Oregon needs framework for online education

Yes, that is the subheading in the main editorial in the Register Guard (April 8th issue); the heading itself is "Adapt to virtual schools."

Like people in other fields, educators have been caught off balance by a migration of their profession into the online world. But there’s no stopping it — thousands of Oregon students already are receiving a public education through virtual schools, and their number will grow. Oregon needs to adapt to this new form of education by putting in place policies to see that its promise is fulfilled while ensuring full accountability both in terms of cost and results.

Maybe you are thinking, "really?" First a clarification: the editorial is not about higher education, but about the K-12 system. Well, I don't think it is about the "K" .... ha ha ha
The editorial notes that:

The distinction between classroom and online learning already is blurring as information technology is incorporated at all levels of education. The growth of online learning will accelerate as the technology supporting it grows steadily more powerful and less expensive. This expansion, in turn, will bring into being broader and more robust networks of social, technical and academic support.

Notice how similar the points are--I mean, this paragraph could easily be written in the context of higher education and online learning.
What was even more impressive? The editorial refers to online "learning" and not online "teaching". That is cool. It is not semantics at all--I am convinced that for way too long we have only focused on "teaching" and "teachers", and it is way past time to focus on what really matters in education: "learning" and "learners".

For the record: I am a learner, and am proud of being one :-)

Online grows at community colleges, and so does Angel?

Because of their mission, community colleges are a lot more responsive to changes in the "real world" and accordingly modify their courses and pedagogy. They have also jumped in big time with online learning. Arizona's Rio Salado is, of course, a huge symbol of this, though an outlier of sorts.

Therefore, it was not anything that was that new when I read in the Chronicle that:

Among other results, the survey found that:

• Seventy-four percent of colleges offered at least one “online degree,” meaning at least 70 percent of the course work required for the degree was offered online. That's up 10 percent from last year.
• Sixty-four percent of colleges plan to increase the number of "blended" courses, for which 30 to 79 percent of course content is delivered online, with some face-to-face meetings.
• Completion rates for online work continues to lag behind traditional courses. The retention rate for online courses was 65 percent, compared to 72 percent in face-to-face courses.
• Full-time faculty members continue to teach the majority of distance-education courses. Sixty-four percent of online courses are taught by full-time faculty members, with part-time faculty members handling the rest.
• The top challenge administrators said they faced in running distance-education programs was hiring the support personnel needed for technical assistance and staff training. That has been the No. 1 challenge identified by administrators since the survey's beginning.
• The primary challenge for faculty members was workload, also unchanged in four years. The greatest challenge for students was assessing learning and performance.

BTW, the same report also refers to "Angel":

One noteworthy departure was in the decline in the use of Blackboard and WebCT as learning-management systems. Fifty-nine percent of respondents indicated they use Blackboard or WebCT, down from 77 percent in 2007 (Blackboard took over WebCT in 2006). The biggest beneficiary of this decline seems to be Angel, which grew in usage from just under 10 percent of respondents in 2007 to over 20 percent last year.

Angel?

Ad for online degree

So, I was doing my typical morning ritual--no, not that!!!--of reading the newspapers online, and I was at the Statesman Journal site where I saw an ad for .... yes, online degree programs.

It was from some outfit ARALifestyle.com, and it said "Top universities partner to offer online teaching credentials." Well, it does not take me much to become curious, and clicking that ad took me to this site. Here is an excerpt:

"The partnership between Ashford University and Rio Salado College Online offers aspiring teachers an accelerated opportunity to fulfill their dreams," said Ashford University Chancellor Jane McAuliffe. "By combining a bachelor's degree and a teacher preparation program, Ashford and Rio Salado are providing students with a truly unique opportunity."

I hadn't heard of Ashford until this ad. Even more curiosity. Turns out that it is located in Iowa. So, this university in Iowa is partnering with Rio Salado, which is in Arizona, for an online degree program. Of course, Rio Salado is quite well known in the online world, and the team that went to the conference also got to see that college's president in person, when she was a panelist.

Hmmm .... wait a minute. Isn't the teacher ed program a major part of our business here? I suppose we can always adopt a Alfred E. Neuman philosophy: "What, me worry?" :-)

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.

Is higher education really student-centered?

Not actually about online teaching/learning. But, triggered by reading about an experience that one of our team members went through .....

To a large extent, the whole academic enterprise has become a system of exploitation. At research universities, the tenured and the tenure-track can't be bothered with teaching and, therefore, these research universities lure a whole bunch of instructors for the lower division courses by offering them graduate assistantships. Rarely does any university do a full-disclosure that most of those aspiring doctoral or masters students will find academic jobs. After all, getting a Phd from Harvard is one thing; getting a Phd from some Podunk university is a totally different thing.

I am simply amazed that this system continues on, and gains strength.

Instead of addressing this point of departure, students and faculty get distracted with negotiating better compensation for these graduate assistants. I don't mean to suggest that compensation is not an issue. It is. But, negotiating a better compensation without doing anything about the very issues that trigger the need for graduate assistants in the first place is to merely "paint a lipstick on a pig"

So, from that very moment on, we have a system that intentionally graduates way more masters and Phds than it will ever need. which means that we then run into situations where for every academic job opening we get gazillion applications, and we also have a huge army of highly qualified but unemployed people who are willing to carry on as adjunct instructors. And this then leads to the temptation to abuse adjuncts ....

I have run into quite a few people who now regret ever having gone on to graduate school, and for a PhD .... their comments are typically along the lines of "if only I had known that getting a job will be this difficult", or "if only I had known how little academic jobs pay" ....

Universities do a fantastic job of glorifying the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake--but the ones who glorify them are the ones with safe and secure jobs.

We do this in our own world here at WOU--we tell students how wonderful liberal education is, without ever telling them anything about the reality of the employment world where a liberal education diploma from WOU might not even get them a job at McDonald's .....

Which is why I suppose I warn students that they are screwed. Yes, I actually use these very words. And then follow it up with how they might prepare themselves. I warn them about how they are screwed because while it is a great idea that man doesn't live by bread alone, well, when that bread isn't there, it gets to be a horrible existence. (I am fortunate that I haven't experienced it myself) furthermore, I do not want to prepare students for that kind of a horrible existence where they have to wonder where their daily bread will come from after getting into a debt of more than 20,000 dollars for a diploma that won't get them any job.

I wrote an op-ed about some of these issues; the editor titled it "Does U.S. oversell college?, which wasn't much liked at least according to one response piece that was published in the same paper!

Our ultimate bottom line is the betterment of our students at every level of higher ed. If we don't do that, and instead we screw up their lives, well, ....

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,