AI is to Writing as Cheez-Whiz is to Cheese (File under “cranky rantsmanship”)

 

Hear me out. I promise you that this is written by a real person, and possibly a Cassandra.

Exhibit A: A long time ago, I had Feelings about the incessant cheerleading for Twitter that first the media, and then colleagues, were going on and on and on about. (That was in the Before Times, before Twitter became Evil X.) My academic compatriots all but posted signs saying "Twitter will save the world, or academic discourse anyway." Now we are all on Bluesky, which alarms right-wing pundit Megan McArdle, she of the "If you're old and poor, sucks to be you" school of economic growth, because there is no profit in it for her, but for a time it did seem that Twitter could be great, and Bluesky, pace McArdle, might get there yet. 

But the point was, the cheerleading was too much, as it had been for other tech that was supposed to transform teaching. 

Exhibit B: Enter the MOOC. Remember them and the quaint old days they represented? They too were going to transform education in all the best ways--turning us into glorified tutors for the MOOC 'n' Bake classrooms we would all be grading for--not teaching, just grading, because that is why everyone wants to teach. UCLA is already going there: an AI + MOOC combination that will transform the world. 

Now to Exhibit C: AI and writing. I've already complained about the mind-numbing effects of reading AI-generated prose and the lengthy knuckling under that the MLA has done in bowing to our new environment-destroying overlords. 

But now I'm seeing professional writers (no names, of course) embrace it as an idea factory. All they have to do is clean it up a bit to mimic their voice and bingo, there's a Substack or blog post. 

I read a few, and the whole "idea factory" thing? Not so much. If that's what ChatGPT 4.0 or Claude or Grok or any of the other idea factories generate what you  consider ideas, then okay. Whatever helps to monetize the site. You do you. If your idea of writing is tweaking some very anodyne non-content, then go for it.  

But all AI-generated prose, in a perfect world, would have a disclaimer: "AI wrote this, so decide whether you want to spend 3 or 5 or 10 minutes of your only precious brain life in reading it." 

Oh, and is it good for your brain to use AI to write for you? Maybe not.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202506/how-chatgpt-may-be-impacting-your-brain 

If you want to eat Cheez-Whiz, it definitely has its uses. But don't pretend that it's a true aged cheddar like you'd eat with fresh apples. 

Same goes for AI writing.

 

Brave new AI world: UCLA comp lit course to be fully AI (except the grading, of course)

 https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/comparative-literature-zrinka-stahuljak-artificial-intelligence?fbclid=IwY2xjawHCkWJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHevSkyx0i5RjId-pd4g4_W-cs4zgTUOz19XwrxVpLU7LD2jt9E4FEkX7Jw_aem_LRrvJbHS0TFgq9uokRfYFw

So here we are: some kind of highly monetized tech company called Kudu is going to take Professor Zrinka Stahuljak’s comp lit course materials and turn them into a fully AI-driven course—except for the grading, of course, which will be left to Teaching Assistants. 

Benefits to students? Consistency across multiple sections. 

Benefits to Teaching Assistants? They get to work on the students’ writing (autocorrect wants to make this “writhing,” and I kind of get it).

Benefits to the Professor? No additional work except for submitting grades. She doubtless has tenure and is not worried about her job. 

Any downsides? 

1. Well, the TAs are going to be stuck reading writing that is likely to be about 95% AI generated (ChatGPT, Claude, Google Notes or whatever) and maybe 5% from Chegg or Course Hero. And they will get to track it all down to report to Academic Standards.

2.  If you were a student, would you put forth your best effort, knowing that everything was canned and your professor was never going to look at any of it? If your professor was like the Karl Marx God in the clouds in a Monty Python skit, who, once having generated content, just says “Get on with it!”? Look, I teach online often, and one of the hardest but most rewarding parts is talking to students as real person to real person. What if you remove even that layer of connection?

3. Who’s going to answer their questions? AI. 

4. Oh, and the textbook that will generate all the AI? Is it OER? Oh, you sweet summer child; of course it’s not. It’s going to cost the students an additional $25 per semester. 

