Oh, MOOCs! I wish I knew how to quit you.

I feel like a broken record or maybe an animated gif. Maybe the MOOC cheerleading  will settle down, I think--and then Thomas Friedman. You know--the MOOC cheerleading piece that Historiann rightly took down in her post yesterday.

I've exhausted just about all the reasons I can think of--and Jonathan Rees has (more elegantly) covered the rest--but here is another one:

What about employers? There's a compelling little graphic over at CHE titled "Employers Prefer All Types of Colleges--Except Online."  Public flagships rate first.  Online universities rank dead last. Heck, they aren't even in the same quadrant.

Now, MOOCs are not the University of Rising Mythical Bird or other for-profits, but except in technical fields, where the appeal of having computer geniuses rise through the MOOC ranks based on sheer talent makes some sense, are employers likely to hire MOOC-certified people who have badges instead of degrees? In this job market?

Is Stanford going to hire its Coursera grads to work at the university in the B.A.-level jobs it has open?

If you want to see any of those posts, here are some:

On MOOCs as "in-person lecture to 35 students BAD, video lecture to 14,000 students GOOD"

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/11/wapo-things-to-learn-from-mooc-pedagogy.html

On MOOCs as a mechanism to sell textbooks: 
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/09/can-moocs-sell-textbooks-king-gillette.html

On MOOCs as creating a two-tier educational system, or Eloi and Morlocks: 
Would little Charles and Alexandra Wealthyname be headed for a MOOC, or is that just for the rest of us?

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/05/come-revolution-university-could.html (With a bonus appearance starring Thomas Friedman's special brand of cheerleading).

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/05/nicholas-lemann-on-higher-ed.html

On MOOCs, credit, and high-status brand dilution:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-bother-calling-it-college-at-all.html

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/05/mooc-roundup.html

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/12/automated-learning-mitx-and-online.html


On professors as glorified tutors--"handmaidens to greatness"--in the MOOC model: 

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/05/more-questions-on-moocs.html (This one features Head MOOC Cheerleader David Brooks. He and Friedman ought to form a double act and take it on the road.)

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2013/01/random-bullets-of-recommitting-to.html

On MOOC economics, or what will happen when MOOCs replace the gen ed courses that pay for all those fancy lab courses: 
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/11/mooconomics-and-health-care-model.html

And one from 2011, touchingly (it seems now) called "Ever hear of a MOOC?"
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/10/ever-hear-of-mooc.html

WaPo: Things to learn from MOOC pedagogy

Today's MOOC cheerleader is The Washington Post, which crows that the MOOC offers "Elite Education for the Masses!"  The ! is mine, but it might as well be WaPo's, given the tenor of the article.

Some things I learned:

• Lectures are bad, according to educrat pedagogy of the last decade, and classrooms must be flipped to eliminate them . . . unless the course is a MOOC.  Then lectures are good because they are delivered by "world-class faculty" at "elite institutions."

• Multiple-choice quizzes are bad, according to educrat pedagogy . . . unless they are inserted into the lecture in a MOOC. Then they are good because they "promote student engagement" and "enhance learning." 

• A MOOC helps to build the brand, a key purpose of education since its beginnings.
•  Dropping the name of a MOOC sponsored by an Ivy is okay because attending a MOOC is just like attending an Ivy. Jonathan Rees has a post about Ivy schools (A shares) and Ivy MOOCs (B shares) that seems a little closer to what will happen, but WaPo didn't interview him. 

• And some people really do find teaching and participating in MOOCs worthwhile.  I'm not being sarcastic about that, and it is inspiring to think that people feel that way, even if they show no interest in the long-term effects of MOOCification. 

This part struck me as sort of sad:

“The real question is, if you start to get very good online MOOCs, why do you need a university?” said Joseph A. Burns, dean of faculty at Cornell University. “And what does an Ivy League university bring to the table? What do you give to students that they can’t get sitting at home and eating potato chips?” The campus ideal, he said, “of a teacher and five students crowded around their feet on a sunny lawn or something like that — that’s gone."

Really? Gone for good, even at Cornell? You're the dean of faculty and you can't articulate what value added Cornell the institution brings to the table as long as its lectures are recorded and put online for free? I can tell you one thing: once there's no more faculty, there won't be a need for a dean of what's not there.

I'd also argue that the "students sitting outside" for class, which I see plenty of at Northern Clime when the weather is nice, isn't something that we ought to give up so easily. Granted, it's not shiny, like an online discussion board or auto-graded quiz in a MOOC, but it signals a different kind of student engagement, one that has a track record of encouraging real learning.

Can MOOC's sell textbooks? King Gillette and the Razor Blade

Jennifer Howard's article "Can MOOC's Help Sell Textbooks?" raises some interesting issues, to wit: if  MOOC's are supposed to be gloriously free for everyone, is it even ethical to require a textbook? A snippet, with some pieces removed: 

But online courses do have recommended-reading lists, and enrollments in the tens of thousands. If even a small percentage of those online students buy books, the sales could add up to a nice boost for a textbook. 

"We are actively tracking the development of MOOC's and believe they do represent a promising market for university-press titles," said Ellen W. Faran, director of the MIT Press. 

Online-course providers continue to draw the line at required reading, and instructors—including those with books to sell—have abided by such guidelines, at least so far. 

"We do strongly urge instructors not to require any textbooks that cost money, since we want the courses to remain accessible even to students that cannot afford to purchase a textbook, including the many that don't even have a credit card," said Ms. Koller, of Coursera, in an e-mail interview.

