More on student feedback, and standards

A few additional comments from online students .... as an addendum to my earlier post on this topic

• Thanks for a fun, interesting, and eye-opening class!
• I wanted to let you know that I have enjoyed taking your class. I have found most classes at Western well frankly too easy. This class was definitely a stretch for me and i feel like i have actually learned something and grown as a student. Thank you for putting forth a challenging class and teaching me!
• I really enjoyed this class. I enjoyed you so much as a professor that I signed up for one of your geography classes next term.
• This has been a good class
• This class has been very interesting to me, I am glad I took it.
  

The really, really, off-beat comment, is the one that includes the remark that most classes at Western are too easy. Not only am I glad that my class was not an easy one, I am all the more excited that I can continue to be a tough instructor :-)

Back in California, when I was barely into my second year of teaching, a colleague in the math dept, Lee, who was a full-professor a couple of years away from retirement, walked across to talk with me at the president's reception during the beginning of the academic year. He remarked that I had already gained a reputation among students that I was a tough instructor--my classes were hard, my exams were hard, and my grading standards were way too hard.
So, naturally, I asked if it was a good thing or a bad thing to have such a reputation. I have worked his bottom line ever since; he replied, "it is a bad thing if students don't sign up for your classes, and a good thing if your classes continue to attract students."

I realize that this posting comes across as being, well, rather boastful. But, this is the only way I can lead up to the pedagogical and philosophical issue here: I am always in pursuit of ways in which I can help students raise their own levels of understanding, without them getting frustrated in their attempts. At the end of it all, even if their grade is only a C+, I want them to be encouraged and happy with not their grade as much as a feeling that the ten weeks were not spent in vain. A feeling that the ten weeks of academic interaction with me and fellow students made them more informed and wiser.

Now, does it really matter if this experience was in a regular classroom, or in an online environment? What rationale might we have to force students into an regular classroom schedule, if the ultimate outcome we are interested in is in the value-added to students?

So far, and I am into my seventh year here at WOU, this approach has worked out well. I don't think I have reached the destination--on the other hand, I suppose this will be a journey all the way until my retirement, or my death, or when I am fired from my job!

And, yes, Lee will be happy to know that students continue to enroll in my classes :-)

Easier for students to give feedback in online classes?

There are times when I wonder if the academic life is worth it. Hey, I am human with feelings!
The neat thing with online classes is that unlike "regular" students, many of the online students email their appreciation at the end of the term, which then pumps me up for the following term :-)

Very rarely do the regular students ever walk up to me at the end of the term to say that they liked the class, or my teaching, or .... There was one student who included a poem along with her final exam answers, which I thought was way too cool.
Since I started using Meebo, every once in a while I would get student feedback as an IM. I saved some of those as screenshots; you are looking at one of those on the left.

Anyway, thanks to the student (whose identity I am intentionally not revealing) for the email, which I have copied/pasted here .... well, given that I teach only one online class this term, it won't take much to figure out which course "xyz" stands for ....

[GEOGxyz] was unlike any other class I've had at Western. .... Keep up the good work Dr. Khe!

Wish you well,

University of the People

So, if you wanted knowledge to be freed from the ball and chains of institutional structures, and if you wanted to democratize the learning process itself, wouldn't you be tempted to call it the "University of the People"?

Not a bad idea, eh? Well, don't try selling this concept unless you want to check out our massive prision-industrial complex, because the University of the People is already here, and will be open for business in April :-)

It will be online, of course. No bricks and mortar, or forcing students to come to class when it is convenient for lazy faculty like me!

According to insidehighered.com,

Shai Reshef has a big goal for his new venture: He wants to offer low-cost, quality higher education all over the world, and particularly in countries where options are limited and students have relatively little money. His solution is the University of the People, which would offer free online degrees. ....
The University of the People plans to start with bachelor's programs in business administration and computer science, with more programs (and associate degree offerings) in the works. The university is starting the process to gain accreditation.

From what I read up more at the "university"'s website, I am not too keen on this particular idea, because it seems to be less about "education" and is more about helping people gain a "degree". But then, hey, let us face it: most of the students we deal with day in and day out are less interested in educating themselves, and are far more concerned about having a good time and getting a diploma in the process. I don''t like it, but then I don't want to be a Don Quixote tilting at the windmills!!!

Meanwhile, the sound of silence on all these important topics of the day is quite deafening here at WOU :-( Apparently we are far more interested in designated parking spaces for faculty, which, is so retro! Yes, asking for parking is nothing but reliving a comment by Clark Kerr, who was the president of the University of California system in the 1960s; he is reported to have said that a college administrator's job is to provide "parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for alumni."

Oh well!

Online classes .... enrolment success

Last fall, I blogged about the healthy enrolment in online classes in geography. Well, I moseyed over to the schedule of classes to see if spring term classes have attracted good numbers.
Bottom line: it is working well :-)

- My online class in spring is GEOG315D, which is about the Indian subcontinent. The last time I offered it, which was last Spring, it was a "regular" class, and only three or so students had enrolled by the first week in March. So, the very responsible faculty that I am (or pretend to be?) I canceled it.

Based on that fall term experience, I had a thought: why not slowly move the potentially low-demand courses to the online format? If there is really a demand for online classes, then maybe students will sign up because of the convenience factor. It is a win for them.

It is a win for me, because I then get to engage students on topics and issues that I believe every student ought to be familiar with. (Would you be happy with graduating students not knowing anything about India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Nepal, which collectively are home to more than a quarter of the world's population, and with quite a few geopolitical and economic issues with global implications?)

It is a win for the university in terms of enrolment management.

As of today, there are 15 in the class, and I won't be surprised if it reached 20 by the first day of Spring--quite a contrast to the four the last time around, eh!

- There is one other upper-division geography course that is offered online (by my colleague), and that is already closed; all filled up and no space left.

- The university gains even more: no need for classroom space for two sections!

The world is changing, even at WOU: one small geography class at a time :-)

What's about to disrupt schools

According to Clayton Christensen, author of Disrupting Class, online instruction will change schooling as we know it--if we're lucky. Christensen predicts that within 10 years, 50% of all classes will be taught online, and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers.

Read the entire article at eSchool News.

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.

A different kind of a university?

So, there I was mindlessly flicking the telly channels, and .... the way one ad started caught my attention.  If the market that the ad was aiming for were watching it, I can imagine them absolutely in agreement with the ad.

What was the ad for?  Kaplan University.  You can watch the same ad here in their website--click on the play button for the ad to start.

It is not that I am being an agent for that university, and nor am I advocating that we throw out the "standard" approach to education.  But, with every passing day, I am more and more convinced that with the phenomenal explosion of technology of a gazillion sorts, colleges and universities need to figure out how to adapt to the changing contexts.  (Yesterday was the big time celebration of Charles Darwin's birthday; so, we better keep in mind that those who don't adapt, well, ....)

What blows my mind is how we refuse to engage in such discussions.  Yes, even to talk about them, leave alone doing something.

And speaking of talent, here is one of my favorite talks from Ted.com.  The speaker is Sir Ken Robinson, and he, too, calls for a massive overhaul of the way we teach (though his focus is mainly on K-12, it has lots of lessons for us.)  BTW, if the embedded video does not show up in the email, then click on the link in the bottom of the email to go the blog post itself and watch the video.