New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Some thoughts on tutes

Next week, I will be teaching my first tutorials at Oxford University (the subject is philosophy of cognitive science). For those unfamiliar with the format, tutorials are one of the forms of teaching at Oxford that every undergraduate has. A lecturer and a student (or a small group of students, maximum 4) convene every week, and the student is guided and gets intensive feedback on the fruits of their independent study. A common procedure is that the student writes a brief paper each week, which they present at the start of the tutorial. The tutor suggests further reading, urges the student to think and to read on the basis of what they have said. There is no lecturing as such going on - it is rather a form of guided self-study. 

Tutorials are sometimes misunderstood as a form of hand-holding or spoon-feeding the student, but in fact the format encourages independence and responsibility. The student has to make sure to do all the reading, digest it, and be able to do the final exam on the basis of it. As it's one-on-one (up to four) it is hard to hide and resort to shortcuts instead of actually doing the reading and the thinking. Tutors get support and training in how to guide students on the right track if they slack or lose motivation; timely interventions make sure the attrition rate and failure rate is very low. 

Oxford's vice chancellor says the system will ultimately become too expensive, as tutorials cost more per student than the yearly tuition fees, which are capped at 9000 GBP . Educating an Oxford student costs about 16,000 GBP per student, which leaves a gap of 7000 GBP which is filled by various money-sources such as the endowments of colleges. His suggestion is to increase tuition fees - we know the outcome of unbridled student tuition fee increases - and it is a grim prospect. So one may wonder whether the tutorial is an institution worth preserving, given the costs. 

MOOCs will take-over...corporate training

Michael Kremer calls my attention to this post by Alex Usher (itself a response to this one). The significance of the post is three-fold: (i) one of the big corporate players in MOOC (massive open online courses) world, Udacity, is changing its strategy from competing with traditional universities to focusing on corporate training--this is accompanied by very forthright commentary by one of the intellectual (and corporate) pioneers of the very idea of MOOC; (ii) the mainstream press is silent on (i); (iii) there is, in fact, no mechanism to keep score on the opinion-leaders of the mainstream press (who have by-and-large been cheerleaders for MOOC and their corporate sponsors).

Over a decade ago the maverick economist, Robin Hanson from overcoming bias, tried to promote interest in (iii), but I don't recall what happened to his ideas.

Anyway, here is a generous excerpt from Usher's post:

There was a big story in MOOC-world last week, which the mainstream press has surprisingly yet to pick up on; namely, that Udacity, one of the three big corporate MOOC players, has just left the building.

Udacity, if you recall, was created by one Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford.  It was he who kicked off the current MOOC craze by opening up one of his computer science classes to the world, and then finding out that 160,000 people around the world had signed up.  Thrun left Stanford to start Udacity which, along with Coursera and EdX, has been part of the Holy Trinity of the MOOC revolution.

Last Thursday, Fast Company Magazine put out a story (hagiography?) on Thrun, which contained some staggering statements from the man himself, including:

(on looking at data on drop-outs) “We don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product”.

(on providing remedial education) “These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives… it’s a group for which this medium is not a good fit”.

(on the value of Udacity courses) “We’re not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you”.

From a guy who cockily said he was on the verge of finding a “magic formula” for education, and that by 2060, thanks to MOOCs, there would only be 10 universities, this is some funny stuff.

Free Stuff: Amherst College says yes to open access and no to MOOCs

--- A guest post by John Drabinski (Amherst)

Should professors make their teaching and research openly – even massively – accessible? Last year, we discussed the ramifications of free access rather intensely in the Amherst College faculty. The content of our discussions can provide food for thought for faculty members at places facing similar decisions.

The three decisions: 1) we approved a web-available College repository for College faculty members' article publications; and 2) we approved making Amherst College Press an open-access press; but 3) we refused to accept MOOC proposals from the Big Three: Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Let me explain why we made those decisions.

We need MOOTs, not MOOCs!

-- A guest post by Ned Hall (Harvard)

MOOCs and MOOTs are different things, and we should be working a lot more on the latter than the former. A MOOT is a Massive Open Online Text, a flexible on-line teaching tool that combines searchable, comment-on-able text, multimedia, tools for peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback, and who knows what other goodies we haven't thought of yet.

