Specifically, I’m afraid that the popularization of “open education” will further reduce our already stunted notion of what the verb “to educate” means until its meaning disappears altogether.
Let me start with a few stories. When I was in my early twenties, I made a little money on the side teaching adults who thought they were tone deaf how to sing. (I somehow got it in my head that this would be a good way to meet women. It wasn’t.) I never did meet anyone who was actually tone deaf. However, I did meet a number of people who had never learned to hear pitch. Hearing pitch—whether one note is higher or lower in relation to another—is something that comes instinctively to most people. But some people just don’t naturally notice whether a pitch is higher or lower. There’s nothing wrong with them biologically; they are physically capable of registering the distinctions. They just never make the connection on their own. Invariably, I could teach them how to focus their attention, hear pitch, and then sing in tune. What struck me as odd, though, was how many people went through their lives believing they had a permanent disability (albeit a minor one) when they were just missing one piece that was entirely learnable.
I went through a similar experience with a college buddy that wanted me to help him write his philosophy paper. Actually, he wanted me to rewrite for him a paper written for an American Cinema class by one of his fraternity brothers so he could turn it in for his aesthetics of film class. I agreed to help him, but only if we did it my way. My friend was a clever guy, and I was confident he could learn to write a decent paper on his own if I could just help him find the missing link in his process. I started by making him tell me in his own words how the topic of the paper he was…remixing related to the essay question his professor had asked. As he explained it to me, I had him write it down. That was his topic paragraph. We then went on to the first example. I asked him how that example proved that his idea was true. He explained it to me. I made him write it down. We had our second paragraph. At which point, the training wheels came off. I told him he would have to repeat this process with the other examples, and that he could do this without me. He looked at me like I had just invented anti-gravity. “You mean, all I have to do is say how the examples relate to my idea and I’m done? Who knew it was that easy!” He got a B- on the paper. Obviously, my friend’s problem wasn’t as difficult to diagnose or fix as those of the “tone deaf” singers. In fact, somebody clearly should have helped him solve this problem some time in the 15 years of schooling he had before he approached me. But the point remains that there was a gap that could be closed through an educational intervention—once it was correctly identified.
There are probably lots of people who have these sorts of blind spots. One of mine is visual awareness. I don’t notice things even when they are right in front of my face. I have no fashion sense, and little consciousness of what clothes I put on my body in the morning (never mind fashion sense). But I have been surprised to discover that I can take decent pictures and even make decent movies when I focus my attention. There’s nothing wrong with my visual faculties. I just don’t naturally know when or how to use them.
Unfortunately, some people’s limitations fall right into the critical path of academic progress. Not just progress in a particular discipline or skill, but any academic progress. I recently spoke with a relative who had gone through four majors at six different colleges before she was able to graduate. What finally made the difference was a teacher who helped her see that she was going to run into tough spots in any academic program and she wouldn’t pass until she developed a set of skills including (but not limited to) help-seeking behavior. It never occurred to her that there was a productive way to engage her teachers—that she could learn her way through the tough spots. It took until her mid-forties before somebody finally told her. I have written before about Purdue University’s use of academic analytics to help teach students exactly this lesson (or, at least, to teach them that they need to learn this lesson). Their success demonstrates that there is a high correlation between the lack of this very teachable skill and students just barely fail school. It also demonstrates that good diagnostics are a key part of ensuring a successful education.
This brings me to Open Education and the chapter in question. Authors Batson, Pharia, and Kumar start out by making a great point about how we need to make a mental transition from thinking about education in terms of the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance:
The manifesting nature of learning via the Internet, open education, starts with abundance—abundance that will only multiply over time. Philip Slater, an anthropologist and author of In Pursuit of Loneliness, saw the post-war abundance in America as a root cause for the “revolution” of the 1960s, when baby-boomers, enjoying the wealth of their parents, who had grown up during the depression, could not understand their scarcity-based beliefs….Their poverty assumptions—lie low, hide your wealth lest it be stolen, do not display emotions, life is full of danger—enraged their Dionysian offspring. “Let’s celebrate life, not suspiciously guard our riches” was translated into “don’t trust anyone over 30,” to paraphrase Slater. We now appear to be facing the same cultural fissure 40 years later: Open educational resources (OER) are so abundant that the scarcity-based assumptions of educators are challenged.
