What is education, and how to get one

Historic library building at Columbia University

Some people think of college as a collection of courses you take on a beautiful campus for four years. It is so much more than that. In the following I try to provide a way of thinking about what college actually is while also constructing an answer to what it might be in the future.

Grit

In David Leonhardt’s NYTimes article “College for the masses”, the author highlights what research has shown in an overlooked benefit of completing college:

Its graduates have managed to complete adulthood’s first major obstacle course. Doing so helps them learn how to finish other obstacle courses and gives them the confidence that they can, so long as they stay focused. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to calling grit.

So much of the college experience is simply the development of this grit, the persistence needed to overcome obstacles, big and small, in pursuit of an overarching goal: What classes should I take? How can I learn this material? How can I pass this class? Where is this class being taught? How can I clear up this confusion about my meal plan account? How can I arrange my time so that I have clean clothes to wear, have some fun, make some friends, and do well enough to stay enrolled? How can I get an answer from this person who isn’t responding to my email? How can I pay for this educational experience? How can I get a job? What kind of job do I want? And so on…

Students need to be able to solve all kinds of problems that crop up in order to get through the maze that is an undergraduate college education. Every college provides a different answer to the question “How, and how much, should we help a student solve the problems facing him/her?” This help comes in the form of professional and peer counselors for academic, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities. It is demonstrated by the length of the lines for help, by the speed at which email answers are received and the helpfulness of those answers.

Two questions

A college or university — its people, places, processes, and organizational structure — is the organization’s answer to the question “What does it mean to be educated?” It is certainly not just a collection of courses. If that were so, then online learning would arguably easily and quickly fully replace the vast majority of colleges and universities worldwide. An institution of higher education is a highly internetworked set of resources and processes, of which faculty and classes are certainly important but are not alone in determining the quality of the educational experience.

The rise of easily accessed high quality online courses may actually end up diversifying and strengthening the answers the colleges and universities construct to this answer. In a WSJ essay “The Future of College: It’s online”, Daphne Koller (of Coursera) makes the following point:

At the same time, universities will devote considerably more effort to activities that occur outside the classroom, be it research, individual mentoring by faculty or senior students, team activities, volunteering, internships, study abroad, and many more types of work and experience. Universities will largely distinguish themselves not by the content they deliver, but by the activities that support and enhance core learning activities.

Bundling

Right now colleges and universities are like the Comcast (or similar) cable service that so many of us can purchase — a big bundle of services for a relatively high cost. Very few students will be interested in the Aviation Club but, don’t worry, the university will have more than a thousand other clubs that the student might join. Yes, that means that each student’s tuition has to support the extra expense (from his/her point of view) of those other 1000+ clubs, but this is the cost of ensuring that the university will probably have a few clubs that the student is actually interested in.

This same analogy can be extended to many other dimensions of the college or university experience. Just as Netflix, Sling TV, HBO Now, and many other services have risen up to disrupt the cable television industry, so have Coursera, edX and others acted towards higher education. But for a person who wants to receive the equivalent of an undergraduate education, he/she has to, first, answer the question “What does it mean to be educated?“ and, second, construct and successfully complete a series of experiences, academic and otherwise, that would enable the student to gain the academic learning and the grit that would fulfill the requirements of his/her answer to the first question. The challenge for the “graduate” then would become that of convincing the world of the quality of the answers to both questions!

I don’t think I have to explain how difficult and confusing this would be if potential hiring organizations were confronted with this for each person who walked in the door looking for a job.

Answering the questions

How do we currently do this? We outsource. We have accrediting organizations whose very reason for existing is to ensure that colleges and organizations meet a reasonable expectation for providing an education (I’m waving my hands and leaving out a lot of details here). This allows us to trust that if a person graduated from a college or university that we have heard of, then we can believe that the person meets some standard expectation we might have related to what it means to be educated. It allows the interested hiring party to focus on the details that he/she is interested in rather than the bigger picture that would distract and complicate the overall process.

An opportunity

Right now, colleges and universities provide a useful bundling of services and experiences. Graduates get an education — academic knowledge and grit. Society (private and public organizations) gets relatively easily understood resources (i.e., educated citizens) that is has learned to allocate in productive ways. An opportunity exists for a new type of organization to structure a virtual education from a set of unbundled educational experiences, services, and classes that are pre-approved to grant the person who completes them as a “graduate”. (That is, an accreditation agency would sign off on this organization’s claim that a graduate has been educated.) This should reduce the cost of completing the education while also making it easier for students to complete since the answers to the two questions are, if not fully answered, at least extensively outlined for them.

I, for one, am waiting for such an organization to appear. It would certainly make higher education potentially more competitive, higher quality, less expensive and open to more people.

State universities in Florida and Arizona make big moves with online education

Within the past two weeks, two major U.S. universities have put forth significant online initiatives that will enable more students to take their classes for first year students without putting additional strain on their classrooms or dormitories. While some similarities exist in these efforts, it is in the differences that make this so interesting.

Arizona State University logo

Arizona State University has made a significant move (also, here) in the integration of online courses into higher education. Here are some of the highlights:

  • They will be creating a dozen MOOCs in partnership with edX.
  • These will be traditional MOOCs, in that anyone can take them for free with no admission requirement at all.
  • If a student has paid a $45 fee for identity verification, then he/she can pay Arizona State a fee so that it can count for credit (assuming that the student passes the class).
  • The cost of the credit is less than half as expensive as other Arizona State credits and the student does not have to pay until after passing the class. The total cost of a year of credit would be less than $6,000.
  • On the transcript these courses will not be distinguished from traditional in-person courses so, in theory, these credits should be transferrable to other institutions similar to any other ASU credits.

This fits with ASU’s mission which is clearly one of inclusion given that it has 83,000 students enrolled, with 13,000 of them already online. ASU and edX are hoping for 25,000 students to enroll in each course, but they have not made public any expectations for how many students might verify their identities and then, further, how many might pay for credit. These courses should enable ASU to capture a whole range of students earning credits before they arrive on campus. They can clearly increase the size of the student body who will be eligible, and in theory prepared, to take ASU’s upper-level courses.

University of Florida logo

All of this can be contrasted with the approach taken by the University of Florida in granting online-only admissions to an additional 3100 applicants this year:

  • Students who accept this admission are required to have 60 college credits before they can enroll in the traditional on-campus system. This time period for being off campus has to be at least two semesters. At least 15 of these credits have to be earned via UF online courses.
  • Students admitted to this program would not have been admitted otherwise, and are only being admitted into programs and majors that are undersubscribed through traditional admissions. Further, pre-requisites in some programs will not be online so it won’t work for students in those programs, either.
  • Students receive a 25% discount off normal UF tuition rates.
  • The university is hoping for 300-400 students take advantage of this option.

Requirements and questions

Both of the above approaches provide a means to increase enrollment at a university without taxing dormitories or classroom buildings; however, these are two very different approaches. At one university, they very specifically target and admit students who can take their online courses via a loosening of admissions requirements. At the other university literally anyone with access to the Internet can take the course.

These programs place quite clear requirements on officials at both universities. UF officials will need to monitor the quality of students in their online courses since they are admitting students they would not have previously admitted. Both schools will need to monitor student preparation in future classes — both hope and plan that these courses will equally prepare the students, but the outcomes will need to be assessed. And these outcomes will be dependent not only on the differing format of the courses but on the differing structure of the classes. Officials at both schools, but also officials at schools around the country, will be interested to see how widely accepted these courses are for transfer credit by other universities, as well as any accreditation issues that might arise from them.