The big advantage of MOOTs over MOOCs is that you spend your time on pedagogical innovation, not on designing what could only be cut-rate assessment, feedback, and cheater-detection.

Why didn't I think of this?

"As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations)." See here for more of the revolutionary cost-saving ideas by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg. [HT Rich Booher on FB]

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.dpuf

New details on Georgia Tech outsourced education

I haven't had time to look at this in any detail, but after a quick skim, it seems that the company they are partnering with left the 'A' off their name.

Bob Meister's proposed Coursera MOOC

Bob Meister, President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and author of the classic "They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street" (please read this if you haven't already; here's a one page summary if you want to start there), has an utterly brilliant proposal to Coursera for a MOOC on Coursera's business model. This is one of the very best things I've ever read on MOOCs (here is our category on them). Here is the punch line -- MOOCs only make sense when public HE has already been privatized by turning to tuition rather than tax funds -- but please do read the whole thing. 

I want to keep public higher education public in a sense [in which] for-profit content disseminated on the internet is not. A large part of Coursera's appeal lies in your own nearly-socialist vision of an informational Common to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing universities and colleges. I personally wish that this part of your vision were coming from the leaders of UC. Instead they are trying to sell students on paying higher tuition because of the demonstrated role of elite universities in generating income inequality while also persuading the legislature to increase “access” so we can generate even more revenue from the tuition we charge.

Here I agree with your and Coursera’s business logic’s implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission while raising its prices at three times the rate of inflation.

I disagree, however, with Coursera’s implicit claim that privately-financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by public systems to be an engine for reducing social and economic hierarchy.

If you want the Biblical version: we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.

Michael Sandel responds

I would sure have loved to see an effort to tackle the broader issues of the SJSU letter, and to take the concerns a bit more seriously.  But in any event here it is.

An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel from the Philosophy Dept at San Jose State

The eloquent and well argued letter is here. I do not think they are being alarmist in their diagnosis of the ultimate function of this and other attacks on the traditional university.  (Let's keep discussion here to the open letter and the function of MOOCs specifically.  I'm going to start another thread today for discussion of things that we might organize publicly to resist these trends.)

Is it, perhaps, time to wake up and start raising hell before academia ceases to exist?

From yesterday's Chronicle

A brief question for MOOC fans

Why do you think MOOCs will lower tuition?

They might lower production costs inside the university,* but previous means of doing that (increasing ratio of adjuncts vs TT faculty) haven’t resulted in reduced tuition (far from it). Instead the increased “profit” from cost savings has been kept in-house. Why should we expect the alleged savings from MOOCs to be treated any differently?

MOOCs: the newest online dating service

Employers willing to pay can now find their soulmates with Coursera's new escort, er, on-line dating, no, headhunter service to find students who like poetry, museum-going, and long walks on the beach. Or soft skills in addition to their raw performance. (Okay, now it's starting to sound like Craigslist.)

Providers of free online courses are officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.... Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums. Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those "softer skills" are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance. 

To be serious for a moment, this is an excellent example of the Autonomia themes of "real subsumption" and the "social factory" (somewhat technical discussion here), that is, the incorporation of everyday social skills into capitalist production.

Why the classroom will not disappear entirely

I hate to be an optimist in response to Dennis Des Chene's dire predictions about the future of undergraduate education being turned into online distance learning environments. So, here follows a refresher course (recall this) on why folk choose to spend a lot of money to have their children join an elite liberal arts college education and the many quasi-elite institutions of higher learning that emulate the elite (I hope my debt to Veblen is clear) :

1. It is a form of status seeking and conspicuous consumption.

2. It provides a) a valuable social network, not to mention b) opportunities for assortative mating.

3. It is a life-style choice (see 1).  Moreover, The enormous residential infrastructure keeps retention/graduation rates very high (see also 4b).

4. It a) teaches a lot of important social skills in b) a protective environment.

5. And for a minority group of students it is an escape from one's class.

Good enough is good enough: on the future of teaching

US Stamp: Mark Hopkins, 1940.
Source: Wikimedia.

