Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

Loading Newer »

What is an honors program?

Published February 7th, 2010 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The chairs have given serious consideration to the development of an “Honors Program” as a tool for attracting and retaining high-quality students. How can we develop a program that would bring and keep high-quality students, while not alienating students outside the honors program? What aspects of an honors program would tip the scales for students who would naturally be offered honors admission to other schools with established honors programs? Should we offer a self-developed gen ed program, guaranteed participation in URES during the early years, specialized IDIS courses, etc.? What role should Residence Life, Financial Aid, and/or Admissions play in an Honors Student experience?

The College of Arts & Sciences at our institution is thinking broadly about ways to improve in our academic program. One of the questions being considered is the possibility of developing an Honors Program. I think we need to start by defining what we mean by an “Honors Program”. I think that definition needs to go far beyond a list of courses. It should address what we think participants should be able to do by the end of the program, or how they would be different upon graduation than students who pursued the standard program. In short, we need to consider the outputs, not just the inputs in such a program.

For a long time, I was interested in changing our curriculum or at least the ethos behind our curriculum to what might be considered an honors program. In that respect, I agree with Eric who argues for the entire college being an honors program. What do I mean by an honors program? I mean a program which is designed for students who genuinely care about their learning, not as a means to some other end (e.g. graduate study, or a good job/career). I believe in many respects this vision hearkens back to the original notion of liberal education. This idea has been described by some as “the caravan,” a collection of individuals, members of the UMW community, who are on a journey of intellectual discovery together. Some in the caravan have been on the journey for a long time. Some are just starting. But at least for a while, they are journeying together. It is not a competition , but a joint effort to learn.

I regret that I no longer see this as possible. There are too many students who are not interested in this kind of commitment, or who do not even understand that education can be something more than ’school’. They see higher education as 13^th grade, just a continuation of their previous 12+ years of schooling. The goal was to be promoted to the next grade or to be awarded the diploma. The diploma doesn’t signify anything—it is the purpose of school. Any learning is seen as incidental (or instrumental). Is it any wonder that students are jaded by the time they get to university?

Despite my jadedness, I still think that an honors program is worth doing. But I think it needs to be done as a program, not as the college as a whole. What would this look like? And what would be the point? I think these questions require a great deal of thought and conversation. My ideal honors program would include only those students (including faculty) who genuinely wished to pursue intellectual discovery. That introduces a complication. Honors programs ‘look good’ in one’s credentials. They would, therefore, be attractive to many whose purpose as undergraduates is to get into graduate school or a good job. (I admit to being suspicious of an honors program as a “tool for attracting and retaining high-quality students” if by high-quality you mean high-GPA.) I’m not opposed to graduate study or a good job. But I think that students should put those goals on hold while they are in the Honors Program, that they should take a few years off from the real world grind to participate in ‘real school’. This, I think, would distinguish us from other Honor’s Programs. I believe that grades are an imperfect measure of motivation for learning, so ideally I don’t think grades should be the sole determinant of entry into the honors program. There are too many smart people who have no interest in genuine learning. I would prefer to enlist students who care about learning but haven’t figured out how to get excellent grades yet. (Do we believe that all students are capable of learning, or that some just don’t have what it takes?) In my honors program, grades would be one part of the application process. But I would also like to see letters of recommendation from faculty, and possibly interviews with the candidates.

What do we mean by an honors program? I think this question needs serious thought. Do we mean a collection of courses that are add-ons to the regular degree program? If so, what would those courses entail? I think a program that bolted on three or four ‘honors’ courses and a thesis to an existing major would be honors in name only. I think a serious honors program would not simply consist of more rigorous courses – harder courses (say Principles of Economics for Majors instead of as a Gen Ed, or Intermediate Theory with Calculus), but deeper courses: Courses that make one think more deeply and perhaps orthogonally about connections that don’t stop at disciplinary borders. I’m struggling to articulate what I mean, but harder and deeper don’t mean the same thing. The former may mean more rigorous in the discipline. The latter may be more along the lines of what an educated person should know. I think these course should be interdisciplinary or extradisciplinary. I think a reasonable honors program might include several inter or extradisciplinary honors courses and several within-the-major honors courses + a senior thesis. But I think to do this right will require a lot more work than we’ve done now, starting with a mission statement: What is the purpose of our honors program? So let’s move forward with this. Let’s research programs at other schools. And then let’s create something unique and real. Count me in.

