Our First Hangout on Air

On April 26, we held a Hangout-on-Air with Wayne Anderson, president of the Associated Colleges of the South.  The theme of the conversation was MOOCs and the liberal arts college.  We discussed how small colleges might respond to the MOOC phenomenon.

Radio Free MOOC?

This article about the radio-based "MOOCs" of the 1920s and 1930s is a great read.  There are some big differences between the current phenomenon and what is described therein that I want to mention:

• In the early-mid 20th century, college was not the seemingly necessary ticket to the middle-class life that it has now become.
• The expense of college had not spiraled upwards as it now has.
• The Internet was not available to facilitate two-way communication as it now can.

Aside from those points, I think the basic thrust of the article is on-target.

Preregistration: Students, you have the right to be refused

Here at Hendrix, we just finished preregistration for the 2013-14 academic year.  I want to reflect a bit on how the system is not designed to put the needs of the students first.

More often than not, only one section is offered of any given course in any given academic year.  It often happens that there is a time conflict with another course.  Widespread frustration with this phenomenon is given voice in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when Hermione uses a "Time-Turner" to enable her to solve this problem.  Alas, time-turners are pure fantasy, and thus if a student wants to take two concurrent courses, the attitude of the institution is to say, "I don't care that you're interested in both things.  This semester, you may only study one of them."

Even if the student is fortunate enough to avoid this problem, there is also the problem of class limits.  The institution can only handle a certain number of students in a course.  There is often a good reason for this.  Nevertheless, the institution says to the ejected student, "Tough luck.  I don't care that you are interested.  You just don't fit."  I don't mean to minimize the efforts that an institution will undertake to address this; often, new adjuncts are hired and new sections opened for just this reason.  Nevertheless, the institution reserves the right to say "No" to a student.

Contrast this attitude with the attitude of a MOOC.  Sign up whenever you want for whatever you want.  The field is open.  If you are curious, we will help you feed your curiosity.  Of course, Coursera, with its own time-limited courses, does not take this advantage as seriously as Udacity does.  I am intrigued at how strong my negative feelings are towards Coursera on precisely this point.

I don't want to pretend that there is a straightforward means for a brick-and-mortar institution to emulate this possibility.  But as a department chair who just had to evict at least two dozen students from courses they wanted to take, I can't shake the feeling that the MOOC world may be sincerely trying harder to serve students than we are.

MOOCS and Academic Advising

It is academic advising time here at Hendrix, which has given me some thoughts about a potential role of MOOCs.

It is very common for a student to sign up for a course and discover that the material is really not interesting or compelling. But this realization might not happen until several weeks into the course, well past the deadline to replace it with something else. Furthermore, courses are something of a scarcity for the student.

At Hendrix, students take four courses per semester, with 32 courses required for graduation. In speaking with some of my advisees over the past two weeks, some of them have expressed that the trade-offs in deciding how to invest their precious course credits in filling out their academic portfolio are really quite stressful.

It could be suggested, then, that a student who is feeling indecisive about what to take could sign up for a couple of MOOCs in the pertinent subjects. The student could then use this experience to inform the registration decision. Unfortunately, the synchronous model employed by Coursera makes this really difficult to do. You have to get the timing right. Coursera's offerings would really be a lot more useful (both in this regard and in other ways) if they would do what Udacity does and archive the course videos indefinitely.

Smoke, Not Light

Let me start by saying that I was really looking forward to this MOOC experience.  Somehow I never got the memo, the one that said that MOOCs were evil, that they heralded the end of education as we know it, that they represented the last flicker of the flame of learning, just before it turned into a wispy ghostlike memory of a time when thinking was an action to be done well or poorly, not an inner replay of a History Channel documentary.  I also didn't get the memo about how MOOCs meant the end of all of our jobs.  I was totally looking forward to it. 

And this is what the internet (video-recording, television, film, radio, langauge) was supposed to be for, right?  This was always the big promise.

Well, I reckon I'm over it.  My MOOC is called "Writing History," and it is run from UCF through the Canvas system.   As near as I can tell, the point of the course was to explore "how and why history is written the way it is."  Or maybe another way to put it:  it's a historiography class.   Or it's not...it's a class about the socio-economic and political forces that shape the writing of history.  Or it's not.  Yes, I'm a little unclear on the concept.  Weeks in, I'm still a little unclear on the concept.  But let me come back to that.

Things started out fine, but right after that, they were not fine.  The course is divided into content modules, one per week.  And a module consists of some very short videos by the instructor, some links to outside reading materials, podcasts, and videos, and a kind of quiz mechanism that is supposed to be like a game but is really like a quiz.  A multiple choice quiz.  Thus endeth each module.

The intro video explained that the instructor, a historian, was not an expert in all of the things we'd be covering.  In fact, he knew very little about some of the things we'd be covering, and so there would be lots of links to outside things.  Sometimes, he said, he'd be assigning reading from books that were not online.  We'd have to get these from our local library or a bookstore.   OK...that could happen.  Not so very "MO" in the "MOOC" formula, but maybe I had the wrong idea.

