Teaching and Learning

Higher education no more. It is "lower education"

2011-03-17T13:29:00.001-07:00

I wonder if I had idealized higher education so much so that it is that kind of idealization that results in an utter disappointment with its current state. If only I had not worked myself to hallucinating images of intellectual curiosities in well defined places!

The latest was when I read about "live sex act" in a class at Northwestern. I was reminded of a similarly bizarre class years ago becoming a controversial news item back in California. (I think it was Berkeley that made news at that time.) But then often one tends to dismiss anything out of the ordinary happening in California as, well, Californian. But, at Northwestern?

Joseph Epstein writes in this context that:

One of the most important things that departed from higher education with the old ideal of the university was intellectual authority. One of the first changes I noticed from my own undergraduate education when I began teaching at Northwestern—and this is certainly not true of Northwestern alone—was all the junky subject matter being taught. Courses in science fiction, in the movies, in contemporary or near contemporary writers already consigned to the third class ... Who is to say that the films of Steven Spielberg are less important than the plays of Shakespeare, or for that matter that Shakespeare himself wasn’t gay and a running dog of capitalism into the bargain?

Joseph Epstein is a familiar name to me because of the number of years he spent editing the American Scholar. It was one of my favorite publications of the few that my university library had on its display shelf. I still recall the essay there by a long-time friend of Scooter Libby after Libby's problems with the law that arose from his work for Dick Cheney during those dark ages when Cheney was the vice president. A Chinese parable that the author discusses there has become a valuable guiding metaphor in my own life. Another piece was an excellent essay about "Teaching the N-word" ... An interesting sidebar story all by itself--my university library no longer has the publication on its shelf. I suppose the subscription to the physical copies, and perhaps the electronic version too, have been discontinued. Meanwhile, there are all kinds of trashy magazines and third-rate journals that are proudly displayed.

I suppose even the absence of the American Scholar from our shelves is an indicator of the depths to which higher education has fallen. No wonder that Epstein calls it "lower education" ....I wish he had authored it at some other publication instead of the atrocious propaganda pages of the ideologues who brought upon the country and the world the horrific war in Iraq.

Oh well, whatever happened to the university as the intellectual authority? When did they begin to allow fakes like me into their campuses?

Governor plans to eliminate faculty unions

2011-02-14T11:58:00.001-08:00

In Wisconsin, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Wisconsin's newly elected Republican governor announced a sweeping plan on Friday that would cut benefits for state employees, including those in the University of Wisconsin system, and eradicate the collective-bargaining rights ...
it would specifically remove the right of the university system's faculty and staff members to bargain collectively. That right was just won in 2009 under a bill signed by then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. Since then, faculty members on two University of Wisconsin campuses, Eau Claire and Superior, have voted in favor of collective bargaining

Adjunct faculty unionization is something that makes sense to me. But, tenured faculty in public universities unionizing always seemed bizarre to me. Three layers of job protection: indefinite tenure, collective bargaining, and public sector?

Meanwhile, the flagship campus at Madison, wants to break free (not unlike the plans that the University of Oregon has):

In response to declining state support, Madison's chancellor, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, proposed last fall a plan, dubbed the New Badger Partnership, that would free the university from state controls over various parts of its operation, allowing it to set differential tuition, provide more student aid, and compensate faculty members separately from pay plans for other state agencies.
Last week, the faculty senate at Madison adopted the principles of Ms. Martin's proposal.

Most of these problems will easily go away if only we stopped overselling higher education and college degree. The more we do this, the more we make it worthless, while driving up the costs, and triggering the need for more faculty and graduate students, and ..... Instead, we have made higher education an expensive credentialing process that forces even the disinterested and unqualified to attend college on lots of borrowed money. Apparently, we seem to be intent on making things even worse for the youth and, in particular, those from lower-income backgrounds.

(Editor: aren't you forgetting full-disclosure? Yes, I am getting to it. I teach at a public university where faculty negotiate through collective bargaining. But, I am not a member of the union.)

Worthless college degrees and "UnCollege"

2011-02-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

The trend, as I have been blogging about, has been one of an overselling of higher education, and the resulting worthlessness of a diploma. I am, therefore, not at all surprised with developments such as the following (ht):

Dale Stephens, a 19-year-old entrepreneur, wants to bring the idea of home-schooling to the college level, with an unusual new Web service he calls UnCollege.
Mr. Stephens is now a freshman at Hendrix College, but not for long. He feels he can learn more outside the traditional college system than as a formal student, and he is leaning toward dropping out at the end of the term and taking his education into his own hands. His new online service is designed to help others do the same.

So, what is driving Stephens into this?

Why should you join UnCollege?
-A recent IBM poll identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency”
-Autodidacticism preserves the joy of learning
-Unschoolers outperform traditional students (86th percentile to 50th)
-Self-directed learning forces you to function as student and teacher
-College lacks academic rigor

What? College lacks academic rigor? I am shocked, shocked :)

Outsourcing comes to India: grading in Bangalore!

2010-04-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

I have often joked that maybe I can outsource many of my responsibilities to India, where there is a surplus of college graduates, with more expected in the coming years.
Ahem, a joke no more.
No, I did not outsource anything ... but, here is the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on a director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston who came up with

a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

Was daily life always this fascinating with new developments all the time? I am glad I live now.
The Chronicle also notes that:

The assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students. In addition, professors receive a summary of comments from each assignment, designed to show common "trouble spots" among students' answers, among other things. The assessors have no contact with students, and the assignments they grade are stripped of identifying information. Ms. Sherman says most papers are returned in three or four days, which can be key when it comes to how students learn.
No Classroom Insight
Critics of outsourced grading, however, say the lack of a personal relationship is a problem.
"An outside grader has no insight into how classroom discussion may have played into what a student wrote in their paper," says Marilyn Valentino, chair of the board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a veteran professor of English at Lorain County Community College. "Are they able to say, 'Oh, I understand where that came from' or 'I understand why they thought that, because Mary said that in class'?"

Colleges of Education Urged to Focus More on Online Learning

2010-03-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

I wonder how my university colleagues--not just in education--will react to this:

"Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," released this month by the Department of Education, is a draft of the National Educational Technology Plan 2010. It calls for an increased role for online learning in kindergarten through 12th grade and says colleges of education must include online learning in their curricula as well.
Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, said students today have grown up with the Internet and are more comfortable with technology, but also have higher expectations for the online learning experience. Ms. Patrick cited Boise State and Michigan State Universities as two institutions whose colleges of education emphasize online learning. But she said most higher-education institutions haven't yet added sufficient resources dedicated to that method of instruction.

In my online class, the final papers are coming in. Some of the comments from the students:

Thanks for an awesome term.
It's been a pleasure working with you
great class. Interesting subject
This has been a great and informative class

Ahem, it is not that my "regular" class students don't have anything appreciative to say :) All I am saying is that there are students who learn--and enjoy learning--in the online mode ...

College Degrees Without Going to Class

2010-03-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

The NY Times has panelists expressing their opinions on online teaching and learning. Worth your time. Scan through the comments from readers too ....
Incidentally, I find it bizarrely interesting that all the panelists are from the Eastern Standard Time geographic part of the country. I get ticked off at such East Coast bias, as if nothing ever exciting goes on west of the Mississippi! oh well ...
Anyway, this is the intro in the NY Times piece:

Online courses have been around for nearly two decades, but enrollment has soared in recent years as more universities increase their offerings. More than 4.6 million college students (about one in four) were taking at least one online course in 2008, a 17 percent increase over 2007.
Institutions like Rutgers University and the University of California system are looking at expanding online courses as a way to keep down tuition costs or increase revenues. Recently, Rutgers said it would triple online revenues from $20.5 million to $60 million in five years.
Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?

Greg von Lehmen, provost, University of Maryland University College
Robert Zemsky, education professor, University of Pennsylvania
Anya Kamenetz, author, “DIY U”
Mark Bauerlein, English professor, Emory University
Karen Swan, education professor, University of Illinois Springfield
Ronald G. Ehrenberg, economist, Cornell University

New site, new courses, new chances to learn .... and free

2010-02-17T22:59:00.000-08:00

The Peer 2 Peer University announced its second round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for 14 courses dealing in subject areas ranging from Physics to Transformational Art.

That is from an email about the next set of courses from P2PU:

The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners--peers working together to learn from each other.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org. Deadlines for sign-ups are 28, Feb 2010. The second pilot phase will run for six weeks from 12 March to 23 April. Each course application may require additional information.

New Journals, Free Online, Let Scholars Speak Out

2010-02-17T06:38:00.000-08:00

So, how is the online environment working out for the faculty themselves? Not while they are in the classroom, but for their own scholarship?

My professors, including my dissertation adviser, in graduate school were pretty darn good trendsetters--they started an online academic journal quite a few years ago. Called Planning and Markets, this is a fully-refereed electronic journal that started in 1998. Yes, last century :) But, for some reason, new "issues" stopped after six years. I should find out from Harry or Jim whatever happened ...

Of course, I am all in favor of not only online journals, but also making them free. Primarily because knowledge ought to be freed from anybody's control--with appropriate copyright enforcement. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lengthy story on the drive for freely accessible online journals. It leads with the following sentences:

He seems genial, but John Willinsky is a dangerous man.
As a leader in the development and spread of "open access" scholarly journals, which are published online and offered free, the Stanford University education professor is not just helping to transform academic publishing. He is also equipping scholars around the world with a tool to foment revolution.
"This is a strong vehicle for academic freedom," says Mr. Willinsky, whose Public Knowledge Project offers free journal-publishing software to academics.