What teachers make

Published January 29th, 2010 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

If you haven’t seen this video, it’ll make your day if you’re an educator.

Taylor Mali on why we do what we do

Training students to ’step up’ to the next level

Published January 29th, 2010 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I had an interesting revelation over the last few days. I’m teaching a senior seminar in the same mode as my seminar last spring. This is the course I discussed in my ELI presentation last week (about which I have yet to blog). This semester, the seminar is exploring the long run implications of the US Federal Budget Deficit. The course website, such as it is, is here. Anyway, the other day as I was thinking about the course and how it had been going, I found myself disappointed. It seemed like we hadn’t made much progress, that the students have been collecting evidence, but then they’ve done nothing with it.

I realized that I was actually comparing my current students at this point in the course, with my previous students at the end of the course. I decided to have a ‘teaching moment’ yesterday. I reminded them that this was not a regular course, that in a regular course the instructor brought in the information and then told them what it meant. So far, they had managed to do the first part, tracking down relevant information — evidence of the growing problematic nature of the federal budget deficit–and that was good. But they had yet to do the second, more difficult step: processing the information publically and drawing conclusions. While this is in fact hard, it’s a central part of what makes this course special. (I realized of course that they’re in the early stages of the learning curve since we’re only in Week 3 of the term.) I told them, they needed to step it up to the next level. To that end, I gave them this assignment (Item 1), where I asked them explicitly to write an analysis and present conclusions. I asked them to do this collectively and then gave them a few minutes of class time to decide who was going to contribute which parts–this was really recognizing which students had done what already–and then how they would organize the analysis effort, and who would serve as editorial team to polish the results. They seemed to get it. We’ll see.

Engagement vs. Grades

Published January 26th, 2010 sgreenla in Teaching and Learning and What is Education?. 3 Comments

I am still surfing on the wave of energy I picked up from attending the Educause Learning Initiative 2010 Annual Meetings last week. As Gardner Campbell has said, faculty development is not a frill, but rather the oxygen academics need to breath. (Someone retold this quote in a session I attended though Gardner himself was elsewhere, and of course, I’d heard Gardner say it before.) I still have much to process before I blog on the conference itself, but the energizing made me pick up something the other day that I need to just put out there.

At my institution’s State of the University address two weeks ago (another subject I need to blog about), we learned that the new watchword is productivity, as measured in particular by retention and graduation rates. I understand metrics, but I wonder if these two illuminate or obscure problems.

As a macro economist, I am very sensitive to what we call “aggregation error.” When you look at the big picture, say by computing an average, you always lose information. Aggregation error asks: Does the average accurately characterize the group? Imagine a group consisting of half poor people and half rich people. The average suggests the group is middle income, which is completely misleading. That’s aggregation error. If the government asked ‘Do we have a poverty problem?’ the answer based on the average income would be ‘no’. And it would be wrong.

One key to student success in higher education appears to be engagement, and student engagement has become a big issue–look at the growing importance of the NSSE, etc. I want to teach students who are engaged in the topic we’re studying. I would rather teach someone who cares about their learning, than one who gets good grades without caring. Perhaps I have a personal bias here. I never thought much about grades in college. I cared about learning and I worked hard and let the grades fall where they may. I was not an A student, but I learned more than many of my friends who were. (One example: I tutored friends who ended up with better grades than I, but didn’t necessarily understand more.)

Inside Higher Education recently reported on a fascinating study about the relation between grades and engagement. It’s commonly understood that grades, engagement, and most importantly learning are positively correlated. The study confirms that grades improve with a student’s engagement, but finds also that the result isn’t necessarily ‘high’ grades. Engagement causes progress, better grades (and thus better “student outcomes”), but not necessarily ‘high’ grades. Engagement is a good proxy for learning, but grades are only a weak proxy, a point I’ve stressed before. The study points out that earning high grades doesn’t necessarily mean one is engaged. As a consequence, using grades to measure engagement is a type of aggregation error.

