Category: Scholarship

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Even MORE MOOC MOOC MOOC! Chronicle article explains the business model

And once again, here I am near the lake, checking in on my online class (which I like to think of as SO-POC– that is, a “small online partly open class” because anyone out there is welcome to visit, join the discussion, do the assignments, whatever, but I won’t grade your work or give you credit if you aren’t enrolled at EMU), and checking my email when I see this from The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses.”

CHE obtained a copy of the contract between Coursera and one of its partners, the University of Michigan.  Of course, even what’s here is kind of a “let’s throw stuff against the wall and see if it sticks” sort of plan/model.   To quote:

Coursera is following an approach popular among Silicon Valley start-ups: Build fast and worry about money later. Venture capitalists—and even two universities—have invested more than $22-million in the effort already. “Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow,” says Daphne Koller, the company’s other co-founder, who is also a professor at Stanford.

Here’s the part of the contract that talks specifically about making money; there are eight ideas listed so far:

  • Certificates, which a student would purchase some kind of certificate or badge or whatever (presumably after completing a course, which is a different model than tuition, which is paid up-front) that isn’t actually credit but which the student post some place.  As in on their LinkedIn account, they have a “badge” that says they passed Listening to World Music.  (BTW, since that one starts in 3 days and I like world music, I might sign up).
  • Secure assessments, which is basically the same thing as certification– students would take (and pay for) some kind of test.
  • Employee recruiting.  This one is kind of interesting; basically, this would allow potential employers to “data mine” Coursera looking for successful students based not on a degree but on skills students might demonstrate through one of their courses.
  • Employee or University Screening.  I think what this means is that if I was applying for a job where my knowledge of World Music was critical, a company could use my score in the “Listening to World Music” course as a way of making a hiring decision.  It also means that if a university wanted to give an entering student a waiver for something, they might be able to use performance in that class– in other words, I wouldn’t get credit at such-and-such a university maybe, but I wouldn’t have to take a gen ed class in World Music.  Or something.

Just to stop here for a second:  it seems to me that each of these business plans depends on the rest of the business world decides that it is going to validate and/or accept MOOCs as a legitimate educational/certifying enterprise.  Given the current reliance of the corporate world for a bachelors degree as an entry point into white collar jobs, that seems like kind of a bold assumption to me.

Anyway, back to the list:

  • Human-provided or manual grading.  To quote, “Company will provide access to (paid) human tutoring, grading, or other forms of human academic support.”  I’m not sure I understand this, but I think it means that maybe students would take these courses for free but they’d pay some kind of tutor.
  • Corporate/university enterprise model.  Basically, Coursera would sell access to its courses to companies for in-house training and/or to “non-University academic institutions (e.g. community colleges)” (swear to God, that is a quote) with the goal of offering a high quality course at a lower cost than these non-University institutions.

So, let’s dwell on this for a moment.  The first idea is corporate clients would contract with Coursera for training.  This isn’t that far-fetched to me, but “training” is not the sort of thing that elite institutions do, and it certainly isn’t what’s likely to happen in that World Music course.  Rather, most businesses are looking for employee training along the lines of what’s going on lynda.com or similar sites– and by the way, those places are making money and they rely on an individual instructor/contractor model, not an elite university model.

The second idea is to sell these “quality courses” to community colleges.  First, the way this is presented in this contract is patronizing at best, but second and more important, there’s already a large enterprise doing this at community colleges and universities alike. It’s called “the textbook industry.”  Now, Coursera courses might turn out to be great, but like textbooks, they don’t teach themselves.

  • Sponsorship, which is simply running ads along the classes.  I don’t see how that makes anyone a ton of money, though that’s Google’s business model.
  • Tuition, which is basically reverting to the model that exists for higher education right now.

Two last thoughts here.  First, I am certainly not a business person and the people starting this all seem like smart cookies to me.  But I have to say this is starting to look like pets.com

Second, I think this passage from the CHE piece is spot on:

When I (meaning Jeffrey Young, the CHE writer) showed the Coursera contract to Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies, he found it “ironic” that major universities are embracing online education when they have been dismissive of earlier efforts by for-profit companies like the University of Phoenix.

