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Assigned Interest

While Annette and Will and I are vacationing on a trip to Florida over the Xmas holiday to visit my in-laws, I have been spending a lot of time planning my teaching for the winter (what everyone else calls the spring) term, especially English 516. The planning makes me nervous though in a good way. I haven’t taught the class for two years, and I’m looking forward to getting back into it, but I’m facing two basic challenges. First, this is a class that ages quickly, so there’s a lot new with this syllabus. Second, I am going far out onto a limb and including a longish unit where we will be participating in the Coursera MOOC “E-Learning and Digital Cultures” being done by folks at the University of Edinburgh. It’s going to be very meta: an online class about writing and technology will take another online class about learning and technology and then talk about the experience both as students in that class and in this class. I think it will work out, though since I don’t quite know what those folks will be doing, there’s a lot of guess work on my part. Stay tuned.

Anyway, one of the things I came across while doing all of this planning is “Grading in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Claire “Tenured Radical” Potter. She makes a lot of good points; here’s my favorite part:

This year I also had a new thought, as I read my own papers, and also peeked at pitiful Facebook status updates by colleagues grading across the land:

Why do we assign students papers that we don’t actually want to read?

This led me to a second question:

If we don’t want to read the papers we assign, why would our students have any interest in writing them?

Then I came to yet another question:

Do the students not sense this lack of interest in their writing by many of their teachers, and might this not have something to do with the indifference they themselves sometimes display to the quality of their own work? 

And finally, I thought, if what we are seeing here is a national game of “garbage in, garbage out,” then:

Could this be one of the constellation of reasons that students plagiarize and purchase papers? I mean, given the choice between baking a cake and buying one for someone who doesn’t give s damn about cake, would you bake or buy?

I would buy. Unless I thought I would be caught, and then I would bake. Grudgingly. And I wouldn’t worry about filling in all the cracks with icing.

For the most part, I agree with all of this, which is why I try (though it doesn’t always work out that way– see below) to not do this, and as my years in the classroom build up, I am more and more comfortable with only assigning things I am likely to want to grade or at least read. Case in point: I decided to not to assign a long (15-20 page) researched seminar paper in 516. It might be the standard deliverable for English department graduate courses everywhere, but students too often come up short in these papers (and I don’t blame them for this), they are probably not fun to write, and they are frequently not much fun to read. So instead, I’m assigning a number of shorter essays, blog posts, and a shorter seminar paper, something of a length that might (hypothetically) be good for a journal like Present Tense.

But I don’t think this is a complete solution and I think there are some alternative answers other than the ones that Potter is clearly implying. For example, why do we assign student papers/essays we don’t actually want to read? I can think of at least three reasons why I’ve done this:

  • I felt like the assignment was something students should do/should demonstrate in writing because it was “good for them” in the way that something like pushups or medicine is “good for you even though you really don’t want to do/take it.
  • A certain stubbornness and/or wishful thinking. I have given writing assignments that I was so convinced should work that I kept on trying them over and over, thinking things would be different the next time. This becomes all the worse when there is one student out of 20 or 30 who completely nails it, which fools me into thinking that it must be a worthwhile assignment.
  • I didn’t have a choice. I can think of plenty of assignments I had to give as a graduate assistant or part-timer that I thought wasn’t a great idea but which I dutifully assigned and graded because I was told to do so. Heck, I’m a full professor and there are still some assignments I give because I am required to do so.

Are these “forced assignments” the reason as to why students are often “indifferent” to their own writing to the point of plagiarism or worse? Certainly that is potentially a reason, particularly for plagiarism in my view. But again, I can think of at least two other reasons to explain why indifferent, bad, and plagiarized writing sometimes happens with even the best of assignments:

  • Students have different priorities– or a lack thereof– when it comes to a particular set of assignments. These different priorities might be understandable (e.g., the single mom working two jobs to make ends meet might not be able to spend as much time as I would prefer on that essay) or inexcusable (e.g., the beer pong tournament enthusiast), but the point is school in general and my class in particular is often enough just not high on the list for a lot of students.
  • Students have different interests. Or another way of putting it: just because I think an assignment is interesting and engaging and is asking for something worth writing or reading doesn’t mean my students will think the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong– I think Potter is about 70-75% right and it is probably best to think of assignments as “treatments” that must be administered no matter how painful for everyone involved. But no matter how interesting and inviting the assignment, there’s nothing I can do if a student isn’t interested in writing about something that might be interesting.

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A few miscellaneous comments on online teaching, what I learned about eCollege (again), and MOOCs

I’ve been pretty crazy-busy this semester because I took on too much and because there were things I could not refuse. So the blog has been pretty neglected lately, mostly because I’ve been thinking and writing about online stuff and MOOCs. (And now I’m coming back to this blog to procrastinate a bit in getting it done with the crazy-busy semester).