While organizations necessarily look at aggregate data as metrics, we must not forget that students are individuals, and the institution needs to treat them (and provide support for them) as such. One size doesn’t fit all.

The most important job of a university teacher is designing the learning environment

Published January 8th, 2010 sgreenla in Assessment & Grading, Teaching and Learning, The Future of Higher Education and What is Education?. 4 Comments

What does a teacher at the university level do? This is a question I’ve pondered for some time, as I’ve been following changes in higher education, for example, the growth in the for-profit sector, and the growth in on-line learning. There seems to be a growing trend for instructors to be assigned to teach courses they didn’t design; rather, the instructors are simply plugged into a course, given a syllabus and told which text to use. They may not even create the exams. This trend, which I find disturbing, is part of the process of commodifying teaching. The role of the instructor seems to be limited to presenting content, and often but not always, doing the grading. While I can see some advantages to this trend (for example, cost efficiencies, tighter rein on what is taught which is important for prerequisite courses) I wonder what it does to learning. My fear is that it reinforces the transactional notion of education as a collection of facts to be transferred to the student. This transfer is then stamped with the certification of a grade, credits earned, a degree, etc. But is it education?

When I was a new teacher, I saw my role as the provider of course content (through lectures), and the examiner to see how much content was assimilated by each student. I was supposed to be the content expert, even when I taught courses for the first time, or on subjects I had never studied! In graduate school when I was asked to teach a course whose subject I had no experience with, I was told: “You’ve studied microeconomics. This is just applied micro.” And I did it. In my first year as a full time faculty member, I was assigned to teach two courses on subjects I had never studied. That’s just part of what happens at a small liberal arts college, but it’s not ideal.

I now have a broader conception of (good) teaching. The most important job of the teacher is designing the learning environment for a course. Learning occurs when students interact with and make meaning of the course materials, as they interact with the instructor and other students. How, and to what extent, that interaction will occur is an integral part of the learning environment design process. When a student interacts with the course materials, he or she is confronted with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The instructor provides expert guidance about how to understand the new ideas and ways of thinking. Other students can similarly catalyze the learning process for their peers by asking questions the student didn’t think of (or verbalizing questions they were reluctant to ask), and by presenting new insights or by providing a more accessible explanation than the instructor did. A course lacking quality instructor interaction is merely self-study; there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a university course and the learning process will be hampered.

Suppose you were plugged in to teach a course that you didn’t design. Suppose you believe that students learn best by writing about the subject, that writing requires students to think more deeply about the subject than simply reading the text does. Suppose that since writing is an integral part of your teaching, your practice is to give essay exams. Now suppose that the course you are assigned to teach emphasizes content coverage over content mastery. The administration wouldn’t articulate it that way, but that would be the reality for the average student. They simply say that you as instructor need to cover the content. And the content would be assessed by giving a common, departmentally designed multiple-choice exam. Would the teaching be different from if you had designed the course? Would the learning be different? I suspect that students who are brighter, or who learn more quickly would earn better grades in the course you didn’t design. But would the course be teaching students or merely sorting them? I’m trying (really!) to keep my biases out of this parable, but I do believe that ownership of the course design matters, that it has an impact on learning.

When an instructor designs a course, he or she is making decisions explicitly or implicitly about a number of dimensions which define the learning environment. These dimensions include:

To what extent will the instructor tell, coach or model for students?

How much of course ‘content’ will be pure content (i.e. facts or findings in the discipline) vs. knowledge creation or research?

Discovery: Are students expected to discover insights or will insights be provided to them by the instructor or text?

Meaning Making: Are students expected to make meaning or will they be told meaning?

Authenticity: How much of the course work is mere school work vs. real? (The difference is the extent to which people outside the course care about the results.)

Degree of Interaction: What degree of interaction is expected between students and faculty, between students and other students?

