Two weeks ago I wrote a post about faculty members’ perspective on student-centered pacing within a course. What about the changing role of faculty members – how do their lives change with some of the personalized learning approaches?
In the video below, I spoke with Sue McClure, who teaches a redesigned remedial math course at Arizona State University (ASU) that is based on the use of Khan Academy videos. There are plenty of questions about whether this approach works and is sustainable, but for now let’s just get a first-hand view of how Sue’s role changed in this specific course. You’ll see that it took some prodding to get her to talk about her personal experience, and I did have to reflect back what I was hearing. Note that the “coaches” she described are teaching assistants.
Phil Hill: Let’s get more of a first-hand experience as the instructor for the course. What is a typical week for you as the course is running? What do you do? Who do you interact with?
Sue McClure:I interact by e-mail, and sometimes Google Hangouts, with the coaches and with some of the students. Now, not all of the students are going to contact me about a problem they might have because many of them don’t have any problems, and that’s wonderful. But quite a few of them do have problems either with understanding what they’re supposed to be doing or how to do what they’re supposed to be doing or how to contact somebody about something, and then they’ll send me an e-mail.
Phil Hill: So, as you go through this, it sounds like there’s quite a change in the role of the faculty member from a traditional course, and since you just got involved several months ago in the design and in instructing it, describe for me the difference in that role. What’s changed, and how does it affect you as a professor?
Sue McClure: Before I did this course, the way it’s being done now, I had taught [Math 110] online a few other semesters, and the main difference between those experiences and this experience is that with this experience our students have far more help, far more assistance, far more people willing to step up when they need help with anything to try to make them be successful. The main difference … is that with this experience our students have far more help.
Phil Hill:Â What about the changes for you personally?
Sue McClure: Partly because I think ASU is growing so much, my class sizes are getting bigger and bigger. That probably would have happened even if we were teaching these the way that we taught them before. That’s one big change—more and more students. So, having these coaches that we have working with us and for us has just been priceless. We couldn’t do it without them.
Phil Hill: It seems your role comes into more of an overseeing the coaches for their direct support of the students. Plus it sounds like you step in to directly talk to students where needed as well. Your role comes into more of an overseeing the coaches for their direct support of the students.
Sue McClure:Â Right. I think that explains it very well.
From what Michael and I have seen in the e-Literate TV case studies as well as other on-campus consulting experiences, the debate over adaptive software or personalized learning being used to replace faculty members is a red herring. Faculty replacement does happen in some cases, but that debate masks a more profound issue – how faculty members have to change roles to adapt to a student-centered personalized learning course design. [updated to clarify language]
For this remedial math course, the faculty member changes from one of content delivery to one of oversight, intervention, and coaching. This change is not the same for all disciplines, as we’ll see in upcoming case studies, but it is quite consistent with the experience at Essex County College.
As mentioned by Sue, however, these instructional changes do not just impact faculty members – they also affect teaching assistants. Below is a discussion with some TAs from the same course.
Phil Hill:Beyond the changes to the role of faculty, there are also changes to the role of teaching assistants.
Namitha Ganapa:Basically, in a traditional course there’s one instructor, maybe two TAs, and a class of maybe 175 students. So, it’s pretty hard for the instructor to go to each and every student. Now, we are 11 coaches for Session C. Each coach is having a particular set of students, so it’s much easier to focus on the set of students, and that helps for the progress.
We should stop here and note the investment being made by ASU – moving from 2 TAs to 11 for this course. There are two sides to this coin, however. On one side, not all schools can afford this investment in a new course design and teaching style. On the other side, it is notable that instructor roles are increasing (same number of faculty members, more TAs).
Jacob Cluff: I think, as a coach, it’s a little more involved with the students on a day-to-day basis. Every day I keep track of all the students, their progress, and if they’re struggling on a skill I make a video, send it to them, ask them if they need help understanding it—that sort of thing.
Phil Hill: So, Jacob, it sounds like this is almost an intervention model—that your role is looking at where students are and figuring out where to intervene and prompt them. Is that an accurate statement?
Jacob Cluff: I think that’s a pretty fair statement because most of the students (a lot of students)—they’re fine on their own and don’t really need help at all. They kind of just get off and run. So, I spend most of my time helping the students that actually need help, and I also spend time and encourage students that are doing well at the same time.
I spend most of my time helping the students that actually need help.Phil Hill: So, Namitha, describe what is the typical week for you, and is it different? Any differences in how you approach the coaching role than from what we’ve heard from Jacob?
Namitha Ganapa: It’s pretty much the same, but my style of teaching is I make notes. I use different colors to highlight the concept, the formula, and how does the matter go. Many of my students prefer notes, so that is how I do it.
Phil Hill: So, there’s sort of a personal style to coaches that’s involved.
This aspect of the changing role of both faculty members and TAs is too often overlooked, and it’s helpful to hear from them first-hand.
Phil, I’m interested to know if you found anything out about the pay rates for coaches v TAs. I’m also interested in what coaches were actually paid to do — how the parameters of their employable hours fit what they ended up doing. Academics are rarely encouraged to think of their work in terms of billable increments, because this would sink the ship. But still I’m curious. Did ASU really just hike up their staffing costs in moving to personalised learning, or was there some other cost efficiency here? If the overall increase in students paid off, how did this happen? I’m grappling with how this worked for ASU in budgetary terms, as the pedagogical gain is so clear.
Kate, great question, and ironically I’m at a conference today (WCET Summit on Adaptive Learning) where the panel is being asked a very similar question. OK, they were asked about return on investment, and I asked audience question more aligned with yours. This topic needs more explanation than just a comment, so expect a blog post soon :}
For a quick response, however, ASU (and all the panelists) view personalized / adaptive learning as an investment, where the human costs in instructors / faculty / TAs / coaches actually go up, at least in early years. They do not see this as cost efficiency, at least for the foreseeable future. Keep in mind that this is remedial math, so students who do not make it through are a cost burden on themselves and on the university.
One panelists on ROI: retention, retention, retention.
For ASU (and see episode 1 of e-Literate TV case study), they see the need to scale students without the same increase in faculty.
The faculty members and TAs at ASU are on the same contracts as before, it’s just that TAs in this program are called coaches. They are paid by the hour already. Sue McClure is a lecturer (non tenure-track) at ASU, which typically is paid per course. I do not know about her employable hours vs. expectations, but I will ask her via email.
I’m really interested in what you learn, and I’d love to hear about this from the coaches’ perspective too, if that’s possible. Experience in Australia has shown that hourly pay rates translate very poorly from fixed time in class or grading to asynchronous online environments and time-distributed student support. This is a problem so many institutions are trying to resolve in fairness to their hourly paid workforce. How do ASU manage it? And how do the coaches feel? As a sidenote I’m also curious to know about the career signalling of time spent as an online coach.
Extremely useful perspective on the real institution return on investment in relation to long-term retention. That would play well in Australia, and could possibly justify the higher cost teaching strategy.