In no super-specific order:

  • I have been working on (and I think it’s done) my contribution to a “symposium” on MOOCs that will be in College Composition and Communication, I think in January. It’s about my experiences specifically with the writing assignments in “Listening to World Music” and the ways that they failed in spectacular ways.  If you are someone who has read my entries about MOOCs as of late, you probably have a sense of what’s going to be in that relatively short piece.  In any event, I really appreciate the opportunity to participate and it just goes to show you that sometimes blogging about stuff can pay off.
  • I was in a meeting just the other day where the topic of online teaching came up, and some of the folks complaining about it– literature colleagues (I know that’s shocking!)– said online classes were obviously not as good as face to face classes.  “So, are you saying that the classes I teach online aren’t any good?” I asked. No-no-no, we don’t mean you, they quickly said, but yes, that is what they meant. What I find continually most annoying about this critique is that it inevitably comes from people who have had no experience with online teaching. I mean none, and it also usually comes from people who don’t have a whole lot of experience or connection to this whole new-fangled Internets thing.  So part of what I said in this meeting was “Look, before you argue that online teaching can’t be as good as face to face teaching, go out and take an online class. Before that, your pronouncements about what online classes are like is a little like me telling you what Antartica is like even though I’ve never been there. I mean, I know it’s cold, but so what?”
  • MOOCs are pretty much the same way, which is why I spent the time I did in “Listening to World Music.” I wanted to see first-hand what these things were like, and since I am unlikely to teach one anytime soon, I experienced one as a student and wrote lots and lots about it. A lot of what I’ve been reading lately about MOOCs though (frankly, including some of what I am linking to/talking about in this post) seem to be coming from folks making educated guesses or knee-jerk reactions.
  • MOOCs have had the advantage of raising the profile of online teaching as a “real” environment for learning. But even though the likes of Daphne Koller and Peter Norvig think they “invented” online education with their MOOCs, the fact of the matter is students have been taking classes online at real universities– particularly regional ones like EMU– for over a decade now. Something like a third of all college students in the U.S. have taken at least one online class. We know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Which brings me to my next point….
  • I don’t think the discussion should be about online classes being as “good” as face-to-face classes or even whether or not online classes “work.” (See “Do Online Classes Suck?” by Alex Halavais on this point). We’ve all seen bad teaching in the best of cozy face-to-face classroom settings, so the idea that that format for teaching is inherently “better” than online teaching seems a little dubious to me. Rather, I think the issue is of what are the trade-offs of these different formats, how do teachers adjust their pedagogy to best fit the situation, and what do we know about the best fit for the subject being taught. One of the trade-offs for teaching classes in a large lecture format is there is not a lot of opportunity for discussion or for student assessment in a format other than an easily graded test. One of the trade-offs for teaching first year writing in small discussion sections is it is prohibitively expensive to staff all of those sections with equally great and experienced professors (let alone great and experienced non-tenure-track faculty), so there can be pretty significant differences between different sections of the same course– thus the point of writing program administration.
  • One of the differences between how my writing colleagues think about online teaching and how my literature colleagues think about it is at what level it is most appropriate. Folks in literature have been somewhat okay with online versions of gen-ed classes but not for classes in the major or at the graduate level. We have the opposite take: we have come to believe that online (and hybrid) format classes need to be a part of the mix for our undergraduate and graduate programs, but we want our students in first year writing to take the class in person and on campus. That might change– I can especially imagine a scenario where we offer sections of first year writing in a hybrid format– but it isn’t going to be changing soon, largely because of the nature of those classes.  Students in first year writing typically need to learn some of the habits that will help them succeed in college: showing up, meeting schedules, learning how to become more self-disciplined, etc. Which leads me to my next rambling point:
  • Who thinks that MOOCs will work in “remedial” college courses? I personally find the term “remedial” both problematic and offensive, not unlike a well-intentioned and ill-informed person referring to someone of Chinese descent as “Oriental,” but I don’t want to go into that for now. The Gates foundation has given out a bunch of grants for creating “developmental” MOOCs– including courses in first year writing being developed by folks at Duke, Georgia Tech, Mt. San Jacinto College, and Ohio State. Each of these are using Coursera as a delivery platform. I’ll be very curious to see how this works out, but based on what I know about online teaching, MOOCs, and first year writing, I think this is doomed.
  • In the 24 or so years I’ve been teaching first year writing, I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of students I’ve had in that class did not want to take it, and some of my students really really didn’t want to take it. Students take first year writing because it is a universal requirement (insert arguments ala Crowley et al as to why that is a bad idea here if you feel so inclined), and this is quite a bit different than the “Edu-tainment” appeal of MOOCs so far. We have decades of evidence on how to best help students who are struggling with subjects like writing, and all of that evidence suggests that these students need a lot personal attention of the sort not afforded in a class of thousands powered by freeze-dried/pre-recorded videos presented in a “stand and deliver” lecture format. The drop-out rate for Coursera MOOCs is already 90%; how much worse will they be in these courses?
  • Frankly, I think the folks working on MOOCs might have it backwards. Maybe they shouldn’t be replacing introductory or developmental college courses, the kinds of classes populated by young, inexperienced, and not particularly motivated students. Maybe MOOCs should replace upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses, the kinds of classes populated by older, experienced, savvy, and highly motivated students.
  • And once again, I discovered this semester in my own teaching that the content/learning management system matters. I have a chapter called “Blogs as an Alternative to Course Management Systems:  Public, Interactive Teaching with a Round Peg in a Square Hole” that is in a book (that’s supposed to be coming out any day now) called Designing Web-Based Applications for 21st Century Writing Classrooms. The basic point of my chapter is to explain the hows/whys/pros/cons of using WordPress as an alternative to institutional CMSs. Despite the fact that I wrote this piece and despite the fact that I’ve used my own installations of WordPress as my primary platform for teaching online for years, I decided for some reason to give EMU’s CMS (eCollege) another try to host the entire class. Not a great idea. The short version is that eCollege works fine to host the grade book and to host content in a series of units where content is delivered, discussed, and tested. It doesn’t work well when a course is an on-going discussion or when it is something that exists in relation with the rest of the world– e.g., not behind a firewall.  So what I found most frustrating was there was no narrative to the class, no place where it was easy to post an update to something I just came across that I thought would be useful to share with everyone. Long story short, I’m going back to some kind of blog space for English 516 this winter term, which is also going to be online.
  • Clay Shirky wrote an interesting blog entry, “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy,” and  Jeff Rice had an interesting response (and he also pointed to this good Inside Higher Ed rebuttal). Of course, “unbundling” the college degree is not something that is new, though it might appear to be new to Shirky who went to Yale and who teaches (once in a while, at least) at places like NYU. I have lots and LOTS of students at EMU who credits from two or three different other institutions on their transcript, and there are lots of EMU students who are simultaneously enrolled at Washtenaw Community College or another school in the area.
  • One place where I agree with Shirky is that if the point of comparison for what works (or doesn’t) in higher ed should not be Harvard or Yale; that said, one of the major concerns I have about MOOCs (and actually online education in general) is that it simply rarifies the already existing (albeit largely unspoken) hierarchy.  I think this is basically what Nigel Thrift in The Chronicle of Higher Education and what Ian Bogost is saying here. The analogy in those last two pieces is to restaurants, but no need to make that analogy when we can make an actual comparison. There are thousands of colleges and universities on this continent that award bachelor degrees in some kind of humanities– English, let’s say. As an initial qualification for some kind of want ad– “bachelors degree required’– these thousands of different institutions are all the same. But we all know that a degree from Harvard is worth more in the marketplace than a degree from the University of Michigan, which is worth more than one from Michigan State, which is worth more than one from EMU, which is worth more than one from the University of Phoenix. It’s been that way for a long long time. What I think MOOCs will do is simply add another lower rung to that ladder.
  • In any event, I’m probably going to be signing up for “E-Learning and Digital Cultures,” as are (apparently) a lot of people in tech-rhet and the wpa-l mailing list. I’m thinking about making my grad students in English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice take this course as part of my course. These people seem pretty sharp: I like this manifesto, and I like this article quite a bit. If nothing else, we’ll be reading/thinking a lot more about MOOCs and online teaching while in an online class, which ought to be meta-meta.
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On Homemade Pizza