“These are two of the most arrogant types of institutions—Silicon Valley companies intersecting with these elite academic programs,” he says. “Neither of them considers that anyone else has come to this place before they’ve arrived. They say, We’re here now, so now it’s sort of legitimate and for real.”

I guess time will tell if that arrogance is going to pay off.

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More MOOC MOOC MOOC craziness

I’m quasi-vacationing this week (that is, I’m away from home at a lovely vacation spot near Traverse City, but I am still teaching online and doing a ton of work stuff so am therefore not really “unplugged” from it all), and while I haven’t been keeping up with my RSS feed too religiously, it sure seems like the MOOC stuff just keeps on coming.  For example:

  • In the New York Times comes  “Universities Reshaping Education on the Web.”  MOOCs are discussed as a “tsunami,” a “game changer,” an experiment too big to ignore, despite the fact that there is no evidence that these things will work, there’s no decent business model, and there isn’t even a good definition here as to what a MOOC actually is.
  • Coursera is adding a dozen more institutions, and Audrey Watters rounds up some other MOOC news.
  • The University of Washington is trying to offer “enhanced MOOCs” that might ultimately grant credit.  Or not.
  • UVa is getting involved in this and apparently not getting involved early enough was one of the reasons why their board fired the president.  Well, before unfiring her.
  • Alan “cog dog” Levine has a lovely song about all this (and the graphic I have borrowed above, too).  And of course the great Stephen Downes links to smart stuff here and here.

It goes on and on and on!  Anyway, a few quick thoughts for now:

  • I am far from against online education or incorporating new tools into learning, and I am also not at all against trying to innovative and even seemingly counter-intuitive approaches to pedagogy.  These kinds of free-for-all, DIY, learning for the sake of learning communities are awesome in and of themselves.  But they’re not a good way to “grant credit,” they’re not a way to pay the bills of higher education, and even the enthusiasts haven’t gotten that part of this MOOC thing worked out.
  • This is looking more and more like the 90s tech bubble where all of a sudden tech companies were claiming that they didn’t need to worry about sustainability of making a profit anymore.  Or maybe worse, it’s looking like tulips.  The thing that’s troubling to me about all this (besides the fact that the bean counters/board members of universities are the ones getting sucked into this and they control the money) is we might not even get to the potential good application of MOOCs before the bubble bursts and/or the administrators are on to a different craze.
  • When I mentioned all this stuff to my wife (who I was surprised hadn’t heard of this), she mentioned to me the definition of “mook” in popular culture:  a contemptible, incompetent, and even stupid person.  A different spelling for sure, but is there something about the similar pronunciation?
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“60,000 Times Question,” or the power of making shit up

I’m not sure where, but I can easily imagine this coming back into some teaching in the near future:  I came across this today via Stephen Downes’ web site, but the original question comes from this post from Alan Levine.  The brief version is that supposedly the 3M Corporation did research that concluded people process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.  But even though this is frequently cited on the internets in many different places, neither Levine or Downes can find any of the details behind this claim.

Levine posted an update on his search for an answer to the 60,000 times question that makes for interesting reading.  The short version is the search continues and the 60,000 times claim is more truthiness than true.

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The SCOTUS decision on Obamacare and “Immediacy” (and digital rhetoric)

I’ve been reading the blogging carnival entries on digital rhetoric with some interest, hoping I could find a way to make a contribution.  I don’t know if this is really worthy or not, but here it goes:

My 1996 dissertation was called “The Immediacy of Rhetoric” and it was an examination of the impact of emerging and largely digital communication technologies (particularly the Internet, but television and lots of other things fit here too) on the ways rhetorical situations work.  I use the word “immediacy” to suggest the double-edged sword of these kinds of situations.  On the one hand, they have the potential of closeness and even intimacy since so many of the usual filters of message, rhetor, and audience collapse.  On the other hand, immediate situations are also sites of chaos and confusion precisely because of these lack of filters.  That’s the very short-hand/elevator-pitch version.

