When I wrote Dancing with the Stars of Pure Math the idea of attending Dick Lipton’s seminar with 10,000 students was novel and risky. That was 2009. Well before the start of the innovative whirlwind in online education that was started when Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng opened their Stanford courses to hundreds of thousands of students.
Dick and I spoke with Sebastian before Udacity was launched and we were both impressed with his vision of the learning experience as compelling media. As best I can recall, here is what he said.
If the traditional lecture is a stage play, then I want to be the movies. Although early film makers tried to adapt live stage plays to the new media by pointing a camera at the stage, it was not a good experience. It was only when film makers realized that they had to recreate the dramatic form that film became a new and compelling experience.
In his recent post at Godel’s Lost Letter (GLL), Dick has given us a vision of a new form of instruction:
The usual video-based course is a film of an instructor talking and writing at a board or on a tablet computer. These courses are popular among students, at least partially because they are free. The videos are informative, although it is yet unclear whether they are as good or better than physical courses. You know—course with students in seats and an instructor talking and interacting with them. We will see…Our plan is to make a mini-series length course with characters who have issues, who follow an interesting story line—vampires?—and yet are able to convey the information we want the students to learn. Our view is to create a new type of film: not a documentary, not a docudrama, not a dry lecture. A mixture of fiction and information.
This is unabashedly an experiment. I have been trying to find a way to incorporate GLL into our online experiments at Georgia Tech, and this is a a prototype of how that might work.
What do you think? Will students go to the movies with stars of pure math?
What other formats do you think might work? I have been (unsuccessfully so far) lobbying Dick and Ken to try what I call The Larry King Show format. In this format the host (Dick or Ken) and maybe a sidekick talk about math by interviewing math celebrities (including the people who created the ideas). They can even “interview” celebrities who are dead by using actors and inventing plausible dialogues.
Larry King was famous for his “Hello, Duluth Minnesota!” call-in dialogues, and that part of the show seems to me to be ideally suited to a seminar. There might even be some surprise call-ins when the topic is (for mathematicians) controversial.
You have to get used to the idea of classrooms as performances.
PCAST to Release Report on Future of the Research Enterprise. On Friday, November 30, the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) will hold a meeting to discuss IT R&D, STEM Education, and Online Courses (see agenda (PDF)). In addition, it will release a new report entitled Transformation and Opportunity: The Future of the U.S. Research Enterprise. The report will address “specific opportunities for the Federal Government, universities, and industry to strengthen the U.S. research enterprise.”
Date: November 30, 2012
Time: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Location: Lecture Room of the National Academy of Sciences Building, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW , Washington, D.C.; Register to attend this public event here.
Resetting the bar: comment from a World Economic Forum Council member in Dubai after following some MOOCs and listening to Daphne Koller’s impassioned presentation,
Now I get it. This is the death of mediocre teaching.
Up for discussion
Change
Institutional roles
The university versus education
The impact of technology
The changing nature of students
Global agreement vs. Disconnect:
Agreed: Education has a role
Confusion: Relevance of institutions
Scary concept of the day: “Global Governance” Former PM Gordon Brown hammered this home. The last thing we need is a European-style bureaucracy to act as a gate-keeper for higher education.
Why is social innovation grafted onto the margins of institutions of higher education? (Note: Where are the liberal arts in these discussions? See my blog post about the not-so-liberal arts)
Complex coupling of learning and value in many cultures – there is no American-style consensus about that this means (more about “Social Contracts and the Global Wisconsin Idea” another day — but see my discussion of The New Wisconsin Idea in Abelard to Apple).
What is the role of access when all content is accessible?
Global reactions to MOOCs (discouraging variety)
President of a THE top ranked research university.
That is not a role that my institution is interested in undertaking. There is a certain class of institution that may be interested, but it is certainly not our class.
Another president:
We would be just as happy with no students at all
Faculty member (no institutional affiliation):
Neither I nor my colleagues have the slightest interest in this [online technology]. If it is not related to my research I am not interested
Faculty member (no institutional affiliation):
There are no rewards for this
Expert in emerging technologies:
This has no relevance to me or my work.” [This is related to the debate over institutional relevance]
Global Reactions to MOOCs (encouraging variety) from Ed Lazowska, University of Washington:
The biggest change I see is that everyone on campus is talking about education and teaching. At a research university that is a big deal.
Big Idea of the Day – Privacy Risks from Learning Analytics
As more fine-grained data is gathered and stored in the Cloud privacy risks spike.
Most legislation in the US predates the internet and GMailWhat are some of the risks? Learners can be tagged with damaging labels because of their trajectory through online courses: “slow learner” vs “smart” even though the labels have no relationships to learning outcomes.
Electronic Communication Act of 1986 – much lower standard for investigators than wiretaps
Warrant for unopened email
Much weaker standard (e.g., relevance) for
Documents stored in the cloud
Opened email
Archived email whether read or not
Role of FERPA
What are the unique risks posed by Big Data
Information from many sources can be combined by investigators
There are incentives for more data and longer retention times
Users are not aware of how much data is being collected
Information playing field is tilted toward large institutions (e.g., states, corporations)
Amplifies advantages and disadvantages
“Capricious” use of stored data
Insurance
Credit worthiness
Law enforcement
What can analytics reveal that violate reasonable privacy expectations?Without sharing, learning analytics data is not very useful, so we should assume that sharing will occur.