Pizza is interesting in that you have connoisseurs who fetishize all aspects of this relatively simple food, and you also have people whose concept of pizza is limited to Dominos or Little Caesars. If you are a connoisseur, chances some of what I’m talking about here has some elements of sacrilege and I apologize in advance for that transgression.  I work with what I’ve got– at least until I can embark on that fantasized backyard pizza oven project.

On the other hand, if you are someone who makes a decision regarding a pizza order based on whether or not the crust is double-stuffed and/or if you get an order of chicken wings with it, there is nothing for you to read here. Move along.

Continue reading “On Homemade Pizza”

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More on MOOCs, writing in November

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about MOOCs or anything else, mainly because I’ve been pretty swamped with teaching and other work-related things, far too busy to have stayed active in either of the Coursera courses I had signed up for, a course on Python programming and Introduction to Genetics. More on that genetics course in a moment; first an update on other things MOOC.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS ONLINE OFFERING DOES NOT REFLECT THE ENTIRE CURRICULUM OFFERED TO STUDENTS ENROLLED AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF PENNSYLVANIA. THIS STATEMENT DOES NOT AFFIRM THAT THIS STUDENT WAS ENROLLED AS A STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA IN ANY WAY. IT DOES NOT CONFER A UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA GRADE; IT DOES NOT CONFER UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA CREDIT; IT DOES NOT CONFER A UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA DEGREE; AND IT DOES NOT VERIFY THE IDENTITY OF THE
STUDENT.

In other words, “here’s your certificate, but it doesn’t mean anything.” That’s fine because I wasn’t expecting anything more than this, I wasn’t paying for it, etc., etc. But I think this also speaks to the various things that Coursera and its like are going to have to overcome before they will be able to offer these things for real credit.

Some promising models for non-instructor-based interaction are emerging. These include crowdsourcing or automation of grading, using grad students or alumni volunteers as online discussion leaders, or having centralized course materials supplemented locally by individual instructors. These approaches may create scalable opportunities for feedback, and are in many ways more consistent with the student drive toward peer-to-peer, customized learning than the kind of broadcast lectures that are currently the foundation of many MOOCs. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the degree to which a sense of connection with an individual instructor, one who models the project of intellectual inquiry, is a key dimension of many students’ motivation. A charismatic instructor of many students is likely to feel the pressure of that desire for connection.

