Online courses through the NY Times

An interesting aspect of online courses, from the Grey Lady:

Nicholas Kristof, Gail Collins, and Eric Asimov will be teaching courses online and in person through the newspaper's continuing-education program, Knowledge Network, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab. The Times has been developing course material with local universities for nearly two years.

Mr. Kristof's online seminar will discuss "the oppression of women in the developing world." Ms. Collins's course will focus on "changes in the lives and status of American women over the past 50 years," and Mr. Asimov will offer a seminar on wine tasting. The courses will cost between $125 and $185.

I wonder, though, how "wine tasting" can be an online course. But then even now we even have language and PE courses online. Fascinating!

BTW, cheer Kristof on. Not because he is a fantastically qualified fellow--perhaps even more than some research university faculty. Not because of his wonderful columns. Not because of his Pulitzers. But because he is a local guy, who grew up round the corner (well, metaphorically) from our campus :-)

Healthcare, then higher education?

Niraj Choksi notes that "For 27 of the past 30 years, the price of education has grown at a faster rate than that of medical care. Education also grew faster than inflation for 29 of the past 30 years, while medical care beat inflation 27 of those years. Could education be our next health care crisis?"

Too bad it is not already considered a crisis!

Why do I say that? Because I have already blogged enough about it :-)

Peer-to-peer U. open for business

Back in October, I blogged about a fantastically creative initiative: the peer-to-peer university.
I had also registered at that site, and a couple of days ago I got an email from them:

Last week at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, we launched the Peer 2 Peer University pilot phase and opened sign-up to our first set of free and open online
courses:

* Behavioral Economics and Decision Making (Neeru Paharia)
* Copyright for Educators (Andrew Rens, Hauwa Otori)
* Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature (Bekka Kahn)
* Land Restoration and Afforestation (Alison Cole, SongAnh Nguyen)
* Neuroethics and International Biolaw (Ana Rosa Tenório de Amorim)
* Open Creative Nonfiction Writing (Jane Park)
* Poker and Strategic Thinking (Niels Sprong)

Please have a look at our new site (http://www.p2pu.org), consider joining one of the courses, and help us spread the word. We are looking for our first batch of self-learners. Sign-up closes on 26 August 2009!

The Chronicle has a brief report on this, and includes this:

Courses are free, but prospective students do have to fill out a brief application and be accepted to participate, and courses will be capped at about a dozen per course section. "We are not applying the typical selection criteria of course, but are just interested to see that people give good reasons why they want to join a course," said Jan Philipp Schmidt, free-courseware project manager at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, and a leader of P2P University. "We want to make sure that participants are truly committed and won't drop out after they realize that it actually takes a few hours of work every week."

Organizers plan to see how things go this semester and will probably revamp the model for its next term, said Joel Thierstein, one of the leaders of the effort, who is also executive director of Rice University's Connexions project, a free online collection of scholarly materials. "We're trying to keep our minds open," he said. "Success will probably come in a form that we're surprised by."

The project is supported by a $70,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Registration for the new university's courses closes August 26.

I hope this succeeds. We need such experiments to be successful in order to transform how we currently put into practice the idea of "education" and "higher education".
BTW, if you decide to test-drive this, will you please update me?

Sue the college if unemployed?

So, in an earlier post I suggested that we have really reached that fork in the road where we need to clearly articulate to students the value they gain from attending--physically--a university.
Elsewhere, I have even wondered whether higher education itself is almost a scam, if it is already not one. A pyramid scheme of sorts. (Yes, a harsh criticism. But, then ....)

A few months ago, I remember telling a colleague that it is only a matter of time the public sits up and figures out that there is something seriously wrong in higher ed, and then students and their families will even start suing faculty and universities for educational malpractice. The colleague was sure it would not happen. Well, I do not know if it has ever happened before, but it has now:

Trina Thompson, 27, filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court.

She is seeking to recover $70,000 (£42,000) she spent on tuition to get her information technology degree.