So it does seem to be profitable to have a MOOC that recommends or requires a book, since "strongly urge" does not mean "prohibit." That's assuming that the student chooses to pay for the printed version instead of reading the book online at flatworldknowledge.com  (or, if it's not there, probably illegally uploaded to a web site). I'm assuming a worst-case scenario here, in which textbooks are required.

But isn't this the same issue as an instructor requiring students to buy the book that ze has written, multiplied by 40,000 instead of 40? The common wisdom on that, which I've gleaned through conversations with others and lurking on the Chronicle's forums, is that if you require a book through which you receive a financial benefit, even if it's the key textbook on the subject, you're supposed to remit the royalties to the students, donate them to a student fund, or otherwise ensure that you don't profit from having the power to require students to purchase the book. How does that work when you have 40,000 or 100,000 students in other countries? One principled professor (can't recall his name) got the publisher to agree to distribute his textbook for free to his Coursera students, but that apparently isn't the norm.

This does answer one question I've had about MOOC's: how will they make money? Here's an analogy. The story goes that King Gillette,* when he was trying to get men to adopt the safety razor rather than the straight razor, decided to give away the razors and charge for the razor blades.  Because they couldn't use the razor without the blades, he'd have them as customers for life, so it was worth taking a loss on the razor to sell a man blades for the next 50 years.  Printer manufacturers do the same thing today: they all but give away the printer and charge a hefty fee for the printer ink cartridges. I wonder if the maker of those machines that use those little coffee pods that are so fashionable now uses the same model, but I haven't looked.

So you lose money on the course, because it's free, but you make money back on the peripherals: you charge for the exam that students take for certification, for textbooks, and, I'm betting in time, for access to the bulletin boards through which the discussion is conducted, since that is already a model being used in traditional universities.

And say you're an elite university: let's call it MegaBucks U. You're the only kind that will have the status to offer MOOC courses while other universities, until they're forced out of business, will be pressured to accept MOOC credits.  You'll make money on the tests, which you'll write and contract out for someone else to deliver; on the textbooks, from your university press; and from the increased visibility and good press that MegaBucks will receive by making "the world's knowledge available to millions" or whatever catch phrase is being bandied about this week.

And you still won't allow MegaBucks U's students to take a MOOC course for credit, because that would be very wrong and dilute the brand.

Again, I ask you: what am I missing here?

*Wikipedia says he wasn't the first to do it, but he's the most iconic figure, so I'm sticking to the analogy.

Edited to add: I am not categorically opposed to any of this, but I really want to see these questions answered. 

Today in MOOC predation: ASU specific about making a profit, vague about everything else

Here is the ASU Plan, from Inside Higher Ed. 

First, go read Jonathan Rees's article about what ASU is doing with its MOOC "Global Freshman Academy.  The basic idea is that ASU is pairing with EdX to give MOOC credit--and, for a $200/credit hour fee, ASU course credit--for those who complete its "courses." Rees rightly points out that this is a smart predation or "no honor among thieves" model, in which whoever steals first steals best.

Then read Dean Dad (Matt Reed), who asks, very sensibly, why anyone would pay $200/credit hour to get MOOC credit when credit at a CC is about $83 per credit hour AND you get access to libraries, tutoring, and other supports.  "Where's the benefit?" he asks, and I can't see one.

It's an old principle in retail and drug dealing, of course: the loss leader. Give them a taste for free or near free, and they'll come back for more.

The private college version is to give heavy financial aid in Year One so that the student attends the school and then cut that aid in subsequent years, when the student is already committed.  I have known people so embittered about this practice after going through it as students that, decades later, they won't give to the school even though they are now exactly the kind of well-off alums that the school wants to court.

Back to ASU's MOOC plan.  Many paragraphs later, here are the specifics:

• Courses are 7.5 weeks long, or what would be half a semester at Northern Clime and most universities.
• It will consist of a "master teacher" and teaching assistants.  No word yet on whether the "master teacher" will be immortalized on a hard drive somewhere to teach lessons in eternity, but maybe that's in a future iteration of the plan.
• What about grading nonquantifiable subjects like, say, writing? 

"Mastery in some courses -- math, for example -- is easier to track through multiple-choice tests or automated grading, but those tools won’t necessarily work in a freshman composition class. “When you have 50,000 students versus 50 students, the methods of evaluation and the methods of assessment will change, but we will have both formative assessments and summative assessments at the end of the course,” Regier said. “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do in every course yet, and we know every course is going to be different.”

To sum up: no plan yet. For now,  ASU plans to have "actual people" grade the work. No word yet on whether those people will be tenure-track or have an otherwise stable job with health benefits, etc.  Of course, this problem isn't unique to MOOC-inspired education. 

Leaving aside the questions we've posed before about eliminating the fun parts of teaching a class and leaving us with the un-fun parts, like grading, I have to give ASU credit for not using commercial software to grade essays--yet.  But I have to wonder:

• Won't this dilute ASU's "brand," since there are no admissions standards for the MOOCs and ASU still has them?  The elite schools' MOOCs have been quite clear that no riffraff MOOC students will be getting credit from Elite U. 
• If they're giving ASU credit, will that appear on transcripts without any qualifiers (like "MOOC Credit")? 

Ever hear of MOOC?

MOOC? It means "Massive Open Online Course," and I read about it in the comments over at the Chronicle--because I don't have time to sit through a long fanboy podcast when I'm supposed to be working, although apparently writing a blog post is just fine, time-wise.

To say, as the Chronicle diplomatically does, that MOOC courses "poses challenges to traditional education models" is putting it mildly. I clicked through to the courses linked in the article and comments and learned this:

• MOOC courses are offered to up to 10,000 students at a time.
  
• You can learn something, or not, and participate, or not, and do the readings, or not. (Okay, so this the way some students approach a traditional course.)
• You don't get credit for the course, as far as I can tell. I've looked extensively at the materials for several sites and couldn't find a mention of it. I don't think it costs anything to take a MOOC course, but again, I couldn't find out from the sites.
  
• The content for these courses seems to be people talking about social media or education through social media, so in a way, the course is more or less a performance of the subject matter.
• People who are experts in the content area come in and curate parts or lead discussions of their content area, so you have social media people talking to people who are accessing the course using social media. Students end up practicing what they are talking about.
  
• I can't judge the subject matter, since I never took an education course, but it is a very different content base from what we're dealing with in literature, history, psychology, or traditional disciplines in the sciences. The Mother of all MOOCs has modules on "collective learning," "connecting our learning," "learning in times of abundance," "triangulating our learning," and so on.

Here are my questions:

• I learn a lot from the experts when I go on a site like fountainpennetwork.com every so often. I don't get credit for going there, but there are many people contributing to a knowledge base. Do discussion forums on specific topics count as a MOOC, or does the subject matter have to be education?
• How would this work for a subject in which there is specific, rigorous content on which students need to be evaluated?
• How would students respond if you tell them, "Hey, kids, here's a swell course for you to take. You'll learn as much as you want to learn and spend a lot of time doing it, but you won't get any college credit for it"?
• According to trusty Wikipedia, the principles of MOOC are to (1) gather information; (2) remix content; (3) repurpose the content; and (4) feed it forward. This is presented as revolutionary, but how is this different from what we have students do in class every single day?
  
• I'm reminded of the "reinventing the educratic wheel" post at Historiann's where some university thinks it has invented something new in promoting class discussion and group work instead of the dusty old lectures that it thinks rule college courses and that, like the "Paul is dead" legend, get dragged out every month or so as a dead horse to beat.
• See also "The University of Wherever" at the NYTimes, linked from More or Less Bunk.

I think what we're really talking about is the issue of credentialing for learning, and MOOC opens up a lot of opportunities and excitement in subjects where credit is not necessary. Do we need to have a credit-based system for certifying that students learn a particular thing? In civil engineering, maybe yes, because otherwise bridges will fall down. I want to fly in an airplane with a pilot who has been tested and has the proper credentials, not someone who drops in to participate in (or maybe not) flight training online with 10,000 other people.

On the other hand, for learning about how social media works in education, maybe yes and maybe no. Maybe the learning and application is in itself the important part and the credentials aren't needed, although if that's so, why are experts named for each module?

Temple Grandin smacks down Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule: a MOOC post

Over at Wired, in "Your Genes Don't Fit: Why 10,000 Hours of Practice Won't Make You an Expert," Temple Grandin and Richard Panek take on Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. Citing Gladwell's well-known example of Bill Gates's computer opportunities, she describes her own similar experience:

Now let me tell you the other side of that story. In the late 1960s, when I was a student at Franklin Pierce College, I had access to the same terminal as Gates — the exact same Teletype terminal. The school’s computer system tapped into the University of New Hampshire’s mainframe. So I had as much access as I wanted, and I had as much firepower as I wanted, and it was all free. And you’d better believe I wanted to spend as much time as possible on that computer. I love that sort of stuff; I love to see how new technology works. The computer was called Rax, so when I turned on the computer, a message would type out on paper: Rax says hello. Please sign in. And I would eagerly sign in.

And that was it. I could do that much — but that was all. I was hopeless. My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code. So saying that if I’d spent ten thousand hours talking to Rax, I would be a successful computer programmer, because anyone can be a successful computer programmer, is crazy.

I say: Talent + 10,000 hours of work = Success. Or to put it another way: Nature + nurture = Success.

Others say: 10,000 hours of work = Success. Or to put it another way: Nurture = Success.

This one-size-fits-all approach to learning seems to me the fallacy--okay, one of many fallacies--of the MOOC paradigm.  Even if you grant the following MOOC cheerleading points, which are repeated ad nauseam as fact by The New York Times--

• That all classes, everywhere in universities, are terrible 1000-person lectures where bad Podunk U teachers drone on to disengaged students;
• That bad Podunk U teachers, which includes everyone not in a MOOC affiliation, only know how to lecture from yellowing notes and have no idea how to engage students in discussion;
• That video lectures are much, much better than in-person lectures because they are shiny and from "the best of the best";
• That those who are against MOOCS also hate baseball, puppies, and humanity

--you are still left with this question: how do you tap into students' varying talents and abilities? 

A MOOC will let you put in the 10,000 hours. It's never going to know the difference. Will it lead to inevitable success, though?

I'm not talking about learning styles but the differences in individuals that you see in any class where there's discussion--that is, any humanities class. They all have talents, but how do you reach them? 

Do you think that Eager Keener in the front row, who has her hand up for 30 minutes out of a 50-minute class, would do well in a MOOC? She might, but how would she (1) receive the affirmation that she so obviously craves and at the same time (2) learn how to share attention and listen to other members of the class without a real live teacher who brings out those abilities?

Or what about Slouchy McBaseballcap, who sits in the back row and is terrified lest his cool be shattered by answering a question?  Sitting for 10,000 hours in front of a computer screen might be just his cup of Red Bull, and in fact, he probably does it already with WoW or Minecraft or something. But how is he going to recognize other talents for analysis, writing, and discussion if there's no live teacher? 

If 10,000 hours in front of a screen were all that mattered, Sunrise Semester would have educated everyone already. But there's more to it than that. 