I’m not sure what Byerly really means by “non-instructor-based interaction.” She suggests “crowdsourcing” kinds of opportunities, but a) again and again I read about the concerns over cheating in these classes, and you show me someone who “cheats” and I’ll show you someone who is successful at “crowdsourcing,” and b), how exactly do you accredit and credential this?

But like I said, I’m finding it pretty much impossible to keep up with the Introduction to Genetics and Evolution class I signed up for because of my own teaching and work and writing about MOOCs, which is kind of a shame.  I will continue to pop into it once in a while as time allows, but I’m not going to even try to spend any time doing any of the quizzes or things I need to do to get certified here.  A couple of quick thoughts for now:

  • The class is very straight-forward/old-school: lectures and problems with due dates. That’s it. True, there is a discussion forum that is for answering questions and the like, but as far as I can tell, there is no reason to actually participate in these discussions– well, unless you had a question, and then you might or might not get an answer with a post.
  • The plus-side of Mohamed Noor: he’s a good lecturer who has clearly given these kinds of talks in front of a camera before. He’s comfortable– almost too comfortable. I think the “production values” format are better than in “Listening to World Music” in that they are more Khan-academy style: it’s a white board-esque presentation that Noor annotates as he talks, and while he is still present as a talking head, he’s off in the corner. Here’s a brief screen capture of what I mean from one of his lectures. The sound quality is kind of bad because of how I captured this on the fly, but you can get the idea.
  • The down-side of Professor Noor: Well, here’s what it says on the “class philosophy” page:

Students in this course should be aware that the instructor, Dr. Mohamed Noor, has freely (with no compensation) donated his time to producing this course, above and beyond his regular duties and responsibilities as a faculty member of Duke University. In addition, there is only one of him and many thousands of students. Please take this into consideration, and do not directly email Dr. Noor about the Coursera class or expect that he can respond to forum posts.

First off, the idea that Noor has “donated his time” is a wee-bit problematic from my point of view, mainly because I do the work I do not out of the goodness of my heart but because I get paid. I certainly wouldn’t donate my time to Coursera like this.  Second, if you are explicitly not available to students, then you aren’t an “instructor;” rather, you’re more of a presenter or author, which is why I think MOOCs are a lot more like textbooks than classes.

To be fair to Noor: he actually has been a lot more available than this passage suggests. He even did a Google Hangout discussion that was captured on YouTube:

As is often the case with things like Google HangOut, a lot of the discussion (I just skimmed bits and pieces of this) seems to be “hey, we’re on a Google Hang Out and talking to each other! Hi! Hi!”

Anyway, all of this is to suggest that I think that “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” seems potentially better than the World Music class, but it too seems to be less of a class involving interaction than it does an opportunity to see someone talk about a topic and take some tests. You know, a textbook.

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WIDE-EMU 2012: A Few Misc. Thoughts

WIDE-EMU 2012 (or is it WIDE-EMU 2?) happened Saturday at Michigan State and it all seemed to go off without a hitch, more or less.  There might be more later, but I thought I’d  write a down a few thoughts before I forget now.

  • This is the second version of the conference we ran successfully last year at EMU, and for me, I guess there are two related reasons why I think what we’re doing is important and valuable. First, there are not enough small, local, and low-stakes kind of conferences happening in the field, at least not in Michigan. I had a couple of folks from smaller colleges come up to me today and thank me (well, me and Derek and Bill too, of course) for doing this. Second, the WIDE-EMU is a “proof of concept” of the idea that if a conference remains small, if you can get a free space (in this case, classroom space at MSU), if most of the amenities (e.g., food, printed programs, other swag) are cut out, and if everyone embraces a little DIY spirit, and if you use tools like Google Sites and a few “borrowed” photocopies in the department– if you can do all that, then it’s really not that hard to run this kind of conference for free. And increasingly, I’m interested in conferences like this one: small and inexpensive.
  • My conference day started out helping people get started, registered, name-tagged, etc. I actually forgot a name tag, which is kind of bad since I’m one of the people who has preached the “bring your own name tag” message loudest. Anyway, after things got going, I wandered around and stuck my head in a couple of different sessions and I ended up staying for Becky Morrison’s and James Davis’ make/talk, which had become a sort of “let’s chat about our topic” since there were only four of us. I thought it was a great conversation.
  • Next, I went to Karl Stolley’s workshop on github– here’s a link to the materials.The good thing about it was I kind of feel like I want to learn something more about github (which is basically a place to share versions of open source code in a way that controls versions of that code) for all kinds of reasons and Karl knows plenty about it. The bad thing is/was I spent like 45 minutes trying install the necessary software and tools only to find that my stupid EMU computer is set up in such a way that I don’t have control to the root directory. (Note to self: erase EMU computer and start over on my own as soon as I have time).
  • Bill HD and Karl had had a little Twitter argument earlier in the week over the role coding should have amongst rhetoric/writing people; Karl obviously thinks “yes” and Bill had a blog post here more or less arguing “no,” or perhaps more accurately, “not so much.” I think both of them are right and wrong in that I don’t have the time/expertise/inclination to spend as much time with coding things as Karl would; on the other hand, I also don’t have programmers handy the way Bill does, so I have to do a little DIY if I’m going to get anything done. Besides, I think learning a little code– or even learning about code– goes a long way.
  • Anyway, after that was Bump Halbritter’s plenary talk “Teaching/Learning/Knowing Writing as Symbolic Action,” which was pretty good. I recorded it with my EMU’s new video camera and I’m trying to get it ready for YouTube on my other computer as I type this, so it should be available soon. Hopefully it turned out decent. His talk was largely about his forthcoming book, Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, which I’m looking forward to reading for my own multimedia writing classes.
  • Lunch was kind of a bust: the original plan was to get everyone to go to this food court area that was supposed to have a variety of options, but the only thing open was a very busy Subway. So there was more dispersal to different parts than I would personally have preferred. Bill and Derek and I ended up going back to the conference building and ordering Jimmy Johns, keeping Derek’s streak alive.
  • I went to an afternoon session on “Robots” lead by Bill and Mike McLeod. It mainly focused on a neat little tool called If This Then That and other stuff involving APIs. Again, I go back to coding versus not coding: on the one hand, some of this stuff is too difficult for me to wrap my head around, as I wrote about here in foolishly trying to teach HTML5 coding last winter. I feel like a lot of the programming/coding required to do cool Web 2.0+ things are beyond my level of expertise. On the other hand, I am constantly reminded that a little coding and experimentation goes a long way, and it is better to know something about these kinds of things than it is to know nothing.
  • I shared my session with Geoff Carter, who introduced an interesting assignment in interrogating/considering videos in writing courses and Michael Salvo, who kinda summed up the conference and Geoff’s and my presentation.

Here’s a video recording of my talk:

I think it turned out okay; it occurs to me now that this is the first quasi-scholarly presentation/thing about MOOCs I’ve done that I can legitimately put on my CV since I jumped on that MOOC wagon earlier in the summer. I am certain there will be more of that soon.

  • Then it was on to the #beerrhetorics, which was a chance to relax, eat, drink, and talk to good friends/colleagues from around the midwest who came into town for this year’s festivities. Good times, and I was the proud program coordinator/mentor as a number of folks spoke highly of the EMU grad students who presented this year. Well done!

Assuming I can get the movie of Bump’s talk to work (and I just got an error trying to import it– oh-oh), I’ll be posting that soon too.

So that’s about it. About this time last week, I remember thinking (and maybe even saying to Derek) I don’t see any reason to do this again, it’s a lot of work, I’ve got so many other things to do, blah-blah-blah, etc. And now after just wrapping it up, I’m already thinking about what we could do the same or differently when we do this next year. So the WIDE-EMU just might be rising again in 2013.

 

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What’s Good about MOOCs? (or, they aren’t about selling textbooks– they are textbooks)

Before I get to an answer to my post header here, a few updates, links, and other observations:

  • I have yet to hear from Coursera or anyone else about my certificate (or lack thereof) for completing World Music. Judging from the conversation on the World Music Facebook page, I am far from alone. On the one hand, there’s a huge “who cares” element at play. After all, I didn’t pay anything for the experience, there are a lot of bugs they’re still trying to work out, etc., etc. On the other hand, if Coursera et al can’t figure out something as simple as who does and doesn’t get a meaningless “certificate of completion” at this stage of the process, why should we trust these people to give real credit later on?
  • There have been tons of MOOC articles/links out there lately, far too many to mention here. One of my favorites though was CHE’s “How the Embrace of MOOCs Could Hurt Middle America” by Greg Graham. (It’s behind the Chronicle firewall, unfortunately.) It’s kind of an unfortunate headline, but I think Graham is spot-on in this piece. He argues that a lot of the enthusiasm for MOOCs by their practitioners is flat-out ego:  “If 160,000 people signed up for an online course I was teaching, I’d probably take my shirt off, write 160K on my chest, and run around campus whoopin’ it up…. Well, the longer I live, the more I realize people everywhere are just as likely to be driven by ego as by higher ideals.” Graham also points out one of my concerns about MOOCs in the long-run: “Ironically, although the move toward online education is being advanced by some of the nation’s most elite universities, in the end it will be the lower half of the student population that will be forced out of the traditional classroom, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
  • Nicholas “The Shallows” Carr weighs in with “The Crisis in Higher Education.”  I agree with a lot of what he’s saying here and I’m glad he makes the connection to correspondence schools of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, but I think he makes the  same mistake that a lot of commentators for or against MOOCs have made, that online education is synonymous with MOOCs, which is of course not the case.
  • Cathy Davidson has a pretty good post on HASTAC, “What Can MOOCs Teach Us About Learning?” I think her points about “what I find depressing about MOOCs” to be especially true; for example, “so many of them are talking heads on a screen.   I mean, really?  That’s the best we can do in 2012?    All the research shows that the single least effective mode of learning is from the lecture.  It’s least effective for retention and it’s vastly less effective than experiential, project based learning when it comes to having subsequent applicability to new situations, to application beyond the final exam.” Exactly.

But enough hating. What are MOOCs good for, anyway?  Here are two things I’m going to try to keep in mind as I embark (more passively) on two new classes, “An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python” and “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution.”