It’s the enraging part that worries me. Open education is often expressed as something along the lines of “we don’t need no stinkin’ teachers.” With all that great content freely available online, we’ll just teach ourselves (and maybe each other). Forget those fuddy-duddy pedants; they just get in the way. Indeed, even the chapter authors themselves postulate a hypothetical “Peer-to-Peer University” in which cohorts of students “come together and learn the material for a course” built around open educational resources. The peer-to-peer model, when it is not couched very carefully, invites the assumption that “learning the material” is a straightforward, Gradgrindian process of information transmission. In fact, knowledge transmission is always mediated by perceptual and cognitive processes that are not straightforward and tend to be ideosyncratic.
Open educational resources will not, by themselves, obviate the need for a teacher as diagnostician. This is a skilled job. You wouldn’t know it from the kind of training most teachers get in the U.S. at our schools of education, or for professors who don’t get any pedagogical training at all, but it is. Furthermore, this is a skill that is not needed in just rare educational cases but rather every day in the classroom, because the vast majority of learners need this diagnostic help at some point or other and the ones most at risk need it in a serious way. Some of this can be done by untrained peers, but a lot of it can’t (at least, not reliably so). My worry is that popularization of open education will move us from the widespread neglect of this critical pedagogical skill set to the outright abandonment of it.
At the moment, teaching skills are still essential and scarce resources. I won’t have a high comfort level with open education as anything more than a supplement around the edges of traditional channels for formal education until that issue is addressed head-on.
Accepting your argument…
First, what is the evidence that diagnosing is a rare and valuable skill? One wonders whether one’s friends or family couldn’t perform this function, if they had some basic education. Or whether exposure to appropriate resources could prevent it in the first place.
Second, what percentage of teacher (or professor, etc) time is currently taken up performing the diagnostic function? My teachers spent a lot of time doing a lot of things that had nothing to do with diagnosing my educational blind spots.
And third, would a system structured to diagnose and identify blind spots look anything like our current system? Or would it not look more like the health system – where we are supposed to feed ourselves, keep ourselves healthy, etc., and to seek interventiuon only when something goes wrong?
Stephen, I’ll take these out of order, starting with your second question. A substantial percentage of teachers (and the vast majority of professors) spend far less time on diagnosis than they should or could. The fact that I was able to teach my friend how to write an essay in an hour after he had made it through a supposedly decent public school and a halfway decent public university without learning that skill is evidence. Part of the problem is that we don’t even have vocabulary to talk about this skill set properly, because it is so under-acknowledged.
Nevertheless, I’d wager that any halfway decent teacher can think of examples where s/he has done some diagnosis that unstuck a stuck student without trying to hard. (I could rattle off a half a dozen other examples off the top of my head, and I haven’t been in the classroom on a regular basis for quite a while.) Regarding the question of its value, the Purdue example alone, in which they were able to increase the number of students who could succeed in school, is strong evidence.
Can laypeople be taught these skills? To a certain degree, they can and should. Everyone should know something about how humans learn. Among other things, it will help them succeed in their own education. But there is a limit to how much cognitive science and education theory we can expect the average person to know. Specialists are required.
Regarding the model of the health care system, you raise a very good point. We could potentially learn from that model—with some major caveats. First, we don’t expect minors to seek out their own health care interventions, and minors make up a substantial majority of our education system. Second, part of our education of minors includes health education (to get back to your earlier point) so that they can be better at looking after themselves as adults. And finally, one major weakness of our health care system that is widely acknowledged by health care policy experts is that people do not, in fact, seek out health care promptly when they should. Sometimes this is for externally driven reasons such as affordability, but sometimes it is just one of those human things. And while it’s not necessarily smart to address these failings through mandates, you can adopt softer methods to encourage good behavior, in the style of the “paternalistic libertarianism” that Sunstein and Thaler suggest. One such method (though certainly not the only one) is to have a teacher acting as a coach.
1. Diagnosing lack of skills is a skill just like learning how to sing and how to dress fashionably. I’m very good at diagnosing missing skills, I’ve learned to dress reasonably fashionably, and I can’t sing. As Stephen pointed out, we’re all doing it all the time, as needed, and when we become aware that it will help us in our lives.
2. The problem isn’t that teachers aren’t good at diagnosing missing skills. The problem is that they have to. The system is not transparent. Classrooms tend to be teacher-centered rather than user-centered. Shift the focus from supply side/institutional support to demand side/user support and let users do their own diagnosing.
My (now adult) children learn a lot of their own accord, so do I, and so did the adults whose courses I was responsible for.
But learning is a process with lots of forces at work which either hinder or enable it.
I think of (good) teachers as managers of that process. By their choice of questions, by the way they motivate, by their design and management of learning activities, by the formative feedback they provide. I’m an enthusiast for OER, but I do not think that simply by making OER available that all or even many learners learn of their own accord. And for tacit know-how – like that needed to make a good violin – you need the input of a someone who has both mastered the craft of violin-making, and that of passing on the craft.
Lynn, while we’re at it, maybe our auto shops are too mechanic-centered rather than customer-centered. Maybe our doctors’ offices are too. I should be able to solve the problem in my car’s electrical system and diagnose and treat my stomach ailment by myself. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine another profession in which expertise would be dismissed so blithely, even by some in the business. You can’t sing? What you mean is that you have been unable to learn how to sing. I’d bet you any amount of money that I could teach you to sing. Now, the fact that you never had anyone who could show you that you could learn to sing is unfortunate. The fact that my relative never, until very recently, had anyone who could show her that she could learn to study is tragic.
I think Seb nails it. Sure, many of us can learn to be self-educators in many domains by the time that we are adults. We need to nourish that under-appreciated capability if we are to expand access to education. But please, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s recognize that there are plenty of critical situations where people need an expert to help them with their learning process.
Great post!
Just to keep the story-telling theme, I struggled with my slap shop for years as a kid learning to play hockey. I went to hockey clinics and camps sponsored by college programs and led by former NHL’ers for formal”classroom” instruction and I played shinny with my friends (peer-to-peer learning?), but it wasn’t until coach Narcomi worked with me one-on-one that I learned I was skating too far up on the puck, shooting with my arms (rather than my hips) and not pointing to where I want the shot to go (a triple diagnosis-my shot was terrible).
All three of these educational environments were important in my mastering the slap shot, each (formal disciplined education, peer-to-peer and one-on-one) providing different teaching and learning opportunities. Ideally Open Education (and I include in this the technologies that make OER possible such as the CMS, LMS, VLE, or PLE as well as recognized standards and open specifications) can replicate these as well.
I see the PLE analogous to shinny, just a bunch of kids experimenting, sharing, testing, learning through communities of practice. Each player could try a longer/shorter stick, play wing instead of defense, try out a move their coach would never want to see in a game or at practice,or even work on an individual weaknesses such as their slap shots. After our pick-up games we went in to watch some of the most ridiculous hockey videos (OER? Learning objects?): Blades of Fury, Bob Proberts’s Top 10 Fights, etc. I designed (unknowingly at the time) this learning environment, choosing my educational tools (cones, shooter tutors, etc.), the lessons I needed (slap shots vs. wrist shots, vs. snap shots), and even my cohort. Today, as a graduate student I have created a PLE, and again I have chosen my tools; WordPress where I write openly from outline to final draft; pbWiki where I keep all of my reference materials, including the books/articles/papers that I have converted to PDF and MP3 as well as links to online materials I think may be relevant; and a variety of other personal utilities that allow me to create, organize and administer my work—in my own format, not one imposed on me by the instructor, course or institution! I also supplement my assigned work with content discovered on the web; videos on YouTube, Blogs and even Wikipedia (GASP!). Because my work is public and open for comment I have a set of peers, and just like on the ice, some of those who comment on my efforts are far more skilled than I, know more, or provide an alternate viewpoint, whatever their contribution I pick-up a little with each interaction.
Yet, just as it would have been preposterous to drop the gloves in a game just because I saw Bob Probert beat the hell out of Marty McSorely in a video I got from a friend, it would be just as foolish to incorporate an idea or concept I got from Wikipedia, a YouTube video or blog comment into my writing without consulting my professor. The ideas I discover outside of class are important, but they may lack context, my interpretation might be incorrect, or I may simply lack the fundamental knowledge to consider the idea intelligently/intellectually. Yet, what instructor wouldn’t be thrilled to hear her students carry on their lessons in the hall after class? What quality teacher wouldn’t engage with a student who brought them an idea from outside the class? Should she care if they discovered that idea through a different set of tools than those prescribed by the institution or even herself, or undertook alternate activities than those assigned, or even met with others than those within her class?
However, the point at hand, the PLE–and personal learning–should not serve as the only learning environment. Formal instruction through the LMS provides value as well. The LMS seems a bit like the clinics and camps I went to: formal, structured, uniform, content specific, etc. The LMS might serve as a tool that allows continuity in instruction, ensuring that each student is exposed to the fundamentals. Instructors and students might give up a bit of creativity, but I know that I needed to learn the rules of the game, basic strategies, as well as offensive and defensive concepts before I could even get into position to take a slap shot. Unfortunately, many courses and instructor rely on this mode entirely. They too willingly deploy their courses and content, managing the course rather than teaching it. I see this in the LMS in use within some of the courses I am currently taking. Each course includes specific tools and content, which in turn dictates how I access materials, how I interact with them and how even how I interact with my classmates. All of which, it seems to me, dictates learning: the ability to teach is predicated by the instructors ability to use the LMS, not their ability to teach. The idea that each student will readily understand the same set of concepts, need assistance with the same set set lessons, or require the same level of help seems a bit idealistic, on par with the idea that each student will be able to educate themselves solely through an Open Educational model.
Fortunately I think we have, not a system, nor a set of tools or even a set of practices, but rather a set of principles that I think can complement both models which capitalizes on the skills of teachers, the value of teaching and the opportunities of Openness. The most exciting learning environment I see emerging within education is the VLE where educational tools and content can be customized by both the instructors and the students to meet the individual needs of both. Instructors can identify the specific needs of their students and design activities to meet those. Instructors can mold the coursework and learning activities to meet their own particular strengths, or even develop modules for various students who may be at different places in the course. The VLE, as an open framework were tools can be added based on need, differs from both the PLE and the LMS. In the former, this is a matter of content: the VLE provides structure and continuity that may be lacking in the students’ PLE. In the former it is a matter of activities: the VLE provides flexibility to “reorganize the chairs in the classroom.” The VLE is coach Narcomi, who brought different tools to our practices and broke us up into small groups with similar needs and at the same time listened to and incorporated what I learned on my own, yielding a better understanding of the game of hockey. All of these tools, the lessons and the activities were open educational resources, but it was the delivery mode–the educational environment–and most importantly, the instructor that made these resources valuable.
Whether teaches can diagnose the individual needs of their students seems moot if they lack the freedom to work with those students, or conversely, those students aren’t there to be diagnosed.
Michael, great post. A couple of thoughts.
Great teachers are wonderful and should be respected and paid quite a bit more than they currently are paid. The problem, I think, is not that teachers are overlooked. The problem is that there simply are not enough teachers. You were a good friend to your buddy. You knew him and he trusted you. You invested in him and helped him learn how to write an essay. Unfortunately, our teachers simply do not have the time to invest in students in the same manner that you invested in your buddy. As David Wiley has pointed out, teachers simply do not scale.
Diagnosis is both an art and a science. However, there is more and more sophistication occurring with self-report inventories that help people identify their learning strengths and weaknesses without the need of an expert. It is not inconceivable to think that soon a person will be able to take an online assessment instrument, determine their primary learning modality (visual, auditory etc.) and then have a curriculum tailored to meet their unique ways of processing information. This process could definitely be enhanced by teachers (and peers!), but it will likely be automated.
Michael,
Yep, great post and super comments!! I know that my comment is going to appear sort of flippant – or at least a step backward. It isn’t meant to be. So,
What is the opposite of “Open Education”?
I don’t think of the opposite of Open Education as being “well taught and well supported” education. I think of it as being “proprietary” or “exclusive.”
Cheers
Ken, open education entails business models or, at least, production and delivery economic models in order to be sustainable. And one of the economic issues, as Glen points out, is that teachers don’t scale the way content does. If you’re going to make education “open”, you necessarily must provide the equivalent educational functions to those that teachers provide. I would argue (somewhat hyperbolically, given Pat’s excellent breakdown of various modalities) that, until you can do that, you can have “open” or “education” but you can’t have both. Open educational resources are necessary but not sufficient for open education.
Great post, Michael. In addition to the diagnostician role (shared with mechanics and doctors), I would add teacher as inspiration. One superb lecturer on our campus told me he sees his role in the large lecture meeting of his class as an “evangelist for reading” (lower-level lit class). With that inspiration, the students then go to the smaller recitation sections with fresh motivation to dig into the text. Sure you can videotape him and put him on PBS, but being in the room with one’s peers, in an interactive lecture situation, is a different experience than watching on a ‘tube.
I realize there may be a thin line between teacher as inspirerer and teacher as evil indoctrinator, but I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, the roles of diagnostician and inspiration are not absent from non-interactive materials or online interactive tools, but I would argue that those roles are stronger when embodied in a person, more so when face to face. Hmm…feels like we’re back to the old Clark – Kozma debate.