What is the source of the course materials: Professor vs. Text (secondary sources) vs. Readings/Literature (primary sources) vs. Student Creation? Also, who selects the course materials? (e.g. Professor chooses the text (or Dept chooses the text) or students find their own information.)

How will class time be used? Lecture from the text or instructor’s knowledge vs. Discussion vs. Demonstration/Laboratory/Learning by Doing vs. Student presentation of content (not for the sake of learning presentation skills but to instruct others.)

To what extent will out of class work be structured or unstructured?

Were any of these dimensions things you haven’t explicitly considered before? What other dimensions can you suggest?

The answers to all of these questions about course design should be based on the course objectives (nominal and actual). Course objectives might include:

Exposure to a subject/ability to be successful through the end of the course (i.e. to learn/remember enough to achieve a certain grade on a final exam, but without any real expectation of retaining or transferring to other contexts). Few teachers would articulate their goals this way, but many teach and assess this way, especially in general education courses.

Introduction to particular skills such as writing, speaking, computing, music performance, artistic performance.

Practice in and ability to demonstrate disciplinary analysis (e.g. thinking like an economist, analyzing a problem like an economist would)

After designing the learning environment, the next most important job of the teacher is to be a learning guide, that is, to facilitate each student’s learning process as an individual journey. This requires building (or at least being open to) a professional relationship with each student. The final responsibility for this journey is with the student, but he or she needs to believe that that teacher is willing, even eager to guide them. The teacher is, after all, on their own intellectual journey albeit further along than one’s students. Am I suggesting that the teacher meet regularly, face-to-face with each student? No. Rather, the teacher needs to make students believe that he or she welcomes and values the opportunity to discuss course material with them. Sometimes this interaction occurs face-to-face before or after class or during office hours. Sometimes it may be a phone conversation, or an email exchange or an IM chat. Most often, though, it occurs in class sessions when the teacher lectures or leads discussion, and when he or she responds to student questions. The critical factors are showing one’s own interest in and enthusiasm for the subject, and showing respect for what students have to say, even when it may reveal misunderstanding. Fundamentally, a good teacher is one who makes students believe that his or her goal is to help them get from where they are intellectually to as far as they can go over the course of the term.

How many students see university education this way? I suspect that students see ‘school’ as an aggregate thing. A degree is a series of courses. A course is a series of lectures (say), which a student is supposed to tune into, and learn at least some of it. The student sees themselves as part of a whole (the class), or buying into a whole (the ’standard curriculum for the course’ or perhaps the teacher’s knowledge of the subject), rather than engaging in their own unique journey in which they create their own understanding of he material. School is like a ski lift. Hop on, ride a while, hop off. Students connect for as much as they can or want to, and they learn accordingly. Their success is defined by their relationship to the whole (did they ride the ski far enough up the mountain?), not their progress in their own learning (making their own way by hiking up the mountain).

Do faculty perceive their responsibility as teaching students or teaching courses? Are we taking steps to move closer to or further away from the idea of a personal educational journey when we commodify university courses? As long as a course lasts a full term, I think it’s the latter. If we could decompose courses as they currently exist into smaller modular pieces that could be combined in different ways, maybe then commodification of the modules would make sense.

Anyone planning to attend this year’s Education Learning Initiative annual meetings can hear more about these ideas at the session I’ll be presenting. I hope to see you there!

Useless Airways

Published January 8th, 2010 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

In the previous post, I described my recent trip to the Caribbean. This trip-of-a-lifetime was marred by the flight home. I should have expected this, since it was on US Useless Air. I am somewhere between an infrequent and a frequent flyer. I expect to make four round trip flights this year, two for work and two for pleasure, two international and two domestic. Over the years, USAir has consistently provided the worst service of any airline I’ve flown. Apparently, this experience is not unique to me: If you google ‘USAir Sucks” you’ll find lots of other testimony to that effect. I was particularly amused by the last line in the above photo from the St. Thomas airport.