There is or was in economics a so-called law known as Gresham’s: bad money drives out good. Another law, of broader application, would have it that good enough dominates best.

The web, including Wikipedia—to which I just happily referred—, illustrates this point. Copying is easy, compiling is easy, finding new information is not so easy, even if that means simply reading journal articles and adding a bit to the existing common store. I have Fuch’s dystrophy, a hereditary disease of the cornea. Naturally I’d like to know all I can about it. I search online, diligently, repeatedly. What I find is the same half-dozen facts repeated again and again, often verbatim, from Wikipedia to the Mayo Clinic to NIH. As soon as one tries to investigate specific questions, e.g. about the risk of surgery, one discovers that the web has no answers. I would say that it is broad but shallow; yet even that conveys the wrong impression, since the “breadth” consists largely in repetition of a small core of fact and not obviously untrue speculation.

The information one gleans, with grains of salt for more dubious sources, is for many purposes good enough. Were you a journalist or a student needing two sentences on Fuch’s, you’d have them, quickly and without effort. But it is not much better than good enough. I think that that is a general tendency: the apparent wealth of the (publicly accessible) web belies a widespread poverty.

Good enough drives out best—and even better.

Apply this now to university teaching. Not long ago people were linking to, and praising, pieces in the Chronicle and the Globe and Mail written in defense of classroom teaching.

Generating "learning data," or, the rush to monetize student work in MOOCs

This IHE article on the Harvard / MIT entrant into the MOOC (massively open online course) sweepstakes complements our previous discussion and brings to the fore another aspect of this initiative, producing commercial software based on the "learning data" generated by the students working in the courses. (Those who don't think such commercialization is a prime incentive here should line up for their chance to purchase shares in a large transport edifice linking these two islands.)

Harvard and MIT say one of their main goals with edX is to generate learning data that the universities  can share freely with education researchers. The MITx platform, which will serve as the technology platform for edX, “already has a lot of mechanisms for understanding how students are learning," said Anant Agarwal, a computer science and engineering professor at MIT and the first president of edX. "These data will be available to researchers at MIT and Harvard and other universities around the world,” he said.

The combination of the data-rich online medium and the scale edX hopes to achieve will "enable [education researchers] to ask very different questions than we’ve been able to ask before," said Alan Garber, the provost at Harvard. By crunching granular data on the activity of students in the edX environment, educators will be able to get a sense not only of how well they perform on high-stakes tests but also “how well they acquire and apply the information months after a class has ended,” Garber said.

In a subtle swipe at the proprietary companies (like Coursera and Udacity) that have also built platforms through which top-tier universities can run MOOCs, L. Rafael Reif, the MIT provost, suggested that the ethic of transparency and public-mindedness Harvard and MIT bring to the table will make edX a more generous and responsible curator of the learning data that MOOC platforms will accumulate.

“We feel very strongly that that data should be available for research under the governance of a not-for-profit structure,” Reif said.

Yeah, because we all know that not-for-profit universities would have no interest whatsoever in spinning off commercial technologies based on data generated from studying student behavior.

An experiment in replacing TA labor by "a critical mass of deputized students"

From an IHE article on a new online course project by Penn, Michigan, and Princeton:

Koller, an artificial intelligence specialist who has taught computer science at Stanford since getting her Ph.D. there at age 25, says that the challenge of assessing student work in humanities-oriented MOOCs could be addressed through a system of “calibrated peer review.” Human readers, plucked from the ranks of the course registrants, could read short essays written by their peers and rate them according to a rubric developed by the professor. A critical mass of deputized students should be able to evaluate an essay “at least as [well] as a pretty good [teaching assistant],” Koller said in an interview.

This could be another nail in the coffin of the current political economy of graduate humanities education. Why should universities pay TAs when the undergrads can grade themselves?

1. Of course, I recognize that this is for the moment restricted to non-enrolled -- i.e., extramural -- students, but you would have to be a potential buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge not to see this as an experiment whose results will be closely monitored for its potential transfer to intramural applications.
2. Replacing the current system may not be a totally bad thing...
3. Will the deputized students get badges?

For connoisseurs of the genre, the rest of the article has some great management-speak: "monetization," of course, but also "metrics," and a few others: