More on the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit (or not)” Project Before Corridors

This post is both notes on my research so far (for myself and anyone else who cares), and also a “teaser” for Corridors: the 2019 Great Lakes Writing and Rhetoric Conference.  I’m looking forward to this year’s event for a couple of different reasons, including the fact that I’ve never been on campus at Oakland University.

Here’s a link to my slides— nothing fancy.

Anyway: as I wrote about back in June, I am on leave right now to get started on a brand-new research project officially called “Investigating Classroom Technology Bans Through the Lens of Writing Studies,” but which is more informally known as the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit” project. I give a little more detail in that June post, but basically, I have been reading a variety of studies about the impact of devices– mostly laptops, but also cellphones– in classrooms (mostly lecture halls) and how they negatively impact students (mostly on tests). I’ve always thought these studies seemed kind of bullshitty, but I don’t know a lot of research in composition and rhetoric that refutes these arguments. So I wanted to read that scholarship and then try to do something to apply and replicate that scholarship in writing classrooms.

So far, I’ve mostly just been reading academic articles in psychology and education journals. It’s always challenging to step just a little outside my comfort zone and do some reading in a field that is not my own. If nothing else, it reminds me why it’s important to be empathetic with undergraduates who complain about reading academic articles: it’s hard to try figure out what’s going on in that Burkean parlor when pretty much all you can do is look through the window instead of being in the room. For me, that’s most evident in the descriptions of the statistics. I look at the explanations and squiggly lines of various formulas and just mutter “I’m gonna have to trust you on that.” And as a slight but important tangent: one of the reasons why we don’t do this kind of research in writing studies is because most people in the field feel the same about math and stats.

The other thing that has been quite striking for me is the assumptions in these articles on how the whole enterprise of higher education works. Almost all of these studies take it as a completely unproblematic given that education means a lecture hall with a professor delivering knowledge to students who are expected to (and who know how to) pay attention and who also are expected to (and who know how to) take notes on the content delivered by the lecturer. Success is measured by an end of the course (or end of the experiment) test. That’s that. In other words, most of this research assumes an approach to education that is more or less the opposite of what we assume in writing studies.

I have also figured out there are some important and subtle differences to the arguments about why laptops and cell phones ought to be banned (or at least limited) in classrooms. As I wrote back in June, the thing that perhaps motivated me the most to do this research is the argument that laptops ought to be banned from lecture halls because handwritten notes are “better.” This is the argument in the frequently cited Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer “The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.”  I think this is complete bullshit. This is a version of the question that used to circulate in the computers and writing world, whether it was “better” for student to write by hand or to type, a question that’s been dismissed as irrelevant for a long time. But as someone who is so bad at writing things by hand, I personally resent the implication that people who have good handwriting are somehow “better.” Fortunately, I think Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky, and Katherine A. Rawson replication of that study, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” does an excellent job refuting this “handwriting is better” bullshit.

Then there’s the issue of “distraction” that results when students trying to do things right are disturbed/put off by other students fiddling around with their laptops or cellphones. This is the argument in Faria Sana, Tina Weston, Nicholas J. Cepeda “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers.” They outline a clever and complicated methodology that involved arranging students so a laptop was (or wasn’t) in their line of sight and also by having some of those students acting as “confederates” in the study by purposefully doing stuff that is distracting. One issue I have with this research is it is a little dated, having been published in 2013. Maybe it’s just me, but I think laptops in classes were a little more novel (and thus distracting) a few years ago than they are now. Regardless though, one of the concluding points these folks make is that laptops shouldn’t be banned because the benefits outweigh the problems.

There are a lot of studies focusing on the multitasking and divided attention issues: that is, devices and the things students look at on those devices distract them from the class, which again typically means paying attention to the lecture. I find the subtly different degrees of multitasking kind of interesting, and there is a long history in psychology of research about attention, distraction, and multitasking. For example, Arnold L. Glass and Mengxue Kang in “Dividing attention in the classroom reduces exam performance” argue (among other things) that there’s a kind of delayed effect with students multitasking/dividing attention in a lecture hall setting. Students seem to be able to comprehend a lecture or whatever in the midst of their multitasking, but they don’t perform as well on tests at the end of the semester. 

Interestingly– and I have a feeling this is more because of what I haven’t read/studied yet– most of these studies I’ve seen on the multitasking/dividing attention angle don’t separate tasks like email or texting from social media apps. That’s something I want to read about/study more because it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference in how applications like Facebook and Twitter distract since these platforms are specifically designed to grab attention from other tasks.