At NY Review of Books: The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Ed

As a distraction from the national news, here are snippets of a review of the film The Ivory Tower  from the NY Review of Books, starring our old friend the MOOC. Below are the usual claims and the reality.

1. MOOCs will free up professors from the drudgery of lectures through the flipped classroom model and will allow them to "teach" through hands-on help with students. Professors will not become glorified teaching assistants or handmaidens to greatness. because that's just stupid fear-mongering on the part of thuggish teachers' unions. It won't happen because trust us, it won't, universities being unlike any other business in that they will provide free services for the public good once they can't charge for them.

A conventional delivery system for “the personal touch” in the MOOC format is the so-called “flipped classroom.” Here a teaching assistant circulates in a roomful of students who have watched the assigned video, and helps them to sort out questions about details. The assistant—as Ivory Tower suggests with a single understated caption—will often turn out to be somebody who was once a professor but whom economies facilitated by MOOCs have demoted to the status of section leader.

2.  Students will learn better and more efficiently in a MOOC.

 In 2013, the company [Udacity] was awarded a trial of its offerings in a contract with San Jose State University; and in July of that year, scores were posted for its spring term entry-level courses. The pass rate in elementary statistics was 50.5 percent; in college algebra, 25.4 percent; in entry-level math, 23.8 percent. Teachers have been fired en masse for results like these by administrators or politicians who would not sit for an explanation.

3.  A rock star teacher in a MOOC makes a world of difference and will do a much better job than, well, 500 ordinary teachers.

What you really want, [a Udacity adept] thinks, is the academic equivalent of a “rock star” to project knowledge onto the screens and into the brains of students without the impediment of fellow students or a teacher’s intrusive presence in the room. “Maybe,” he adds, “that rock star could do a little bit better job” than the nameless small-time academics whose fame and luster the video lecturer will rightly displace.

Note that there's no proof here, because why do you need proof when you have one anonymous stockholder's or employee's opinions? We all know that people learn from celebrities.  Maybe Kim Kardashian could teach a class.

4. MOOCs have always been about the greater good of reaching thousands with free learning. That's why university administrators, a notably starry-eyed bunch unconcerned with the bottom line, are so keen to implement them.

Still, however fanciful the conceit may be, the MOOC movement has a clear economic motive. Many universities today want to cut back drastically on the payment of classroom teachers. It is important therefore to convince us that teachers have never been the focus of real learning.

Udemy and MOOCs: is this the future?

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has been posting a lot lately about her participation in The Faculty Project, which seems to be part of Udemy.com, an online space for MOOCs (massive open online courses). I've been intrigued by this, since in addition to hating plagiarism, corruption in sports, online for-profit education, and Big Pharma, she's been as scathing about the use of technology in the classroom as she is about poor writing.

A lot of the courses at Udemy are how-to and technical courses that teach students how to program in Python, create games for the iPad, and so on. Soltan's course is on interpreting poetry, and since she analyzes a lot of poetry at University Diaries, this is a natural extension.

I keep seeing that the MOOC is the future of the university, if there IS a future for the university.

The New York Times tells me so, and who am I to argue with the New York Times?

Still, I'm curious:

• If you hate the idea of PowerPoint or technology in the classroom and also hate online courses, why would you participate in this?
• Is Udemy and its system of MOOCs something Soltan sees as a way to counter for-profit online education?
• Do the "best Professors from the world's leading Universities" (tm) get paid for participating in these, and do they have any responsibilities beyond recording lectures?
• Assessment right now is by computer-graded tests, and discussions are held in forums; the idea, according to the New York Times, is to get everyone to an "A+" level. How might this work in the humanities?
• When might Udemy decide that Udemy graduates or badgeholders who've taken a MOOC course would be "the best Professors from the world's leading Universities" and worthy to record courses, since the MOOC courses will not bear the name or logo of the university from which the current "best Professors" hail?
• Or are we in a beehive situation, where a select few prerecord wisdom for the MOOC worker bees and the bees can't hope to move from wisdom-ingesting to wisdom-dispensing?

Updated to add: Margaret Soltan graciously answers all these questions and more over at Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/mooc-synthesizer-iii#dsq-form-area

Why bother calling it "college" at all?

Jonathan Rees has another MOOC post guaranteed to make your blood boil, and he promises another post soon. From Salon.com via More or Less Bunk:

Koller believes that with the right grading “rubric” students can grade each other’s papers even on issues of critical reasoning and grammar, thus solving seemingly daunting logistics problems.

Well, I can "believe" in unicorns, but that doesn't mean that they're about to descend to earth and shower us with magical kisses.  Anyway, the ETS thinks that it has that problem licked with its e-rater essay software, so why don't all these corporate types get together, merge all their software solutions, and eliminate the pesky professors altogether? (Oh, wait . . . )

Of course, e-rater has a few glitches:

Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was allowed to test e-rater. He told Winerip that the system has biases that can be easily gamed.

E-Rater prefers long essays. A 716-word essay [Perelman] wrote that was padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences received a top score of 6; a well-argued, well-written essay of 567 words was scored a 5.

"You could say the War of 1812 started in 1925," Winerip says. "There are all kinds of things you could say that have little or nothing to do in reality that could receive a high score."

The thing I can't figure out is why the various MOOC providers are so intent on aligning themselves with colleges and universities.