Continue reading “What’s Good about MOOCs? (or, they aren’t about selling textbooks– they are textbooks)”

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Five ways EdX can help “the little people:” you know, community colleges, etc.

I still have a “what’s good about MOOCs” and/or “MOOCs are textbooks” post in me, but I wanted to post briefly about an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, “5 Ways That edX Could Change Education” that came out a few days ago.  It’s mostly in the vein of articles about the great potential of MOOCs, this from the comparatively conservative and slow-paced edX group.

But this part annoyed me. After discussing the succes of bringing a small MIT-like class and lab to Mongolia for three months, there’s this:

EdX is now preparing a bigger experiment that is expected to test the flipped-classroom model at a community college, combining MOOC content with campus instruction. Two-year colleges have struggled with insufficient funds and large demand; they also have “trouble attracting top talent and teachers,” says Anant Agarwal, who taught the circuits class and is president of edX. The question is how MOOC’s might help community colleges, and how the courses would have to change to work for their students.

“MOOC’s have yet to prove their value from an educational perspective,” says Josh Jarrett, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which backs the community-college project. “We currently know very little about how much learning is happening within MOOC’s, particularly for novice learners.”

Why does this annoy me?

Let’s just assume for a moment that the initial claims were true, that one of the problems two-year colleges face is insufficient funds, this despite the fact that many community colleges have been better off than four year schools under both Obama and Bush II. First off, I might have a bit of a chip on my shoulder here since I teach at an “opportunity granting” university to begin with, but I don’t think the troubles CCs and schools like EMU are having stem from an inability to attract top talent and teachers.  In fact, I don’t know what evidence is there for that assumption at all, other than “we all just know” that the talent and teachers at places like MIT and Harvard have to be the best and obviously welcomed at CC’s and lesser colleges and universities.

Second,  if Agarwal really wanted to replicate the success of his Mongolia experiment elsewhere, he (and edX) would send some “talent and teachers” and lab equipment into some inner city school districts in Boston or Philadelphia or Detroit or something and see what happens. Using this experience as a justification for an online class involving thousands of students just doesn’t make any sense.

And third, there’s this point from Josh Jarrett, that “MOOCs have yet to prove their value” and how we don’t know how MOOCs can help “novice learners.” Everything else I’ve read about MOOCs suggests that the drop-out rate is extremely high, which I think is pretty good evidence MOOCs are not well-suited for novice, ill-prepared and otherwise disenfranchised students. But beyond that, just how many “novice learners” have these MIT and Harvard people ever dealt with in any classroom setting, let alone an online one?

I think it might be useful for edX and their ilk to look at this from the other direction. Instead of claiming that they must know best (since they are “the best”), why not start with the premise that community colleges and regional universities might have something to offer the world about MOOCs and working with novice learners? After all, CCs are the places that actually have taught these students for decades, so they might know a little something about how to do it. Further, it is the CCs and regional universities in this country that (other than proprietary schools) have done most of the online teaching and they’ve been most successful at holding down costs.

I mean, I realize the folks at MIT and Harvard (and Stanford, Princeton, U of M, etc., etc.) are really smart and I presume they’re well-intentioned. But isn’t it more than arrogant for these folks who have almost no previous experience in online teaching and who are charging students $30-50,000 a year in tuition to come into CCs and tell them they can solve CC’s problems with free online classes?

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Mooc Link clean-up time

I have a post in mind about what is good about the MOOC thing as far as I can tell and I think I’m going to be proposing something with Bill HD and some others about MOOCs for ATTW. But first, I want to post all the MOOC links I’ve got open in browser windows right now; so in no particular order:

From CHE, “In Colleges’ Rush to Try MOOC’s, Faculty Are Not Always in the Conversation.” A lot of conflation between online teaching and MOOCs here (wait, it’s not the same thing? really?), a lot of enthusiasm from administrators, not much from faculty. A quote:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is an example of a campus that moved swiftly. As soon as Phyllis M. Wise, the university’s chancellor, heard about Coursera from other administrators who had signed on, she wanted to follow suit. She asked the executive committee of the university’s Academic Senate for a recommendation on whether to work toward a Coursera deal, and a faculty task force quickly issued a report giving a green light for such a partnership.

The task force devised a list of questions about how a Coursera partnership would work, said Nicholas C. Burbules, a former chair of the Academic Senate and a professor of educational-policy studies. For example, how would potential revenues from Coursera be divided within the university, and how would faculty members be compensated for teaching Coursera courses?

“I don’t think anyone knows exactly where this is going,” Mr. Burbules said. “We’re on a very fast train right now, and we’re jumping on board and seeing where it ends up.”

From CHE, “Publishers See Online Mega-Courses as Opportunity to Sell Textbooks.” You get the idea from the headline. First off, this is at odds with the corporate MOOC movement’s public declarations of offering a free education for the world:  textbooks are expensive. Second, and this is partly what I want to write more about later, it seems to me that MOOCs could be a replacement for textbooks, or at least a platform for them.