Two other things I’ll mention.  First, somewhere in The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault says that when there are disruptive moments in history (I can’t remember the exact quote right now, but I think he and/or his translator even uses the term “rupture”), one of the first things we have to do to make sense of it all is smooth over that rupture with some kind of explanation.  Or something like that.  And one of the hallmarks that signals the end of discourse regarding a disruption in particular and a situation in general is self-reflexivity on the way the situation itself was communicated.  This happens in main stream media all the time.

Second, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how memory works and the things I’ve read that suggests true multitasking is impossible– that is, we can’t really process two or more tasks at once, but we can shift between multiple tasks very quickly, often in a fraction of a section.  I haven’t worked this out in my own head yet, but I think this is one of the reasons why that even with all of the speed, intimacy, and chaos possible with various immediate and fluid situations, we still ultimately make meaning of a rhetorical event afterwords in the same way we make meaning out of pretty much everything else, and we still need, desire and highly value a point of fixed closure– thus the ongoing role of articles, books, and similarly fixed vessels.  Interaction, exchange, and commentary are all fine and good as part of a process, but we value (in all senses of that word– as a cultural value, an intellectual value, money, etc.) the last and fixed word.

So, the reporting of the Obamacare decision as an example of immediacy:

I found out about the June 28, 2012 decision while driving through West Virginia and Annette told me.  She had found out via her iPhone while doing a reading of Facebook.  So that’s a a simple simple example of how current and future technologies change the potential to interact in rhetorical situations: absent these tools, digital rhetoric/immediate situations aren’t possible.  That might seem just obvious, though maybe not.  I am reminded of a discussion I had with my dissertation advisor about a chapter describing the context of the internet in 1996.  She didn’t think it was necessary because how much could change, really?  After all, there were already 30 million users and Netscape; how much further could this internet thing go?

In any event, tools matter a lot.  Of course, that isn’t necessarily uniquely limited to digital tools since the tools and technology of literacy, writing, printing (followed later by mass distribution technologies like affordable paper), audio recordings, film, video, etc. all have had significant technological/toolish impacts on how rhetorical situations in particular and rhetoric in general works.  Or even is, since rhetoric was classically limited to live speakers.

A lot of humanities and comp/rhet types (academics in general, perhaps) downplay the role of technology in our thinking about how rhetoric (and just about everything else) works, I think because many/most humanities and comp/rhet types understand the theory a whole lot better than they understand the tools (or coding or “computers” in general).  I’ve read lots of stuff in the name of “digital rhetoric” (and don’t get me started with “digital humanities”) where tools and technology are secondary at best, sort of the bottle holding the wine, and technology merely alters the speed and potential proximity of components of a rhetorical situation.  But in terms of both digital rhetoric generally and what I mean by immediacy, that’s the whole point:  the evolving speed and presence potential of new technologies have been in some sense gradual and historic (the way that postal systems and then the telegraph changed communication in the 19th century comes to mind now), and in other ways radically fast (the way we find out about emerging situations/events via social media on ever-connected smart phones).  The tool is not the only thing that matters, but when it comes to contemplating “digital rhetoric” generally or immediacy in particular, it’s critical.  Without contemporary and future-looking computer and media technologies, there’s no “digital” in “digital rhetoric.”

One of the first things that happened when the decision was announced (and that I missed because of being in the car and that I recap here with hindsight and memory) was CNN and FOX screwed it up.  As NPR reported, reporters literally ran with paper out of the Supreme Court so that the results could be digitized– that is, broadcast, posted on the web, sent out as audio (analog in how we hear it though digital in how it is posted)– by rhetors (news outlets) to the audience.  Dennis Baron had a blog post where he argued that this was an intentional misreading of the decision by these media outlets because they were mislead and because “everyone expected” the decision to be overturned.  The media simply reported what they thought they already knew.  But I think the right answer is it was sloppy reporting facilitated/enabled by the speed of immediacy, the lack of any interpretation/mediation of events, and the collision of the analog decision (available to reports first as dead trees text) with the digital world.  The Supreme Court’s decision Obamacare is of course complex, but it is not misleading.  The desire and potential to be the first to report the decision trumped the desire/need to actually be correct.

So again, immediacy is a double-edged sword.  Digital media technologies can break down the boundaries between audience, rhetor, message, and interpretation itself, which has the potential for great intimacy.  We can “be there” during riots in Egypt as part of the “Arab Spring” through not only major news outlets but thousands of participants in social media and video sites.  On the other hand, these immediate situations also have the potential for great chaos and confusion precisely because of the lack of boundaries that define interpretation and expertise.  Again, think of the chaos of the Arab Spring, especially through the filter of media, and the confusion of being flat-out wrong as was the case with the decision on Obamacare.

Speed matters a lot, too.  Clearly that’s what is at work with the misreporting from CNN and FOX.  Sure, this is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened and “scooping” the competition has been the hallmark of journalism dating back to its most yellow days.  But the rapidness/simultaneity that is cause and necessity of digital media makes the speed all the more important.

Very shortly after the reports emerged, the efforts at closure (and to seal the rupture in the narrative) began. It’s an understatement to describe the decision as a surprise.  Shortly after Annette shared the news via her iPhone, I turned on the radio.  All I could find out in the middle of nowhere West Virginia was a conservative talk show, and clearly, the decision was an enormous rupture for these folks.  The fact that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal minority on the court was inexplicable to the commentators and callers.

But within hours, explanations to close and reconcile the rupture emerged (and they continue, too).  One theory was that Roberts’ decision based not on the commerce clause but on taxation was in reality his effort to give conservatives ammunition in the fall elections, and conservative commentators immediately changed their attack from being about “individual freedom and choice” to “the largest tax in history.”  Quasi-conspiracy theorists suggested that Roberts changed his mind at the last minute, that Justice Anthony Kennedy was pressuring him to switch back, and that this last minute switch is evident in the text from the various decisions.  Another theory suggests that Roberts made his decision in the name of protecting his legacy as Chief Justice in particular and the institution of the Supreme Court in general.  And so on.

Interestingly enough, I have yet to hear a commentator on either the left or the right suggest that Roberts made the decision he made based on his interpretation of the law. Given that a lot of law professors thought the law was constitutional before the decision, perhaps the real answer is that Roberts did his job as a scholar of the law and a judge.  But that account doesn’t explain how a conservative (Republican) judge could possibly side with a liberal (Democrat) policy, which is why I suspect this explanation has been largely discarded.

Neither speed nor the seeking of closure are uniquely digital, though I think they’re altered by the digital in some interesting ways and I think they are inescapable in digital environments.  Even as we celebrate the fluidity of possibilities in digital rhetorical spaces, we crave and value in all senses of those terms the closure, finality, and even authority that comes from “print” (either the old-fashioned paper kind or the electronic new-fashioned kind exemplified by eBooks and electronic journals).

I haven’t thought this all the way through yet (or even partly through), so I’ll refer to two other blog posts I had on this.  First, there’s my reaction to seeing David Weinberger at U of Michigan talking about his latest book, Too Big to Know.  It’s not that I disagreed with Weinberger about the nature of knowledge has changed as a result of the digital age and the internet and such.  That’s all fine and good, but Weinberger hasn’t earned intellectual and actual (e.g., money) capital from his blog; he earned it from his book.  The same goes for folks like Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book about the future of academic publishing, Doug Eyman and his (hopefully) forthcoming book, Liz Losh and her excellent book, and so on.  Even the prize the U of M Press/Digital Rhetoric Collaborative is based on publishing a book.

I don’t say this to dismiss digital rhetoric; I say this to simply point out that there still must be some unique value to books given that is where most of the scholarship on digital rhetoric has appeared.

Second, as I mention indirectly in this post about Daniel Kahneman, everything we describe about rhetoric (digital or otherwise) is definitionally a memory.  This post– which I’ve been writing off and on for over a week now– is an effort to examine a specific event that I see as demonstrating characteristics of immediacy, but like any other analysis, it takes place in hindsight.  We cannot really think about digital rhetoric as we experience it.

Anyway, a rambling what digital rhetoric means to me.  I’m anxious to get back to reading others’ thoughts on this.

 

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The end of one short term, the beginning of another, and an “open learning” invitation

We have two short (7.5 week) terms here at EMU during the summer, and today I’m wrapping up the first one.  I have been teaching a couple of sections of English 121, aka “freshmen comp,” and it’s been interesting.

My two sections were made up of students far from the typical demographic of that course with only a handful of true “First Time in Any College” students for fall and winter terms, though the low number of FTIACs is more typical of the spring/summer terms.  I had several students who thought they were about to graduate but they had somehow managed to not take one of the only universally required courses earlier– usually because of transfer issues.  I had several ex-military folks and a couple of unemployed/underemployed and (approaching) middle-aged and older folks attending to finally finish a degree.  I had a number of high school-aged kids who are attending EMU through the Early College Alliance program, which means my youngest students were somewhere around 15 and my oldest was (I think) about 65.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I’ve had a number of recent “what are you people teaching in first year composition?” encounters with others at EMU in the last couple of weeks.  Under the best of circumstances, it’s an impossible class, really.  It’s bad enough that we assume that students can take a single course in a single semester in their first year of college and in this course, they can learn everything they will need to learn about writing clear, “correct” prose and research skills for the rest of their college careers.  The idea that I can teach and students can do all that in 7.5 weeks (instead of 15) is ridiculous.  I tell students throughout the term that I wouldn’t take my course if I was in their shoes because it’s too much work crammed into too small of a segment of time.

But for the most part, students rose to the challenge, and in an interesting and unexpected way, I think the diversity of the students made for pretty pleasant groups of people in both classes.  I once again used RiP!  A Remix Manifesto as the framing device/topic for the term, and students found a lot of great things to write about.  One thing that’s always nice to see is when a student begins the class knowing almost nothing about whatever it is they decide will be their topic of research and they end it still enthusiastic and a whole lot more knowledgeable than when they started.  So it’s all good.  It’s not enough (it’s never enough), but it’s a good start.

Oh, and another thing I did this term this term was I incorporated a bunch of readings from Writing Spaces.    The results were generally good but mixed– and I mean that as a good thing, because not everything can work equally well in all situations and because I assigned a lot of these readings based on the abstracts and/or titles.  There are definitely some pieces in there I’ll be using again the next time I teach fy comp, which could be as soon as this fall or as late as– well, who knows.

But I am turning around and starting up another class for the second part of the summer term in just a few days.  Beginning on July 2, I’ll be teaching a 7.5 week and online version of English 444:  Writing for the World Wide Web.  This is a course I created shortly after coming to EMU back in 1998 and I’ve taught it now at least a dozen times in different formats and versions.  I’m very much looking forward to what we’ll be doing this summer especially after learning from some of the less than smart choices I made in trying to include HTML5 coding last term.  Ain’t doing that again, and the same goes with this “Content Management Strategy” stuff, though for different reasons I might come back to in a different version of the class.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far into this post and you’re interested in joining in on the upcoming version of English 444, feel free.  I can’t give you MOOC-like badges or actual credit or grades or anything like that, but since I spent a fair amount of time over the last couple months bitching about the overselling of MOOCs and open learning and all the like, I figure the least I can do is invite people to see how I do things.  Seriously.  Sign up if you want to comment, or just read along on the site.

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MOOCs and “Prior Learning Assessment”

More in the series of “the summer of MOOCs” articles and posts here:  Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, “Making It Count.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are not credit-bearing. But a pathway to college credit for the courses already exists — one that experts say many students may soon take.

That scenario combines the courses with prior learning assessment — a less-hyped potential “disruption” to traditional higher education — which is the granting of credit for college-level learning gained outside the traditional academic setting.

Here’s how the process could work: A student successfully completes a MOOC, like Coursera’s Social Network Analysis, which will be taught this fall by Lada Adamic, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. The student then describes what he or she learned in that course, backing it up with proof, in a portfolio developed with the help of LearningCounts.org or another service, perhaps offered by a college.