We had booked a 6pm flight to Washington-Dulles airport via Charlotte. When we arrrived at the airport around 2:30pm we immediately discovered a problem. Passengers were milling around the check-in desk like cows being prepared for the slaughter. The flight was delayed due to a mechanical problem, first for 3 hours and eventually for 5. This, of course, meant we missed the last connection to Dulles. Nothing to worry about, except for our three minor children waiting for us at home.

USAir generously gave us dinner vouchers for $10, enough to purchase a hot dog (the least expensive sandwich) and a small soda. We arrived in Charlotte about 2:30am, and were put up for 3 hours in a hotel–I can’t tell what it was like since I was barely awake on both ends. We got home successfully, only a half day late. The kids survived.

PS, our morning flight to Dulles was delayed, for mechanical problems.

What I did on my Christmas Vacation

Published January 7th, 2010 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Okay, some people might consider it a stretch to call this last month a vacation, since I’ve been away from teaching for eight months while on sabbatical. Still, it was a break from normal life and it provided an excellent dividing line between my sabbatical and returning to teaching.

So what did I do? I spent the week between December 27 and January 2 sailing the Virgin Islands aboard the Arabella shown here. It wasn’t cheap, but it was well worth the money. I have never taken a cruise before, but from what I understand this was not typical. The Arabella is 160 feet in length and has a crew of 7. We were part of a group of 31 passengers, who we got to know quite well over the course of the week. Indeed, we have even formed a Facebook group. Usually, we sailed for half the day and then spent the other half snorkeling, swimming, hanging out on the boat or a beach, hiking or doing some other activity that was appropriate to the venue. We had breakfast and lunch on the boat, and dinner in a restaurant on whatever island we were visiting. The Arabella’s chef, John, was fantastic–indeed, his food was superior to some that we ate in the restaurants. He achieved this working in a kitchen only slightly larger than a telephone booth. The crew was really excellent, adding to our enjoyment, and I don’t just mean by staffing the onboard bar. They really worked hard to make the trip a success.

Within a few dozen hours, I had forgotten what day it was. I didn’t give any thought to work and I didn’t miss being off-line.

Never having visited the Virgin Islands before I wasn’t expecting all the hiking opportunities. Indeed,

almost the entire island of St. John is part of the Virgin Islands National Park. The only hiking we did do was on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. Here’s a view from the ridge overlooking the Bitter End Yacht Club, where we were anchored.

One other oddity was a hermit crab we discovered near the top. I wasn’t aware that they did much hiking, especially given the size of the pack on their backs.

New Year’s Eve we were privileged to see Michael Beans‘ Pirate Show. Aside from the music and other high energy performance art which was great (How often can you win a shot of rum with your knowledge of Blackbeard?), Beans advertised for a charity he founded to fund a school for Haitian children. I’m sure he’d appreciate your support for this worthy cause.

Something I didn’t appreciate was how easy it is to get around the various Virgin Islands, (US or British). Each of the islands has regular, inexpensive ferries to the others. The last day, instead of returning to St. Thomas on the boat, we got off at St. John where we cleared US Customs. We spent the morning bumming around Cruz Bay, had a very nice lunch at the Banana Deck, and then hopped the ferry across to St. Thomas. The flight home was another story…

It’s about people, not technology

Published December 17th, 2009 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Jim Groom posted a thoughtful reflection about this article by Gardner Campbell on the history of UMW Blogs in the latest issue of UMW Today.

For me, the money quote in Jim’s post is

I think what sets UMW apart from many a school is quite simple, early on Mary Washington made a conscious choice to invest in people rather than technologies.

When the trend is to make higher ed more efficient, it’s all too easy to forget that people, not just bodies but specific groups of committed, creative individuals, are what make or break an institution. This is another piece of what I was trying to say in my last post. People aren’t commodities defined only by their CVs. Rather, it’s the right group of people in the right time and place that matters. We’ve been extremely fortunate to have had that at UMW over the last decade. And that is the true legacy of Gardner and Chip German.

Is higher education more than the sum of its parts?

Published December 7th, 2009 sgreenla in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

Higher education is in the midst of a revolution, even if the majority of higher education faculty are unaware of this. What are the signs of this revolution?