So I started moving through weekly modules.  Well, I tried to.  The Canvas interface is very simple--click on the link to watch the video.  You can adjust the volume, but that's it.  The instructor is a slow-talker, and I really wish that I could speed things along, but whatever--I'm watching videos.  Well...I'm trying to watch videos.  The links are often broken.  Sometimes they lead to nothing.  Sometimes they lead to videos, but not the ones they're supposed to lead to.  The online conversation threads are full of sad cries for help:  I can't get to the next module because the links in last week's module are broken!  Dozens of these messages.  I wrote some myself.  Sometimes, after days of this, the instructor would chime in on the threads:  Videos are fixed, enjoy.  But in at least two cases, they were not fixed.  And there was no other mechanism that I could find for reporting this kind of thing.  Well, that's just technology, right?  So I decided to roll with it, keep up as I can, even though this is a steady problem. 

So I'm watching videos sometimes.  Now I've got nothing against the instructor.  He appears to be interested in the stuff.  But he really doesn't seem to know about it.  Maybe it's a chance for him to learn, too--I can relate.  But he is clearly reading a script in these vids, and he clearly did not write it.  My reason for thinking that is that a) he can't pronounce the names of the people he's talking about, and b) he stops midway through sentences, very frequently, as if he does not know that the sentence continues.  And very slowly--did I mention that?  I would be extremely surprised to finds out that he had even read these ahead of time, much less written them.

Luckily, his videos are very short.  The real content comes from the links.  And most of the links are to BBC podcasts.  I love the BBC, really, hearts.  But I'm surprised to see that a very significant part of this course relies on the BBC.   Oh, and sometimes, for example, a link to "all of the works of Tacitus"--so you can brush up on that a bit, too, to help you with the BBC PODCASTS.

So...as far as I can tell, we've got a less-than-ideally-invested instructor, a swarm of technical troubles, and a heavy reliance on educational programs that someone else produced.  And almost no student/instructor interaction.

Yeah, what about student/instructor interaction?  Well, every now and then, the instructor makes a short, very concise comment in the discussion threads.  (There are only threads, no live or real-time interaction.)  He did warn us that he wouldn't show up much.  Something about not having time, and something about only wanting to chime in when he had something significant to say.  He doesn't want to stomp on our conversation.  His respect in this regard has been excessive.  Most of the threaded discussions are about things like this: "I am writing the history of my great grandfather's experiences in WWI, and that BBC podcast really made me realize that writing history is fun, not scary."  Response:  "Oh, I totally know what you mean.  I love thinking about ancient times.  I am so glad I am taking this course."  As someone who cares deeply about conversation, I harbor only pious feelings about any and all comments.  We all start from where we are, and that is a sacred thing.  But there is no instructor presence here, really, and so any chance of "capitalizing" on these starts, in a guided way, is lost. 

(And here's where the unclarity of the concept comes back in.  Many of the participants are, for personal or professional reasons, prospective writers of history.  That is, they saw the title, Writing History, and signed up for it, thinking that it would help them figure out how to do their own writing.  But that is really not at all what the course was supposed to be about.  As near as I can tell, it was supposed to be meta-historical--a look into the conditions which shape the writing of, and study of, history.  That's a difficult idea, and only tangentially related to practical aims.  Now, given the fact that the readings and videos are not really about that idea, maybe it doesn't matter.  But if there was a way to counteract the misunderstanding that many of the students had when they signed up...and still have...it would be regular and robust guidance from the instructor.  His insufficiently focused course, unsupported by the assigned materials, and uncorrected by his interaction, creates much more smoke than light.)

All in all, I am not impressed.  Again, I was excited by the MOOC idea, not worried about it or suspicious of it.  And I can imagine a course with none of these problems--it could be a real thing.  It would obviously require a lot more work on behalf of the instructor.  I do think that at least some students are enjoying it, and that's great.  Some of them are clearly not in a position to take a course in other ways.   And I'd say that a lot of the commenters are people who are taking the course completely out of personal interest, and that's great, too.  I am a little worried that they might not realize that what they take to be a real college level course, millions of Brits take to be after-tea entertainment.   I'm also a little worried about abstract things like:  Is it going to be the case that British taxpayers are on the hook for the great MOOC revolution?  Has anyone told them? 

I'm going to stick with it.  Maybe all of these wrinkles will be ironed out.  Maybe our instructor will soon get to material that he is more comfortable with.  Maybe he'll interact more.  Maybe he'll post the transcripts of his script-based videos, so that we can read them even when the videos won't work.  Maybe the students will start to understand better what it's all about.  It's a lot of Maybes.

  

I have a horse in this race.

As a communication scholar, much of my research involves educational applications of emerging technologies. One might think that this would make me predisposed to the MOOC vision, but I'm actually quite skeptical about the claim that MOOCs represent a serious threat to small universities such as Trinity. 

It is important to acknowledge three factors that bias my interpretations. 