Notice, Mary, that the guy leading this effort is an education professor? :)

Bill Gates likes OpenCourseWare. Cool!

2010-02-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

The University of California at Los Angeles has stopped posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from an educational-media trade group, leaving other colleges worried about repercussions.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment contacted the university in the fall, alleging that it had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible only to students then enrolled in specific courses.

That was from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

All of a sudden, the experiment to offer for free a whole bunch of educational materials is running into all kinds of difficulties. OpenCourseWare with its set of problems, thanks to participating universities experiencing financial troubles as a result of which they axe funding for OpenCourseWare.

But, there is a really encouraging news: Bill Gates is passionate about online learning, and has personally checked out OpenCourseWare and the likes. Gates notes in his blog:

A lot of people ask me what I’m reading and how I learn about new topics that interest me. I am fortunate to have time to read a lot and I also like to view courses online from MIT’s OpenCourseware, Academic Earth, and others. These courses have ignited a passion of mine, which is to think about how to harness this approach so students who otherwise wouldn’t have access can experience these great courses and learn from these great teachers.

I know, you are thinking: "what? Bill Gates blogs?" Yes, he does. And he tweets too. Check out whom Gates is following!
Anyway, Gates then writes:

I’ll be writing more about some of my OpenCourseware favorites as well as other good sources for online educational material.

Hey, I will await your comments, Mr. Bill Gates.

Free Online Courses Don't Hurt Enrollment

2010-02-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

When customers visit Amazon.com, the Web site lets them sample parts of books for free. Some open-education advocates think this try-it-before-you-buy-it idea offers an answer to one of the biggest questions facing the movement to publish course materials free online: What business model can support giving away your content?

New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students.

The data suggest they needn’t worry.

But, of course, most faculty shall oppose online education, the same way the GOP is a party of no :)
The rest of the article here.

17 percent increase in online enrolment!

2010-01-27T09:09:00.000-08:00

From the Chronicle:

Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium.
The growth rate eclipsed last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the 1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population. The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning, found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up from about 3.9 million the previous year.
Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
"They have to wake up and begin to think about this as a strategic item," Mr. Mayadas says.

Wake up, yes. But, what if the people reading this are the ones who are already awake about online learning? Who will wake up those who refuse to get up? :)
More so when that same news item also includes this:

Fewer than one-third of chief academic officers think that their faculty members accept the "value and legitimacy" of online education, a perception that hasn't change much in the past six years. (Another survey, released in 2009, also reflected broad faculty suspicion about the quality of online courses.)

On reforming education .... Mission Impossible?

2010-01-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

The following comment--about K-12--is equally applicable to higher ed:

unfortunately, society does not generally invest enough in innovation—especially in areas where it would help the poor (who aren't an attractive market) and where there isn't an agreed-upon measure of excellence. In the U.S., that means we have not invested nearly what we should in innovation for education. Our education system has been fundamental to our success as a nation, but the way we prepare students has barely changed in 100 years.

So, in case you think it was some nutcase blogger (ahem, present company excluded) who said this, well, think again. That comment was by Bill Gates, in Newsweek, who goes on to note:

Another crucial innovation in education involves using interactive technology to deliver high-quality materials for teachers and students. Now that watching videos is a standard part of the Internet experience, we can put great lectures online so that everyone can benefit from the best teachers. (Personally, I like the online physics and chemistry courses from MIT.) Alternatively, software can also be used to tailor lessons to individual students, so kids can stop spending time on the things they already know and focus on the areas they are confused about. While it won't replace face-to-face teaching, it could make remedial courses far more effective—helping students move on to the next phase of their education instead of discouraging them into dropping out. That's the kind of innovation that can lead to a brighter future for everyone.

Hmmm .... but does he know about the resistance from higher education faculty to distance and online education? Yes, I too love those online and video materials from MIT and other places that are all active members of the OperCourseWare Consortium, and use those materials in my classes too. Oh, yes, not to forget the fantastic lectures through TED.com .... well, I wonder when higher education will change, for the better!

Virtual classrooms, and the teacherless classroom

2009-11-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

As this NY Times report observes:

Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

If only it can happen easily :-) A typical reason why this is not happening, given the level of technology we already have:

Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.
Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”

I have always believed that my online classes are strictly about education in that grander sense of it being something way above and beyond "producing workers." So are my "regular" classes. If anybody took a look at, say, the syllabus for this course, the work that I ask students to complete in order to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas, the kind of feedback I give them, I cannot imagine anybody even remotely thinking that this undermines the grand idea of what education is all about.

Now, I don't want to give any impression that my work is under criticism--far from that. It is just that I always prefer using my personal examples; this way I do not then unintentionally insult/hurt others.

Demand for online grows, but supply shrinks? Depressing!

2009-10-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Ever since MIT made its curriculum freely available online, its philanthropic feat has become a global trend. Colleges compete to add new classes to the Web's ever-growing free catalog. The result is a world where content and credentials no longer need to come from the same source. A freshman at Podunk U. can study with the world's top professors on YouTube.

I have nothing to disagree with the excerpt from this report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I have streamed in more than a couple of videos from the MIT site. One of those videos was Tom Friedman's talk at MIT on the "World is Flat"--it was the closest to having Friedman on campus to talk to my students. One of the students was so impressed with his talk that she said she even talked with her church pastor about Friedman's observations. (Elsewhere I have recorded my own reservations about Friedman and his penchant for metaphors, but that is not the focus of this blog!)

But, thanks to the Great Recession, OpenCourseWare is probably the last line item a resource-constrained university would pay for--after all, it means spending money on something that gets PR for the university but is to essentially hand things for free. The Chronicle adds:

"I think the economics of open courseware the way we've been doing it for the last almost decade have been sort of wrong," Mr. Wiley tells The Chronicle. Projects aimed for "the world," not bread-and-butter clientele like alumni and students. "Because it's not connected to any of our core constituencies, those programs haven't been funded with core funding. And so, in a climate where the economy gets bad and foundation funding slows, then that's a critical juncture for the movement."

Yep, it is a dog-eat-dog world and, to paraphrase Norm from the TV show Cheers, OCW is wearing a milkbone underwear :-(

I think this is only a temporary setback, however. it is only a matter of time before we accept that forcing students to do time in a classroom does not necessarily mean that gain the desired competencies. On the other hand, a competency-based education means that it can be in any mode the students want, and at any pace the students desire. This stupid factory model of mass production will end soon, and I will celebrate like crazy :-) Finally:

Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
"And then, ultimately, I think there will be increasing opportunities in the digital space for certification as well," Mr. Carson says. "And that those three things will be able to be flexibly combined by savvy learners, to achieve their educational goals at relatively low cost."
And social life? Don't we need college to tailgate and mate?
"Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."

Let us go one additional step and clarify something here: it is NOT the role of a university to provide for social life for students. That is an awful waste of time and resources.

Econ prof teaches online while serving in Iraq. Awesome!

2009-10-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

When Cheryl J. Wachenheim, an associate professor of agribusiness and applied economics at North Dakota State University, says she taught her courses last year from a remote location, she means a desert nearly 7,000 miles away from her Fargo campus.
A captain in the Minnesota Army National Guard, Ms. Wachenheim deployed to Balad, Iraq, just north of Baghdad, in August 2008, for a 10-and-a-half-month stay. She continued teaching courses in micro- and macroeconomics online, from a fortified trailer crammed with medical supplies, body armor, the M-16 rifle she was required to carry wherever she went, and a computer.

How cool is that, eh! The entire article in the Chronicle is a must read.

But, I don't understand this part:

To get Internet access, she and nine other soldiers on her base in Iraq chipped in for a satellite dish and dug holes in the sand all over the base so they could run wires underground and into each of their trailers.

They had to pay for internet access? WTF!

My sincere salute to her:

She worked out of Joint Base Balad, one of the largest American military bases in Iraq, dubbed "Mortaritaville" because of its location in the line of fire. Ms. Wachenheim says that when she walked around the base after hours, C-RAM (counter rocket, artillery, and mortar) weapons would light up the night sky.
In that kind of environment, running her classes was more like rest and recreation than work, Ms. Wachenheim says. Without the teaching duties, she would have felt like an economist at loose ends.
"Some people like to read on the base, some like to watch movies," she said in a telephone interview from Fargo, where she returned to teach this semester. "I like to interact with students. People in the unit didn't want to discuss the idiosyncrasies of the economy. This gave me that outlet."

Hey, thanks Professor Wachenheim.

So, how about the online classes at high schools?

2009-10-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

When I was in California, every once in a while I would come across high school students who were taking online classes at community colleges primarily because their small schools,or their homeschools, did not offer advanced courses. Well, that was before the Web as we know it today. Naturally, I would expect a lot more highschoolers learning online; but, the data simply beats my estimates:

online education is spreading rapidly among secondary schools, a trend that raises many questions for admissions officials.