A couple links via Stephen Downes.  First, “The Coursera Gift Horse,” from Jonathan Becker’s blog “Educational Insanity.”  Basically, he’s saying that there are some problems with Coursera, sure, but why are people complaining about this awesome and free resources? Of course, he’s just started this Social Network Analysis class, the one that Bill is taking too (more on that as I make my way through my links), so let’s see what he thinks in a couple weeks.

Second, “Why We Shouldn’t Talk MOOCs as Meritocracies” by Mike Caulfield. He has a lot of other smart things to say about MOOCs too.  Here’s a quote:

The danger of MOOCs (which, by the way, are at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, two cultures inordinately obsessed with meritocracy) is that they will return us to seeing a world that sees large levels of failure validating small levels of success. And they will build a breed of student that is the Jamie Dimon or Bill Gross of tomorrow, someone who knows they are chosen, and becomes oblivious to their own privilege, luck, and detachment.

These are the cultures which have destroyed America over the last 30 years – the idea that our job as a society is to look only at the levelness of the playing field, and ignore how the rules consistently favor the team in power.

If we begin talking about MOOCs as meritocracies, we are doubling down on the flawed ideology that got us into this mess.

Sorta hard to be a movement that’s supposed to empower those who are disenfranchised from  higher education and to be a movement of elites at the same time, isn’t it?

Third, there’s mooc.ca, which is “a place to host MOOC  news and information,” for all your MOOC-y overload needs.

And last from Downes (for now) is this handy little graphic:

In the nutshell, this is for me the problem of Coursera and other models that are are trying to replicate/replace the way education works.  For education to work, you’ve got to have some version of the diagram on the left.  Education requires an instructor who coordinates what’s going to happen in a given experience (that is, creates the “syllabus” for a “class”), is the expert to whom students turn for a definitive answer (and in my view, this is true in educational settings that are “student-centered” and/or where knowledge is more epistemic, contextual, or contested), and is the person who determines if the student has learned what they were supposed to learn to get credit (assessing, grading, credentialing, etc.)  On the other hand, the “many to many” and scalable diagram on the right depicts learning, which can happen in lots of situations, including a MOOC.

From Inside Higher Ed comes “Marketing to the MOOC Masses,” which is about that textbook thing again. A quote:

Elsevier, the academic publishing giant, announced on Tuesday that it will offer a free version of one of its textbooks this fall to students who register for Circuits & Electronics, a massive open online course (MOOC) being offered by edX.

The publisher actually made available a free version of the textbook during the first iteration of that course last fall, with little fanfare. The results are in: Rather than prompting scores of traditional students in similar courses to pass on purchasing the textbook in favor of registering for the MOOC and freeloading, Elsevier found that providing a “static” digital version of the text for free to MOOC students actually galvanized sales elsewhere.

“The version that is online on edX is a static version — a PNG file, which is not downloadable, not manipulable and doesn’t have all the flexibility that a true full e-book does,” said Dan O’Connell, a publicist for Elsevier. “So we found that actually it isn’t cutting into, and in fact it seems to be elevating, sales.”

Many many moons ago, when I was working on a textbook and the editing people were asking me what I thought would be innovative, I suggested to make a version of it available online for free and so they could recognize the “value added” of the actual book. They thought that was pretty funny.

Also from IHE, “Gates, MOOCs, and Remediation.” Given the drop-out rate on MOOCs (which is all part of that meritocracy argument), I’d say this is not the role of MOOCs.  But there is apparently some grant money tied to it, so I don’t know, maybe it’s worth checking out.

The local “paper,” annarbor.com ran “Hundreds of thousands flock to free University of Michigan classes offered on web-based Coursera platform.” I have a comment in the discussion that people liked.

And last but far FAR from least comes news that my friend and colleague Bill Hart-Davidson is going to be blogging about the Coursera MOOC he’s enrolled in, “Social Network Analysis.”  Here’s his first entry; he’s apparently already getting into trouble.

 

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On Frontyard Gardening

It’s been months since I’ve posted anything here that relates to “life,” so in the spirit of taking a day off from school (mostly), I thought I’d write a bit about the story of our front yard garden.

Annette and Will and I live in the Ypsilanti neighborhood of Normal Park, which is mostly older homes (ours was built in the late 1940s) with lots and lots of trees. Like lots of people in this neighborhood, we do a fair amount of gardening. I wouldn’t describe us as passionate or knowledgeable (I always admire people who know the names of all of their plants, especially when they know them in Latin), and I don’t think we’re going to win any prizes or be on a garden tour any time soon.  But we do pretty good, I think.  When it comes to flowers and the like, we tend toward hard to kill perennials, pretty standard annuals, a lot of hostas, and hanging baskets that always dry up and die by early August. Herbs grow like weeds, so almost all of them work. We’re not trying to live off the land or anything, so for the most part, food-wise we like the kinds of vegetables that are always best super-fresh, things like lettuce and especially tomatoes. We stick things in the ground, try to remember to water them, hope for the best.

Square foot gardenA couple years ago, I heard about and then bought a book by Mel Bartholomew and his “square foot gardening” methods.  My first efforts were back in 2009 along the side of our house in a narrow strip of yard that got a surprising amount of sun.  That worked out well (here are a few more pictures of that).

