Phil and I will be giving a webinar with the same title as this blog post for EDUCAUSE ELI on Monday, February 11th at 1 PM ET. It’s aimed at folks on campuses, especially Presidents, Provosts, and other academic decision-makers, who weren’t necessarily focused on online learning in the way that they are now that MOOCs have gotten their attention. We’re going to try to position MOOCs in the larger landscape of online learning and talk a little bit about how campuses can think about the various options in the context of their institutions’ respective missions and strategic goals. It’s a lot to try to accomplish in an hour, but I think we can give people a basic framework and a few important questions to ask themselves.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching
Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me:
The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say that the video was clear and helpful, but they will misremember it as confirming their (mistaken) preconceived notions. In short, they won’t learn. In contrast, if you show them a video that starts by directly stating and then refuting their misconception, they like the video less and say it is confusing, but they actually learn more. This is a really important pedagogical point to know whether you are giving traditional in-class lectures, writing curricular materials, or creating one of those oh-so-modern video lectures that all the cool kids are into these days.
It’s also a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to. And it gives us good reason to be skeptical that taking large lecture courses online, turning them into REALLY large lecture courses (with nice videos), and expecting that new and more effective pedagogies will rise out of the data because, you know, science or something, is more of a hope (or a fantasy) than a plan to improve education.
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Data Envy
While we have occasionally written about college costs and budgets here at e-Literate, it mostly hasn’t been part of our brief as a site that focuses on technology-mediated education. That is changing, in large part because cost and budgets are increasingly becoming the drivers for change, in California and elsewhere. But I’ve been astonished at how little information seems to be readily available and how little analysis is out in the academic press about even the basics of college and university finances work.
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Smart
Governor Brown appears to be focusing his attention on “bottleneck courses”:
As part of the additional $125.1 million in proposed state funds, $10 million has been directed in the Governor’s budget for online strategies to get more students through so-called “bottleneck” courses. These are courses across the system that cause many students to slow their time to degree until they can find a “seat” in that particular course. They are either lower-division general education requirements, pre-requisites for majors or high demand classes. The directed funds would be used for a multi-pronged approach incorporating technology-enhanced learning, student advising and course redesign to ensure student success. Together, all of these efforts are expected to provide thousands of students more access to classes and help them progress to degree.
They will also save the state money. In a state system, every student is subsidized. Reducing time to graduation also reduces budget burdens. So it’s good for everyone. This is a smart, targeted approach that could also form the basis for experimentation and innovation with ed tech. Note the reference to “course redesign.”
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Re:Booting CA Higher Education: My First Thoughts
As expected, the 20 Million Minds-sponsored event was fascinating and information-packed. Kudos to the foundation for setting up such a rich and, I think, important meeting. In fact, I’m still digesting it, and may need to write several posts to lay out my thoughts once the dust settles. But I do want to get my initial thoughts down while they are fresh. In particular, underneath all the head nodding and apparent agreement, there were some strikingly divergent ideas about the future of higher education that are worth spelling out in some detail.
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Announcing MindWires Consulting
Phil and I are both gearing up for the Rebooting CA Higher Education jamboree, but I wanted to take a moment to briefly (and proudly) announce that the two of us will be starting a new company called MindWires Consulting. As you may know, Phil has been working with Delta Initiative; we expect to continue partner with Delta to help support their clients going forward. But we also have much more in mind. In the coming weeks, we’ll have more announcements to make about partners and plans, as well as some comments about the relationship to e-Literate. (Short answer on the relationship: MindWires will have its own web presence separate from this blog.)I am very excited about our plans and look forward to sharing more about them with you soon. -
California Discusses Cost and Effectiveness in Higher Education
On the heels of the passage of a historic tax increase to cover deficits in the California higher education system, the UC system is apparently already warning that they may need to raise tuition again. In response, Governor Jerry Brown has called for action and discussion about rising tuition costs, and in particular, to discuss how getting more aggressive with online education might help the cost situation. The Los Angeles Times characterized it this way:
“In order to meet the needs going forward without constant large tuition increases, there will have to be different ways in which people learn and people teach,” Brown said.
He told the regents — and they quickly agreed — to invite industry leaders in free online education, such as the Udacity website, to the January meeting to discuss how UC can more aggressively get into the digital classroom.
Brown said he wanted those talks to be “not in the gilded tones of academia but in the harsh reality of the marketplace and technologies.”
In response this call, the 20 Million Minds Foundation is sponsoring a conversation about controlling rising costs while maintaining (or improving) quality in the California public higher education systems from 9 AM to 2 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, January 8th. More information, including the full agenda and the webcast sign-up form, can be found on the home page of 20mm.org.
This event has the potential to be impactful for a variety of reasons. First, the folks who are organizing the event were directly involved with California’s new law to fund the creation of 50 open textbooks for higher education. Their involvement by itself means it is likely to be an interesting event. Second, it comes at a critical moment in California’s funding situation. Something has to change. Third, it’s California. What happens there matters, both because the state is so big and because it has been a model for quality public higher education. Californians still have a great deal of civic pride invested in that idea of themselves (which may be why Governor Brown was able to pass the tax increase). And finally, with the MOOC hype at its apex, previously unthinkable technology-driven changes to large, conservative prestige schools are suddenly not only thinkable but positively trendy.
It turns out that e-Literate will have its own little part in this grand drama. Our very own Phil Hill will be both a speaker and the moderator of several panels. I will have the privilege of participating on one of the panels. Never having been at an event like this before, I will be fascinated to see how it all plays out. Obviously, various folks will be coming with different agendas. From my personal perspective, while I’m not a big believer in the role of the “harsh reality of the marketplace” as a driver for educational policy, I do think the harsh reality of student debt burdens should motivate a sense of urgency. And I think there is a huge opportunity for a long overdue rethink of how we approach education. Fellow panelist Candace Thille from CMU’s OLI has said it well:
“Rather than using information technology to mimic or scale typical classroom teaching methods, I hope the participants will begin to discuss how to use emerging technologies to effectively re-engineer the teaching and learning process as a whole. We have the opportunity to address large-scale societal issues in higher education while simultaneously making progress in our fundamental understanding of human learning.
Another issue we need to address is balancing institutional competition and collaboration. Many higher education pundits believe that the competitive nature of American higher education is a key reason that many American research universities are the best in the world. However, pursuing innovation in teaching and in education research are areas in which, I believe, we can make progress more rapidly through a better balance between competition and large-scale collaboration.”
If the conversation can get beyond a zero-sum political tug-of-war between disruptive xMOOC companies and traditional academic institutions to a genuine dialog about new possibilities, then this could turn out to be a big deal. But as I said, I’ve never been to anything like this before and I’m frankly not sure what to expect. It will be interesting.