First, I have a vested interest in the continued existence of the face-to-face interactive lectures and discussions that flourish at Trinity. I simply do not want to imagine a world in which MOOCs would make my job obsolete. My concern is not solely based on economic self interest. One can always hunt for other lines of work, and almost anything related to programming would actually pay more than most teaching gigs. I'm more concerned about the quality of life. Everything about this job makes me happy. Even on the first Monday after Spring Break, with stacks of grading piling up on my desk, this job is amazing. 

The first startup was named
 Metaversatility. The second
company was (and continues
to be) Elastic Collision.

Second, my interpretation of MOOCs is necessarily shaped by the fact that I was once an evangelist for the virtual world Second Life. In fact, I took a year of unpaid academic leave to co-found two startup companies that developed virtual spaces for commerce and education. I rode the wave at the right time, returning to the academic fold at the exact moment when the real-world economy crashed, bringing Second Life's economy with it. Five years later, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I recognize that there were many flaws with the grandiose visions promoted by virtual world boosters. Though I remain convinced that something like Second Life will be very important in the near future -- perhaps even merging with MOOCs and wearable interfaces -- I'm far more skeptical about virtual promises than I once was. 

Third, something changed in my life five years ago that significantly undermined by enthusiasm for virtual interaction. I married my best friend (also a Trinity professor), and I became a step-parent to a super cool seven-year-old. It soon became clear that I could not be fully present in my face-to-face relationships when spending ten, twenty, or thirty hours a week in Second Life. When I was touting the benefits of virtual classrooms, I thought of virtual interaction and face-to-face interaction as substitutable ingredients. Today, if asked to choose between face-to-face and virtual interaction -- whether in my personal life or in the classroom -- I am far more likely to opt for face-to-face interaction.

I understand that virtual interaction is often quite meaningful, and I have little patience for those who think that online communication is somehow pathological or strange. But life experiences have instilled in me a far deeper respect for the importance of being physically proximate to other human beings. 

A close family member is currently undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for Type 2A breast cancer. (She is doing quite well, I might add.) During Spring Break, I spent a week with her in California. Physical proximity and the ability to hug my family members was essential. Second Life wouldn't have been the same for so many reasons, including the fact that chemo-related neuropathy has made extensive typing and avatar navigation very difficult for this person. She's a highly technical person who has been programming computers since the 1970s, but she's not currently able to take full advantage of virtual conferencing technologies. The avatar is too difficult to control, typing is only possible in small amounts, and the all-seeing gaze of the web-cam is far too intrusive for someone undergoing chemotherapy. 

If money or other circumstances made it impossible for me to visit my family in California, Second Life (and other virtual platforms) would be better than not interacting with her at all. But it would be a distant second to physical proximity. 

So, these are three biases that influence my observations: 1) I have a vested interest in the status quo, 2) my previous enthusiasm for Second Life has left me with "once bitten twice shy" skepticism, and 3) life-changing experiences have helped me understand the deep importance of physical proximity and face-to-face interaction. 

Was This a Fair Test?

I just limped across the finish line of my first MOOC, Galaxies and Cosmology (10 out of 15 on the last quiz = pass!).  I got what I wanted out of the course; I learned the time scales for events in the history of the universe, the types of galaxies and how they evolve, and most importantly, a lot of jargon that will help me better follow astronomy seminars.  I also learned more about how I'd develop my own MOOC -- that displaying slides with narration was mostly OK, but that I'd still want some animation for complex math, and that there would be no need to show my face while taking!  But I'm also left with a new reservation about the recent explosion of MOOC interest.  If we are looking at MOOCs as an option to classroom instruction, was this a fair test of the system?

With a couple of exceptions (coding and poetry courses about which others have posted), most of the online courses I have seen advertised, and certainly the one I took, were what we would call survey courses, or general overviews of a field.  And I think this is part of what is fueling the MOOC excitement -- it's fun to have the horizon suddenly pushed way back, and have whole new expanses of knowledge available to you.  It's the same thing we saw with the advent of search engines; it's incredibly addictive to watch a movie and say, "What else has that person been in?", or watch Jeopardy! and ask, "Where the heck is Suriname, anyway?", and have the answer immediately available.  But while survey courses are great introductions to a field, they hide much of the work required to become a practicing member of the field.

Through the Galaxies and Cosmology course, I know what the Friedmann equation is, and what the solutions look like in certain limits.  But I haven't had to solve it myself, and in no way feel prepared to use it for any real astronomical calculations.  I learned some new terminology and have shown (increasingly less) retention of it, but I'm not ready to apply it beyond reading comprehension.  Which is fine, because that's what the course was intended to do.  But add in the requirement of learning applications, and all of the warts of the MOOC process (limited interactivity with instructors, poor signal-to-noise in message boards, grading process versus result) become magnified.

I think Gabriel Ferrer said something very important in the previous blog post.  The current incarnation of MOOCs cannot replace classroom instruction, but they can free it up, and allow it to concentrate on its strengths.  Present your material through online instruction, where students can choose their own hours and pace of learning.  Then devote classroom time to application, problem solving, and interactivity, and you get the best of both worlds.