5. If this is the wave of the future—the MOOC of the future, if you will—what about intellectual property? 

Questions:

1. Is this going to cost the university more than simply having a course in D2L, Canvas, or Blackboard? 

2. Since Kudu is compensating the professors, how does this affect their employment with the university? 

3. Cui bono? Kudu and the University’s bottom line, probably. But what about the students? What about the connections that teaching a humanistic subject is supposed to foster? 

4. Out of state tuition at UCLA is 43K a year. Would you send your kid to be taught by a bot? Call me when Bezos and the other billionaires and millionaires send their students to be taught by nonhuman objects instead of people. 

MLA on AI: I promised I wasn't going to write more about it, but here we are

 Internal monologue of the last 15 minutes: "You have papers to grade . . . don't look at that MLA AI report that you couldn't see the other day because its server crashed . . . papers to grade, remember?  . . . don't do it!" and here we are. It is the Great MOOC Panic of 2015 all over again, and it is pure catnip to people with opinions.

So as you probably already heard, CCCC and the MLA have joined their unholy forces to weigh in on Generative AI. (I kid because I love.)  https://hcommons.org/app/uploads/sites/1003160/2024/10/MLA-CCCC-Joint-Task-Force-WP-3-Building-Culture-for-Gen-AI-Literacy-1.pdf

There are three of these working papers; this one is the latest. I did read through it, although probably to get into the spirit of things I should have fed it into an AI engine and asked for bullet points.

Some positive thoughts:

1. I appreciate the work that went into this, truly. There are thoughtful people on the board, and they have really tried to make guidelines that would be helpful. 

2. It's really useful for distinguishing between AI and Generative AI and other forms as well as what they can and cannot do.

Some questions: 

1. Is it strongly promoting the use of GAI in every course? You betcha. I kind of see it, since they believe the wave of the future is training students to use it effectively, since the whole "help students to write better on their own" ship has apparently sailed.

2. What is our role as educators in all this? 

1. Training students to evaluate GAI for accuracy, which means that we--instructors--get to spend more time getting cozy with GAI and checking up on it as well as evaluating student papers. Two for the salary of one!
   
2. Teaching students 
1. to evaluate GAI output for relevancy, bias, and data security, 
2. to evaluate rhetorical situations where GAI is and isn't appropriate
3. to having them write metacommentaries on their use of GAI in a paper
4. to monitor how GAI helps (!) their development as writers. Yes, reading the GAI output and assessing it as well as assessing their papers: twice the grading fun.
   
3. Toward the goals of #1 and #2, seek out more professional development opportunities about GAI, and "[r]ead current articles and popular nonfiction about AI as well as emerging Critical Artificial Intelligence (CAIL) scholarship" (10). Are you tired yet?

3.  Can you opt out?

Yes. "Respect the choice to opt out" (10). 

   BUT if you opt out and are contingent, could you lose your job? 

Also yes. "Some instructors may face consequences in hiring and evaluation processes when they opt out of teaching AI literacies in their classrooms, particularly when shared governance processes have determined department-wide uses for AI in the curriculum" (10).

4.  But if I'm just one instructor, can I decide it's not appropriate for my course? 

Theoretically, yes; in practice, probably not. The report strongly, and I mean strongly, advocates for program-wide and department-wide if not university-wide adoption of a consistent policy of integrating GAI training as a cohesive whole.

I agree that this should be done in a systematic or coherent fashion, and it's much better to have something consistent. Will there be professional development time and funding devoted to this? 

5. I hear the tinkling of shiny "if you're not on board with the tech, you don't understand it" bells with this one. 

Faculty development meetings should be a space for building instructors’ conceptual knowledge about GAI literacies, helping them develop theory-informed pedagogical practices for integrating GAI into their teaching, and allowing them to experiment with GAI technologies and develop their technological skills.

Such gatherings can simultaneously address instructors’ resistance, fear, and hesitation about using GAI in their teaching while also recognizing that faculty development programs cannot make instructors experts in GAI, which is not an attainable goal given the fast-changing nature of these technologies

 Translation: 

• If you question it, it's because you fear it, which is stupid. You are stupid and not thinking correctly about this. 
• We are telling you that this is the wave of the future, and if you don't get on board with a new technology, you are just plain wrong. 
• If you have questions, you are wrong.
• If you hesitate rather than swallowing this wholesale, you are wrong. 
• You need to be persuaded, not listened to. Your fear and hesitation are not legitimate. They are resistance that needs to be overcome.