The growing emphasis in higher education on outcomes assessment,
The decline in public funding for higher education,
The growth in the for-profit sector,
The growth in on-line learning,
The increased availability of open courseware/content.

These trends have led me to ponder what higher education is at its most fundamental level. What is a college course? What is university-level learning? What constitutes a university education? Is it merely a degree, a signal to employers, or is it more than that?

Let’s start with a tentative list of the components of a university education. Feel free to suggest additions. A university education includes:

Lectures by content experts,
Instruction in skills by skilled practitioners,
Instruction to a certain high level of expertise (higher ed. vs secondary ed.)
Opportunities for self-actualization: learning to think bigger than yourself; learning to see and begin to understand the world at large.
Opportunities for learning to behave as and to be an independent adult.
Receiving a degree, ideally from an accredited institution.

Now, except for the degree, university is not the only place one can obtain these things. One can go to lectures at local venues. One can listen to expert lectures though the Open Courseware initiative at MIT and other universities. One can take courses in writing, speaking, computing, etc. from non-universities. One can read textbooks oneself. Opportunities for self-actualization can be obtained my entering military service, or simply by living independently. So what do universities provide that one can’t do through other means?

Why does one shop at the supermarket instead of going to the butcher, the baker, the green grocer, etc.? Because the supermarket has everything you need—it’s a one stop shopping experience. Universities are supermarkets of higher education. In some contexts, there’s only a slight advantage to going the ‘all-included’ route. For example, one can enjoy a perfectly fine meal dining a la carte instead of selecting a fixed price meal. But for most people, university is more like a supermarket than a fixed price dinner. Neeru Paharia points out that a university

provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do.

Similarly, aAtos (in a comment on Kevin Carey’s “College on $99 a month” says:

Well why does anyone hire a personal trainer? You can eat less, walk, run, jump, squat, bend, sit up, push up, pull up and lift heavy objects for free. All the moves are available online. The answer is that most people don’t have the self discipline to do it themselves. Most people need an authority figure to give orders, and/or a large group of similar people doing the same kinds of things. Traditional schools provide both.

In other words, there are efficiencies in obtaining higher education from a university. Having a cohort of students studying roughly in parallel allows a school to efficiently provide an expert teacher to guide them, as well as an appropriate educational infrastructure.

Additionally, as Anna Kamenetz mentions, there’s the whole question of accreditation which at present is only available through universities. Paul states (in a comment on Carey’s article)

Colleges and universities aren’t in the information business – they’re in the certification business. The value of individual degrees lies in the perceived value of the certification.

JM continues (in another comment on Carey’s article):

Accreditation exists because the outcome of education is highly probabilistic, so society needs market controls to ensure that what you the employer get when you shop for a worker is what you pay for. Otherwise you would have thousands of unscrupulous degree mills just selling pieces of paper.

Inside Higher Education recently reported on an initiative of the Midwest Education Compact to create a Credential Repository for Education, Skills and Training , kind of a decentralized online university aggregator, where students could combine courses from different sources to be certified as an accredited college degree.

This is just one example of a larger trend in higher education: to disaggregate the components in an attempt to provide each more efficiently. Western Governor’s University explicitly designed its program to do this, and they seem to be achieving that goal. (Their annual tuition is only $5780.) But this approach raises a bigger question: Can you slice and dice the various components of higher education without losing anything? Is higher education no more than the sum of its parts?

What’s clearly missing from the list of the components of higher education above is that extra something that differentiates higher education from training. In short, education is more than content acquisition.

Zephyr Teachout points this out when she says:

Quality education is much more than a sum of college credits. At its best, a third element is involved – a leavening agent that enables the experience to rise above a mere accumulation of completed courses. That element may vary from campus to campus, but it almost always involves intense personal interactions and critical discourse among students and among students and their professors.

As Yale Wood Shoppe notes (in another comment on Carey’s article):

You are not being educated if your ideas are never challenged and you are not in a social environment where you will learn to think in ways you have never considered before. A fast-food degree online would be useless.