• The high-status universities that started the whole thing want no part of diluting their brands by actually granting credit from their illustrious institutions.  They know that the real graduates of their institutions will have the high-status jobs anyway. 
• There's an incessant MOOC bashing of a straw man--the large lecture class--because it isn't modern and shiny and technologically interesting in the way that a taped lecture delivered over the internet can be. Traditional college is too "old-school" (heh) to be of interest to digital natives, blah blah blah. 
• Unlike those nasty colleges that require students to show up and earn credits, the for-profit MOOCs are interested in monetizing education at the expense of quality profits bringing everyone together to sing "Kumbaya" and learn for the sake of learning.  Granted, I think that this really is the idealistic vision of MOOC professors and some MOOC initiators--that they want to share their knowledge with everyone. But for-profits are harvesting and selling that freely given expertise, or if they aren't yet, they will be soon.  
• The political factions that are starving public universities to death and touting MOOCs apparently despise colleges, or the humanities, anyway. From Salon.comhttp://www.salon.com/2013/02/22/conservatives_declare_war_on_college/?source=newsletter:  "Conservatives don’t like big government and they don’t like taxes, and increasingly, they don’t even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States." It's a two-fer: college is government (hated) and also humanities (hated), so why wouldn't you love what gets rid of both? 

If we are in the midst of a Great Divide that will return in-person education to its pre-WWII status of educating the few, the proud, and the wealthy, with lesser alternatives for the rest, why define the form of education being proposed as "college"?  In other words, if you hate it, why do you want to wear its credentials? 

NY Times: MOOC Press Release or Reporting? You decide.

At the New York Times, we learn more about "the future of education." Hint: It's not live instructors in live classrooms.

And on Wednesday, San Jose State announced that next fall, it will pay a licensing fee to offer three to five more blended edX courses, probably including Harvard’s “Ancient Greek Heroes” and Berkeley’s “Artificial Intelligence.” And over the summer, it will train 11 other California State campuses to use the blended M.I.T. circuits course.  

Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper-level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity’s for lower-level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction.

Comment: Never enough money for instructors; always enough money for licensing content from a private provider.

But students will have access to live tutors in Mountain View :

The online mentors work in shifts at Udacity’s offices in nearby Mountain View, Calif., waiting at their laptops for the “bing” that signals a question, and answering immediately.

Comment: Mountain View for now, until it's cheaper to outsource them to another country. I predict they'll be outsourced within 3-5 years, just as accounting firms, software companies, radiology practices, and other professional firms have moved their basic reading/preparing/customer service tasks to India. Remember, this is a for-profit business, not an educational institution.

Near the end, an acknowledgment, of sorts, that some naysayers are trying to rain on the parade:

Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes. The state, they say, should restore state financing for public universities, rather than turning to unaccredited private vendors.

Rhetorical sleight of hand #1: Is there any part of the "specter" that isn't a real threat? Yet calling it a "specter" pokes fun at those possibilities as irrational fears instead of what is an actual business plan--star professors, glorified tutors, and all of it.

Sleight of hand #2: There are those professorial thugs, the "faculty unions,"  again, wanting to restore state financing instead of, I don't know, giving the money to for-profit companies and dismantling the university system into the bargain. Translation: "they" want to cost you, the reader, money in the form of hard-earned tax dollars, and they don't care about those poor "shut out" students, as "we" do.

Sleight of hand #3: "They say" that, do "they"? See that rhetorical move? The MOOC cheerleaders in the article are the right-thinking people who believe that "students come first," the implicit "we as readers," unlike the union thugs, the "they."

But who cares, right?

And if short videos and embedded quizzes with instant feedback can improve student outcomes, why should professors go on writing and delivering their own lectures?

Sleight of hand #4:  "Delivering their own lectures"--as if this is the sum total of teaching. First of all, WHO LECTURES IN THAT WAY any more (in the humanities, anyway)?  Second, this confirms that the business model is to break the profession of teaching into discrete tasks, assign one superstar, outsource the grading and tutoring to drones, and boom, you're done.

Now the extra credit question:

Are MOOC providers going to hire their own graduates--for they will have graduates, now that they have accreditation? I keep asking this, and I keep being deafened by the silence.

And an extra credit comment (h/t to Jonathan Rees)  and also a link to a prior post:

Percentage of MOOC professors who think that students completing a MOOC should not receive credit at their institution: 72%.  

MOOC Roundup

It's getting hard to tell the MOOC players without a scorecard, so here's a scorecard or maybe a bingo card. I'd tag this with the label "MOOC," only the New and Improved Blogger doesn't give you any way to add them.

• Harvard and M.I.T. are teaming up with edX, a massive course platform built on the MITx version that MIT rolled out earlier this year. (NYTimes, Inside Higher Ed. I thought there was one at The Atlantic, but I couldn't find it.) 
• Coursera. Penn, Stanford, Michigan, and Princeton's version of the above.
• Udemy. This is the one that Margaret Soltan is using and blogging about over at University Diaries.
• Udacity. This one seems to be a computer science version exclusively.
• Not online but massive and reported on in the Chronicle, so I'll include it here: a 2,670 student class at Virginia Tech that is so inspiring that all 2,670 chimed in to say how awesome it is in the comments.

Any questions?

• Will any of these places give you course credit with MIT and Harvard names attached? Please stop asking rude questions.
• How will these courses be graded? "The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers."
• What will happen to traditional universities? Mid-level ones ought to be worried, says "George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University." 
• Why? “Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation. Dr. Bacow, co-author of a new report on online learning, said it remained unclear how traditional universities would integrate the new technologies.
• What role will faculty have? “What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.” 

Last MOOC post until 2013

I promise: no more Cassandra-like questionings of MOOC cheerleading until 2013.  Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk has got that covered anyway, and he's actually taking a MOOC class, so his points are more legit than mine.

This piece of MOOC cheerleading--"The End of Higher Education as We Know It?" with an implied "Yesssss! Go, Team!" at the end of it-- is from TheStreet.  It's just as uncritical and glittery as the rest, although you'd think that a publication that thinks it's based in economic reality would ask a few questions.  Here are some excerpts, with a few comments from me:

The economic problem with college, as Shirky notes, is that it's labor-intensive and does not scale. You can push down salaries to an extent [and God knows we've tried], but it still takes a lot of people, many buildings and a lot of land to produce even a mediocre college education. What makes an elite education is the unique talent of its faculty [but not, apparently, the quality of its research, its labs, or the ability to learn from other smart, highly motivated students in person], which can't be discounted because demand for it is so high.

What Udacity does is spread that limited talent across to the broadest possible audience, while doing away with those other costs. [Because developing courses, creating infrastructure, and other costs are nonexistent.] Everything else can be done through one-on-one tutoring. [Paid for by whom? Provided by whom, once local universities are gone?] Standardize on the best courseware, with the best lecturers , and use the Internet to deliver that to the widest possible audience. [See? Easy-peasy once you redefine education as the best courseware and brand-name lecturers.] 

Again, there may be value in MOOCs, and that value may even lie in the quality of education they provide--but nobody's asking the questions. With that, and with apologies to Alexander Pope, I'll shut up about this until the New Year:

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow'r,

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

All MOOCness is but Art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see

All discord, harmony not understood,

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, whatever MOOCs, is right

MOOC partnership in the classroom

First, a riddle:

Q. How is MOOC news like a bag of potato chips?

A. First, you can't stop eating them, and then you can't stop offering them around to all your friends, regardless of how bad they make you all feel the rest of the day.

Here, from the Chronicle, is what a MOOC-infused class looks like:

The San Jose State instructor ran his edX-infused course as in a fairly standard "flipped" format. He would instruct students to watch Mr. Agarwal's short lectures before each class session. Mr. Ghadiri spent the first 10 minutes of each class answering questions from his students about the MIT professor's lectures. Then he typically spent 10 minutes giving his own lecture: a summary of the most salient themes from Mr. Agarwal's lectures, plus some original material. 

After that, Mr. Ghadiri divided the 86-student class into groups of three and had them do worksheets on the lecture material. The instructor and his teaching assistants fanned out across the classroom, observing the teams and giving them tips when they were stuck. Finally, Mr. Ghadiri gave the students a quiz to take on their own. Mr. Ghadiri says he wrote all his own quizzes and worksheets.

So, as an instructor, you get to:
1.  Repeat another person's lecture, emphasizing what he or she thought was important. The students thus get the MOOC information twice. Wasn't the flipped classroom supposed to save time?
2. Answer questions about another person's lecture.
3. Create worksheets and quizzes.
4. Grade worksheets and quizzes.
5. Spend extra time prepping by watching another person's lecture.
6. Tutor students.

The fun part is all outsourced--getting the information together, presenting it to a live group of students with plenty of interruptions and extemporaneous ideas exchanged.

But don't despair.  You still get to grade.

Short blogging break and some MOOC articles

Travel and a research trip, about which I'll write later, but for now, a couple of thoughtful posts on MOOCs:

An article on the MOOC business model by CUCFA President Robert Meister:
http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php

Sample: The educational Commons you propose is one in which the private owners of instructional platforms like Coursera will appropriate without exchange profitable information that can eventually be used to determine how much rent can be charged for access to the “Common” based on our personal, demographic, academic, and income profiles. (For this purpose you could correlate our unique user identity and online performance with other databases in existence or yet to be developed.) The free educational “Common” that Coursera’s business model promises is already programmed to be enclosed as private property. Your eventual entry fee can be dynamically priced (like airline tickets) to reflect the changing levels of student optimism or desperation about the future on which your long-term marketing strategy relies.

"Is College Moving Online?" by Nathan Heller at The New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller

Sample: “I was surprised at the outcome,” David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, told me. “It seemed to come down the road as something that was going to happen.” Wills started out being open to moocs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX’s representatives seemed able to address them. “One of the edX people said, ‘This is being sponsored by Harvard and M.I.T. They wouldn’t do anything to harm higher education!’ What came to my mind was some cautious financial analysts saying, about some of the financial instruments that were being rolled out in the late nineties or early two-thousands, ‘This is risky stuff, isn’t it?’ And being told, ‘Goldman Sachs is doing it; Lehman Brothers is doing it.’ ” The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors. “It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch,” he told me.

He and others worried about what this might do to smaller preachers. “I have to say, it turned my stomach to think that we were going to be making decisions about other people’s jobs in a discussion to which they were not party,” Adam Sitze, a member of the department of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst, told me. “Some very brilliant people are at institutions that are not wealthy.” In a meeting, one of Sitze’s colleagues, the political theorist Thomas L. Dumm, described the conveyance of moocs to weaker universities as “eating our seed corn.”

And from earlier in the article:

“I could easily see a great institution like Harvard having a dynamic archive where, even after I’m gone—not just retired but let’s say really gone, I meandead—aspects of the course could interlock with later generations of teachers and researchers,” Nagy told me. “Achilles himself says it in Rhapsody 9, Line 413: ‘I’m going to die, but this story will be like a beautiful flower that will never wilt.’ ”

Comment: There's a thin line between immortality as a beautiful flower and immortality as an undead zombie that eats the brains of the living.   

MOOC 'n' Bake

I recently listened to Jane Maas's Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond. One of the entertaining stories she tells (and they're all good) is about what happened when the people who invented Shake 'n Bake in the 1960s tried to introduce another product. (Apologies to Ms. Maas if I get the details wrong here.)