But this is not our first rodeo with the whole "look, it's shiny!" argument, is it? With MOOCs? With auto-graded essays? With Twitter? With every future-forward "get rid of the books" library?  

I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm saying that rushing headlong into every new technology--tech enthusiast here, remember--without allowing for questions and a thoughtful assessment is what we keep doing, and I wonder if we will ever learn from our past experiences.

 

In which I am tempted to MOOC: How Writers Write Fiction 2015 from the Iowa Writers Workshop

I saw this at The Toast: the Iowa Writers Workshop is offering an 8-week MOOC on creative writing, and I am really tempted. http://iwp.uiowa.edu/iwp-courses/distance-learning-courses/fall-2015/how-writers-write-fiction

How tempted? I actually signed up to be on their mailing list the last time and got a notice of this a week or two ago.

Do I have time to do this? Absolutely not.

But I have wanted to find out more about creative writing for a long time. I have longed for the opportunity to write fiction or creative nonfiction without the abject humiliation of showing my possible writing to the creative writing people I know. Abject humiliation from strangers, on the other hand, would be fine.

I don't really want to do this under my own name, though, in case I am terrible at it. I'm pretty sure this was George Eliot's reason, too.  I wonder if I could use one of my aliases to sign up.

The economics of wishful thinking about campus funding

Given the resounding thump on the head that the protections of tenure just took in Wisconsin (see Historiann's posts), I've been thinking about the implications of articles that call for universal tenure, or tenure-track lines for teaching, or vast increases in lines because humanities are a good thing, or even free state-funded tuition for college students.  (See Notorious's post on this issue.)

A few years ago, there was a call for tenure-track faculty to "just say no" to any hiring of contingent faculty instead of tenure-track lines, and if that meant courses didn't get taught, well, tough beans.

Now, I like the principles behind these idealistic stands, but I am wondering about how these would work in an economic environment like this one where state legislatures continually raid the higher ed budget to fund other things, where double-digit decreases in state funding are the norm, where tuition is mandated by the state not to increase, and where some governors may well destroy great university systems so that they can make the destruction a cornerstone of their conservative credentials. See

How might the conversation go at Everystate University?  I'm hypothesizing that it might go something like this in the worst case:

Words and Widgets Faculty: "We need to teach 100 sections of Words and Widgets 101 next semester, but we don't have enough faculty."

Admin: "Increase course sizes. Put 'em in an auditorium. Hand 'em some clickers."

Faculty: "No, we won't increase course sizes."

Admin: "Okay, hire some contingent faculty."

Faculty: "No, we made a pledge not to do that.  In fact, we need 10 new tenure-track teaching faculty in our department right away to teach 3 sections apiece. We will also need you to fund the search costs. If you don't do that, we can't and won't offer 100 sections."

Admin: sounds of crickets

Time passes. True to their pledge, the Words and Widgets Department offers only 70 sections of Words and Widgets 101.  Many angry phone calls from students later, the department and Admin meet again.

Faculty: "See? We can't offer these courses without enough tenure-track teaching faculty."

Admin: "Contingent--"

Faculty. "Not gonna do that.  It would threaten our educational mission and break our pledge."

Admin.  "Here's 70% of your last year's budget, then, since you only taught 70% of the students. Oh, and we now have an agreement with MOOCs-R-US to teach the other 30% online."

Faculty: "You can't do that. You have to run it through the Faculty Senate."

Admin: "Oh, can't we, though? Bwahahahaha!"

This doesn't mean that the noble ideals aren't worth fighting for.  They are. But in my pessimistic moments, I wonder about how these might fare in the world of academe as it currently exists.

Edited to add: See Bardiac's roundup at http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/teaching-track.html

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")? 

It's not a "best practice" unless someone makes a profit

At the Chronicle, somebody's determined to confuse/conflate "innovative teaching methods" with "stuff we can charge students for."

Among the "innovative" methods that those pesky professors know about but are swinging their Luddite sledgehammers at:

•  Using standardized assessment tools to gauge student performance.
• Using external (paid) materials to augment content (This at a time when a lot of us can't persuade students to buy books and some state legislatures are trying to outlaw book ordering if a free alternative is available)
• Using clickers 

Also taken as given as "best practices":

• Flipped classrooms (which Jonathan Rees pointed out in a post about Coursera could be used to divide "content" from "helper teachers" or whatever, the old MOOC model) 
• Hybrid courses (partly online)

The study is from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but I'm guessing some of the many profitable edtech/content providers are very interested in this, too. 