JM continues (Comment):

Education is NOT content. Content is the medium through which education flows. Nearly all of the content introduced to a typical student at a typical university is in the public domain. What a university sells then, which is markedly different from a newspaper or a car factory, is *perspective* on content. Education not only tells us which articles to read, but how to read them, what the key thing to take away is, and gives a relative probabilistic indicator of how well the student actually learned the concept. And this isn’t an easy thing to do.

(Notice that this *perspective* is provided by the instructor. I’ll be exploring the role of the instructor in a future post.)

There’s a tendency among those who don’t understand higher education to think of this ‘leavening agent’ as a frill or something “touchy-feelie” which can be dispensed with. But it’s not; it’s essential. This “leavening agent” is like technology in a production process. Technology is critical in production, and yet it’s implicit rather than explicit. (Firms don’t spend money on ‘technology’ per se, but on equipment and employees who embody the technology.) We don’t see technology directly so it’s easy to ignore, but if you do so you will not be able to explain a great deal of the productivity that occurs.

So where does that leave us? The missing piece, or at least the piece which seems to be least developed in online courses or programs is the social/community piece where interaction takes place. That is the difference between self study and study at a traditional university. It’s not that online courses can’t have interaction, but that at present they don’t have it to the degree we see in good traditional face-to-face courses. And that makes online courses inferior in at least this important dimension.

The pressures to provide higher education more efficiently are not going away. In response, we should expect to see many schools moving to develop online programs, even though it’s not clear that there is a cost-effective model for grafting online programs onto a traditional university. The greatest potential, at present, for online programs is to reach geographically diverse students or under-served students who can’t afford traditional university. Non-traditional online universities will have the advantage here, since they are organized for this purpose and don’t have the overhead of traditional institutions.

Where will the greatest threat to traditional universities exist? The answer is in programs where the interaction piece is least present, since less will be lost by going online. Think about the lower level courses at research universities and other (non-liberal arts oriented) universities. These courses tend to have large numbers of students, so the opportunities for interaction in the classroom are limited. They also are more likely to be taught by graduate assistants rather than experienced professors.

Small liberal arts colleges and Ivy League schools have a comparative advantage in interaction so at one level they are the least at risk. But at least for the SLACs, the pressures for more efficiency will be strong. Schools like Mary Washington will need to do two things to survive in the future: First, we need to make publicly clear to our stakeholders the quality education students receive at a small liberal arts institution, which is not available at other types of schools. In the language of economics, we need to differentiate our product by highlighting the type of interactive, reflective, thoughtful education our students receive. (And we need to do this is new and creative ways. Simply describing our program as “liberal arts” isn’t enough.)

Second, it behooves us to explore ways of providing online courses which are every bit as interactive and social/communal as face-to-face courses are now, which I believe is possible. (UMW is in well placed to for such an exploration, if we just have the will and the leadership.) Schools that don’t do that, especially non-liberal arts institutions, are going to find themselves increasingly between a rock and a hard place.

Does poor nutrition cause the swine flu? (No)

Published October 29th, 2009 sgreenla in Economics and Teaching and Learning. 1 Comment

I’m writing in response to Laura’s post here on a piece by Thomas Friedman. Friedman’s piece reminds me of why I could never be a regular, on-a-schedule, blogger. Because if I don’t have anything to say, I’d have to write something like this, which really doesn’t say anything worth reading. Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the legion of Friedman-bashers. I teach from The World is Flat, though I think The Lexus and the Olive Tree is probably better. But this article has nothing to teach us about how the world works.

There are two issues here I want to comment on:

The economics: How do recessions work?
Teaching/Learning: Can we teach creativity/innovation?

There is no necessary connection between the two issues, which is one reason I didn’t like the article. Let me discuss the economics first, since that’s something I can claim expertise in. Then I’ll go on to teaching creativity.

