Taking online to the next level?

Hasn't one of the criticisms about online teaching and learning been the lack of face-to-face interaction?  Here is one solution that is being implemented:

One of San Jose State's most recent additions to that lineup is a videoconferencing system that allows faculty and students to interact in a "face to face" format online.
"We wanted a tool that would help students feel less isolated when taking Web-based classes," explained Debbie Faires, assistant director for distance learning for the School of Library and Information Science. After reviewing the various products available on the market, the institution selected Live and Next, both of which are developed by Elluminate of Pleasanton, CA.
Live enables real-time collaboration between instructors and students and allows for the addition of synchronous content to asynchronous distance learning. The Next suite comprises two different products, Plan for organizing, scripting, and packaging content and activities for live, online sessions; and Publish, for the creation of standalone recordings or industry-standard audio files from session recordings, and the storage of those files on a computer, learning management system (LMS), Web site, or other media.

Creating the Future of Learning

Thanks to RM's email, I knew about this project, whose opening statement should be awfully depressing for us in universities:

Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.

Great, thanks for reminding me that I have not complained enough about the status-quo maintaining traditional institutions that colleges and universities are, even as the world outside thinks that them faculty are way too radical.  Radical, shmadical!!!  Well, my consolation is that the project appears to be focused on K-12 and not on higher education :-)
But, whether it is about K-12 or about higher education, the following paragraphs are wonderfully applicable to both:

Contested Authorities

As the hierarchical structure of education splinters, traditional top-down movements of authority, knowledge, and power will unravel. Before new patterns get established, it will seem as if a host of new species has been introduced into the learning ecosystem. Authority will be a hotly contested resource, and there will be the potential for conflict and distrust.

With measurement strategies and metrics producing mountains of information, we will need to decide what data are important, what they mean, and how we can act upon them. We will also need to explore how we can fairly evaluate performance when we are altering our minds and bodies through environmental hazards and physical experiments. Standardized testing is already surrounded by controversy, but new metrics and measurements will emerge from a variety of places outside education.

It remains to be seen whether new learning agents and traditionally certified teachers will cooperate or compete. While we can expect third-party learning agent certification to emerge, in many cases, the absence of regulation will mean that self-monitoring and reciprocal accountability will be the best methods for ensuring quality.

I know for sure that most of my colleagues do not like their authorities to be contested.  Yes, absolutely firsthand experiences on this.  Good thing none among them reads this blog.  (ed: that's what you think!)

More on virtual professors won't ask for tenure

A follow-up to this post almost a year ago. It was about a piece on scientists and business leaders getting together to "plan a new university devoted to the idea that computers will soon become smarter than people."

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education has an update on Singularity University:

Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.

It's all evidence that the university has touched a cultural nerve, playing on hopes and anxieties about how technology is changing society—and tapping into an urge to more actively shape that future.

Those same forces are leading professors at traditional universities to explore similar questions. A high-profile meeting of computer-science professors this year, for instance, explored the potential long-term dangers of computer technologies, with an eye toward shaping policies to avoid the worst-case scenarios popular in Hollywood movies like The Terminator.

Singularity University is itself an innovative approach to education, bearing more in common with a fast-paced start-up company than an ivory-tower university. Some of the professors here—many of whom teach at traditional colleges during the year—said traditional higher education can learn from the entrepreneurial venture.

I tell you, higher education is changing with all kinds of experiments that was previously beyond our imagination, and is changing rapidly. We are at an inflection point, and are ready to take off. Now, do you really want to be "left behind?" :-)

And in case you thought the founders are nutcases, well, think again:

Mr. Diamandis says he dreamed up the idea for Singularity University while trekking in Chile during a vacation. He had brought along Mr. Kurzweil's hefty book, The Singularity Is Near, which boldly pronounces a timeline for drastic technological change over the next few years. Mr. Diamandis says that he felt it suggested a need to study the many technological areas identified as exhibiting exponential change, and that his first thought was to start a university to do just that.

Mr. Diamandis has created an academic institution before. In 1987 he cofounded the International Space University, which has become a leading training ground for officials in space programs around the world. The university has a campus in France, where it teaches a master's-level program, and holds a summer session here at NASA Ames.

Welcome to the future!

Oregon is no Harvard!

“We are no Harvard.”

Harvard, the country’s oldest university, is managed by the Harvard Corporation. This executive body is formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College and is, according to the university, the “oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Yes, this educational corporation is older than any of the American multinational business corporations that we are familiar with. To phrase it in another way, Harvard is the oldest multinational corporation!

On the other hand, the public university system in Oregon, and in other states as well, reflects a different notion that higher education is a public good. And the idea that citizens should not be deprived of an opportunity to gain higher education simply out of lack of money—the kind of money it would take to attend a private university like Harvard.

In case you are wondering, the tuition, fees, and dormitory expenses for four years at Harvard works out to about $52,000 for 2009-2010. For all practical purposes then, expenses for a year at Harvard can pay for all four years at any campus of the Oregon University System!

But, the commitment to a notion of affordable and accessible higher education has to be followed up with extensive public subsidies because knowledge, like most things in life, has costs associated with it. Unfortunately, we do not have enough loose change in the state’s coffers--yet another consequence of Measure 5, and the decisions of citizens to vote down funding proposals since then.

Thus, it is a no-brainer that when state governments decrease allocation for higher education, universities are then forced to suddenly increase tuition and fees—even if that were not in prior plans, and even if it means disastrous public relations.

The lack of state funding has, therefore, resulted in the shifting of the cost burden on to students and families. This increase over the last thirty years in Oregon is more than three times the increase in inflation over the same time period, mostly because of the decrease in state-support, which has worsened particularly over the last twenty years.


If because of dramatic reductions in state funding we are now making it more expensive for students to attend public universities, what happens then to the original political notion to ensure that Oregonians should not walk away from higher education for lack of money? Or, perhaps worse, what if students are graduating with debts, which is the reality now? The average debt that a graduate of the Oregon University System carries is now more than $20,000!

The current chaotic approach then forces universities to manage their way through uncertainty, when it comes to planning for beyond the biennial budget horizon. In a recent research paper, Professors William Doyle (Vanderbilt University) and Jennifer Delaney (University of Wisconsin, Madison) conclude that "the costs of an increasingly volatile system, with unpredictable finances for institutions and unexpected tuition increases for students and families, are too great to continue to ignore."

It appears that we are at the metaphorical fork in the road where decisions made could result in lowering the quality of our universities, or making higher education inaccessible, or both. It is quite possible, therefore, that it is only a matter of time before Oregon and, perhaps, the rest of country decide to consciously walk away from the goal of providing quality higher education that is accessible to everyone.

In no way do I mean to suggest that there is an easy way out of the conundrum. But, I would prefer public discussions on our commitment to public higher education, instead of relegating this to backroom budget negotiations at the Capitol.

I suppose we can take comfort in the news that Harvard, too, is having a tough time with the economic downturn. Its endowment has taken a huge hit and has lost $11 billion over the past year. The Harvard Corporation now has an endowment of only $26 billion to manage. Wait a second, $26 billion?

The wild, wild, west: online v. traditional learning

And the fight is not even between a non-profit and a state university.  It is between two state universities.  In the same state!  Read the entire story here; excerpt:

Morgan State University has objected to the creation of a doctoral program for aspiring community college administrators at the University of Maryland, University College, raising questions about how the state will handle competition between traditional universities and their online peers.

Morgan offers a similar degree and has told the Maryland Higher Education Commission, which would have to approve the program, that UMUC could lure students away, in violation of civil rights precedents set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Though the standoff is reminiscent of Morgan's 2005 fight to prevent Towson University and the University of Baltimore from creating a joint MBA program, it's complicated by UMUC's status as a predominantly online institution.

The higher education commission has already said that UMUC can offer the program to students outside Maryland. So if Morgan wins this fight, a state university could offer a doctorate to students from 49 states but not to students from Maryland.

"It doesn't make sense," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. "I'm not aware of another instance in which an online degree has been considered duplicative of a face-to-face program. I think there's an important principle at stake here."

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?  :-)

Online courses for $99 a Month

This simply might be the most remarkably innovative product yet in the economic marketplace of higher education and online education: College for $99/month.

Think of it as comparable to an all-you-can-eat menu for a flat charge.  This one allows you to take as many courses you want for only 99 dollars a month.  The company is StraighterLine.
Excerpt from the article:

... StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.

The analytical piece in the article that I like is how such a marketplace competition might parallel the crisis in the print journalism industry, about which I have blogged earlier.  The article notes:

Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter—and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.

What happens when the number of students making that choice reaches a critical mass? Consider the fate of the newspaper industry over the last five years. Like universities, newspapers relied on financial cross-subsidization to stay afloat, using fat profits from local advertising and classifieds to prop up money-losing news bureaus. This worked perfectly well until two things happened: the Internet made opinion and news content from around the world available for nothing, and the free online classified clearinghouse Craigslist obliterated newspapers’ bedrock revenue source, the want ads. Suddenly, people didn’t need to buy a newspaper to read news, and the papers’ ability to subsidize expensive reporting with ad revenue was crippled. The result: plummeting newspaper profits leading to a tidal wave of layoffs and bankruptcies, and the shuttering of bureaus in Washington and abroad.

It is one awesome, and equally challenging future of higher education that we are looking at.

Which is all the more the reason why we seriously need to figure out what higher education means, and ought to mean.  If we erroneously conclude, as we have for some time now, that a four year degree is simply a matter of student successfully completing courses from a range of options, well, we have written our own death warrant.

To me, higher education has been anything but that.  But, that discussion on outcomes, assessment, and capstone does not belong here.  Further, I have already critiqued enough the bait and switch that colleges currently practice--the bait that a degree will get them jobs, and then the switch that higher education is all about finding oneself and that this is for the long-term. 

So, I am hoping (much against hope) that challenges like this $99/month development will trigger discussions and changes in practice.  But, I think I am older and wiser enough to realize that status quo will continue and one day we will become redundant and out of jobs.

BTW, how does the higher education lobby protect itself from such innovative developments? Again, from the article:

The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors. And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online.

Well, Smith is no ordinary dude--he is, after all, a Harvard grad :-)  So, he worked out a way to get around this--hilarious!!!:

he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become “partner colleges” that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.
One of StraighterLine’s original partner colleges was Fort Hays State University, just off I-70 in Hays, Kansas.

If you read until here, and you have no idea about Fort Hays State U: One of our own here at WOU is a distinguished alum.