Huge Square Foot Garden (sitting area)So in 2010, I decided to tear up an even larger space for I referred to as “the huge square-foot garden” because it was four 4X8 foot raised beds of mostly perennials and herbs. I had pretty good luck with things in 2010 and 2011, though not as much this year– more on that in a second. But this way in the backyard garden has its limitations because it is largely shaded by the giant trees around there– you can see some of them in the background of the photo to the right.

But in 2011, we had a pretty bad year with the side of the house square foot garden, partly because of weather and partly because my neighbor’s tree really shot up and put this once sunny all day long spot into a lot of shade. We missed the tomatoes.

Anyway, that’s what started this year’s front yard garden.

Front Yard Veggie Box Garden

We started with a box built from three twelve-foot long 2X12s, one cut into four three-foot lengths (I had them cut at Home Depot).  Will and I nailed those things together, laid it on top of some gardening fabric, and filled it mostly with “Mel’s Mix” (1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost), though I also added a lot of garden store variety top soil and compost to fill this thing up. The 2X12 box is unnecessarily large and takes a lot of dirt; on the other hand, my smaller boxes are starting to warp a bit, and this thing seems pretty indestructible.

Then I tore up much of the rest of that part of the front yard and ordered several yards/a half-truck full of compost/topsoil.  As the video suggests, there was no going back after this.

It started off looking pretty pathetic back in April:

Progress

But we’ve seen pretty steady progress over the summer, and by early September, things were looking pretty good:

The perennials in the front yard, September

We didn’t do this as a political statement about urban farming or our rights as homeowners to plant vegetables in our front yard. We just wanted a sunny spot to grow tomatoes and things. But I remember mentioning these plans to my mother and she thought it might be “tacky,” and there have been some cases (including in a northern Detroit suburb) where it is against code or neighborhood agreements and such.  If you do a search for “front yard gardening,” you’ll come across as many “is this illegal?” web sites as you will pages with tips.

I didn’t think it would be a problem in our neighborhood because there are lots of gardeners around here, but I have to say I’ve been kind of surprised by the enthusiastic and nothing but positive response we’ve heard from people. Whenever Annette or I are out there weeding or picking things, people walking down the street stop and inevitably say something nice about it all. I think it’s fair to say I’ve talked to more of my neighbors in the last five or so months than I did in the previous 10 years.

And we’ve gotten a shitload of tomatoes.

A few tips and/or thoughts for next year:

  • One of the reasons why this has worked out so well is because I bought a cheap timer for the sprinkler, which I ran for 30 minutes a day, especially when it was super-hot and dry around here. The simple success of that was a real eye-opener for me, and I’m planning on doing more of that with some of the other garden spaces around here next year.
  • The tomatoes did great, though I am thinking that next year, I’ll try planting heirlooms and more unusual tomatoes instead of the more “garden variety” (pun intended) varieties. Carrots were a real surprise— we never had this kind of success with them before– so there will be more of those, and since the basil did crappy in the the backyard this year, I’ll try some more fo that up front next summer.
  • I’d like to rehabilitate the side yard garden again, maybe with some combination of perennials and veggies that don’t require quite as much sun. We’ll see.
  • And growing isn’t over yet, I don’t think. I need to figure out how late I can still plant stuff like spinach out there.
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17 more universities jump aboard the Coursera express

Because I have a Coursera account (which apparently makes me a “Courserian”), I received the email below this morning about seventeen more universities joining in with Coursera.  You can read the whole thing, but to me, this is starting to have the feel of the metaphorical freight train and a lot of institutions are seeing themselves on the tracks.  They either have to jump on the train or get the hell out of the way.

Oh, and I could be wrong about this, but I’m willing to bet that all 33 universities associated with Coursera haven’t really had any sort of online course offerings to speak of before Coursera came knocking. So again, the “next big thing” in online teaching is being lead by institutions who haven’t done much of it.  Hmmm.

More great universities. More amazing courses. Huge Coursera welcome to our 17 new partners!
Dear Courserians,

Today, we are thrilled to welcome 17 more universities — including four international schools — onto Coursera:

Berklee College of Music
Brown University
Columbia University
Emory University
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Ohio State University
University of British Columbia
University of California, Irvine
University of Florida
University of London
University of Maryland
University of Melbourne
University of Pittsburgh
Vanderbilt University
Wesleyan University
View a full list of schools and courses here.

These 17 universities will expand the course offerings even further, adding new classes in the fields of music, medicine, and humanities (among other disciplines) from renowned professors like Arnold Weinstein of Brown University and Grammy award winning Gary Burton from Berklee College of Music. We are proud of the diversity of the course offerings — from “The Science of Gastronomy” from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to “Financial Engineering and Risk Management” from Columbia University. Many of these courses are pushing the boundaries of what was thought to be possible to teach online.

Working with schools, professors, and students over the past six months has taught us that online education has an incredible power to bring people together and open up doors that might otherwise remain shut. If you haven’t already, read Laura Cushing’s first-person essay of how online courses have given her the opportunity to learn more than she ever thought was possible.

We are deeply inspired by these stories — your feedback continues to help shape the evolution of our course experience.

We’re learning along with you, and thank you for being part of this!

Happy learning!
Daphne, Andrew, and your Coursera team