Both of these programs, though especially the one from ASU, put officials at other universities on notice. The large freshman classes are cash cows that fund or offset the small enrollment upper-level seminars that faculty love to teach. This particular outcome would strike at the heart of the part of teaching that they are attached to. Certainly, many faculty do not enjoy teaching large enrollment freshman classes…but they do enjoy the benefits that these courses allow.

The questions before university administrations are, at least, the following:

  • Will these online courses be effective and popular with students? How effective? And how popular?
  • If they become effective and popular, how long will it be before students enroll in them in large numbers?
  • Will the students who enroll in these courses be students who want to come to my institution?
  • Is my institution willing to cede the enrollments, and corresponding tuition, in these courses to other institutions?
  • What is the cost of delay?
  • If we lose this revenue, what effects will it have on my institution?
  • If we want to get into this online education game, where do the funds come from?
  • How would we ensure that the quality of these classes is up to our standards? And are our standards appropriate in this evolving world?
  • How do we get the faculty we want to deliver these courses to actually deliver the courses?

These are big questions that have to be answered by both university officials and the faculty at those universities. The financial health and academic quality of each university depends on coming up with the right answers.

LinkedIn is a worthy and serious competitor for most colleges

LinkedIn Logo

On April 9 LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, a provider of quality courses and online videos that made its name in teaching consumers and professionals how to use technology. Late last week Goldie Blumenstyk in the Chronicle of Higher Education analyzed the move in How LinkedIn’s Latest Move May Matter to Colleges.

Her point can be captured in this quote:

[I]t’s a sign of the growing interest in making academic and other educational credentials more visible and transparent to employers and others with reason to see them.

LinkedIn offers college rankings, university pages, and tools to support the decision on where to attend college. Crucially, it also provides tools for people looking for jobs and for companies looking to fill job openings. Ms. Blumenstyk cites Ryan Craig, an education investor, who said said

[T]he most fundamental disruption facing colleges will come once a “digital marketplace for human capital” takes hold.

The question before us is whether or not LinkedIn is going to (soon) become this wide-spread marketplace. Pieces are falling in place for LinkedIn. People will be able to take Lynda.com classes and have their LinkedIn profile automatically updated. Companies will be able to trust these updated certificates more than member-generated ones. Further, these automatically updated certificates will be more easily searchable since LinkedIn/Lynda will be more consistent with their tagging. Given these two changes (increased trust and better searchability) the tags for the Lynda courses will be more valuable and thus desired than those for non-Lynda courses. This would drive more students to Lynda for courses that they think would be valued by employers.

What is a college to do? It is clear that the college cannot act on its own. If every college created its own tags for its own courses, this would require that companies learn the vocabulary for each college from which it hopes to hire…something that clearly is sub-optimal. So, again, what is a college to do? Here is one possible approach (assuming a motivated group of cooperative-feeling academics) that would be easier to implement for institutions that have stayed on top of their learning goals and assurance of learning activities for assessment bodies:

  1. Form a working group across multiple institutions for this pilot.
  2. This working group should come up with a superset of program-level learning goals (e.g., these) from across all the institutions.
  3. Have each institution choose 20 classes from similar areas (e.g., economics, finance, or engineering) and tag each class for the applicable program-level learning goals.
  4. Now have the working group come up with class-specific knowledge tags for each of the classes. The working group should come up with standards for how many tags should be the norm for each class.
  5. Each institution would have to come up with a way for students to opt in to the sharing of information about courses taken.
  6. The institutions would have to get their technical staffs together with LinkedIn’s technical staff in order to come up with an API for uploading these tags to LinkedIn.
  7. Further down the line, national organizations for each academic area might think of defining a standard vocabulary for each area.
  8. Also, colleges and universities would want to publicize these tags in their course catalogs so that students would know what benefit that he/she would receive. Further, faculty would have to be given tools for assigning and then maintaining the tags for their courses.

This is quite the commitment (and, regardless of how it appears, provides just a glimpse of the complexity of the process) but the alternative is to cede the benefits that LinkedIn can fairly easily grab…and, with them, a good sized chunk of the future education market.

Liberal arts and more professional academic pursuits are both vital

Nicholas Kristof, in his opinion piece “Starving for wisdom” in today’s NYTImes, puts forward an argument that both liberal arts and more technical or professional pursuits can “enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well. I’ll summarize his three main points here:

  1. The humanities give its students valuable communications and interpersonal skills.
  2. The study of the humanities helps its students come to better public policy decisions.
  3. Knowledge of the humanities improves our emotional intelligence.

His overall conclusion:

In short, it makes eminent sense to study coding and statistics today, but also history and literature.

My undergraduate degree comes from a small liberal arts institution; my masters in business comes from a business school that has made its name with its engineering graduates; my PhD comes from a business school at an Ivy League institution; my first position was at a business school at a large research university; my second position was at a small residential business school. I have seen all kinds of students at all kinds of institutions and they all seem to work.

However, I am glad that I have a liberal arts education. When I was an undergrad, I can’t tell you that I was happy that I was in all of those required classes; however, as an old man I can tell you that the breadth of that education has helped me in innumerable areas — analytic skills, my interest in astronomy and art and classical music and philosophy and history and nutrition and physiology, ability to contribute to public policy discussions, and so on. I’m not so sure that it helped me get a job, but it prepared me for life, for a full and interesting life.

I am also glad that I also received more technical training as well. I benefitted from classes in micro and macroeconomics, computer science (FORTRAN77!), accounting, finance, marketing, operations research, artificial intelligence, and many others. These have been incredibly valuable in my professional life. But if that’s all I knew, all that I was exposed to, I wouldn’t have had such rich life.

When thinking about what a student (maybe your child) or all students (for policy makers) should take in college, let us not forget that college should not be looked at only as a technical school or job preparation school. It is four (or five or more) years that a person can use to grow, to mature, to prepare for life, to learn about the diversity of people and problems in this world. A job is part of that, but it is not the only part, or the only part that matters.

Progress on Drupal-based class site

Recently I wrote the post “The course Web site is integral to the success of blended or online learning”. Today I spent the day working with the installation of Drupal on my laptop trying to implement what I described.

My goal is to implement this with a standard installation of Drupal (of course, with the addition of contributed modules). It has been at least ten years since I have programmed with PHP (which is what Drupal is written in) so I’m not going to be writing any modules myself any time soon. To this end, I have relied on the following modules:

  • Content Access
  • Node Reference
  • Flag actions
  • Rules
  • Views
  • FiveStar (Voting API)
The form that is used to create a critique of a class post.

These modules have allowed me to make some progress on my goals. In just a couple days I have implemented the following:

  • Students can submit a class post and define it as “For review”.
  • Students can submit critiques for any class post that is defined as being “For review”.
  • Students can see a list of class posts (designated as “Published&rdsquo;) sorted by number of comments (ascending) and publication date (ascending); this way they can see the class posts most in need of comments.
  • Students can submit comments on both class posts and critiques.
  • Students can vote on class posts, comments on class posts, critiques, and comments on critiques.
  • Students can individually bookmark any comment on the site.
  • Students can see a ranking of the content that is receiving the highest average voting.
  • Professors can mark any content as “recommended” for students.