On Friday, Brian Lekander, program manager for Star Schools, a distance-education initiative in the U.S. Education Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement, described the rise of virtual learning in elementary and secondary schools. Thirty-two states have virtual-school programs, and 70 percent of all school districts offer online and distance-learning programs, according to the Education Department. In 2008, two million secondary students were enrolled in online-learning programs or in "blended" programs, which include face-to-face and online instruction. In 2000, that enrollment was only 50,000 students.

"It's going to drastically change over time what classroom education looks like," Mr. Lekander said.

Sure,evaluating their work for admissions is one task. But, there is another aspect--these students will be quite comfortable in the online environment and could even favor the online classes over the regular ones. I mean, this is a demand to which I had not quite given a lot of thought ....

More on the Peer-to-Peer University

2009-09-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

A follow-up to my earlier note on the P2PU. Their broadcast email reports quite a success for the first attempt:

227 people completed the sign-up form for our 7 pilot courses. A little more than half are based in the US, but we have had sign-ups from 35 different countries.

Not bad at all.
The icing on the cake? This one:

The first P2PU student managed to get official credit. Tom Caswell writes: "I am a lifelong learner, but I am also a full-time PhD student at Utah State University. (BTW, I was able to get independent study credit for this course through USU.)". And participants in the land restoration course are taking the course as part of their formal studies.

Good going :-)

Reaching Out to the Skeptics

2009-09-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

I can't recall ever disagreeing with Thomas Benton; his columns almost always echo my thoughts and sentiments--in ways that I could not have articulated myself. He clearly comes across as a dedicated professional, a great teacher, and a genuine researcher. Hey, good work, man. (I liked the early days when he maintained only his Benton identity--a pseudonym ....)

Benton's latest column is about online teaching and learning. Of course, there is not much for me to disagree there. He writes:

Ultimately, the quality of the teacher and the effort put forth by the individual student are more important than any specific method. A method that fails for one person can succeed for another, and so I want to keep the chalkboard, the overhead projector, and the cross-legged conversation under the trees just as much as I'd like to see more faculty members supplement their traditional teaching with a variety of new-media and online projects.

Yes, sir. This is exactly what I keep talking and writing about too.

Benton suggests:

I think there are increasing numbers of teachers who, while mildly skeptical, are at least open to the idea of experimentation. Persuading them to recognize the possibilities of new technologies has at least seven interlocking components:
1. Move away from a dichotomous view of teaching as online or face to face, and toward the idea that all courses can potentially involve both methods.
2. Create opportunities for consultation and collaboration among faculty members, librarians, and technologists.
3. Eliminate most of the uncertainties and technical problems faced by faculty members who would like to try new methods but don't know how and lack the equipment.
4. Provide continuing support to faculty members who experiment with new teaching methods, not just during the development phase of a course but throughout its implementation, so that teachers can learn and adapt "on the ground."
5. Find new ways to streamline the process of developing online content and managing courses to protect the time of faculty members.
6. Reduce the isolation of teachers by promoting the development of collaborative new-media projects—with students as well as other faculty members—as a legitimate and recognized supplement to traditional, solitary research production.
7. Show the effectiveness and complementarity of different approaches to teaching, taking care that assessment instruments do not skew the results.

This assumes though that the naysayers are willing to listen to arguments, look over the evidence, and, most of all, believe in assessment. Not in my world. Hey, I found something to disagree with Benton :-)

Taking online to the next level?

2009-09-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

“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

2009-09-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Online courses through the NY Times

2009-08-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-25T10:12:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-03T09:52:00.001-07:00

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 :-(

2009-07-23T03:51:00.001-07:00

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"

2009-07-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-20T20:11:00.001-07:00

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.

Online MAT programs .... us, USC, and ????

2009-07-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, perhaps even as much as two years ago, when USC launched the online MAT program and advertised it as the first in the country, I emailed that announcement to a few people in the COE. Naturally, they were surprised with USC's claim--hey, even we have had an online MAT for a while.

Anyway, that experience reminded me of what a professor of mine said in our first ever graduate class at USC--yes, that is where I earned my grad degrees. Martin Krieger wanted us to understand that in this world, it is not a question of what we say, but one of who says it. Thus, it is no surprise to me that nobody cares for my op-eds, even though I might (and I do) provide leading-edge analysis, even before, say, the master manipulator of metaphors does :-(

Similarly, it becomes a big deal when a leading research university does something online, while the online work done at smaller universities, including ours, barely registers a blip anywhere. The harsh reality of life, I guess.

No, I am not simply ranting and raving here. USC's PR announcement from July 9th states:

The MAT@USC cohort, which officially starts this summer, is a strikingly diverse group that reflects the school’s long-running commitment to promoting diversity in education.

One hundred and forty-four students from across the United States have enrolled in MAT@USC, the first online program of its kind to emerge from a major research university. The program creates an interactive online environment based on streaming video, animation and other Web 2.0 technologies.

Despite wide-ranging backgrounds, the incoming MAT@USC cohort shares a commitment to urban education and an enthusiasm for creating positive change.

Notice how they have carefully worked in the fact that it is the first of its kind from a major research university? It is the truth, the whole truth, .... :-)

Online purely for the locals?

2009-07-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

When I was at California State University-Bakersfield, in addition to my faculty responsibilities I was also the director of the Environmental Resource Management program. Students could complete this program in the online mode, too, and the logistics of this was handled by the Extended University there. Most (all?) of the students in the online program were outside the local area--within the state, and outside. In fact, that was the prevailing rationale at that time: online was a way to bring in additional dollars.

Now, as has been the case at our own campus here, online teaching and learning is increasingly seen as primarily for the locals. Which is what this report in the Chronicle (free--no subscription required) is about:

"The regional publics, which are finding themselves more and more tuition-dependent, due to shrinking state resources, have found themselves in a very competitive environment where we need to adapt," says Robert J. Hansen, Southern Maine's associate provost for university outreach. "The average student is getting older and older, and they've got busy and very complicated lives."

Blended or hybrid courses that combine online and face time have been around for years. Now universities are surveying regional needs and blending whole programs, sometimes eliminating fully face-to-face options for courses.

Mr. Mayadas lays down a rule for localness money. At least 50 percent of classroom time must be pushed online (at the level of programs, not necessarily individual courses). How they get there varies. Some throw in fully online courses, blended courses that meet weekly, or hybrids that meet even less often.

Less Face Time

Robert J. Kaleta, director of Milwaukee's Learning Technology Center, has little doubt where are all this is going: "Three years ago, all of our degrees would have required this face-to-face contact in all courses. Ten years down the road, you probably won't have a class that requires just face-to-face contact."

I tell you, as I indicated in an earlier post, am all the more convinced that I should jump into offering hybrid classes starting in winter 2010. Try stopping me :-)

Students learn effectively in online settings

2009-07-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

[The] U.S. Department of Education released a report that, at least at first glance, carries a strong message about the medium: Students learn more effectively in online settings. Most powerful of all appear to be “blended” courses that offer both face-to-face and online elements. Previous research has generally found that online and offline courses are equally effective.

I had been thinking about testing a blended approach, and this report in the Chronicle, from which I excerpted the above paragraph, gives me that much more of an incentive to do that for the winter term. However, I wonder if the university will be ok with me teaching one class completely online, and another in a blended mode, and only one as a "regular" class. If the university is ok with that, then I am looking at an exciting winter term from this pedagogical attempt ....

The report also notes that:

“This report should not be interpreted as saying that one medium is better than another,” says Barbara Means, a director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, a California research firm that conducted the project under contract with the Education Department. “This should not be interpreted as saying that computers are better than professors.”
Instead, Ms. Means says, the study offers evidence that particular kinds of online instructional techniques are effective—and some of those techniques, she suggests, could theoretically be imported into old-fashioned chalkboard classrooms. For example, the study found that in online courses, students often spend more time directly engaging with the course content than do their counterparts in traditional classrooms. But in theory, there is no reason why traditional courses could not be redesigned to increase students’ “time on task.”

In other words, it’s the instructional technique that matters, not the technology, just as Mr. Clark proposed decades ago.

Or, to put it another way: If online courses are more effective than their face-to-face counterparts, it may be because the new setting forces instructors to break out of stale teaching habits, and not necessarily because computers are an intrinsically superior medium.

Ahem, I don't think I had any "stale" teaching habits that I got rid of. Wait a minute, I don't think I have any stale teaching style even now :-)

Have a fantastic Fourth of July cookout and, if you are like me, well, I bet you too are thankful that you live in the paradise that the Willamette Valley is--except for the four weeks of grass seed pollen!!!

"Cover it live" .... it is so cool!

2009-06-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

I was reading a commentary by a medical professional/writer, Abraham Verghese, whose essays I have read and even used in my classes. An example, you ask? How about this one?
Wait, this is about teaching/learning/discussing online.... Just hang in for a few more sentences :-)

So, I was reading Verghese's comments on the health care reform issues, and in that he referred the reader to kevinmd.com for "an excellent discussion". The nerdy reader that I am, I faithfully followed that link.

And, this is where the technological aspect kicks in. At kevinmd.com I noticed an option to replay a live Q&A on health care reform. And at the bottom of that window were the letters "Cover it live". That was enough to trigger my curiosity, and hence this blog post.