And then there’s the category of research I wasn’t even aware was happening, and I guess I’d describe that as the different perceptions/attitudes about classroom technology. This is mostly based on surveys and interviews, and (maybe not surprising) students tend to believe the use of devices is no big deal and/or “a matter of personal autonomy,” while instructors have a more complex view. Interestingly, the recommendation a lot of these studies make is students and teachers ought to talk about this as a way of addressing the problem.

So, that’s what I “know” so far. Where I’m going next, I think:

  • I think the first tangible (not just reading) research part of this project is going to be to design a survey of both faculty and instructors– probably just for first year writing, but maybe beyond that– about their attitudes on using these devices. If I dig a bit, I might be able to use some of the same questions that come up in the research I’ve read.
  • We’ll see what kind of feedback/participation I get from those surveys, but my hope is also to use a survey as a way of recruiting some instructors to participate in something a little more case study/observational in the winter term, maybe even trying to replicate some of the “experimental” research on note taking in a small class setting. That would happen in Winter 2020.
  • I need to keep reading, especially about the ways in which social media specifically functions here. It’s one thing for a student (or really anyone) to be bored in a badly run lecture hall and thus allowing themselves to drift into checking their messages, email, working on homework for other classes, checking sports, etc. I think it’s a different thing for a student/any user to feel the need to check Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever.
  • I can see a need to dive more deeply into thinking/writing about the ways in which this research circulates in MSM and then back into the classroom. As I wrote in my proposal and back in June, I think there are a lot of studies– done with lecture hall students in very specific experimental settings– that get badly translated into MSM articles about why people should put their laptops and cell phones away in classrooms or meetings.  Those MSM articles get read by well-meaning faculty who then apply the MSM’s misunderstanding of the original study as a justification for banning devices even though the original research doesn’t support that. Oh, and perhaps not surprising, but the tendency of the vast majority of the MSM pieces I’ve seen on tech bans is basically reinforcing the very worn theme of “the problem with the kids today.”
  • I also wonder about this attitude difference and maybe students have a point: maybe these technologies are a matter of personal autonomy and personal choice. This was an idea put into my head while chatting about all this with Derek Mueller over not very good Chinese food this summer, and I still haven’t thought it through yet, but if students have a right to their own language use in writing classrooms, do they also have a right to their own technology use? When and when not?
  • And even though this is kind of where I began this project (so I guess I’m once again showing my bias here), a lot of the solution that motivates faculty to ban laptops and devices from their classrooms in the first place really comes back to better pedagogy. Teaching students how to take notes with a laptop immediately comes to mind. I’m also reading (slowly but surly) James M. Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Teaching right now, and there’s a clear connection to his advice and this project too. So much of the complaints about students being distracted by their devices really comes back to bad teaching.

I predicted the demise of ASU’s Global Freshman Academy MOOC four years ago

From Inside Higher Ed comes “Arizona State Moves On From Global Freshman Academy.”  ASU and edX are “pivoting” away from the GFA and they give a variety of dubious reasons as to why. The real reason– which I first predicted back in April 2015 and which I unpack here a bit– is because nobody wanted it.  (To be fair, I was far from the only person who predicted this outcome).

But just to back up: the GFA rolled out in 2015 as a novel approach to MOOCs. Students could register for and complete a MOOC for free, and if they completed the work and paid a $45 processing/identity verification fee, they could then could have their work evaluated and/or sit for a test. Then, assuming the student passed, they could pay $200 per credit to ASU for transferrable academic credit. The goal was to roll this program out so that by 2016, students (they were expecting several thousand) could take their entire freshman year through this program and enroll at ASU as a sophomore– or transfer those credits someplace else.

Long story short, it didn’t work. Not at all. Here’s a quote from this most recent article:

Of 373,000 people who enrolled, only 8,090 completed a course with a grade of C or better, just over 2 percent of all students enrolled. Around 1,750 students (0.47 percent) paid to receive college credit for completing a course, and fewer than 150 students (0.028 percent) went on to pursue a full degree at ASU.

Anyone paying attention saw this coming. In December 2015, IHE ran “Less than 1%,” which was about how less than one percent of those eligible paid the identity/processing fee, and even less than that actually paid for credit. In 2016 at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in Houston, I went to a panel about the GFA and first year writing, and when I asked about enrollments back then, the presenters (all folks who were teaching in the MOOC and enthusiastic about it) kind of dodged the question. For my book, More than a Moment, I tried to contact someone at GFA in 2017 to find out if the enrollment numbers had changed; they never got back to me, which I took as meaning “no, the enrollments were still extremely low.”

