innovative pedagogies, etc.

One of the workshops at the annual meeting has a fantastic title: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, written by Don Finkel (Heinemann, 2000), challenges faculty to think of teaching as a practice of designing intellectual experience for a community of students, rather than one of “telling.” Drawing from the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire, Finkel proposes a variety of teaching practices that put the material at the center of students’ experience in the classroom, such as the Conceptual Workshop – a practice that engages students in community dialogue and inquiry and gives them the opportunity to apply ideas to complex situations.

I am sure you have figured out the rationale for posting this in this blog, as opposed to my other blog: when we teach online, don't we teach with our mouths shut? That in the online mode we put learning in the front and center?

As I noted in a posting in my other blog,
In the Chronicle, [former Harvard president] Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview."
They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

Isn't online teaching and learning a part of the process of experimentation, gathering evidence, and fine-tuning our approaches? Or, have we just stopped doing science altogether? I hope not.

So, ready to head to the AACU meeting? It is right up the road in Seattle, in Jan 2009.

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.

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!

Filter registration for online?

A few minutes ago, a student who is in my online class this term swung by to say hi and chat. During the conversation, he remarked that online is not for him. Because he way prefers the schedule of meeting twice a week, having conversations, and asking questions in class. On the other hand, in the online class, he feels that he is keeping things for the last minute, ....

To which I replied, "remember my emails that online classes won't work for everybody?" I told him that this is exactly why I had also included in the class webpages resources on how to be a successful online student. "of course" he said. I know what he means because a couple of terms ago he was a student in one of my "real world" classes--he was always prepared, had questions and wisecracks .....

Maybe one of the things we should do is to develop a gate system--something that makes students read a whole bunch of warnings, then click on a box that indicates that they have read through them, before they can register for the class. You know, something like how when we purchase an airline ticket online, we have to acknowledge that we are ok with the terms and conditions .... (Well, for that matter, even regular classes ought to have such a gate system--we can then avoid students taking naps in the classroom!)

Maybe such models have already been implemented somewhere. We can steal them, eh!

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional?

So, "RM" sends an interesting piece that "an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component."

It is neat that my gut instinct is validated by the results of this survey. "When asked why they prefer courses that offer streaming lectures online, most students cited making up for missed classes, convenience, improving retention of materials covered, improving test scores, and help with material review prior to class."

I suppose my only warning bell here comes from the fact that "The research, it should be noted, was sponsored by Sonic Foundry, a developer of streaming media technologies." Perhaps it is because of what my graduate school professor, Martin Krieger, drilled into my head--to always watch out for who funded the research, or which think-tank sponsored the distribution of the study, .....

In any case, even if turns out the data exaggerated the trends, I am willing to believe that there is a significant percentage of learners who would like to have access to the lecture, online and when the lecturer is usually asleep. I.e., in the regular classroom the lecturer is awake and the students are asleep, which means that it is only a matter of shifting the time curve a tad with lecture capture. No? :-)

BTW, the lead researcher in this was a Professor Raj Veeramani. Guess what? Either he is from Tamil Nadu--the state in India where I am from--or his parents or grandparents came from there. It is a distinctly Tamil name. I tell you, we Indian-Americans are now beginning to show up everywhere. Need proof? Read this.