Situations like this are what I had in mind when I wrote in a recent op-ed that:

To make things worse, fresh college graduates find that there are few jobs waiting for them, a situation that has grown even worse.

After all the time and money invested, students and their families begin to wonder if college degrees were worth it.

Having seen quite a few students in those circumstances, some, including me, wonder whether higher education is an economic bubble that is waiting to burst, similar to other bubbles that already have burst in this Great Recession.

Anyway, in the Monroe College lawsuit, we can console ourselves that the graduate is not challenging the idea of higher education itself. But, to me this is nothing but the opening shot. Why? Because, as far as I understand it, there are supposedly two reasons for college:

• To enhance the economic productivity of people
• To help them have an enriched life

Yes, education helps with economic performance. With few exceptions, literate people are more productive than illiterates. With few exceptions, high school grads are more productive than those who have completed only six years of schooling. But, division of labor and the increasingly complex society does not mean that everybody needs a college degree--not at all.

When we begin to point out such facts, then the pro-higher education lobby (yes, every single one is a lobbyist, whether registered as one or not) falls back on the much higher value that education delivers but, unfortunately, which economic calculations cannot capture. A neat bait and switch that some student will soon challenge in a court of law.
BTW, if high school graduates do not seem to have an idea of how education is good for their soul, well, how is that magically going to happen in the 13th year of education or the 14th? And, is there anybody who believes that all those partying away as undergraduates went to universities because they believe higher education will lead them to a richer understanding of life?

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!!!

"Teach Naked"

No, it is not what you think it is about :-)

A couple of years ago, I asked our IT grand poobah whether we have done any kind of cost/benefit analysis on the investments we have made in smart classrooms. The reason for asking that? I had noticed quite a few smart classrooms that were being used merely to project dull and boring sentences-filled PowerPoint slides. I explained to the grand poobah (isn't that your job title, BK? ha ha) that there seemed to be very little usage of the internet connection, or the DVD player, or even the document projector. Are we then ok with charging students tech fees that are used for smart classrooms, which turn out to be nothing but glorified overhead projectors?

The response was immediate, something along the lines of "great idea. Would you like to be the lead?" We both laughed. I suppose I laughed harder because I knew what kind of a "shoot me here sign" I will be walking around with, on top of my bullet holes :-)

It is not that I am a tech-nerd in the classroom either. I tell my students that when they have access to the readings, my slides, and all kinds of information on the web, well, why should they even come to class? At least one student always jumps in with the answer I look for: for discussions. To me, it is great having smart classrooms because I can then pull up appropriate info, data, graphics, videos, and news items on the fly as we discuss. But, it all depends on the eagerness of students to discuss, and my ability to catalyze and lead the discussions. (I hope I am ok in that!)

This article in the Chronicle (available without subscription) is about the smart classroom's value, or lack thereof:

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled "smart" classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to "teach naked" — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He's not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw.

You think all this is irrelevant to the discussions on online teaching and learning? Nope.

Now that so many colleges offer low-cost online alternatives to the traditional campus experience, and some universities give away videos of their best professors' lectures, colleges must make sure their in-person teaching really is superior to those alternatives.

"Schools need to be thinking this way," says Mr. Platt. "It's where they're going to prove they add value to being there in the room, and not being online."

Moving to PowerPoint from transparencies was the easy part of upgrading teaching for the digital age. Now that an entire infrastructure for instant online delivery is widely in place, all that's left is the hard part of changing what happens in the classroom, which might need to stay a low-tech zone to survive.

Yes, I too think that we ought to figure out how to demonstrate the "value added" in a live classroom is somehow superior to the value from online learning. But, removing smart technology from the classroom is a bizarre way to do that. I mean, why not go to the extreme of not having a fancy building, no comfy chairs for students, no climate control, .... after all, wasn't that the case in Socrates' time, whose "socratic method" is what most discussions are modeled after?

Technology is like the kitchen knife--we can use it to cook wonderful dinners, or use it like how OJ did.
ps: If OJ did not have access to a kitchen knife, well, he would have used something else.
pps: Yeah, right, OJ did not kill anybody!

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.