I’ve been very impressed with Drupal and its modular construction. The above represents some pretty good progress in a short time, but work still remains:

  • I already see that the system is collecting information about how many times the student votes, comments, critiques, and writes. I just need to centralize the information so that it’s easy for the student and the professor to monitor and use the information.
  • The main work that I have remaining is constructing the lessons pages (and, of course, the content).

I have yet to figure out the information architecture for the lessons. I don’t know what modules to use, I don’t know whether to use node references or a taxonomy as a means for categorizing the lessons, etc. And I haven’t had too much success finding any type of large community of higher education Drupal users. They are out there, but it’s a pretty small group. Given the strength of the platform, I’m surprised.

Given what I have discovered about Drupal, I’m hopeful that this is going to change in the coming years.

Educational technology and Christensen’s disruptive change framework

The major challenge facing higher education has been brought about by educational technology and its ability to bring about disruptive change. In March 2000 Clayton Christensen and Michael Overdorf wrote “Meeting the challenge of disruptive change” (Harvard Business Review), which discussed why so many successful companies have such trouble innovating, and then laid out decision rules that set out plans for action for companies in order to give them the best chance for successfully innovating. This seems like a fairly direct application of this framework, and one that I would expect my students to bring up fairly quickly in their analysis when thinking about what higher education institutions should be doing in relation to this challenge.

The innovation framework

The authors described a 2×2 framework, with one axis being fit with organizational processes, and the other being fit with organizational values. The idea is that the path towards innovation depends upon the fit between the existing organization and the innovation needed:

  Values
Processes Well Poorly
Well Functional or light-weight teams Heavyweight team, developed in-house, then spun off
Poorly Heavyweight team, within organization Heavyweight team, separate spin-off or acquired organization

Applying the framework to higher education

I think it’s fairly clear to anyone who has been around higher education for any period of time that it does not have the right values to innovate. Everything about higher education is centered on stability and incremental change. From the framework we can now see that we’re going to end up with a heavyweight team that will eventually have the commercialization of the project be in a separate organization. The only remaining option is whether development will be done in-house or in a spin-off organization.

This option is determined by whether or not the existing organization has the right processes to innovate. Here I am just going to focus on the decision-making protocols (one of the significant processes) of a fairly typical top business school. Each tenured faculty member has what amounts to lifetime employment and operates more-or-less as an independent contractor. He is accustomed to teaching the classes he wants, how he wants, with the topics he wants, in the programs he wants, and generally at the times he wants. Sure, not every professor gets what he wants every time, but the professor expects his desires to be taken into account. When major questions are addressed, task forces are convened, data is gathered, committees are formed, faculty meetings are held (and held and held), further data is gathered, votes are called and postponed, more meetings are held, and then the proverbial camel emerges from the other end. Then, assuming that some type of decision is made, actually getting faculty to do something significant is another matter entirely — the phrase “herding cats” is frequently bandied about. So, I would say “no,” higher education generally does not have the right processes to innovate.

Conclusions

Thus, according to the innovation framework above, this would say that when a higher education institution is addressing the wholesale changes required by technology, they should create a heavyweight team dedicated to the inovation task. The team should have complete responsibility for its success, and it should end up operating in a separate spin-off or acquired organization.

The next question is how should this be done? For a future post…

Using video as proxy for a class discussion

A case classroom at the Ross School of Business

I am going to be offering a blended version of a class that I have offered the last three years as a pure case discussion class (which I have discussed a bit before). I don’t currently know what percentage will be face-to-face versus online, but I’m guessing that over half (and maybe up to 3/4) will be online. I need to come up with a way to move the class online while still offering the benefits of a case class.

Benefits

I do believe that students benefit in several ways from a case class:

  • Being put on the spot to discuss a situation with a professor,
  • Have a give-and-take with the professor (and other students),
  • Hearing the opinions (often contradictory) of other students,
  • Defending his/her position against challenges.

This is all very useful to these undergraduates, and are some of the major benefits of the case discussion method.

Challenges

A recent change for this class is that I am moving the bulk of my class online. The second is that I am hoping that the class continues to grow so that I have more than the 60-75 students that I have had the previous three offerings. The question becomes how can many students continue to get the benefits of the case discussion method (or, at least, many of them) while taking the class online?

Insights

When teaching a case class, 95-100% of the class speaks at least once every 3 hour class period. I certainly didn’t see how I could carry this off over video. I was stumped for a while but I had several insights the other day.

  • I realized that no one student ever spoke more than four times during a class, and almost never more than 2-3 total minutes. Add that up over the semester and it’s entirely possible that no one student ever spoke for more than 30 minutes over an entire semester, with most totaling more like 15-20 minutes. (These are rough estimates.)
  • Many, many students want to say something nearly every time I ask a question, and feel like they don’t get to make the points that they want to make most of the time.
  • Two of the benefits listed above come from listening to other students, forming opinions based on that conversation, and forming defenses of his/her position against those other opinions.

Proposed solution

I am still working through the details, but I am thinking that every week we could have a process that goes something like the following.

Google+ Hangout
  1. Groups of three randomly-chosen students would be assigned to read two cases and answer some simple questions about them.
  2. The answers of all students would be made public, and a new set of more in-depth and analytic questions would be made public.
  3. A pre-assigned set of 4-8 students would prepare for an online discussion about those questions, plus lingering questions from the first set of questions. If we had 2 cases per week, then this would give up to (2x8x12) 192 students per semester the chance to go through this experience. Or, if I had 60 students, then each student could have 3 chances per semester.
  4. The rest of the students would only have to think about those questions, but in no way have to prepare.
  5. I could have a conversation over Google+ Hangout (especially OnAir) with that set of of 4-8 students in which we go over their thoughts about the second set of questions (plus other stuff that might come up). I assume that each Hangout would last about 30 minutes.
  6. The rest of the students in the class could watch the Hangout live or watch it recorded on YouTube.
  7. One third of the students in the class other than the students involved in the Hangout would be responsible for submitting a write-up related to the second set of questions. Another third would be responsible for critiquing a couple of those responses. The final third would be responsible for commenting on the responses. Authors would be able to respond to the critiques and comments as they see fit.

Wrap-up

Looking back at the benefits that I list at the beginning, I believe that this new structure does a pretty reasonable job of delivering those benefits. Students are put on the spot in the Hangouts. They have exchanges with the professor and students in the Hangouts. Those students plus the audience gets to hear the opinions of those students. Certainly, the students in the video have to defend their positions (from the students and the professor). Additionally, in the follow-up writing assignment, the students in the writing and commenting roles are all learning to formulate arguments for a position and defend an argument against attacks.

Like I said, I am still working through the details but I think I have come up with a promising proposal. Has anyone tried anything like this? If so, please share your experiences with me through twitter or the comments below. Thanks!

The course Web site is integral to the success of blended or online learning

Sakai Project

Introduction

Here at UM we use CTools, an implementation of Sakai. While this is a perfectly reasonable CMS, it was built to support a class from a different era, one in which the professor is the center of learning and students are simply the recipients of knowledge.