In his article, Friedman cites a conversation with Todd Martin, someone of no particular authority. (Friedman describes Martin as, “a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.”) Martin’s argument which Friedman accepts, is that the same job skills that make one untouchable in a flat world, keep one employed in a recession. Okay. But Martin actually argues that our failure to teach those job skills is a cause of the current “Great” Recession. This is a stretch (my polite way of saying nonsense). Here’s an analogy that may help your understanding: Good nutrition may keep you from getting sick, but does lack of good nutrition cause the swine flu? No. Martin, and by extension, Friedman are arguing the latter. Let’s look more deeply at what’s going on.

Friedman’s argument for economies over the long term, as expressed in The World is Flat, makes a lot of sense. (You may have to read to Chapter 15, where he admits that these are general tendencies in a globalized world, rather than laws of nature.) I’m not going to justify them here. But Martin’s argument for the causes of the Great Recession does not make sense. He should study the history of business cycles.

The features of the current recession which Friedman describes (lawyers who do only what is asked of them are the first to be laid-off) are not unique to this recession, but rather are characteristic of every major recession. Megan McArdle, in the Atlantic Monthly, quotes another lawyer as saying “the partners were pretty honest that they were probably going to end up firing plenty of people who would have been just fine if there had been any work for them [emphasis added].” But there wasn’t enough work for them. That’s the nature of a recession.

Who do you think the boss will fire if not the people who have so far not distinguished themselves? If you accept the premise that the lack of business requires lay-offs, who do you let go? (I’m not arguing that this is a good thing, but rather just that that’s how businesses operate. If they don’t do this, they may go out of business themselves if the recession is bad enough.)

Part of the reason why the current downturn feels so bad is that the last major recession we experienced in the US occurred in 1982. Anyone under the age of 40 probably has no significant memory of it. As a consequence, our view of recessions is that of fairly minor inconveniences as we experienced during the minor recessions of 1990 and 2001. The unemployment rates of the last two recessions peaked at 7.6% and 6.3% respectively, compared with our current unemployment rate of 9.8%. This is not to diminish the pain experienced by those who were unemployed during those recessions, but each of those recessions lasted only eight months. (Yes, I know unemployment stayed ‘high’ longer than just eight months.) Contrast this with the peak unemployment during the Great Depression: 28% and a duration of more than a decade.

McArdle notes: “There’s something in us that needs to believe that awful things must happen for a reason. And in some cosmic sense, they do–there are no uncaused causes running around the universe. But that doesn’t mean that the reason they happened is that the person they happened to did something to deserve it.” We live in an imperfect world, where bad things do happen. Period. The Great Recession was caused not by our ineffective teaching of creativity and innovation. It was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble, which occurred when the market for a very innovative financial product, the collateralized mortgage obligation, imploded. Lot’s of people have been hurt; only a few deserved it.

If the earlier part of this post was mostly a response to Friedman’s piece, the rest is mostly a reaction to Laura’s. Laura quotes Laura McKenna as saying that schools don’t do a very good job of teaching innovation. One thought that occurred to me was that creativity and innovations are broad concepts. In a sense they don’t exist in the abstract. It’s hard to imagine teaching creativity outside of a specific context: Creative writing, for example. Or teaching innovation.

McKenna’s argument doesn’t really respond to Friedman’s assertion. It only says schools can’t, not that they shouldn’t teach creativity/innovation. I think this argument reflects the traditional divide between skills and content. Students who only learn content find they don’t have the content they need for a changed world, while students who learned a particular skill set, say critical thinking, are better able to find productive employment in a changed world.

I don’t teach K-12, so I may be way off base here, but my approach is to teach students rather than content. (Is that the difference between teacher and learner-centered teaching?) My job isn’t to teach (i.e. present) content; it’s to encourage/enable/create an environment for students to learn. In this context the teacher as consultant metaphor works well for me, at least up to a point. My client is each student.

Laura mentions her son being punished in school for ‘coloring outside the lines’. Punishing a child for doing something ‘different’ on an assignment seems counterproductive to me, unless you see your job as teaching and grading content (or teaching following the rules, which is a bit different). The question for teachers ought to be what are the meta teaching goals each student needs to obtain, and how can you guide each (individual) student to attain those goals while using the talents and abilities embodied in each of them?