There’s also this handy flow-chart:

This isn’t a bad idea in theory and maybe even in practice.  It kind of reminds me of the old days when future lawyers went and studied to take the Bar Exam without needing to go through that pesky law school business.  I believe this is how Lincoln became a lawyer.

But it doesn’t take much to spot some potential problems, too:

  • “Credit for prior experience” is essentially the formula used by diploma mills to justify their fake degrees– the “PhD in life,” so to speak.  So until that well-deserved bias is overcome, getting actual college credit from an actual college will be tricky.
  • The problem with prior experience is you have to actually have prior experience.  I of course do encounter students at EMU who come into classes I teach with a lot of worthy prior experience.  Just the other day, a new grad student asked me if she could get college credit for her prior experience as a teacher (the answer was no).  But for the most part, the reason why students come to college in the first place is they don’t have prior experience.  So while some combination of MOOC/prior experience thing might be useful for adults returning to college after years in the workplace, it isn’t going to be too useful for most of our students.  And by the way, it’s the younger, more traditional college students who are going deepest into student loan debt.
  • What exactly would this credit “count” for, anyway?  Take the example of the course mentioned in the introduction:  that Social Network Analysis course looks like it might be pretty cool, but what exactly would we count that as at a place like EMU?  It probably wouldn’t correspond to anything in the Written Communication major, and I don’t think it would count here as a gen ed class.  So at best, someone could transfer this class as just “credit,” and any transfer student can tell you that that’s not very useful.
  • Even this article says that the process someone would have to go through to make MOOC credit count might not be worth it, “that students might decide it’s easier to retake an equivalent course at a traditional college than to seek prior-learning credit for a MOOC.”
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“Haven’t we said this before?” A blast from the past about correspondence courses, fwiw

For some reason while I was at the gym this morning (maybe because it’s been a while since I had time to go to the gym, maybe because of other things I was reading, maybe because all this MOOC and other online education stuff has been on my mind), I thought about a minor project/presentation I gave back in 2001 at the Midwest Modern Language conference as part of a “special section” for computers and writing.  The talk was called “‘Haven’t we said this before?’ What the History of Correspondence Courses Teach Us About the Promises and Problems of Online Distance Education Courses.”  In brief, the talk (and I include it all after the jump for anyone interested) was my response to David Noble’s critique in Digital Diploma Mills and also an article in Mother Jones highly critical of online education.

Much of my argument– which was meant to suggest that correspondence courses way back when weren’t great but they weren’t horrible either–  was based on my reading of a 1938 University of Michigan MA thesis by Anthony Matulis about U of M’s correspondence study programs way back when.  I still remember that project, looking through very old and largely abandoned texts about correspondence schools.  It was kind of fun work; I might try to go back to it.

Anyway, I thought I’d share it here, for what it’s worth.  I think the analogy between classes by mail and online classes is still relevant, and I think it might be useful for some of these “MOOCs are going to save and/or transform higher ed as we know it” to recall that people said the same thing about correspondence courses 100-some-odd years ago.

Continue reading ““Haven’t we said this before?” A blast from the past about correspondence courses, fwiw”

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Udacity joins Pearson in skipping this whole pesky “education” thing (and more complaining about MOOCs)

A couple months ago, I had a post here about how I see “education” working as a combination of learning, teaching, and credentialing.  In that post, I pointed out that ventures like Coursera are at this point PR vehicles for the elite universities because they are offering “courses” to the masses but they would never actually accept these courses as credit at said elite universities– in other words, there’s no way the University of Michigan is going to accept a certificate or badge of completion as credit toward one of its degrees, even if students pay for the privilege.  However, as I also pointed out in that post, that doesn’t mean less elite institutions like Ivy Tech aren’t willing to count these things.

Well, now Udacity is doing the same thing.  To quote from their blog:

Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Pearson VUE, a worldwide provider of testing services. Students may still complete a Udacity class on our website as they always have. And now, students wishing to pursue our official credential and be part of our job placement program should also take an additional final exam in a Pearson testing center. There are over 4000 centers in more than 170 countries.