Just to be clear: Some of these don't cost money, of course, and I have no problem with any of them if the instructor finds them useful. But to take these as evidence of "innovation," and by implication to cast those who don't use them as not using "best practices," is illogical and rhetorically fairly--no, really--shady. 

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.

Mad Men Season 7: Random Bullets

"Don't worry. It's not symbolic."
"No. It's quite literal."

I treated myself to Mad Men non-HD from iTunes ($22.95) this week. A few episodes downloaded, and then Episode 4, "The Monolith," got stuck. It would not download more than 10 minutes, but iTunes insisted it had already downloaded and could not be downloaded again. An endless loop of frustration? Symbolic or quite literal?

What's the song for this event and this season, Matt Weiner? "Riding along on a carousel, round and round and round and round with you"? Or "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/ Here I am, stuck in the middle with you"?

Season 6 was not fun. Watching Don Draper double down on what we saw him do for all of Season 4--drink too much, stick with an irritating and sanctimonious Wise Woman of a mistress, and mess up at work--was, well, like being on a carousel, and not in a good Kodak-moment kind of way.

So far this season, we are in for even more misery theater.  Here's how it seemed to me last year: "There's a trend in television now that I think of as Misery Theater: how much can you punish or torture the protagonist for his or her sins and still keep the audience's attention? For you Game of Thronesfans, let's call it the Theon Grayjoy rule, or maybe we should just call it Degradation Limbo: "how low can you go?"

Well, now Theon/Don is reduced to shuffling around the office, doing the bidding of lesser men, as new creative director Lou ("He's adequate!" protests Cutler) is poised to cut down his ideas. Unlike Theon, he literally has all his body parts, but symbolically not so much.

Don has so angered everyone in the office with his antics that they're willing to stomp on his good ideas (new computer account) along with the bad ones. Then again, everyone in the office is in a foul temper all the time, including Peggy, and it's apparently all Don's fault. The only ones who aren't are Roger, who seems happier since he stopped trying to work at all, and Ted, who looks as if someone just stole his beloved puppy.

But the interwebs seem quite certain that the Mets pennant means that Don may be back on track in 1969, and certainly the sight of him typing on a magically restored typewriter at the end gives one hope. If he can write a pitch like Accutron, he's still got the gift.

"Just do the work, Don," Freddy Rumsen tells him. Words to live by, for sure, and I hope for the sake of the show that there's a silver lining to this endless black cloud.

By the way, did anyone else get a kick out of the computer sequence? It's big, it's shiny, it's the future, and no one knows or cares what it can do because Big! Shiny!  Future! I think the model was the MOOC 360.

The name is MOC, not MOOC, and we're charging for them. What? You got a problem with that?

So the world turns on its axis, and, like clockwork, the "monetization plan" that various critics have wondered about reveals itself. 

Inside Higher Ed reports that Udacity has decided to change its business model:

Beginning next month, the massive open online course provider Udacity will cut the first O from the acronym and only offer MOCs. Founder Sebastian Thrun, whose "pivot" last year shifted the company's focus to corporate training, in a blog post announced Udacity will stop issuing free course completion certificates on May 16.

To be fair, they're only charging for the certificate.  If you want to do the course and then manage to convince a hiring manager somewhere that you actually know this stuff for free without the certificate, well, good on ya, as the Aussies say.

So, from free, open-access, and change-the-world elite education for the masses to a fee-based certificate and a corporate training model in 3 years?  Now that's a speedy adaptation to market forces.

It's really kind of reassuring that MOOCs have found their feet and that those feet don't have to stomp all over higher education, at least at present.

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. 

MOOCs: Can we say "I told you so" yet? Probably not.

No real post because of family events but --

SJSU has suspended its Udacity courses because of failure rates from 56-76%. See also Tenured Radical and Edge of the American West.

It's the lesson of MOOC 'n Bake: MOOCs may be great for self-paced learners seeking a tech credential, or those who just want to learn more about a subject, but a substitute for real fried chicken education they're not.

But evidence-based practices and actual student outcomes have never been a strong suit for MOOC enthusiasts. Quality and student learning are not their concern; efficiency and cost containment are.

As long as someone's willing to lavish grant money on MOOCs, and as there's money to be made by mass producing and "delivering content," MOOCs aren't going away anytime soon.

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.

Wait, what? So Coursera wants to be Blackboard when it grows up?

This Inside Higher Ed article about MOOC partnerships has me confused. Instead of offering free education for the masses, and definitely not the classes, Coursera has another business model in mind, and it's coming soon to a state university near you.

But some universities will try Coursera to see how well they can use its software to offer traditional for-credit online classes to dozens of registered students at once. If universities like the platform, long-time industry players like Desire2Learn and Blackboard could find themselves with new competition.

 If a little competition will improve Blackboard, I'm all for it. I think, though, that what they're talking about is selling content modules of the sort that a lot of textbook providers already have available for Blackboard.

Koller said she now wants people to start thinking of Coursera content as

a textbook.

Figure 1. Daphne Koller tries a different approach
to explain MOOCs to wary faculty members.

Clever girl, Daphne Koller. Since faculty have been making a fuss, the message has changed from  "MOOCs are shiny and good for us all" to  "Don't fear the MOOC! It's just a talking textbook."

But the dream of a professor-less class, or an unprofessor class where knowledge of the person in the room doesn't count, hasn't died yet:

SUNY's associate provost, Carey Hatch, said the system also plans to offer incentives to campuses to develop and consume online courses that meet general education requirements. Some courses could be “guided MOOCs” where a SUNY instructor helps SUNY students work their way through a course that was created by another institution. 

See that "develop and consume"? How much will state universities be allowed to develop, and how much will they have to pay to "consume" content that they probably already have in their "online classes that meet" gen ed requirements?

“We hope to reach more students with the existing faculty that we have,” Hatch said. 

"Reach more students with the existing faculty that we have"--I'm confused again. Does mean that state schools' "existing faculty" will get to grade and tutor more students than ever before but still will not be allowed to run their own courses?

To partner with so many institutions, however, Coursera will sidestep a contractual obligation to primarily offer courses from members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America. It will do so by creating a new section of its website to house material from the less-than-elite state universities. This different section will offer MOOCs but will be branded in a different way.

Figure 2. Don Draper didn't get the account,
but the Coca-Cola of ketchups is
still iconic as a brand.

They really aren't kidding about perpetuating class structures with this model.  You can buy Heinz, or you can buy store brand ketchup, but it'll be absolutely clear on everyone's transcript.

You'll be shocked to learn, in a follow-up article at IHE, that SUNY faculty weren't told about this brave new plan for their futures until after the administrators had made it a done deal.

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.

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. 

EdX finds a way around SJSU Philosophy Department's Principled Stand

From Community College Spotlight, which asks a question that we've all asked more than once around the blogosphere: "Is Online Learning for Steerage?"

Apparently the SJSU Philosophy Department's principled stand on EdX's course doesn't matter because--surprise!--EdX found a way around it:

Provost Ellen Junn said nobody had told the philosophy department to use the Sandel course, however several professors said they felt pressured to offer it. Peter J. Hadreas, who chairs the department, “said that administrators had now arranged to offer it through the English department, reinforcing his concerns that it would be taught by professors who are not trained in philosophy and would be especially reliant on the edX materials.”

Nice to know that disciplinary content doesn't matter to some administrators when free and shiny courses are involved.

In K-12 news, students in Louisiana were surprised at being signed up without their knowledge for the for-profit courses (called Course Choice) offered by the private company FastPath Learning.  FastPath offers a free tablet for signing up, and you don't even have to pass the course or turn in the tablet at the end.

Pop quiz, since we are being MOOC-like today: Where does the money for FastPath Learning courses come from?
a) the already limited funding for classroom teachers
b) administrative savings
c) all the high-tech bigwigs promoting it

Bonus question: In all likelihood, the EdX philosophy course will be "facilitated" or whatever glorified tutoring option is available by
a) tenured faculty who have already said "oh, hell no"
b) part-time faculty who fear losing their jobs if they say no

In the MOOC tradition, you can score these answers yourself.

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? 

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%.