Failures
Past Associations
Mental Instability
Financial History
Behavior of acquaintances and family members
Personal indiscretions
Social Security Number and other protected identifiers
Legal proceedings regardless of outcome
It is beyond the state of current technology to share private data from learning analytics while simultaneously
Limiting disclosure
Ensuring data utility
Jeff Selling writes in CHE: College Presidents Tone Deaf on Value:
Whatever tools we settle on, the efforts to measure value start at the top of the institution and the groups that represent higher education. And right now, college presidents are either tone deaf to the concerns of the public or they don’t believe in their own product.
I wanted to draw your attention to a new blog from my colleague Aaron Lanterman. He calls it Edupocalypse Now: Education and Innovation in the End Times and I encourage you to visit it here Aaron’s first post is abouit taking the bullshit out of degree requirements. Here’s a sample of what you can expect:
One summer, I took a class in ancient and modern Japanese culture. Out of the list of courses that would satisfy that particular well-roundedness requirement, I’m not sure why I picked that class in particular. My father won a computer art contest in the early 1980s, and the prize was a family trip to Japan. I have fond memories of that trip; that might have contributed to my decision, but I’m not sure. I recall writing a term paper for the class, but I can’t recall what I wrote about. The professor told some interesting stories about this adventures in Japan, although I can’t remember any of them now. Relatively speaking, I suppose I enjoyed the class. The material was somewhat interesting, and at the time I probably would have defended having to take it as contributing to my “well roundedness.”
But almost two decades later, I realize it was a waste of everyone’s money and time.
It was a waste of my parent’s money. It was a waste of my time. And having spent the last decade as a professor, I now realize it was a waste of the professor’s time.
Aaron says he was inspired by a few Georgia Tech colleagues but in an email he sent to me this morning he says:
I’ve been reading Roger Schank’s blog. I think I am becoming radicalized. After reading his posts I want to run around screaming “RAAAAAAAR! RAAAAAAAAAAAR!” I should probably channel that into something more constructive.
I have great respect for Roger Schank’s ability to create a new generation of radicals, so I suspect this is Aaron’s real inspiration.
I am now showing EN’s RSS feed on the right hand column, and I hope you visit the site often and even say RAAAAAR! once in awhile.
The first thing you notice is the chaos. There is no one in charge. No place to go to find out what to do. There was a time when Apple stores did not have blue-t-shirt greeters at the front door. You just had to stand there, trying to make sense of the clusters of customers, gawkers, helpers, facilitators, and salesmen. Everyone seemed to be either milling around or hustling off someplace with a sense of purpose, while you just stood there wondering what to do next. My first experience with a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) was like that.
I was writing the chapter on open learning in Abelard to Apple when I noticed that a group of Canadian learning technologists and innovators, led by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and David Cormier were organizing a course that was open to the world. Here is how I described it in Abelard to Apple:
Open-ended college courses are uncommon, but not for any pedagogical reason. There is no theory that dictates how college degree programs should be chopped into courses or how many semesters there should be, except that everything should work out to be just long enough to fit the required number of credits. Many institutions offer “Maymester” terms that fit between spring and summer and last two or three weeks. Advanced material is sometimes taught in small recitation groups and is spread over several semesters because there are as of yet no textbooks in the field and therefore no natural course boundaries. The length of a college course is a number that is chosen arbitrarily, and it varies from place to place.
Attendance is also a loosely defined idea for most college courses. In Europe, where completion of course requirements is determined by final examinations, attendance has no meaning at all, and students feel free to drop in when it suits them. Even in American classrooms, instructors rarely take attendance, and the only evidence that regular attendance affects learning is purely anecdotal.
There is no scientific reason that universities have not organized their curricula around Erdös-style open-ended courses. In 2008, George Siemens, a professor at Athabasca University—the Canadian version of Britain’s Open University—and a research scientist for the Canadian National Research Council named Stephen Downes decided to offer a course on a theory of learning that they call Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK. CCK is a long tail concept, a pedagogical theory asserting that learning takes place as students discover how to navigate the interconnected networks across which knowledge is distributed. Their course was about CCK and simultaneously used CCK as the primary teaching method. It was offered again in 2009, and eventually attracted several thousand students.
I not only wandered into a MOOC, but I also was handed a blue t-shirt, one of those black id tags on a lanyard, and a mobile phone so that I can connect new arrivals to people who can actually help them. This happened last year when George sent me an email asking whether I was interested in participating in a new MOOC that he was organizing. This one was about change in higher education. He wanted to call it, appropriately enough, “Change, Education, Learning, and Technology.” I said, “Sure!”.
Here’s where the Change MOOC lives. Actually, it lives lots of places. You can find it here as well. And if you are a member of the Georgia Tech community you can also find it here. There are Twitter feeds that you can find with the hash tag #change11. There is even a virtual study group at OpenStudy.com. Change11 is just entering its 5th week, and there is already more content than I can track. I find myself paging though FlipBook late at night just to see what’s up.
Who’s taking the course? It’s really impossible to say because many of the thousands who have registered already never say who they are or participate in the online discussions. But many hundreds do. They are mainly teachers, and they come from elementary and secondary schools around the world. There are also a fair number of educational consultants, bloggers, and professors who do research in education and educational technology. Conversational clusters self-organize. There are fights that crop up among groups that hold differing positions on important issues, and there are a few water balloons that are lobbed between groups. There are trouble makers, and serious students, casual observers and opinion-makers.
Who’s missing? People who should be getting comfortable with the disruptive forces in higher education. There are almost no university administrators or technology managers. EDUCAUSE is nowhere to be seen. There are dozens of websites that devoted to studying and commenting on policy issues, but if they are aware of Change11, they are silent about it.
Is Change11 or MOOC-fication the wave of the future? Probably not. It’s an experiment. It is no more likely to be predictive of what the future of higher education will be like than Stanford’s open course on Artificial Intelligence. Like all experiments, success is not the important factor. One thing is certain: higher ed desperately needs innovation and the only way to innovate is to try out a lot of ideas.
I was attracted to the MOOC concept because it illustrated a narrative that I was constructing for my book, but I was drawn into the idea of the course by the Greeters who assured me that the whole point of being there was to navigate concepts and discussions that were meaningful to me.
So now I find myself greeting new arrivals with: “Hi, I’m Rich. Can I help you find what you need?”
If you are lost already — if you feel like you have jumped into the middle of a conversation — then let me suggest that you click on the video above.
Here the reasoning behind one of my criticisms of higher education: the factory model — a model that is in near-complete collapse — was imposed upon universities at the turn of the 20th Century by well-meaning industrialists who simply wanted to establish some discipline on the chaos that reigned in those days. Their charges jumped on half-developed industrial engineering theories and folded them into public policy, and that is the legacy we cope with today in the form of bloated bureaucracies, an over-reliance on measuring inputs, ineffective testing, and a largely parasitic accreditation industry.
Now we have a new generation of tinkerers who hear that costs are out of control and want to automate the hell out of college teaching instead of focusing on spending the money more wisely. Let me give you a preview of one of my conclusions: it’s not that we cannot afford to teach undergraduates the old way, it’s rather that everything from intercollegiate athletics to debt-laden performing arts centers grabs budget dollars before they get to the classroom. The main financial threat to American colleges and universities is mission creep, not a lack of robot-teachers.
That’s why I was particularly intrigued by Audrey Waters’ critique of Khan Academy that appeared in Explainer. I am a fan of Khan and especially his content — in fact, we are launching a program called TechBursts at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities to experiment with how to deconstruct a mature curriculum along those lines — but like Waters I am somewhat alarmed that there is such a rush to declare Khan Version 1.0 such an unqualified success.
It’s not that I am swayed by the “Yes but conducting a hands-on experiment is so much better than Sal Khan’s explanation of force…” argument. Indeed, deliberately taking the laboratory out of an introductory physics course does not seem like a good idea, but Khan does not advocate that either. Classroom inversion would in fact allow more time for mentoring in a more interactive laboratory setting.
It’s rather that I have not seen a cogent analysis of these critiques:
Technology replacing teachers: OK, it’s not a good idea, but in the all-or-nothing world of transforming higher education there’s no such thing as just a little automation. The zealots want it all.
The Bill Gates connection: The Gates Foundation and Bill’s personal commitment to reform has been a welcome entry to higher education. It certainly helped breathe life and excitement into a field that had become dominated by bureaucrats and backward-looking analysts. But the criticism that Gates will morph into a new Andrew Carnegie set of heavy-handed approaches is worthy of closer examination
Old Wine, New Bottles: I don’t know if Khan Academy is bad pedagogy (Although I suspect that it is not since it seems to me to be pedagogically agnostic) but applying a layer of 21st Century Technology to a 19th Century curriculum does not sound at first blush like a good way to start the transformation process.
Learning or Leveling Up: Waters outlines a critique of gameification and somewhat unfairly says that the major criticism is that it puts the emphasis on earning badges rather than learning. But so does the inflation-ridden practice of traditional grading. On the other hand, there is a rush to Web 2.0 platforms that is not informed by even a sliver of experience in actual college settings.
Part of a Larger Trend: This is the most worrisome critique. There are severe problems in higher education, but quick fixes that nibble at the edges probably just make things worse. At best, they divert attention and resources from more severe problems. At worst, they promote change for its own sake, and that is never a good idea.
It’s unlikely that the first generation knowledge bursts that Salman Khan assembled on a shoestring are the salvation of higher education. They are Version 1.0 of a technology that has not even been thoroughly wrung out yet. It’s great that Bill Gates is a backer, but does anyone remember Windows 1.0? It took Microsoft three versions just to get it working.
Innovate.EDU 