I came across this news via George Siemens’ elearnspace.  Siemens, who is a Canadian researcher/teacher about technology in education and who has been a pioneer of Massive Online Open Courses, is critical of this move.  He sees Udacity as essentially “selling out:”

Udacity is recognized as an innovative model of learning in the future, but, in order to gain legitimacy, decides that a connection to the established testing system is more important than blazing a new trail. This connection serves to reinforce the existing educational model rather than to continue the path of creating a new one. As Udacity creates similar connections to other education companies and organization, it quickly becomes apparent that the network being created is one of validation and lockin, rather than innovation and a new vision for learning. You can’t do much innovation if your point of departure is blocked by existing testing and assessment models.

True enough, but I guess I’m more cynical than that.  I see Udacity as merely “buying in:”  that is, I think the unspoken goal of Udacity, Coursera, and other comparable projects has always been to leverage the assessment industry and generate “cheap credit” that might be applicable at less picky colleges and universities.

Now, I do appreciate the fact that entities like Udacity do extend some opportunity to education to the rest of the world and that comes across in Udacity’s press release.  Still, if you follow the money, I don’t think Udacity and Pearson are in this to extend opportunity to people in Sri Lanka.  No, I think the goal of these entities is to compete in the higher education market in the U.S., Canada, and maybe some of Europe, and specifically, to compete with the “lower half” of that market:  for-profit universities, community colleges, and (probably) opportunity-granting regional universities and colleges.

Incidentally, Siemens also has a really good post on his (and his colleagues) vision(s) of MOOCs, one that I would argue is at odds with corporate model that is all the rage as of late.  Go read it, but basically, Siemens’ vision of a MOOC strikes me as about community and connection, with an emphasis on student-centered learning and on the value of making things and student contributions to the learning process, as opposed to the “sage on a stage knowledge delivered from the elite leaders to the unwashed masses” model of the Coursera/EdX/Udacity/et al of the world.

I still don’t think MOOCs are the future of education, at least on this continent and as long as the credential of the college degree is so important.  Or let me put it this way:  I will believe in the viability of MOOCs and open education when that young person applying for an entry-level job in the Federal government or for the Bank of America or “insert your major employer here” with a “non-degree” series of badges and certificates from various free/low-price online entities wins that position over a young person with a bachelors degree from a traditional university.

That said, I’m all for the MOOC model that Siemens is talking about.  I don’t know if they are educational per se, but they are certainly great opportunities for learning and teaching, and maybe someday we can figure out a way to make them legitimately “count” for something.

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Experience, Memory, and maybe Situation

Via this episode of A Show with Zefrank, I came across this really interesting talk by Daniel Kahneman at TED:

Kahneman is talking about the study of happiness and how that is fraught with problems, but the thing I’m particularly interested in is the distinction he makes between our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self.”  I’ve never heard this one before.  To summarize these two summaries: the experiencing self is the “right now” and only lasts about 3 seconds at a time.  The remembering self is the part of your self that puts together the narrative of a life, and it does this by picking and choosing particular segments of your experiencing self– and, by definition, discarding most experiences. One of the rather odd features of this paradigm is that memories drive experiences.  To quote from zefrank quoting Kaheman, “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences  Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences.  We think of our future as anticipated memories.”  In the video I link to above here, Kaheman talks about this in relationship to happiness and also how we think of past experiences like surgeries and vacations– it makes sense, believe me. Kaheman goes on to describe the “tyranny” of the remembering self with what I think is another pretty compelling example:  we often experience things more for their value as a memory than for their value as an experience, though we spend much more time actually experiencing (and discarding those experiences) than we do remembering.  The example Kaheman has is a particularly memorable vacation that he went on to the Antarctic:  it lasted three weeks, but he says he has only “consumed” those memories for 25 minutes.  And as zefrank observes, we all force our experiencing selves to do certain things only so that we can have the memory as opposed to the value of the experience itself.

Another example that immediately comes to mind is writing.  We tend to block out the bulk of the actual experience, focusing in on break-throughs and good moments (or especially bad ones, I suppose), and I think just about all writers prefer to have written to the actual act of writing.