Recently in “Technology turbocharges a new educational philosophy” I wrote how technology extends the capabilities and influence of professors and students while also supporting different communication patterns. It also makes it possible to support individualized learning. In this article I want to bring these soaring ideas down to earth, if just a little bit, and discuss what they have to do with the course Web site.

And I'm good with my hands, too.

A practical guy

I’m a very practical guy; I was a practical student and I am a practical professor. When I was a student I didn’t do very much classwork unless I thought I would get something out of it. What was that something? Either I thought I would learn something that was particularly interesting to me or I thought it would help me get a better grade. And not too much in-between. I definitely didn’t do work because it’s supposed to be interesting, or everyone else likes learning about this stuff, or it’s not so hard so just do it.

I have taken that attitude with me in my role as professor. I try to make it clear why what I’m teaching is really interesting to me (so that they know that there is someone in the world who likes this stuff) and why I think it should be interesting to them (usually tied to their academic development [smallest chance of connecting with them], career, or personal life). You might expect me to say here and I also make it clear how the student can get a good grade. Actually, I generally don’t. I don’t really do this on purpose. I point in the general direction of what is good versus what is bad, but I don’t want to set an artificially low ceiling and say this is good enough to get an “A”. I have found that my students are amazingly good at exceeding any bar that I put up for them. So…I let them set the bar. I let them define their range of activities, input, and insights. They explore their talents, and I help them refine their approach. The results have most often been exemplary.

Students as teachers

You might be wondering what this all has to do with a course Web site. Here’s the connection. I believe that:

  • Communication among students is important.
  • Learning is good, whether or not the source of the learning is the professor or a student.
  • Students can provide excellent instruction to other students (and the professor, if he’ll listen).
  • Timely and meaningful feedback is a powerful way of learning and improving.
  • Students can be good at providing feedback to each other.
  • Students grow and learn just as much when they are in the role of teacher as when they are in the role of learner.

Recall from above that I personally didn’t like doing something (unless I really liked it) unless I thought it would help me get a better grade. Well, suppose that students think this way. (Not too unreasonable, in my opinion.) In order to get them to take on the above roles, they need to believe (in the absence of truly liking the material) that what they are doing will help them get a better grade. The question now becomes how do we make the connection between them taking on the above roles and them getting a better grade.

The reimagined course Web site

The course Web site has to support, track, and enable measurement of all of these new activities. If the activity isn’t being supported, tracked, or measured, then it isn’t being integrated into the student’s grade. And if it doesn’t count towards the grade, then the student isn’t doing it. Thus, the Web site has to fill all three of these roles or it’t not doing all that it can to support students and professors as they make their way through the semester.

The Web site is no longer simply about an inbox that the student puts assignments in so that the professor can grade it. It’s no longer about the students sending messages to the faculty member and vice versa.

So, what does the course Web site need to do?

  • Provide a way for students to submit a draft, for other students to critique the draft, for the author to evaluate the critiques. Each stage needs to be captured and attributed to each individual student.
  • Provide a way for students to submit a final version, for other students to respond to the document, for the author to respond to those responses, and so on. And for everyone to evaluate the quality of the arguments made.
  • Provide a way for students to submit teaching materials.
  • Provide a way for students to add to existing teaching materials.
  • Provide a way for students to evaluate the specific contributions (messages, critiques, responses, materials) of students whenever and wherever they might see them. And to give credit to students who take the time to provide the evaluations themselves!

It is definitely the case (for now) that each professor is going to want different reports for different classes. Each professor will want to emphasize different tasks and different roles for the students to play during the semester. This exploration is necessary in order to move to a new model of learning that is pretty far away from our current model. I believe it has the potential to be a better model, but we definitely have a lot of thinking, planning, experimenting, and doing ahead of us.

Drupal

Next steps

This isn’t simply a next generation of a traditional scholastic CMS. This is more like a community support/building Web site combined with a media publishing site. I actually don’t think it would be that difficult to build such a site with Drupal. It seems like all the tools (modules) are already there just waiting to be put together in the right way. I’m in the process of building it right now, so I guess we’ll see one way or the other.

If you’re interested in this project (or know of a related one that I apparently don’t know about), please let me know via twitter or the comments.

Technology turbocharges a new educational philosophy

We can be empowered by the community we live, work, and learn with.

In this article I add a couple of points to my ongoing analysis of the new educational philosophy that is becoming apparent to me, and then I describe how technology makes this superior experience more frequently available to more people.

A new educational philosophy for large classes

In this article I proposed that the way to provide a great education at a lower cost is based on the concept of community:

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I have previously emphasized some concepts underlying this philosophy:

  • Project-based learning is one key
  • Students as both learners and teachers
  • The student must have some motivation for learning and participating.
  • One of a a professor’s key areas to focus on, especially during the first phases of a semester, should be toward building connections with the students and among the students.

There is a sense in which none of this is new — I myself participated in just such an experience in my classes at Furman University. I had many very small classes (less than 15 students; some less than 10) and formed close connections with students and professors. We worked on significant projects, we were expected to take responsibility for our own learning, and we frequently taught other students both in class and out.

What is new here is that this philosophy is to be extended to much larger groups of students. The never-ending hours of the sage on the stage delivering a PowerPoint lecture to a large, uninterested, an uninvolved audience is to be forever banished to our memories (and hopefully forgotten soon after that). Recent changes in attitudes and technologies have given hope to those people who want to reinvent education.

Competence and gamification

In my previous discussions, I have forgotten two additional points that I am adding here:

  • Competency-based focus
  • Gamification of learning

In this first point, the idea is that education should no longer strictly be about pitting the students against each other and seeing who does better. Increasingly, the goal is to get students to achieve a level of competency. Professors have always known that our measures of “goodness” are inexact. We hope they are generally correlated with knowledge in a specified field, but we know that applying decimal points to the measures we use is putting too fine of a point on it. In many instances we should acknowledge this reality and simply certify that a student has reached a satisfactory level of competency.

Note that this switch is not solely of interest to students and faculty. It will require some cooperation from other constituencies who value the ranking that we do within our classes. Think about organizations who hire our graduates and graduate schools who enroll them. What would they think about seeing a large number of “competent” check-marks on a graduate’s diploma? How and when would they determine which of our graduates were our best students? Should we care? (My guess: Yes, we should, at least in the short run.)

For the second point, the gamification of the learning process in a sense explicitly recognizes what every student who gets good grades knows: If you want to get a good grade, then figure out what the professor wants, and do more of that. Gamifying a class makes what the professor wants fairly clear or, at least, determinable in a shorter time frame. Feedback, by definition, comes quickly and directly. “Did I get a trophy/points/badge?” If so, the student did well; if not, then he/she needs to do something else. This gamification can support the move toward building a process that leads towards competency; it can support the process of completing a project; it can support students in their roles as student and teacher; it can provide some extrinsic motivation where the intrinsic motivation might be lacking. In short, gamification is can be a powerful tool in this move towards the new philosophy of education.

Photo used under (CC BY-NC 2.0). Photo by ThomasHawk at Flickr.com

Technology makes all of this more frequent and feasible

With the development of and focus on new educational technologies, as well as with the successes of classes delivered by Udacity, there is real hope that the new educational philosophy can take hold at a large scale. Technology extends the capabilities and influence of professors and students. They can both reach farther; they can both create far more things (both real and virtual) than they ever could before. Simply: they are empowered to teach and learn in new ways.

Technology also supports different communication patterns. Traditionally, students have been assumed to be learning when the professor is delivering material to them. Students talking to the professor? That is either an “interruption” or a “question”. And let’s just ignore the “students talking with other students” part. Both of these were not what learning was about. But now? We recognize that some of the most important interactions occur when students are talking with other students or when students lead the professor to consider something in a different light. Students are highly qualified to teach other students; they generally have very good insight into how these other students are thinking and what types of problems they might be having; they can communicate in the other student’s language directly to the problem that they are having. Use technology to support and rewards this type of communication. Improved learning could be the result.

If these other communication patterns are so important, then why have they been relegated to the sidelines? Why, indeed. Probably because they were done outside the limelight, away from the arenas in which the “serious learning” was, in theory, taking place. With technology, and with the recognition of the importance of this other communication, the hope is that we can now capture, support, measure, and reward it so that it gets more frequent and more meaningful.

We must also remember that everybody’s different. And we differ in different dimensions. The power of technology allows us to track, and learn about, and respond to each of our students differently. It allows us to move away from the lock-step madness with which we have been infected. We can think “what does this student want?”, “what does this student need?”, and “what is the most appropriate thing for this student to be doing?” These are questions that we couldn’t allow ourselves to think when teaching large classes. It would lead to too much work, and it would be seen as being “unfair” or giving “preferential” treatment. With developing educational technology, the hope is that every student might receive this “preferential” treatment and that it might become the norm rather than the very rare exception.

Wrap up

As Sir Ken Robinson says, let people do something they are good at and that they are passionate about, and good things will follow. Using educational technology in the right way seems to empower faculty to create a learning environment that allows students to do just this. It allows us to teach more students in this way. It empowers students to teach other students. It empowers the professor to think about personalizing the educational process for the student. All of these changes should make it clear that it is not the new technology that is creating all of the excitement in education circles — it is the changes that it enables that has people talking about a revolution in education.

To a large part, it is up to us to act, to try things out, and to learn in the best possible situation. With that as a goal, why shouldn’t we give it a try?

What higher education should be investing in

The problem or, rather, problems

Many universities are in a difficult financial position, with falling state appropriations, pressure from the public to reduce tuition, a worsening demographic profile here in the U.S. related to traditional college-age students, and increasing competition from online and locally-based remote campuses who are attempting to poach the university’s traditional market.

Okay, so it’s clear that cash in-flows will not be trending up any time soon. Further, the cost side doesn’t look much better.

The usual solution

University leaders are faced with the question of what to invest in. What should they spend money on in order to ensure their survival? This is the focus of the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Richard A. DeMillo titled “So you’ve got technology. So what?” What colleges have been doing is investing in technologies in the service of classrooms such as learning management systems. DeMillo doesn’t think this is such a good idea:

The classroom is the handmaiden of a factory model of higher education, and the colleges that are truly strategically focused are already abandoning that model. Their technology investments will be aimed at reinventing education.

In characterizing the effects of technology on higher education, he draws the useful, though not uncommon, analogy between that industry and retailing. Executives at retailers such as Montgomery Wards (and, now, Borders and Sears and JCPenney and, now possibly Best Buy) thought that all of their infrastructure that supported their personal relationships with their customers would protect them from new competitive threats. (How is that working out?) Recent troubles at (irony!) Best Buy and Walmart are putting a lie to that position.

Complications

It turns out that their past investments, far from being an asset as change is buffeting the industry, are actually a drag on the university as it confronts change:

  • All of that physical infrastructure will have to be maintained. This is at the expense of investments that it might make in technologies and people that might support online or remote education.
  • Much of that physical infrastructure could only be re-purposed at great expense, so universities are probably stuck with it. This will encourage them to continue to offer traditional classes. This will distract their leadership from the actions and decisions that need to be made to commit them further to an online model.
  • Traditional classes have to be taught by faculty. These faculty have only a limited amount of attention and time to spend on teaching classes. If some students are in-person and some (extra, additional, add-on) students are remote, then faculty will not have an incentive to design a class that is optimal in any way for the remote students. They will have pressure to service those sitting in the classroom right in front of them, and this will probably be at the expense of the remote students.
  • Their faculty also do research. Unless that research is valued by students, then the whole research infrastructure maintained by the universities will be a further drag on the university, further increasing its costs. This is not a problem when all of the major players engage in research; however, when some viable alternatives have a mix of activities that doesn’t include research, then the value of that research can be cast in stark relief, and it’s possible that the outcome will not be what research-focused faculty desire.

Let’s assume that, like retailing (and many, many other industries), education is coming up on a time of radical change. History has shown us that companies who have attempted to make marginal changes may perform acceptably for a while, or they may go under quite quickly (Circuit City, anyone?), but in any case it will be a tough period in which hard decisions have to be made.

A potentially enlightening piece of information

DeMillo wraps up his article with a comparison:

It has been known for 30 years, for example, that one-on-one tutoring is such a vastly superior mode of instruction that virtually every student’s performance can be moved two standard deviations on standard achievements scales. Incumbents [universities] have inexplicably read this data as a call to invent a classroom that has a similar effect on learning.

Disruptors look at the same data and say, “This has nothing to do with classrooms. Why not use the technology for personalization that matches the performance of a human tutor?” That would not involve new classroom technologies or better learning management systems. It probably does not even require fundamental technical innovation. Instead, it would involve abandoning a business model that overly values selectivity, investment in physical infrastructure, and ineffective use of human capital in favor of a culture of sharing and accessibility in which students are able to use the technology to develop deep and personal ties to instructors and fellow learners.

It is this last sentence that you should really focus on. How might it even be possible to move from the first to the second?

My proposal

So, again, what to do? Where should college presidents, provosts, and deans be directing their investments? I propose a multi-pronged strategy:

Grow remote enrollment as quickly as possible
Universities need to think of remote students as central to their mission. The only way to really drive this home is to increase the numbers so that they are equivalent to, and then larger than, the number of students on campus. This will involve changes in marketing, admissions, staffing, and myriad other areas of the university.
Support remote learning
This really involves at least two main efforts. The first is related to faculty. The skills for teaching a face-to-face class differ from those needed in online classes. Some retraining will be necessary for existing faculty, as well as the recruitment of new faculty. The second is related to technologies that support remote learning. This is a fast moving field, and knowledge is continually advancing related to what is the state of the art. This is going to require continued investments in order to keep up with the competition. Say good-bye to long life cycles, and say hello to annual changes (if not full-fledged reinventions) of courses.
Support the combination of multi-section classes into one
Given that they will be teaching in-person classes for the foreseeable future, they need to address this type of class delivery model. And given that they will be competing with more nimble and less financially encumbered competitors, they are going to have to become more efficient. Thus, no matter the number of students taking a particular class, think of teaching them as one section. Given that scenario, make the investments that improve the teaching of that type of class.
Ignore investments in small classes
Current faculty love teaching these classes, and generally don’t require much coercion in order to get them to teach it. If an investment related to teaching does not support the teaching of extremely large classes (either face-to-face or remote), then don’t make it. Get by with the minimum. Something has to give, and this is it.

This would be a fairly radical prescription for change at most large universities. Can you see it working at your university? If not, how do you see it surviving in the coming decade? What does it need to do…and will that be enough to ensure its survival?

Delivery of blended courses

Higher education administrators and faculty (and students, for that matter) at traditional universities are comfortable thinking about, planning, and participating in face-to-face (F2F) classes. Administrators and faculty for online programs are comfortable thinking about using technology to deliver courses exclusively using technology. When those of us in traditional higher ed have used technology more recently, it has been to capture F2F lectures for later viewing. More extensive, integrated, and nuanced usage is needed in order to take full advantage of the technology and thereby deliver a superior education. We need to develop a more extensive playbook of pedagogies that we are comfortable employing.

When thinking about using educational technologies in a class or across the curriculum, you need to have a playbook of possible approaches available to you so that you can have a better chance of achieving the learning outcomes you desire. For face-to-face teaching, we have a selection — lecture, case discussion, lab work, and mini-lectures interspersed with exercises to name a few. We need to just as comfortable pulling out different approaches when different class set-ups are available to us. The following is an exploration of different technologies that can be used to support different pedagogies.

Playbook of pedagogies

As detailed in my earlier post How to provide a great, lower-cost education, several different teaching approaches are now available to professors:

  • Same time, same place (“synchronous, co-located”)
  • Same time (“synchronous, non-co-located”)
    • single remote place
      • high quality
      • normal quality
    • multiple remote places
      • singles
      • groups
  • Different times (“asynchronous”)

In the following I examine each of these and discuss the general technologies that are applicable to each.

Technologies for pedagogies

I am going to start with the synchronous (and especially a co-located) approach because I am assuming that the blended course will have some of this as part of the class. However, just because it is face-to-face doesn’t mean that technology is now not a part of the equation. Many technologies are in place that can support learning even in this most traditional setup.

Same time (all versions)

Classes in which the teacher and students are all participating at the same time (regardless of location) have lots of available tools. The professor can use MediaSite to record a lecture so that students can watch it later or, if they were not able to attend for whatever reason, watch it for the first time. When giving a lecture or otherwise looking for student responses, tools are available for allowing the professor or student to ask questions. LectureTools, Socrative, and PollEverywhere each have their own take on allowing a professor to ask questions and students to answer. (See my recent post on this topic for more details.) Either TodaysMeet or Twitter (along with TwitterFall) can be used to provide a backchannel that allows students to ask questions during a presentation.

For controlling the presentation while in front of the students, the professor can either use a wireless presentation pointer (e.g., Kensington Wireless Presentation Pointer) or Doceri. Doceri is like a wireless mouse for the iPad but it also allows the presenter to write directly on the screen over the slides (or whatever is on the screen). This software also allows the user to control the computer using the iPad. This software doesn’t enable the professor to necessarily do anything new, but it frees him/her up to move around the classroom more. It does make it easier for the professor to give control of the presentation to a student; all he has to do is give the iPad to the student instead of calling her up to the podium at the front of the classroom. If you want more information about this, then see my video demonstration and explanation.

If the professor is more interested in in-class activities and exercises, then Eggtimer can be useful so that students can better allocate their time usage during class. Another useful tool for in-class activities is a group text editor, and Google Docs provides quite a robust web app for this. (At this time the iPad app is not recommended; work on a laptop if you want to use Google Docs.) Students can work in ad hoc groups while brainstorming or developing an answer to some question, or the professor can assign groups and make the documents available in each person’s Google Drive, giving the right students access to the appropriate documents. Another tool for multi-user access to a shared document is Scribblar. This program is more of a graphical editor where multiple users can draw in a shared space; it also provides a tool for users to text each other and to speak to each other. It allows the import of PDF and PPT files for group editing and commenting. They maintain a set of videos that help demonstrate and explain the program’s operations.

Finally, faculty frequently want to provide “handouts” at the end of class. If these consist of links from around the Web, sqworl provides an easy-to-use tool (for both the professor and the student) for gathering the links and accessing them later. If the professor has text to distribute, then Google Docs can be used to make PDFs or Word documents available to a distribution list (such as the students in a class).

Same time, same place (“synchronous & co-located”)

All of the above applies here.

Same time, single remote place, high quality

It seems that Cisco telepresence has defined this market. To get an idea of what this product can do, look at the images on this page. The idea here is that two groups of people, who can be half-way around the world from each other, can have a nearly-face-to-face conversation over this type of hook-up. The two limitations are 1) high cost, and 2) each side has to have compatible hardware and telecommunications capability.

This approach is one that is made at the organizational level. All other decisions would be made after this choice because it changes what options you have available to you, such as size of the classroom and interaction strategies.

Same time, single remote place, normal quality

In addition to the information under “Same time”, the professor can use Google+ Hangouts On Air to broadcast his lecture or discussion (or whatever) live to YouTube. This web app also can record the broadcast for whomever you want to watch at a later time (with the same controls as any other YouTube video).

The real difference between this setup and the one to follow is how you treat the class. In this case, you can treat them as a group, and give them things to do as a group. They would generally know how to act and what to do because communication among the students would not be electronically mediated in any way.

Same time, multiple remote places (singles vs. groups), normal quality

In addition to the information under “Same time”, the professor can use Google+ Hangouts On Air to broadcast his lecture or discussion or whatever live to YouTube. This web app also can record the broadcast for whomever you want to watch (with the same controls as any other YouTube video).

The difference in having students dispersed as singles or in groups (either groups of students in dorm rooms or in offices or wherever) is, again, how you treat the class. As singles, you would have to think very carefully about how you might assign small group activities during the class itself. As groups, this would be natural and, actually, to be expected given that the setup so easily supports and calls out for these interactions. The students will be having them anyway; why not integrate them into the class?

Different times

The key to this approach is to think of how you can personalize what the student is going to do. If they are going to watch the video or do the exercise by themselves, then do all you can to take advantage of this flexibility. You aren’t addressing a group of students — think about addressing each student one at a time. Design the activities with this in mind.

I recently wrote a post describing several useful tools for video, movies, and screencasting (including Screencast-O-Matic, Qwiki, and YouTube). I also wrote a post on assessment tools that would be useful for this type of approach (including TED Ed and Flubaroo). In addition to all of these, both GarageBand and Screencast (for broadcasting via RSS feed) are useful for creating and disseminating a podcast.

Out-of-class approaches

Yesterday I posted an analysis of different approaches to communicating with your students when they are not currently sitting in front of you or remotely attending a live lecture.. In that post I consider the following approaches:

I certainly have my favorites but you have to consider your goals before you choose one (or multiple) of the above.

Class assignments have also changed with newly available technology; here are a few options:

  • Wiki
  • Curation tools
  • Mind mapping
  • Video
  • VoiceThread

See my recent post on this topic for a more in-depth discussion. This is a quite diverse set that provides many more alternatives than simply writing text reports and handing them in. These assignments can demand a different level of creativity from the students, but the faculty member has to be prepared to work with this diversity.

Finally, Google+ Hangout can be used for remote office hours. It provides a fairly seamless and straight-forward means of communicating among up to 10 people.

Conclusion

You can see in the above that the faculty member has lots of choices available to him/her when the move is made to a blended class. The school’s culture and technology will determine some of the choices; however, the professor’s knowledge of the choices and level of comfort with the technology will also be a large factor in how effective the class ends up being for all participants. My recommendation is to simply try out a couple of the above in a class this year. Just one day, just one approach. Work with some faculty and computing services support staff beforehand to give you some confidence that you can carry it off. However, at some point you are just going to have to do it!

Best of luck on your journey!

Communicating electronically with your class

One aspect of managing a class that has changed significantly — or, at least, has a great potential to change significantly with little effort — is communication with students outside of class. When I first started teaching, we didn’t have any real means of communicating with students outside of class. Eventually we could use email, and then we graduated to using the course Web site. Now we have both those choices plus several more.

My preferences are to use a tool that reaches a student’s cell phone with minimal effort. This makes it much easier to reach into the student’s world. Any time you require that the student get out of his/her comfort zone, then the odds drop of communicating with the student in a timely manner. This preference of mine definitely shapes my views on technology usage.

The problem here, as with so many things in higher ed, is that the expectations and desires of students aren’t inline with those of faculty. Let’s look at the arguments for and against some of the available approaches.

Email

Email

My students use email very little. The only time they seem to use it outside of class-related usage is when they are looking for a job. There is something to be said for preparing a student for the workplace, but there’s also something to be said for reaching the student in a timely fashion. I try to use email as little as possible. Recently, I have used it to communicate grade information to the student because I had a program that made that option easy. Other than that, I have tended away from email usage.

Forums (discussion boards)

I was a big user of discussion boards in the late 1990s and very early 2000s; however, my students never were. If they had a question to send me, they sent it via email or came to office hours. If they saw questions from other students, they waited for me to answer them. Very very rarely did students participate on a discussion board if they didn’t have to. I have basically stopped using these for that reason. They are a good idea in theory, but in practice my students simply don’t use them.

Course management system

Here at the University of Michigan we use CTools, which is an implementation of Sakai. This is a perfectly capable, functional, and traditional course management system. As such it provides all sorts of tools for communicating with students:

Announcements
The professor posts information that can be read by all students
Forums
Discussed above
Assignments
Allows students to submit documents in fulfillment of a specific assignment
Chat Room
For live communication among class participants
Drop Box
Allows students and the professor to share documents privately
Messages
For sending a direct message to a site participant
Polls
For collecting information from the class as a whole on a given question
RSS feeds

These are all perfectly reasonable and useful tools that have an underlying assumption that students go to the course Web site. If students don’t go to the Web site, then none of this is useful. So, the question is how to get them to the Web site? If I use the CMS, then I need to use it in combination with some other tool that will alert students to something they need to do or see.

Blog

Another approach that I continually come back to is the use of a blog as a course communication center. Students can subscribe to the blog RSS feed so that any post made on the blog appears in their RSS feed reader. Thus, a student would not have to be at the course blog in order to get information that I have posted. The only problem with this: students rarely use an RSS feed reader. While this approach fits with my way of reading (I’m a huge reader of blogs in my RSS feed reader) and writing (I’m writing this blog, aren’t I?), it just doesn’t work for most of my students.

Twitter

Twitter

This tool has a lot going for it. Students and professors can send private messages to each other. All class members can send messages that can be viewed by all other class members. Professors can announce information to the whole class. Students can ask the professor a question (privately or publicly) and the professor can provide an answer (again, privately or publicly). In addition, for many students this will become an important communication channel in their work lives; giving them some training and experience in using this tool before they start their job would be a good thing.

A couple of problems with this is that messages are limited to 140 characters, and messages can be missed in the general twitter deluge of information. If users go to the trouble of ensuring that messages from a certain user are forwarded to the user’s text messaging account, then that mitigates this concern somewhat; however, users still have to search for the class hashtag in order to find all information related to a specific class. If they don’t, then it’s possible that they will miss something. One possible solution to this problem would be to create a twitter list for all of the participants in the class. This would ensure that all of the tweets from all of the people on the list appear in one place.

Twitter is definitely in my planned communication arsenal. I will be using the #bit330 hashtag and the @bit330 account in the fall to communicate with my students. I expect that they will follow this account and I will follow their accounts. I used this three years ago when students weren’t really that into twitter usage. Now that it’s more integrated into many of their lives, I assume that it will go better than it did back then (not that it was bad or anything).

Remind101

Text messages with Remind101

Another (currently free) text messaging-based solution is provided by Remind101. With this platform professors can text students but not vice versa, all without having to know each others’ phone numbers. You can see a demo video on this page and an extensive FAQ on this page.

This platform addresses is like the approach taken by twitter except that it is private to the class, students can’t send messages, and the messages are segregated to their own channel (i.e., not integrated with the whole twitter feed). It’s a really straight-forward solution. The professor gets a special code for the class, and then he/she shares this code with the students. Whenever the professor wants to make an announcement, then he/she sends a message to the Remind101 phone number that includes the class code. Everyone who has registered with that code then receives the message.

If you have routinely used email to send out announcements and found that students don’t get them in time, then consider this as a solution if you don’t want to adopt twitter.

Conclusion

For me, email is a fallback option; it is available but it isn’t anything that I want to use. I especially don’t rely on it any more for time-sensitive communications. I have basically stopped using forums, and will continue to ignore them, until I hear of some practices and accompanying technological changes that I can implement that somehow makes this tool more attractive to students.

Both course management systems and blogs are okay, for what they do, but they don’t reach students where they live. For me, the drawback of Remind101 is that it doesn’t provide a channel for students to communicate with each other or for them to see communications from other students; there can be much value in this kind of shared group communication channel. I plan on using twitter for announcements and to point students to a specific URL (many times within the CMS) that contains more information. This way I can take advantage of the technologies within the CMS and use twitter to draw students to the CMS in a way that is convenient for them.

I’m sure that I have missed some other tools currently available, and I’m equally sure that new approaches will be available within a year. But, for now, I hope the above analysis provides you some food for thought when planning your classes in the upcoming year.

Digital and multimedia alternatives to traditional written reports

It used to be so much simpler. When asking a student to display mastery of some material, a professor would ask for a 10 page paper. The student would research the topic, type up the contents, maybe include an image or graph, add the bibliography, and turn the paper in. The professor would walk out of class with a stack of papers to grade. This was all so predictable.

Well, not any more. The opportunities for displaying mastery are probably limited most by the professor’s imagination more than either the students’ abilities or the technical tools. Here I will go through some of the ideas for new types of projects that have crossed my mind recently as I have been planning my courses.

Wiki

I have used Wikidot to host my course Web site for the last five years or so. It’s very stable and has a ton of features; see their education page for more details. But I have also used it as a way for students to write reports. I have been ecstatic with the results. Take a look at this one on the U.S. coffee industry as an example of some particularly amazing work. Here are the advantages of using a wiki for my assignment:

  • Students could easily link to current news stories.
  • Students could easily include photos and videos that were appropriate for their topic.
  • Students could write this work that it was going to be a public good when they finished it; on the day the project was due, they would turn their wiki from being private to being public. The report became something that anyone could look at as an example of their work. This definitely provided some motivation.
  • Students could amass a lot of information, but they would also have to learn to organize this information in a comprehensible manner.

Let’s consider this last point a bit more. The wiki tool gives students a lot of options for addressing this problem of how to organize additional information they have gathered. In a paper, students have three choices: footnote, table, or appendix. With hyperlinking (to new pages or within an existing page) and tabs, wikis provide more dramatic and (potentially) more effective tools for organizing information.