Shake 'n' Bake was wildly popular. What's not to love about seasoned crumbs that you can put in a bag, shake up with chicken, bake, and eat? It was not pretending to be fried chicken, but it was easy (and in the 1960s, cooking for most families was all about easy) and kids would eat it.

In other words, it was what it was: easy to fix and tasty. The results could be replicated in any kitchen. It was a hit.

But then someone thought, "Hey, why don't we make a product with batter so that it can be like real fried chicken? Wouldn't that be even better?" They tested this extensively, selling packets that would become batter if you added water, and debuting the finished product in focus groups. It tasted great, so they went ahead.

Then they rolled it out into test markets, where it sank like a stone. Why? The focus kitchen product tasted great. People liked it. Why wouldn't housewives buy it?

Turns out there were several reasons. First of all, who wants to knead raw chicken in a bag of goopy batter and watch said batter slide off the chicken parts? Second, if you didn't fry it in the right temperature of oil, it was a soggy mess. Third, it had an unfortunate tendency--well known to any of you who've added wet anything to hot oil--to whoosh into a fireball. The fireball thing kind of put the kibosh on the product, which was quietly deep-sixed.

In other words, only under the exact right conditions could this superior product be created. It could not be repeated en masse or by just anyone. It was a failure.

I think there's a lesson here.  There was hype, and enthusiasm, and a limited report of success that depended on a lot of conditions that couldn't be replicated in ordinary circumstances. If MOOCs are Shake 'n' Bake--and that can be good, and MOOCs can be good, for particular purposes--why are others trying to make them be fried chicken, when that requires more expertise and special preparation?

I thought of this when reading WaPo (h/t, as seemingly always, to Jonathan Rees) with this line from Eric S. Lander: "But MOOCs such as his might offer some professors elsewhere a chance to spend less time preparing and delivering lectures and more time working hands-on with students."

My question for the day: would the MOOC superprofessors be willing to reverse the roles? Would Eric S. Lander be willing to spend all HIS time "working hands-on with students" after having having the creative portion of his class outsourced to a MOOC? What if he's doing the tutoring instead of the lecturing? What if he has to spend time listening to someone else's lecture and referring to it when he goes into class to work with students? 

If there's a true commitment to MOOC principles, shouldn't there be turnabout in who's driving and who's riding shotgun? 

MOOC leaders leap, wonder if maybe they should have looked

In "Beyond MOOC Hype" at IHE, Ry Rivard reports that some MOOC cheerleaders are starting just now to ask the questions that the rest of us have been asking since 2011. 

After showering MOOC enthusiasts with money, Dan Greenstein has an insight:

"It seems to me, at least with respect to MOOCs, that we have skipped an important step,” he wrote in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed last week. “We’ve jumped right into the ‘chase’ without much of a discussion about what problems they could help us to solve. We have skipped the big picture of where higher ed is going and where we want to be in 10 or 20 years.”

Yup.   And Carol Geary Schneider:

Carol Geary Schneider, the head of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, worries that MOOCs can amplify the “least productive pedagogy” in American higher education, which she calls lectures followed by multiple-choice tests. But she does see potential for MOOCs to help flip classrooms so professors can spend less time lecturing in class and more time engaging students. 

“It would be a tragedy if you substituted MOOCs in their current form for regular courses,” she said in an interview. “But it would be a creative breakthrough if you take advantage of MOOCs and other forms of online coverage to make more space and more time for students to apply concepts and methods appropriate to their field to real problems.”

So Schneider does see the lecture/multiple-choice question format as less than ideal, although she does not question the "flipped classroom" model.  I'm also a little worried about "coverage," which suggests a simple transmission model of pedagogy.

But it's a start. Now if we can make them go back and read all the bloggers' posts about this, they'll maybe have some answers for our questions.

Random bullets of interesting news

1. You know how people are always warned to make hard-to-crack passwords and end up using "password" or "12345678" or something easy anyway?  Would it make you feel better to know that the people behind the nuclear launch codes felt the same way?

From Making Light:

Given how nervous many of us were during the Cold War, it’s just as well that we didn’t know the interesting fact recently reported in The Guardian and Gizmodo: for about twenty years, and in direct contravention of orders from presidents and defense secretaries, the U.S. military had the eight-digit nuclear launch codes for Minuteman missile silos set to 00000000.

Apparently they resented the eight-digit “fire only if ordered to do so by the president” security system imposed on them in 1962, as it made firing nuclear missiles slower and more difficult. They responded by permanently assigning the system a single launch code that was the moral equivalent of using “password” or “12345678” or “qwerty” as the overall password for your online account.

But it gets worse: 

[I]n case you actually did forget the code, it was handily written down on a checklist handed out to the soldiers. As Dr. Bruce G. Blair, who was once a Minuteman launch officer, stated:

Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel.

This ensured that there was no need to wait for Presidential confirmation….

Feel safer now? 

2. And in MOOC news:

Many speakers repeatedly pointed out that the cost of MOOC production -- which can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars -- has created classes of MOOC producing and MOOC consuming institutions. This creates issues for both groups; the former doesn't want to appear elitist, while the latter rejects content not created by their own faculty members.

“Maybe this seems obvious,” said Christopher Brooks, a research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. “Lots of things seem obvious in hindsight.”

Or maybe, for some, in foresight. 

3. In closer-to-home news, I'm trying the "append only a final comment" to their last papers based on advice you've all given.    The comment gives feedback on the paper, but I didn't put in any marginal comments. The students have all been invited (via the comment) to come and talk to me next semester if they want a more complete set of comments on their papers. Do my hands twitch to add marginal comments? Yes, sort of. Is the time tradeoff worth it? Yes.