Now, I am assuming that Kaheman intends us to view all this imprecisely and perhaps even metaphorically:  that is, I don’t know if your experiencing self really only lasts for 3 seconds, how much time your remembering self re-experiencing things, etc., not to mention that I suspect the division between the experiencing self and remembering self has to be a bit fuzzy.  I mean, what do you call those experiences where you are remembering in the first place?  Doesn’t the act of remembering itself have to be “an experience,” so to speak? But this does get me going in thinking about rhetorical situation, especially in relation to immediacy, not to mention writing itself.  I’m not sure I have the right way to explain this yet, but what Kaheman is saying here for me helps to reconcile the either/or dichotomy of the origins of situations as discussed by Vatz and Bitzer.  Bitzer argues that situations exist prior or our recognition of them and we make rhetoric out of them, and Vatz argues the opposite.  But maybe both are correct in that rhetorical situations are born in the experience self (thus Bitzer’s argument) but can only be acted on by the memory self (Vatz’s argument).

Or maybe it points to the reason why we can’t really make sense out of most rhetorical situations until after they reach some point of closure because really, experiencing self doesn’t make much “sense” out of anything.  It experiences and that’s that, while the only way to mediate experiences– that is, for audiences to make meaning of the message/event of rhetors (think of the triangle here, people)– is via the remembering self.  Remember (no pun intended), if the experiencing self is happening every 3 or so second, what other choice would we possibly have?

So, maybe the point of various memory technologies is to extend that experiencing self into longer bits of time, or to at least assist the remembering self into finding clearer meaning in moments.  Think of stop-action photography:  an apple being shot or other similar things takes on a different meaning when mediated through a specific technology like high-speed photography.  The experiencing self is not at all capable of capturing this kind of detail, but I would assume that if you witnessed the event life the remembering self would sew together the experiencing self with the image?  Maybe?

Anyway, I think I need to read some more of this stuff….

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One last Bonk post for the road

I’ve pretty much reached the end of my MOOC experience in Curt Bonk’s “Empowering Learning Through Community.”  As my previous posts suggest, I haven’t exactly been wowed by the possibilities of MOOCs based on this experience.

I don’t really blame Bonk, at least not much.  His course and materials were introductory/basic, so I didn’t really get a whole out of the class.  But that’s more my own fault regarding expectations about what I might have been able to get out it.  Bonk provided some solid advice and materials that I think would be a useful place to start for someone who has never taught online before who wanted to know a bit about “best practices” and the like, and if we ever pull together a graduate course/program about teaching writing online at EMU, I can easily imagine returning to this stuff.

None of Bonk’s materials are particularly earth-shattering or innovative though.  And interestingly, as I think is pretty clear with the videos on his YouTube channel, the “production values” of these lecturers are pretty poor.  That strikes me as a bit of a problem or at least weirdly ironic.

As for the whole MOOC thing:  forget it.  Sure, it’s possible for someone to learn something from a MOOC like this or the efforts from Harvard, MIT, U of Michigan, etc., etc., but you can learn a lot from the history channel or even the food network.  Heck, I learn a lot about cooking from FoodTV– and maybe I can even earn badges for it!  And then there are these things called books.  It seems to me that those are the original massively open tool for potential learning, tools that allow “students” to interact with the material in any way they see fit and at the time of their choosing.  When you factor in the costs and technical restraints of online courses, massive and otherwise, seems to me that books are still a better deal.

It’s weird that MOOCs are getting as much press and attention as they are right now, frankly.  Just over five years ago, there was a controversy here at EMU about a faculty member in my department teaching these online classes with 100 or so students.  I blogged about it here; the problem of this made national news because the idea that you could actually have an online class worth anything with that many students was back then considered ridiculous.  Most of the best practice studies I saw back then said that online classes functioned best when enrollment was capped at around 15-20– not unlike face to face classes, by the way.  So why is it that now anyone thinks that a “class” with 1000 students– even a free class– would all of a sudden be a good idea?