The demo of how Cover it live works is simply too good to believe. And check out their complete demo library. It seems to be so easy to integrate real-time blogging with chat with Twitter with web-search with youtube .... The more I started exploring it, the more I can see how in a few years I could even have "real time" classes while sitting at home.
I did a quick search for whether it has been adopted in academic contexts. This blog (Classroom 2.0) has some recent (April/May 2009) discussions on it.

The speed at which all these technologies are coming up .... simply mind-boggling!!!

PS: BTW, if you read until here, you will be all the more interested to note that Abraham Verghese is, also, from India. His book on treating HIV patients in a remote corner of Tennessee was way too honest .... A wonderful read. Now, of course, it might seem dated, even though it is about the late eighties!

Using Blogs Instead of Course Management Systems

2009-06-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

In my academic life, I have always marched to my own drum beat, and I get knocked down quite a bit for that. Add to this the researcher in me who constantly worries that I might not be correct after all. I tell you, contrary to appearances, there is a lot going on in my head. All the time :-)

My own drum beat in online teaching is perhaps best seen in how I have continued to refine my usage of blogger.com and reliance on emails for class interactions. Ideally I would have liked my students to also be ready and willing to discuss their understanding in an open environment--a transparent classroom. But, at least one student formally requested that our class interactions be private, as much as a "regular" class is behind closed doors. Fair enough, I thought, even though my preference is for openness.

I am, therefore, immensely pleased with this piece in the Chronicle. Way too pleased because it is about a day-long meeting to improve CUNY's online classes, in which a key idea was whether the free blogging software can take the place of course management software:

The meeting's focus was an idea that is catching on at a handful of colleges and universities around the country: Instead of using a course-management system to distribute materials and run class discussions, why not use free blogging software — the same kind that popular gadflies use for entertainment sites?
The approach can save colleges money, for one thing. And true believers like Mr. Groom argue that by using blogs, professors can open their students' work to the public, not just to those in the class who have a login and password to a campus course-management system. Open-source blog software, supporters say, also gives professors more ability to customize their online classrooms than most commercial course-management software does.

So, I am not alone.
You know what a relief that is? More than anything, it is impossible for every faculty to teach the same way--we differ in our teaching styles as much as, or even more than, how we differ in our learning styles. However, it feels good to know that there are at least a few others who are experimenting with, and finding success, in the same kind of things that I am trying. (Here is my blog for the online class that is coming to an end this spring term.)

The Chronicle piece also has an example:

To demonstrate how a blog might be used in a course, Zoë Sheehan-Saldaña, an assistant professor of art at CUNY's Baruch College, showed off the blog for her course "Designing With Computer Animation." Students posted their assignments on the blog so that other students — and people outside the class — could see them. Students were encouraged to post comments on one another's work as well.

Although new versions of Blackboard include a bloglike feature, Ms. Sheehan-Saldaña said there are benefits in teaching students to create blogs using systems they might encounter in future jobs.

Maybe soon I will be able to convince everybody registered in one of my classes about the sheer joy of working in this transparent classroom. But, as long as even one student has reservations about it, well, I need to treat online classes on par with regular classes and cannot impose openness. Once before, I tried partial openness--by including blogging as a requirement, as an assignment. But, that is not the same as a truly open classroom.

Now, I have even less of an incentive to experiment with Moodle :-)

I am not the only one who loves online teaching

2009-05-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

I have fallen in love with this method of teaching. I feel more connected to my students than I ever have, and I feel needed and appreciated daily.

That is how the author of this opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education concludes his essay. And, that is how I feel more and more with my online classes and students. So much so that next week I am lunching with a few online students who said "yes" to my suggestion that we meet and eat in the real world :-)

And how did that opinion piece start?

"Impersonal, disconnected, and unfulfilling." That is how I would have answered if you asked me 10 years ago what I thought of online teaching. As a teacher, I feed off the energy of the crowd and thrive on exciting and entertaining my students to the point of drawing even the most resistant into attending class. When the economy and my growing family necessitated that I teach online as well as in the classroom, I couldn't have been more surprised by the satisfaction and joy that could come from a distance-learning program.

Teaching online can be rewarding, but ...

2009-05-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a relatively fair and balanced take on teaching online. Of course, there are a few places where I disagree with the author. But, by and large, a balanced piece.

This term, I am realizing how technological glitches can affect stuff .... (Bill, you do not need to do anything here; things are happening, but a tad slowly. That is all.)

The good news is that I got a new laptop. I asked for a built-in webcam, so that I would not have to use an external camera to record my video clips and, yes, the new laptop has that. The relatively bad news is that ever since I got the new laptop--was it four or five weeks ago--things started unraveling, and finally I lost all access to the network drives, printers and, worst of all, the computer wants to connect to the H: drive even when I am home!

So, the first couple of weeks I did not do videos because I did not want to struggle with the old laptop that was wheezing like it would die any minute. And for almost three weeks now, totally different kinds of problems. Problems that are proving to be quite a challenge to our tech people.

So, this is what I think: I am relatively tech-okay. Perhaps significantly above average tech fluency compared to what might be the norm for a middle-aged university faculty! So, I have been dealing with the problems without harassing the tech people. (I wonder if they think that I am harassing them!!!) On the other hand, imagine if a less than tech-fluent faculty were teaching online, and such problems came up.

Which then makes me wonder whether there should be some kind of 'if you are below this height" metaphor that needs to be in place? What would be an example? When I am on campus, I could not connect to the "P:" drive, which is where my web pages are. So, what was my work around? Using our FTP (Filezilla) to connect to the drive from home. I just did not engage in web page editing when I was on campus. On the other hand, last term when a colleague told me how frustrating it was for him to go back and forth with a USB drive, and how he sometimes forgets it, I told him that he might be better off using Filezilla and demonstrated it. He was impressed, and commented that he wished he had known about it earlier.

Teaching online, the way I understand and practice it, requires a constant learning of new technology. I am all for learning new stuff--if I find something that fits with my teaching style, I use it. But, I don't ever use technology for the sake of using that fancy technology. I am not sure though whether non-users, and maybe even some users, understand how much such constant learning is required ..... or, am I using an incorrect framework?

The Sale of Waldorf--not the NY hotel!

2009-05-06T06:18:00.001-07:00

In an earlier post, I referred to online education degrees being advertised in the Statesman Journal, and noted there that until then I hadn't heard of the provider--Ashford University. That mystery is solved now...when I read that:

It was novel a few years ago when Bridgepoint Education purchased the Franciscan University of the Prairies, also a small, religious Iowa college. Today the renamed Ashford University has both the former institution's campus (since improved), but also new online programs.

The same report notes that:

Many experts have been predicting -- just like Hanson -- that in the next few years more for-profit universities will buy financially struggling nonprofit colleges. And the model that Waldorf and Columbia Southern are following -- where the nonprofit institution retains some identity and a campus, even as it add programs linked to the larger for-profit interest -- appears to be growing.

I am not sure how much the two examples the story cites become a trend that "appears to be growing." Oh well .... :-)

Virus, schmirus! No cancellation of online classes

2009-05-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I commented to my online class students that

So, we realized one of the advantages of an online class: campus closure because of a virus does not affect this class in any way. Maybe you were thinking that is exactly the disadvantage, eh!
If a computer virus shuts down our computing systems down for a day or two, guess what? No class cancellations even then ..... :-)

And then this morning I am recipient of the following emails.
First from a colleague, who included a couple of us in the email to the dean and the division chair:

This is just to let you know that I am making back up plans in case of further WOU closures. I am informing students as to what they will need to do to take part or all of the rest of my courses in an online format. I emphasize that this would happen only in the event of further closures.

If I don't hear from you to the contrary, I will assume that this meets with your tentative approval, given the circumstances.

I would also like to volunteer my services to help out other faculty who may interested in forming such back up plans. While going online entails a tremendous amount of additional work for faculty, I see no other alternative in the scenario of additional closures. I also realize that some subjects are more suited to this form of learning than others. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

I think we would be wise to have alternative plans as this flu has the potential to be extremely disruptive. The sooner such conversations happen, the better.

To which the dean replies:

I’m supportive of your planning…indeed, the more that faculty utilize web-based course management assistance (Moodle, et al.) the more seamless a campus closure/reopening would be.

I am glad that such sentiments are being expressed in different arenas, in support of online teaching and learning. But, and I know I will be repeating this for the gazillionth time, like here, I don't see any systematic campus conversations on online teaching and learning. Our task force has a limited charter, and maybe for all the right reasons. However, at some point though we will have to become obsolete .... I mean the task force, and not the individuals :-)

Happy Cinco de Mayo; isn't it awesome that it always falls on the 5th of May? ha ha ha

Do I overestimate how high-tech students are?

2009-04-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

In my introductory class, while explaining how technological changes trigger significant changes to the economic landscape, I used video stores as an example. About how even a few years ago, going to the video stores to rent VHS tapes was the typical way we rented movies, and now those stores are fast disappearing.

It was then I made a comment that perhaps not even five freshmen at WOU own a VCR anymore. And boy was I mistaken when I asked the class to raise their hands if they owned a VCR. It seemed like more than half the class did. And right here in their dorm rooms. "I still watch those VHS movies from when I was a kid" said one girl.

I admitted to them that it was a revelation to me. I told them how it has been almost two years since I canceled my Blockbuster card. Increasingly, I even head to hulu.com, or the respective networks' websites to watch a few TV shows. I told them that maybe the last videotape I ever used in a class was a few terms ago, and that when I donated all my educational VHS tapes to the library, the librarian told me that they too might not use them!

I am, therefore, wondering whether this particular class was an exception, or whether WOU is an exception, or whether the stereotypical representation of the younger generation as into iPods and all-things-mobile is a complete exaggeration that misled me to hypothesizing that our students don't own a VCR anymore.

Do we have any surveyed information on the use/proficiency when it comes to our students and technology? I just think this is so strange a response from my class; I was so convinced that VHS had become prehistoric :-) Even if you folks don't have hard data, any anecdotal information?

Don't Starve the Staff of Online Programs

2009-04-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

I suppose JoNan will take this blog post with her to the president's office and ask for a huge raise :-)

The excerpts and comments here are triggered by a viewpoint at insidehighered.com. Hey, even the title for this post comes from that same source ...

First, a paragraph that will certainly address one of the leading concerns at our campus here:

[L]aunching an online degree program is not as simple as hiring adjunct professors and teaching courses that have been used in a physical campus setting. To do it right, you need a good learning management system, faculty who are experienced and effective online teachers, training and instructional design support, IT support and online tutors.

So, with the adjunct issue out of the way, now on to the rest of the story, to use the late Paul Harvey's phrase ...

The author makes a case for "coaches" who can appropriately guide students, troubleshoot their support issues, and make the online environment a wonderful learning place for students. I am reminded of a comment made at one of the sessions we attended while at the WCET in Phoenix: student support for online students cannot be located only in the physical world--but that has to be online as well. Which means that the registrar, or the financial aid people extend their services in the online realm too. The author writes:

At Tiffin University, we began using success coaches with our at-risk students on campus in the fall of 2007. In the fall of 2008, we took our best practices for on campus learning and applied them to online learning, when we created Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University , an online associate degree program that offers students mentoring and support and transferability to most four-year colleges and universities.

Whether a student lives in Maine or Oregon, he or she has a success coach to help them make the transition from high school to college, and to keep them on track toward that associate degree and transfer to a four-year college or university.

In the first place, I hope the usage of "Oregon" is rhetorical, and that students from Oregon are not actually ditching the various online programs here in favor of online classes at Tiffin U.

Second, which is the main reason for this posting, are such discussions going on anywhere at WOU? I mean, for instance, when we have a CJ program that is online .....

In the name of efficiency ....

2009-04-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

So, when we went to the conference in Phoenix, one of the panelists at a session that I went to was from the Dakotas. He talked about how there is state-wide coordination in order to promote efficient use of tax dollars.

I am a big fan of efficiency, and responsible use of tax dollars. But, there are limits to applying the concept of efficiency when it comes to knowledge and learning. While I have no empirical data to back me up, my hypothesis is that efficiency is not THE bottom line, and should not be THE bottom line.

(An aside: from an evolutionary perspective, our own individual bodies are far from any efficient design; instead, we are built with redundancies. While one kidney will work just fine, we have two, just in case! For all I know, we might be more efficient with three fingers and an opposable thumb, rather than the four-plus-thumb combination, and we would be using base-8 and not a base-10 system. All right, too much of a digression!)

Why all this you ask? Fair enough. Read for yourself this excerpt from Tom Brokaw's op-ed piece in the NY Times:

In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.
I know this is heresy, but couldn’t the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?

Brokaw's point in that op-ed is that "it’s time to reorganize our state and local government structures for today’s realities rather than cling to the sensibilities of the 20th century. If we demand this from General Motors, we should ask no less of ourselves."

I disagree with that, but let me restrict myself to this education argument of his. The connection to online? Hey, it will not take a rocket scientist, or a journalist, much time to figure out that they don't need even satellite campuses--instead, every home with a computer and high-speed connection becomes a personalized campus with its own cafeteria and student center! Ultimate decentralization of higher education. And then somebody else comes along and proposes that we should outsource it all to the University of Phoenix, or worse--to the University of Madras, from where I earned my undergraduate degree :-)

God is dead!

Oregon needs framework for online education

2009-04-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-04-06T06:26:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-15T13:12:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-02-19T13:22:00.001-08:00

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?

2009-02-13T08:34:00.001-08:00

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.

Emerging media essential for grads

2009-02-11T19:25:00.001-08:00

Not specific to online learning, but I found this article to be very interesting, and relevant.

Knowing how to navigate the Internet, blog and operate a BlackBerry is paying off for recent graduates. A study released by Ball State University found 67 percent of companies were willing to pay employees with emerging media skills a starting salary one to 4 percent higher than those without.

Read the entire article here

Is it April yet?

2009-02-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

Hmm...I guess...I'd be anxious to see the full report to be fair. But that would be my point too - was this a fair survey? I dare say that if you surveyed a similar set of faculty members 30 years ago about SLO's and faculty's time and effort and pay with a 'pencil and paper versus electronic submissions of writings', you might get a similar "poo-poo-ing" of the quality, compensation and place in education.

Is it really fair to survey faculty and admin who don't teach online and/or are not interested in doing so? What are they looking at when they assess the SLO's of online classes they are not privy to, against campus courses that they haven't sat-in on?

I've witnessed campus courses that were poorly delivered, as well as online courses that were pretty much 'self-delivered', as well as online courses that were rich of SLO's beyond many campus courses for the same subject. However, I made an effort to go out and assess and compare courses. How many faculty really know what they're dogging?

That's not to say that there is a huge need to improve, offer more and quality training, compensate for learning a new tool.

Oh yeah, that reminds me - isn't a standard claim of anyone in education that we're not getting compensated enough for our time - especially extra time creating better learning opportunities and experience for students?

Professors Regard Online Instruction as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning

2009-02-10T06:25:00.000-08:00

Not so good news about online teaching and learning, according to this report in the Chronicle. Here is an excerpt from the Chronicle report (The full results from the survey will be available only in April):

Instructors' extra time and effort aren't being rewarded financially or professionally, and what's more, online education doesn't translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in the faculty survey. More than 10,000 faculty members at 67 public campuses responded to the survey.
While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior. Among faculty members who have taught online courses, that figure drops to 48 percent, but that still represents a "substantial minority" holding a negative view, Mr. Seaman said.
The survey also found that a majority of faculty members felt that institutions provided inadequate compensation for those taking on the additional responsibility of teaching online courses. And many respondents said that students needed more discipline before they could benefit from online instruction. Low retention rates among students and the lack of consideration of online teaching experience in tenure-and-promotion decisions were also cited as barriers to faculty interest in online teaching.

Identity Crisis Online?

2009-02-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Looks like vendors are quickly gearing up for the eventuality that there might be a big push to establishing the identities of online students. I blogged about this earlier. Here is one I received in the email (no, am not advocating for their product; all I am doing is bringing this to your attention). The whole thing reminds me, yet again, of the fantastic cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago, which I provide here for your amusement, before you get to read the email from a vendor :-)

And now the email from the vendor ....

Increase academic integrity and reduce the costs of proctored exams by ensuring the right student is taking an assessment.

Join Campus Technology, National American University and Acxiom to learn how your institution can verify student identity without hardware from within your learning management system (LMS).

Register today to hear Dr. Jeffrey L. Bailie, Director of Online Faculty Development Distance Learning at National American University and Michael Jortberg of Acxiom describe how NAU reduces the need for proctored exams.

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Don't miss this important and timely webinar. Click here to register now.

If you and your institution leaders would like a one-on-one demonstration to learn how to increase distance learning integrity with authentication, please visit www.Acxiom.com/StudentIdentity or give us a call. We've taken common practices from the financial industry and enabled them for distance learning programs, which we can integrate with your LMS. Our cost-effective identity verification process offers:

Secure verification capabilities designed to reduce the cost associated with testing center registration, proctor validation and proctored exams.
Predictable pricing and the flexibility to meet instructor and administrator needs.
No servers, staff, web cam, broadband of fingerprints required.

Thank you,

Mike Jortberg
Acxiom Corporation
Michael.Jortberg@acxiom.com
1.630.944.0379

Learn more about ensuring academic integrity in distance education by reading Acxiom's white paper – "Methods to Verify Identity of Distance Learning Students." Click here for your free copy.

System Requirements for Webinar

PC-based attendees: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendees: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

An absolutely riveting online course

2009-01-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

Here's an excellent article about designing online courses:

An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching

Source: Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology

Abstract: This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence. The principles include: the online world is a medium unto itself; sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence; in the online world, content is a verb; great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. The list is not intended to be an exclusive set of principles or a comprehensive guide to online teaching. Rather it is a collection of important ideas and suggestions for teaching excellence in the online world.

This article could be a great resource for faculty on campus who are teaching online, and at the same time could provide a framework for our activities with the Online Learning Task Force.

2009 Horizon Report just out

2009-01-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

The 2009 Horizon Report is out today and is worth a look. While it does not specifically address online learning, it does speak to the inevitability of increased use of technology in teaching and learning.

This quote is from the blog: Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. “Campus leaders and practitioners alike use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology,” noted Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC. “Over the six years that the report has been published, the impact on technology planning and discussions on campuses has been substantial. Now with six years of data to consider, we continue to look back at the overarching trends over time. What we see is that there are several long-term, conceptual themes that have affected, and continue to affect, the practice of teaching and learning in profound ways.” More than 75,000 copies of the 2008 Horizon Report were distributed in print and electronically last year.