Credit for MOOCs? Only for "non-elite institutions"

If this doesn't make you wince, read it again.  Yes, we knew a while back that there'd be no credit for you in a MOOC if you're part of the elite cadre that's producing them.

But let Caroline Hoxby, cited at MOOC.com, spell it out for you. MOOC-consuming institutions are, well, how to put it?  (Here's the working paper.)

• They are like Mickey D's (I'm paraphrasing) in that they sell "current educational services for current payments,”  unlike the "venture capitalists" of elite institutions that  "invest massively in each student" and reap the benefits of--knowing that they've helped to further human knowledge?  Don't be ridiculous: they'll reap the real benefits in donations from their rich, grateful alumni.
• And since these non-elites are effectively training academies (paraphrasing again) rather than actual universities like Stanford and Duke, MOOCs can replace them: "they may provide viable substitutes for [non-selective post-secondary education] courses that are already effectively summarized by certificates.”  

Hoxby is right about one thing, the very thing that bloggers have been writing about for the past three years: why would students at high-status institutions pay expensive tuition for credits from their own institution if they can get credit for the course through a MOOC for free?  I won't keep you in suspense: they wouldn't.

If highly selective schools start accepting MOOCs for credit, and students stop paying, the institutions may no longer be able to financially support the effort to create the courses in the first place. This is just one of the reasons Hoxby argues that these institutions should not consider accepting MOOCs for credit, even those MOOCs they develop themselves.

So developing MOOCs is effectively like elite institutions eating their own seed corn, which I think Jonathan Rees pointed out some years back.

One thing the summary of the report, at least, doesn't seem a bit concerned about that humanities faculty at places like Amherst were thoughtful enough to consider: what happens to the non-elites once the elites have had their MOOCs inserted into their curricula?

Actually, I'm being unfair to Hoxby. She's really just laying out the economic reality that we're all going to have to deal with sooner or later.  Once MOOCs get their hands--tentacles?--into non-elites and things get worse, as they will, what she tells us will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

TIME leads the cheering for MOOCs

"And the heavens parted, and behold, the MOOC descended from heaven and revolutionized education"--no, wait. That's not a quotation but only the tone of the author's puffy opinion piece, this week's feature article in Time.  Here is the shorter version, so you can decide whether to read it yourself.

A sample "fact": "Online classes were not, generally speaking, very good. To this day, most are dry, uninspired affairs, consisting of a patchwork of online readings, written Q&As and low-budget lecture videos" (35).

Hey, there, Ms. Author: do you have any source for that, or are we just playing straw man bingo here? Straw man bingo, you say? Okey-dokey then.  Just checking. I thought Time fancied itself a news magazine, but whatevs.

Amid the glow of the piece--the physics MOOC at Udacity was so awesome!--a piece so fulsome that I thought glitter was going to spring off the page, I did learn this tidbit from Udacity's co-founder David Stavens: "I think the top 50 schools are probably safe.  There's a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live in side the bubble, is wonderful" (41). Gee, you think?

And when Author visits the University of the District of Columbia, she sees the other kind of school that is "safe": "very selective--and very unselective--colleges will continue to survive" (41).

The rest of us? Well, we're pretty much --- oh, go ahead and supply the word yourself: obsolete. Jonathan Rees has been warning us about this, in more elegant language, for months now.

And there's more! Here's the takeaway: "Ideally, Udacity and other MOOC providers will help strip away all the distractions of higher education--the brand, the price and the facilities--and remind all of us that education is about learning" (41). You don't say!  About learning? Really? Not about sports teams and the facilities that universities keep building in a desperate arms race for students? Not about creating a community of people who can learn together? Not about the connections to community, alumni, businesses, and place that can help a lot of students through internships and jobs? Not about research--for who'll do the research when professors at the Top 50 are teaching all the courses in the country? I read this and wondered idly how many graduates of the Top 50 got jobs in part through their connections, people they knew from their university experience, extra research they did by working with a professor, a project they did that an employer saw--no, that surely doesn't have an effect on a person's career. At all.

Well, since I have actual students who sent in actual papers to be graded, I have to sign off now.  Given the pace of the cheerleading, I guess I should be grateful that we still have classes and the opportunity to connect with students, since apparently that whole model is going the way of the dodo.

Random Bullets of Recommitting to Writing, with a side dash of MOOCs

Between MLA and a bout of illness, I've fallen off the writing cliff big time. Here's a self-reminder list about why I need to climb back up.

• Unless I want to move to a non-pseudonymous blog where I can talk about MOOCs and brag about my posts on Twitter, the way everyone else does, my writing life lies elsewhere and I ought to knock off talking about them while I work on the book. 
• Ditto for the comically inept and silly MSM posts about lazy professors and the rest of it. 
• Double ditto for the MLA debates over the "dark side of Digital Humanities," which is an interesting discussion but a distraction.
• Jonathan Rees's recent post about disaggregating knowledge and separating it from the workers who own it (a MOOC practice reminiscent of labor-busting in the olden days) reminded me of this New Yorker article in which Atul Gowande argues that a Cheesecake Factory model of consistency might help improve medical practice. While Gowande makes a good case for this in medicine, it occurred to me that this is the MOOC model, too. In the "I'll teach/lecture, and you can be my tutor/assistant/handmaiden" model now being hyped for local professors, we're all going to be the  sous-chefs doing prep for a meal that we never get to create. If I'm going to be stuck in a food assembly line arranging arugula leaves on a plate hour after hour, day after day, for the creative foods that the MOOC superchef/lecturer hands down for us to replicate, having your own writing as a focus is going to have to replace the satisfactions of teaching.
•  Time to get to work.