Now, this latest article says ASU is trying to pivot toward a program called “Earned Admission” which “allows students to earn credit toward their freshman year at low cost.” ASU says the shift toward this “Earned Admission” program is working.  A quote:

The Earned Admission pathway allows any person over 22 years old to gain admission to ASU if they complete four courses and earn a 2.75 GPA.

“At this point, the combined number of students who’ve earned admission to the university, including employees from Starbucks and other corporate partners, is around 400 students,” said [Philip Regier, university dean for educational initiatives at ASU and CEO of the university’s central enterprise unit EdPlus].

So far the students who have taken courses through Earned Admission have demonstrated much greater motivation than those who studied through Global Freshman Academy, said Regier.

“We’ve learned that students need to have some skin in the game,” he said.

I guess this is good, but it’s probably not surprising that older “adult” students who want a traditional degree from ASU who are then told “take this program, and you can get in” indeed have some motivational “skin in the game.”  But honestly, this seems like a lame explanation as to why the GFA failed, and it also seems to me this program is addressing problems with the admissions process which have nothing to do with MOOCs or any other delivery method.

I can also say there was nothing special or particularly good about these GFA courses. I write about this in some detail in the book, but I attempted their “College Algebra and Problem Solving” MOOC and failed at it miserably.

In any event,  this latest news about the demise of the GFA proves is that a lot of the points I’m trying to make in More than a Moment are still basically true (which again, maybe this means this book is still relevant):

  • MOOCs are not at all new but are following in the tradition of innovation in distanced ed, from correspondence to TV/radio courses to “traditional” online courses. Had MOOC providers studied this history a bit, they would have realized that the primary audience for these kinds of alternative delivery opportunities has always been non-traditional students (older people with some or no previous college who now wanted to take a class or two) and people who already had an undergraduate degree and who are either seeking another educational experience (a “certificate,” a “nanodegree,” whatever) that might help them advance in a job, or they are seeking “edutainment.”
  • The big for-profit MOOC providers had little prior experience in distance education and all came out of super-elite institutions. They thought they had “invented” online teaching and seemed completely unaware that there are hundreds of “opportunity-granting” universities (like EMU) and community colleges and the like who had lots of experience in online pedagogy and who had been doing this work successfully for a long time. This is extremely true with this GFA initiative because (as Matt Reed pointed out when this program was first announced), $200 per credit for an ASU gen ed class isn’t worth it, especially when a student can take a similarly transferrable gen ed course– and with an actual human instructor!– at a community college for half the price.
  • MOOC providers were trying to sell traditional college students (late teens/early 20-somethings, along with their families) an experience that they didn’t want. We’ve known for a long time now that traditional students are not trying deciding on a higher education experience based on picking the cheapest option available. Rather, traditional college students pick their colleges based on a combination of “the best” school they could get into (in terms of academics, overall reputation, and the track record of graduates getting good jobs), the social life of the university, and then costs. The analogy I give in the book is MOOC providers were trying to sell super-cheap fast food when most of the customers in this market want the best full service meal they can afford.
  • While content scales, education does not– at least it doesn’t scale well enough and in most classes, particularly classes where there is a lot of interaction between participants (first year writing immediately comes to mind) or where the students need extra help. I can tell you from personal experience (and I describe this in some detail in my book) that the GFA MOOC in remedial algebra wasn’t a whole lot more than an interesting textbook. And again, if all it took to learn something was content– like a textbook– then organized education at all levels would have disappeared hundreds of years ago with the rise of print.
  • MOOC providers (and most pro-MOOC pundits) severely underestimated the established breadth and depth of higher education. Education entrepreneurs are constantly telling us  higher education is ripe for the same kind of “disruption” that has happened in other content-heavy “industries” like journalism. But given the long history of most universities in the US and the world, a better comparison would be with institutions like the Catholic church. Further, the minimum “certification” that’s long been necessary for entry into most middle-class/upper-middle-class careers in the U.S. has been a bachelors degree from a recognized university– and the “better” the university, the more valuable the degree. So no amount of free courses or nano-degrees or certificates or whatever else MOOC providers could offer were going to convince students it was a worthwhile option to the bachelors degree, regardless of the price (even free!)

But like I said, I go into a whole lot more detail on all this in More than a Moment.