The six areas of emerging technologies selected this year that will have significant impact on higher education:

Mobiles
Cloud Computing
Geo-everything
The Personal Web
Semantic-Aware Applications
Smart Objects

You can download the full report or watch a video of the presentation introducing the report to the world. It’s nearly 54 minutes long (the first 10 minutes are introductory) but I took a glance with no intention of watching the full thing and then couldn’t turn it off. Lots to think about here.

Axis of Evil? :-)

2009-01-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

If all we learn is online, then .... writes Nicholas Carr:

Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?
It's hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What's much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path - the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

Well, you may want to re-read this posting on whether Google is making us stupid!

Are we sure it is the student who is doing the work?

2009-01-23T12:07:00.000-08:00

Hey, after the conference I subscribed to a couple of listservs so that I can get updates on online learning issues. (as if I don't have enough things to do; but, that is another story!) Well, today I got an email, in which there are two things that we might want to look into. First the excerpt from the email:

A Special Issue of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching is planned for June 2009 that will be focused on the topic of integrity in the online environment and authenticating the identity of students taking online classes. This is a timely topic in light of the provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (H.R. 4137) that requires that institutions that offer distance education “…have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education or correspondence education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit”. As rule-making with respect to this legislation is in progress, articulating effective approaches to meeting this requirement is essential. Many in the distance education community have already sought to reframe the conversation to focus on pedagogical and curricular approaches, as opposed to costly and potentially invasive technological ones.

1. You/we have an opportunity to contribute articles.

2. More importantly, it is news to me (maybe not to you) that there is rulemaking in progress to require institutions offering distance ed to ensure that the registered student is the same as the one doing the work. I mean, I welcome the discussion on this topic because it is an extremely important aspect of credentialing. (I know of lots of horror stories in India, where correspondence courses through some universities were notorious for being diploma mills. And, no, I did not get my degree that way!) But, it is interesting that this is being worked into the Hr. Ed. act itself.

Maybe if I require students to turn in their assignments through video-clips I can verify the authenticity, eh :-) But then what if they had outsourced the work to somebody in India (hopefully not graduates of those correspondence courses) and then all they do is present the work in an YouTube clip as if it is their work? I tell you, students will always sniff out the path of least resistance :-)

Where exactly are the cart and the horse?

2009-01-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Hey, I am guilty of not contributing through the Wiki that Robert set up for us. (It was Robert who did that, right?) Maybe because I am just too damn comfy in my blog mode :-)

But, am amazed at how rapidly things like Wikis are diffusing through society, and with the different examples. The example below has political shades and, therefore, am a tad hesitant. So, first a disclaimer: I do not belong to the groups listed on the website that I am going to refer to, nor am I registered with any political party for that matter. I am just a nutcase who reads anything--even the info on the cereal box!

Ok, now the example .... I am kind of following the evolution of the stimulus plan because of my interests in policies. One blogger notes:

hop to Read the Stimulus and insert comments directly into the bill's text. Their motto "$850 Billion, 334 pages, and counting... somebody needs to read it!" But, of course, the best part about these sites is that no one person has to read the whole thing.

It is fascinating. Even a couple of years ago, it would have been impossible for real-time commenting from citizens. And now, real time discussions with distributed intelligence.

From a pedagogical perspective, I wish I could do such things in an online class. However, even if I am all set to do it, well, I will have to teach students on how to engage in such discussions and analysis before we can get to the real discussions and analysis. So, it frustrates me as a teacher that there are such fantastic tools like Wiki out there but that I am not able to put them to use. I am now all the more jealous of the history project demonstration that we watched at the conference.

Even the blogging I tried out last term was only partially successful. Granted they were freshmen and sophomores, but .... the best that some could do was inserting a hyperlink into their posts. I could not achieve what we hope for in these contexts: discussions, referencing through hyperlinking, commenting on other posts, ..... I am like many faculty who think that this ought to happen quite naturally, but it does not. And a ten-week term is too short a time for me to spend teaching students these skills, at the risk of not having time for content matter ....

Which is when I sometimes wonder whether the cart is way before the horse!

So, what business are we in?

2009-01-17T21:11:00.001-08:00

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki comments on the rapidly shrinking newspaper readership. (Yes, the market for my newspaper op-eds is in grave danger, and I am not sure whether anyone cares for my blogs!) Anyway, in that column, Surowiecki notes that:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Which got me thinking: what is our "business"? I am not referring to the horrible distortion of academe into some kind of a customer- and industry-friendly corporate model. That is a different discussion for another day.

But, if, suppose, "liberal education, and developing life-long learning skills" are the business that we are in, then shouldn't we learn from the newspapers and make sure that we too don't become irrelevant in a way?

Look at the parallel: there is a great deal of interest in news reports and analysis and, interestingly enough, there is way more than what we need that can be freely accessed. Journalists are beginning to complain that while their work, skills, and knowledge are recognized as important, there is no money in them in the web-based model. In fact, the NY Times itself is so deep in debt that by May it has to raise 400 million dollars. Of course, the parent company of the LA Times went bankrupt!

The other day the recently retired managing editor of WaPo (whatever his name is!) was a guest on Terry Gross' Fresh Air. He said that going by the number of visits to the WaPo site, it is clear that the paper has never had such a readership ever in its history. The challenge, he said, for WaPo and every paper was to figure out how to translate that phenomenal readership into money.

On a similar note, knowledge, which used to be available in restricted brick and mortar campus environments, is now freely available for anyone who wants to learn. Want to make cocaine? Want to read the complete works of Shakespeare? You have questions? The Web has answers! At the rate at which Google is everywhere, it won't surprise me if the company comes up with a neat way to offer a formal education through Google itself!

Aren't we looking at the same fate that the newspaper industry is facing?

Online teaching and learning is, therefore, an extremely important strategy to avoid the redundancy that we otherwise face. We might have a few more years left in terms of the system delivering "captive audiences" who will fill the classroom space. But, that time will end soon. It is not if, but is a question of when that end will come.

The liberating Web :-)

2009-01-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

So, to give you an example of why I prefer the flexible approaches of the various free tools available over the rather suffocating LMS like WebCT or Moodle ....

I teach an online class this term (GEOG 418). The syllabus, schedule of tasks, etc, which are the basic contract items with students, are at pages that I maintain at wou.edu. Here is the homepage for the class.

The discussion questions and the student responses are all through emails--from our respective wou addresses, so that we don't have to be concerned about any spam/blocking issues. I have a group distribution address for this class--so, students email to this one address (geog418) and we all get the messages.

I have started doing videos to clarify concepts. These videos I route through YouTube. I have set up a blog for the class, where I post my emails to the class and the YouTube videos. Just as any post here in this blog automatically is pushed out to your email addresses, which is how you are reading it now, I have set up my class blog to be automatically mailed to the same geog418 address. So, it is not that students have to check my blog as well--all they need to do is check their emails :-)

On top of all this, I have also set up the class homepage such that the latest two blog posts are automatically fed into that page. So, when you go to this class homepage, you will find the latest two blog posts also there.

The neat thing is that once I have set these up, there is no additional work for me because all these from different service providers work well and automatically with each other.

Thus, I am not sure whether I should invest time and effort to migrate to Moodle. If there are some serious advantages, please let me know and I shall certainly look into it.

ps: I don't have students also blogging because then I need to provide support for some kind of a "blogging 101", whereas no new learning is needed to read and send emails ....

Educause: “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009

2009-01-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009.” The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes (click on individual Challenges to visit their wiki page):
Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
Reaching and engaging today's learner.
Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.
The community has spoken. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and contribute ideas from your vantage point on campus to build a network of solutions around each challenge. Do you have a reading or a resource to suggest? Would you be willing to interview colleagues on campus providing a snapshot of how your campus is addressing an issue? Would you volunteer your name as a resource for others to contact to learn more about your campus solutions? In the coming weeks, we’ll use individual challenge wikis to begin organizing content under the guidance of volunteer workspace managers.
In the meantime, visit the project homepage to get the background and find your place in the Challenges Ning network. Then, bookmark this wiki to begin adding your voice to the community.

Source: http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/TLChallenges09

Recession and online classes

2009-01-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

Ms. Allen also expects the number of students enrolled in online courses, which two-year and private for-profit colleges have embraced, to rise during the recession. Back in November, the Sloan survey asserted that the high cost of gasoline might compel more people to learn from home. Although gas prices have since fallen, Ms. Allen said she still expects the struggling economy to push more students into online courses for other reasons.

“If you don’t have a job, lowering your gas costs is not your primary motivation for going back to school online,” she said. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want. We also see that most of the online learners are older, and there are family issues.” With online programs, she said, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

If the recession does move more adults into cyberclassrooms, it will accelerate a trend that has been happening since the Sloan Consortium began publishing its online-education reports

That is an excerpt from the Chronicle--my go-to site every morning for news and updates on the academic front.

Of course, the Sloan Consortium has an online agenda. But even otherwise, it is only common sense that people without jobs--and that number is rapidly increasing--would way prefer to upgrade their academic qualifications from their homes as opposed to rushing around to classes. They would rather rush around to meet with people for possible job openings.

Rating faculty becomes easier in the online mode?

2009-01-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

The reports at Maryland remind us that as professors put material online, they are leaving far more of a trace than traditional lecturers ever did. In the old days, once a class ended, the chalkboard was quickly erased by the next group, and the scrawlings were gone forever. Now professors are converting their yellowing lecture notes to text on course-management systems, or posting videos of their lecture performances for students to watch later for review.

All of those materials are preserved on college servers. And such data could easily be used to evaluate the quality of the teaching going on behind closed classroom doors, though the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has no plans to do that.

Though the idea of using technology to rank activity is new to teaching, it has long been a staple of academic research.

For decades, scientists have tracked the number of times their articles are cited by others, and such citation indexes have been important for career advancement.

Teaching has had no similar metric—except, of course, for student evaluations. But many people consider those evaluations imperfect measures because students may rate most favorably those professors who are more generous with their grading rather than those who challenge them.

So in an era when colleges are under more pressure than ever to be accountable for their costs and quality, the question arises: Will colleges begin to use technology to help them measure teaching? And should they?

This excerpt from a report in the Chronicle will not help sell online teaching and learning to the unocnverted.

But, at some time, we will have to recognize the fact that there is no "metric" for teaching. It is an article of faith that those who teach are good at it. The reality is though we faculty are far from being good teachers.

I joke around with my students that they should thank their stars that they were not in my classes even five years ago--I know I sucked then compared to now. Even two years ago! In California, the first time I taught a televised class, I got a copy of the first telecast, which I asked my wife and daughter also to watch. I came home and asked them for their feedback. As they started listing the different things I was horrible at, I remember how awful I felt. I stopped them after a while.

Later, when they were asleep, I played the VCR (yes, that antique item!) and watched my lecture in solitude. I was awful. Simply awful. My hands were flailing all over the place. Every sentence had ums and ers. I was asking students for their views, but not putting them together to tell a story. My PowerPoint slides were awful. There was nothing that seemed ok. Bloody depressing it was.

Yet, there was nothing in the system to pull me up for the awful teacher that I was (And, after having observed quite a few, I am sure there are even worse than me!) Do we run any other service with such profound implications where we care not about the quality of the service? A simple error at the DMV and we are ready to pounce over the separator and assault the person!

Thinking and reflecting about teaching and learning has made me better, no doubt. I am not sure if I am anywhere near being a "great teacher"; I am just happy I am not as bad as I used to be :-)

I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that society--maybe the goverment--demands that there is a measure of teaching. It will be neat if we can preempt that. But, I doubt it. After all, I am at a university where even the student evaluation of faculty and courses happens only once a year and not every time!!!!!

Virtual professors won't ask for tenure!

2008-11-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

Projects like Typealyzer, that I blogged about, are all heading towards that grander idea of Artificial Intelligence. Soon, we will be able to train computers to think like humans, and do a better job at that than we humans can do. (Will computers then also make movies like The Matrix? Hmmm....!)

Today, I headed to one of my regular sites--The Chronicle of Higher Education, and there is 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."

When I read that, my thought was perhaps you folks would want to know about this. Hence, this post. The piece adds:

The idea that gave the new university its name is championed by Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the "singularity" — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains. His argument is that several technologies that now seem grossly undeveloped —including nanotechnology and artificial-intelligence software — are growing at an exponential rate and thus will mature much faster than most linear-minded people realize. Once they do, computers will take leaps forward that most people can hardly imagine today.

Finally,

Computers will become better at teaching than most human professors are once artificial intelligence exceeds the abilities of people, argues Ben Goertzel, director of research at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, Cal., a private organization promoting Mr. Kurzweil's ideas.

These new computer teachers will have more patience than any human lecturer, and they will be able to offer every student individual attention — which sure beats a 500-person lecture course.

Sure, one-on-one human teaching will always exceed a computer-student experience, Mr. Goertzel acknowledges, but what college undergraduate gets a personal tutor these days?

Virtual professors probably won't ask for tenure. And Mr. Goertzel sees them as key to expanding educational opportunities, by greatly reducing the price of a high-quality education.

Read the entire piece here.

The personality of this blog

2008-11-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

That was the result from Typealyzer. I will leave it up to the readers and participants of this blog to determine how much this analysis is correct.

If you are interested in how Typealyzer evaluated my personality in my regular blog, you will be impressed at how quite different the two personalities are :-)

From the mouths of babies ....

2008-11-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

So, here is something interesting. And, unlike the previous one, this actually relates to online teaching and learning :-)

Students in my intro class have to blog about something from the class discussions that made them think about for a little more. Well, the topic that we covered in class this week was globalization, and outsourcing. The following is what one student has posted: (Yes, students can address me by my first name if they choose to.) Note her remarks on online classes.

Perhaps the worry that eventually their jobs might be on the line is also an unstated reason for faculty to oppose expansion of online teaching and learning? But, if that is even remotely a point, then all we have to do is look across the industry and see what is happening with the automakers, right? Not being flexible enough to adapt to changes is now threatening the very existence of General Motors, whose CEO once reportedly uttered, "what is good for GM is good for America" ....

outsourcing: when will it stop?
I am not sure how Sriram says that teaching a a job that will not be outsourced, it already has been. I, myself have taken classes online with teachers across the country. I didn't like it very much, so I will not do again, but I know many of people who do like it and have taken alot. It is not like nobody has heard of it either, because universities are constantly advertising online. If something like teaching can be outsourced, where will outsourcing stop? I can just imagine our world turning into something like what was portrayed in the movie Wall-E, where humans don't have to physically do anything anymore. We will eventually advance technology enough that we can do everything from a computer and it won't matter where we actually are at all.

Divorce in "Second Life"

2008-11-14T10:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, I agree this is not about online teaching and learning. But, at the same time, it is yet another marker on how much online activities and cyberlife have become complex.
Against such a background, it becomes obvious how much we could come across as the metaphorical dinosaur if we keep resisting online teaching and learning. It is there; deal with it, is the message, I suppose :-)

CNN:

A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world.
Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.
"I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."
Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as "avatars" and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars.
Taylor said she had caught Pollard's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: "I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."
The couple's real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.
But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities: "He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life."
Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.
Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

It felt so strange reading this at the CNN website, and not at the Onion's :-) Truth can be stranger than fiction, indeed.

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

2008-11-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T10:47:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-10-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

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.

"Learning"--not the professor--is the focus in online

2008-10-17T07:12:00.001-07:00

In the contemporary world where our lives are far more complex than lives fifty years ago, and where there are multiple demands on the few hours we have to spare, online classes make it possible for students to follow-up on the course materials at non-traditional hours--very rarely does their work come in between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm, and it is more often the case that they post them way into the night.

To quite a large extent, online classes once again, after a long time, places the emphasis on "learning" as opposed to "teaching". The teacher is no longer the "star" in the classroom, and is not the center of attention. Which is how it ought to be. The focus shifts to the content we read, study, discuss, and write about. The teacher is more like a guide on the trip, as opposed to being the proverbial "sage on the stage". I am sure that there is a small piece in me that likes being the center of attention in a classroom, which then makes me feel like Norma Desmond in an online setting :-)

Of course, this also means that there is a much greater responsibility on students in the online environment than in the real-world classroom. If they need clarification, then it is up to them to ask those questions or make comments. If they snooze, well, they lose--unlike the real world classroom, a fellow classmate won't be nudging them when they snore instead of paying attention!!!

For students, online learning is not inconsistent with many other activities we pursue: we shop online at what would be non-business hours in the "real world". Same for online banking. We rent from Netflix, and we even watch Netflix online--bypassing the DVD altogether. Things are changing so fast that most of us don't even pause to think about it. When we do--or when professors force people to do so, we realize how much the landscape has changed.

In such a context, you will find this hilarious satire from The Onion quite appropriate and educational--as always, the video is on target, and shows how the nighborhood Blockbuster video store will soon become something of a historical curiosity for the young--as much as a vinyl record player is now history. (nothing lost if you do not to watch this video)

Oddly enough, over the almost ten years that I have been teaching online, I find that my workload for online classes is greater than the workload if I were to teach this same course in the real world. I mean, for starters, I could have easily talked about all these with way less effort than typing them all here!!!

Technology and passion in the service of learning

2008-10-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

In earlier posts, I referred to MIT's opencourseware project, and to the president of Blackboard remarking that online learning is not simply about putting a course online. So, it was neat to read in today's Chronicle a commentary that brings these two ideas together. I tell you, it feels great to know that I am not an idiot after all when I wrote those things :-)

Anyway, enough about me, eh! The author writes:

That culture of sharing and participation usually starts with the students themselves, as we see vividly in the complex, multiplayer game worlds and in the power of study groups, whether conducted face-to-face or virtually. Such a culture must also involve content. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was a pioneer when it developed its OpenCourseWare project. Other universities quickly followed MIT's lead, and both the content and the means of accessing class materials and remixing and repurposing them for different audiences grew.
But it's time that we in higher education move beyond considering only content. We must begin to determine how that content can encompass multiple kinds of instructional or learning activities. It is, after all, the combination of things we do with content that creates learning platforms.

As I was reading it, my thought was that today's professors are like the DJs of today's music. DJs are totally unlike the old time disk-jockeys. The current ones mix music, sample them, every once in a while create their own music, and the best of them pretty much set the trends.
The fantastic aspect of Web2.0 is that I am able to sample content and ideas that I could never before, and am able to remix them to create my own music in the classroom. (Well, maybe my students think it is all cacophony!)

Anyway, the author (who is at USC, my PhD school!) then says:

We must think about how technology, content, and knowledge of learning and teaching can be creatively combined to enhance education and ignite students' passion, imagination, and desire to constantly learn about — and make sense of — the world around them. And we need to collect and share good models in which various professors' and students' experiences are commented on and tried out in new contexts. ....
.... Today the Web offers students incredible opportunities to find and join niche communities that ignite their passions. That sets the stage, through productive inquiry and peer-based learning, for such students to acquire both the practice of and knowledge about a field.
In the end, the millions of niche amateur communities — from the Latin word amator, meaning lover of — could provide a powerful learningscape for lifelong learning that is grounded in the learning practices that students acquire on campuses. That would be a major step toward creating a culture of learning for the 21st century.

Hey, maybe online teaching and learning will even revive the learning of Greek and Sanskrit? We currently can't offer them at most universities because if is simply not cost-effective to offer this for a couple of students. This is what happened at USC, when it shut down German. Online? Endless possibilities :-)

Should small colleges offer online instruction?

2008-10-06T09:47:00.000-07:00

We typically offer arguments in favor of small colleges, small class sizes, personal interactions, etc. While I personally favor all these, I am not sure whether we truly achieve significantly better outcomes just because, for instance, a class is small size. My colleagues teach intro classes that have between 70 and 100 students each. I always cap my intro classes at 40. Not that we have done any systematic studies that measure how much students learn in these competing formats, but I am tempted to conclude that there is not much difference in the outcomes. If every one of us learns differently, then does it also not mean that some students might prefer the anonymity of a larger classroom for their learning, while some might like smaller classrooms so that they don't feel lost? I mean, that is only one example, right?

We can take it one more step; most students prefer not to come to class at all. Not anything new. I suppose as long as we have had classes, we have also had students who were not thrilled to be in the classroom. So, there could be a demographic group that actually will prefer online education? So, ought we not serve them? Well, that is the question handled in this Q/A with the president of

Brenau University, a small college in Georgia, has a strong focus on distance education. The institution offers 11 online degree programs, most of them career driven, an uncommon focus for a liberal-arts college. Brenau's president, Mr. Schrader, says that about 40 percent of faculty members teach the online courses.
Q. Why did a liberal-arts college like yours decide to start an online program?
A. We did it to meet the communication needs of the current generation of students. If the majority of the world is going to learn online, the liberal-arts schools will have to make a decision. They can't give up on their responsibility saying they don't like online courses; either they participate in them and do it well, or they throw in the towel.
The complete interview is here in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Not simply a matter of putting the syllabus online

2008-10-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

I think I taught my first online class about nine years ago. My wife beat me to online teaching by three years, I think. And, she taught calculus, which meant spending hours composing the equations using MS-Word's equation editor. Oh those godawful days with modem connections and slow computers!

Even that many years ago, we clearly understood that online teaching was not simply providing the syllabus and notes online, and then everything being on "autopilot." The reality was quite the contrary and we spent a great deal of time interacting with students and evaluating their work. It took a while for learning management systems to rise up to that reality (I personally don't care for those systems.) The CEO of Blackboard, Michael L. Chasen, says:

When the industry started, it was about how to put a course online. Now it's about how to put the whole educational process online. It's about teaching and learning that take place in the classroom environment as well as outside — people putting their communities online, people putting their student services online. That's just a different problem than people were trying to address back when we started the company in 1997.

Which then opens up immense possibilities for something like Second Life--to become an online learning environment. No wonder then that my wife is exicted about a NSF-funded grant at their college that will underwrite developing and offering courses in Second Life!

Gas prices and online classes

2008-10-03T14:09:00.001-07:00

If the stereotype is that most college faculty are left-leaning and environmentalists, then does it mean that online teaching and learning will be a huge environmental asset to a university? The ultimate "green" college is an online college?

Students, particularly at state universities like ours, are not from affluent families to begin with. So, with gas prices high, and with commitments like taking care of kids, online education might appeal to them quite a bit, right? Well, that is what we found out when gas prices went up sharply. The following is an excerpt from a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of months ago:

Many institutions say that their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly compared with last summer's and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase.
The Tennessee Board of Regents, for instance, reports that summer enrollment in online courses is up 29 percent over last year. At Brevard Community College, in Cocoa, Fla., summer enrollment in online courses is up nearly 25 percent. Harrisburg Area Community College, in Pennsylvania, saw its summer online enrollment rise about 15 percent. And at Northampton, in Bethlehem, Pa., online enrollment is up 18 percent.
New Formats Ahead
"All across the country, community colleges and universities are getting requests for
online programs specifically with students mentioning the price of gas," says Ray Schroeder, director of the office of technology-enhanced learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Some experts say that the rising interest in online programs could lead more colleges to expand their offerings, or experiment with "blended" courses that mix in-person and online meetings.

Online courses and intellectual property

2008-10-03T13:47:00.001-07:00

Almost two years ago (November 11, 2006), I emailed the president of the faculty union in response to a call to boycott expanding online classes. I have no idea whether the administration and the union have figured out anything more on this. Here is most of that email:

... regarding online classes and intellectual property issues, I would argue that course materials belong in the intellectual commons, and not behind walls that prevent access.

Over the past few years, I have been impressed with two important approaches in particular:
1. The idea of "Creative Commons" that Lawrence Lessig champions.
2. MIT's venture into "opencourseware".

I am not sure if it was Lessig who started Creative Commons, but it was from one of his talks a few years ago that I became aware of it. (More info at http://creativecommons.org/)
This approach appeals to me because I think the more we make ideas available for everybody, the more humans progress. I don't think that all our progress has come out of material incentives alone, which is what complex intellectual property rights
regimens attempt to do.

A similar, and in fact related, venture is MIT's OpenCourseWare. (More info at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
When it was launched I remember thinking, hey, this is why the Web is fantastic: we can easily makes things available for free and easy access to people wherever they might be. This is all the more the case when it comes to distributing knowledge to people in resource-constrained countries, which are quite a few in this world.

MIT's approach has catalyzed the development of the "Opencourseware Consortium". (More info at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/) It has now become a world-wide effort to pool together the academic knowledge.

Even at a personal level, most of the stuff I do I post them online. (For that matter, even my work reports are online: http://www.wou.edu/~khes/personal/workreports.htm)
I maintain webpages for the courses I teach and none is password protected. If anybody finds it worthwhile to use it, why not? Every once in a while I get an email from some faculty member somewhere in the world who wants to use some PowerPoint file. Of course, I reply that they can use it. For my classes too I scan for insights from other faculty. Many days in the summer I spend re-educating myself about the courses I am scheduled to teach by simply browsing through the syllabi
on the Web.

... I also hope that the union would urge the OUS campuses to join the OpenCourseware Consortium, if a campus is already not a member.

Did online trigger higher enrolment?

2008-10-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

When we offer this class in the "real world", an enrolment of 20 to 25 is typical.
I won't be surprised if we have done a swap of sorts--a few students who might have taken this class may have very well opted out because it was online.
However, those who opted out because of the different modality had a whole bunch of alternatives in the real world. Those students who were searching for online options, however, would not have had that luxury.
So, if we are looking strictly at enrolment in this class alone, we are even. However, institution-wide, I would guess that the online class helped out quite a few.

In terms of filling up fast .... I think that this class did reach 20 quite early. I capped it at 25 only because the online mode is pretty much a writing-intensive environment, and 25 is the WI cap.

BTW, I am experimenting with video clips this term. With the horrible mic and webcam at home, I have already done two video clips that I shared with the class. I route them through YouTube--this way I don't have to worry about how to stream the video.
The second video was a near-disaster because only when I was viewing the video did I realize that the audio is ultra soft. I couldn't be bothered with a "take 2" :-)
I am planning to get a better mic this weekend. I attempted to play a music CD in the background, and that program froze--I think things are getting complicated for my three-plus year old university laptop. Would be neat if they replaced it with a newer one .... oh well.

Online classes: who takes them, and why?

2008-10-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

I conducted an online survey, of students in my GEOG 413 class, which is completely online this fall term.
I kept it very simple, because I did not want to bore the students. At the same time, I wanted to get some key information, so that I can correspondingly massage my course structure. The summary of that survey follows.

Note:
I had embedded into the class homepage a survey that was actually through polldaddy.com, where I developed the survey questions.

What I find interesting:
A majority of the students have never had me as an instructor. So, it is not any “familiarity” that drew them to this class.
For ten out of the 25, this is the first online class ever.
Only 13 out of the 25 are confident that they would have taken this class, even if it were not online.

Summary of responses:
What is your current standing?
Sophomore: 1
Junior: 10
Senior: 9
Senior-plus/Grad: 5

Have you taken any introductory geography class?
None 0
One 8
Two 5
All three 3
Yes, at another college 9

Did you take the introductory geography class with Sriram?
Yes 7
No 18

Did you take any upper division courses with Sriram?
GEOG 410: 2
GEOG 418: 1

Have you taken online classes before?
No 10
Yes, only one 1
Yes, two 5
Yes, more than two 9

Would you have taken this course if it were not online?
Yes 13
No way 3
Maybe 9