Curation tools

If the professor is interested in having a student follow a topic over a period of time (a month or so), then the curation tools that are currently out there provide some really easy-to-use tools for collecting and organizing information. LiveBinder is one such tool; you can learn more on this page. (Here is one example.) They promote themselves as “your 3-ring binder for the Web”, and this is quite appropriate. It’s a tool for gathering resources and putting them into categories. It’s quite utilitarian in nature but these binders are easy to work with.

Scoop.It provides a completely different experience. Think of this tool as providing a way for students (or you) to gather Web-based resources on one particular topic. Here is their Scoop.It page on Scoop.It itself. You can see that it is uncategorized, simply providing an attractive page of articles that they have gathered on a single topic. I could see producing a Scoop.It page as being part of a student’s assignment as a way of getting the student to understand that the topic they are covering is a living, changing thing (whatever it might be).

Network-drawing or mindmapping

Pearltrees example

Instead of writing about a topic, the professor might ask students to create a mindmap about a topic. These tools have gotten much better in the last couple of years. (Some of them are free while others provide very low rates for academic users.) They each make it quite easy to draw networks of related concepts, but each tool is somewhat different.

PearlTrees is a tool for gathering URLs from around the Web. This works by clicking on a bookmarklet in your browser, and then this “pearl” is added to their personal network. The student can then go to the network and re-organize the page.

Spicy Nodes exampleMindmeister example

SpicyNodes feels more like a writing or composition tool. This is a tool for sitting down, thinking, and creating; it’s not something that feels like it could be thrown-together. The “nodes” in this network can be text, simple HTML, URLs, or graphics.

Finally, MindMeister provides the ability for students to work in groups without worrying about stepping on each other’s electronic toes. Here are some education examples. While here the user can add graphics, the focus is clearly on the thoughts and organization of ideas.

Video

The tools for creating videos are widely available and cheap. If you assign a group of students to create a video, the probability of one of them having a smart phone that can take video approaches 100% for any group of 2 or more. Almost every laptop comes with a web cam. I’m going to write an entry on this soon, but there is all kinds of free software available for producing videos:

Professors should think really carefully before they don’t assign videos during a class. It provides a different way of increasing student interaction with a topic, and might get them to think in a different way about how to organize their thoughts than they would otherwise.

VoiceThread

VoiceThread is a unique multimedia collaboration tool. It allows multiple users to collaborate or comment on a video or PDF (or whatever) in multiple different ways. You really should look at their features page.

The question here becomes how to use this tool in a class. The professor could assign a video clip to a group of students and get them to create a commentary on it. These could then be shared to the whole class as a way to get a classroom discussion started. Another alternative would be before every class assigning different groups of students a specific article; they would then be assigned to point out its strengths and weaknesses and how it could be improved. Again, this could be distributed to the class as a whole for discussion. Finally, there’s no reason that these need to be short videos or be the result of a limited amount of work. Students could use their creativity to figure out how to use this tool to present multiple sides or viewpoints to an on-going controvery in a field.

I think the possibilities with this tool are extensive; personally, I need to adjust my thinking to this new way of working. I’m hoping that you’ll hear more about this from me later.

Lessons from The Boss about teaching

It works for The Boss and it works for me

Bradford Times on flickr took this photo; Creative Commons attrib-noncommercial.

David Brooks recently wrote “The power of the particular” (NYTimes, June 26, 2012). In this article he tries to explain how it is that Bruce Springsteen (aka, The Boss) is so wildly popular in Europe with such a young crowd.

No, I’m not going all “Entertainment Tonight” on you. I found his analysis related to part of my theory of teaching. Brooks explains how we all have a need to create detailed (sometimes imaginary) worlds as a way of orienting ourselves in the real world. We are also attracted to these detailed imaginary worlds — think Tolkein’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, Tupac Shakur’s Compton, or Springsteen’s Jersey.

Thus, paradoxically, Springsteen’s very localness attracts him to people around the world. As recounted in the article, tens of thousands of Spaniards can be seen at his concerts deliriously singing “Born in the USA” at the top of their lungs. Oh, really? You were? Probably not, and probably won’t be there any time soon, but these people relate to his world in a deep way.

Brooks takes the following lesson from this:

The whole experience makes me want to pull aside politicians and business leaders and maybe everyone else and offer some pious advice: Don’t try to be everyman. Don’t pretend you’re a member of every community you visit. Don’t try to be citizens of some artificial globalized community. Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your own past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.

This sounds exactly right, but I think it can and should also be applied to teaching. This very much echoes what I tell young professors who ask my advice for how they should act in class. I have always told them to be true to their personality. If they like dumb jokes, then tell dumb jokes. If they love talking about their family or hometown, then do so. If they are hyperactive, then let that come through. If they have a particular fondness (or disdain) for a particular part of their field, then let that be apparent. They should let out their personality.

In short, let the students see you as a whole person. Only then will they treat you as a person, listen to you as a person, and truly hear you if you have to give them some positive reinforcement or strong critiques. They will be able to recognize the words as coming from you, a fully-formed individual, and not from some one-dimensional automaton who does not have their best interests at heart.

I have always considered this to be my greatest strength as a professor. I’m not the greatest lecturer and I’m no treat to look at and I’m not the world’s smartest person, but I do care about my students and I let them see my personality. It allows us to have more meaningful conversations, relationships, and — maybe surprisingly until you reflect on it — learning.

If you let the students into your world, they will let you into theirs. And then true trust, teaching, and learning can begin to flourish.

Higher education sounds an awful lot like Borders right now

An old Borders location in San Diego, CA

In the June 26, 2012 New York Times, a great article titled “Public universities see familiar fight at Virginia”. In describing recent events at the University of Virginia, author Tamar Lewin perfectly captures the difficult situation in which highered finds itself.

Here is ex-President, rumored to soon be reinstated President, Teresa Sullivan commenting on online education:

Dr. Sullivan said that online education was no panacea — and indeed, was “surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential and unless carefully managed can undermine the quality of instruction.”

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Let’s see, where have I heard these words before? Oh, yes:

  • As a leading retailer, Sears has found that selling clothes online is no panacea and, indeed, is surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential (compared to our vast network of stores) and, unless carefully managed, can undermine the personal service that we provide our customers.
  • As a leading bookstore, Borders has found that selling books online is no panacea and, indeed, is surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential (compared to our vast and growing network of stores) and, unless carefully managed, can undermine the personal, in-depth, knowledgeable service that we provide our customers.

Not a good sign for highered, for sure. The following is a great description of how highered leadership works, and provides insight into the difficulties people in those positions face:

And while she agreed that she is, indeed, an incrementalist, she stressed that that did not mean she lacked a strategic plan.

“Corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university,” she said. “Sustained change with buy-in does work.”

Many public university presidents, past and present, said that those on the boards of the leading universities — typically business executives without much experience in academia — do not always understand the complexities of leading a large research university, and the degree to which a president can succeed only by persuading.

The UVA board tried to move quickly — too quickly, it turns out — but I wouldn’t be surprised if the next board is successful in getting its way because the situation is becoming untenable for too many institutions. Faculty salaries are going to have to be cut drastically; classes are going to have to increase in size; and educational technologies are going to have to be deployed (effectively, let’s hope) on a fairly extensive scale. Difficult choices have to be made. Reality must be faced, and soon. Getting a president reinstated doesn’t change any of that.