1. Harvard Envy – This is the same point Christensen & Eyring made in The Innovative University: That Harvard is the epitome of higher education and that which all (not-for-profit) universities strive for.
2. Club College: Why so many colleges look like resorts — This chapter on the forces pushing schools to become like “Club Med” was powerful.  Admittedly, this has been a pet peeve of mine for years.   Should schools try to compete for students based on their amenities or should schools try to compete on the basis of their educational programs?  For me, the latter is a no-brainer.  At the same time, I’m well aware that students can’t easily compare the quality of one school’s programs over another, but they can and do select the school with the professional quality fitness center or hotel quality residence halls over schools that do not.   How do we get off that train?  I don’t know and neither apparently does Rosen except to say “Just don’t do it.”  Competing on amenities is like attack ads in politics:  We say they’re bad, but we believe they work.
3. The Challenge of Community Colleges — This chapter on why community colleges are not the answer to higher education’s woes was unpersuasive to me.  According to Rosen, the problem with community colleges is they try to do too much, from offering vocational training to general education for students interested in transferring to four-year schools to offering hobby courses.  As I read this chapter, I found myself wondering if it wasn’t merely an attempt to justify the relatively narrow range of programs offered by the For-profits.  Rosen also argues that community colleges aren’t as cheap as people think because of the subsidies offered by the states.
4. A Crucial Part of the Solution:  How a new kind of college serves a new kind of student – This is Rosen’s argument in favor of For-profit universities.  He reminds readers that when land grant universities began, and again when community colleges began, the reaction by traditional higher education was just like the reaction today to For-profit schools.  It’s clear to me that more people need higher education, both initially and as lifetime learning.  Rosen’s argument that For-profits are part of the solution makes sense.
5. The Case Against Private-Sector Higher Education – This is the chapter which received acclaim for Rosen’s being open to the criticisms made against For-profit schools.  I found the chapter disappointing.  After paying lip service to the well-known examples of a few schools aggressively recruiting students from homeless shelters and obtaining loans for them, Rosen didn’t seriously address any other criticisms of the For-profit sector.
6. 2036 and the Coming 25 years of Change in Higher Education – I really liked this chapter.  Rosen may be wrong on some of the details, but I think he’s nailed the major trends we’re going to see in higher education.

I think Rosen overreaches when he argues that the tuition (only)-based model of For-profit institutions is an advantage over the multiple funding streams of most non-profit schools.   He makes a good case for the way research and intercollegiate athletics can take on lives of their own, driving some schools in directions that shortchange undergraduate education.  I found his argument that public universities are in this same category, due to the subsidies provided by states, less convincing for a school like mine where state support is only slightly more than 20% of our budget, where we have no Division 1 athletic programs, and where faculty have substantially higher teaching loads than at research universities.  Additionally, I wasn’t convinced by his argument that For-profit schools are in fact cheaper than public universities.  Rosen says that For-profits are cheaper for tax payers since there are no public subsidies, but even if that’s true, it’s not the point.  He seems to conflate two distinct issues: the relationship between private costs and benefits, and the relationship between social costs and benefits.

If higher education provides a public good, and arguably it does (though admittedly we have done a poor job in recent years in making that point clear to taxpayers), then providing the right amount of higher education requires subsidy, assuming that the social benefit is there.  It’s not clear to me that the social benefit of schools with very low completion rates, like some For-profit institutions, justifies the costs, especially when the financing takes the form of government-provided or guaranteed loans.  When those loans are repaid, there is no cost to taxpayers, as Rosen states.  But when students fail to complete a degree, they often fail to repay the loans.

One of the criticisms by traditional colleges and universities about the for-profit schools is that the latter are providing mere certification, rather than education, or that at best they offer narrowly defined training.  The author missed a chance to speak directly to this criticism.  What is the vision of education offered by the for-profits?  Is it limited to a fairly narrow range of career-oriented fields?  Does that imply that those are all we should offer in higher education?

The strength of Change.edu is the author’s assertion that we must do a better job of measuring the learning that takes place at Not-for-profit schools.  Only then can we make an apples-to-apples comparison.  I note that while assessment is critical, not all the benefits of traditional higher education can (as yet) be measured, but we need to incorporate them in our assessment nonetheless.  If quantitative assessment is difficult, then qualitative assessment is worth pursuing.

The book is written for a general audience, which I take to mean people not familiar with the literature on higher education reform.   It is framed as a story rather than an analytical piece.  It presents a series of assertions (and makes a number of assumptions), but does little to provide supporting evidence for them.  Who knew, for example, that face-to-face instruction was invented at Harvard?  My biggest complaint is that the authors don’t consider any alternatives to their thesis.

It is quite a long story, slightly more than 400 pages.  The first 170 pages are a history of two schools: Harvard & BYU-Idaho.  One could get the bulk of the argument by starting with Part III, pages 171-219, and then focusing on the crux of the story in Part IV, pages 220 -324.  The remainder of the book is largely summary and conclusions.

The premise of the book is that the problems of U.S. higher education come from a single source: All colleges & universities try to mimic Harvard, but very few have the resources or students to be successful at that.  The result is that colleges & universities try to be all things to all people (as is Harvard), rather than trying to be competent at something simpler: providing a more generic higher education to the many people who need something more than high school.

A key implication of their story:  Not every student can (or should) obtain a first class education like at Harvard.  So, let’s stop pretending otherwise and explicitly tier our higher ed offerings both across institutions & within them.

If we shouldn’t be like Harvard, who should we be like?  Answer: We should be like BYU-Idaho (and a few similar institutions).  Their solution includes five or so components, each of which makes a certain amount of sense to me:

1. End intercollegiate athletics
2. Adopt a year-round academic schedule
3.  Rethink pedagogy in radical ways
4.  Simplify and standardize programs
5.  Expand their reach through online programs

Their first point is that intercollegiate athletics is a money sink that adds to the inflation in the cost of higher ed while providing no academic benefits.  Higher education should be about education, not development for professional athletics or entertainment for students, staff and alumni.

The second point comes from the observation that campus infrastructure is essentially unused or at least underused for about a third of the calendar year, namely the summer. While many institutions have a summer term, it’s generally treated as a poor step child, rather than a full blood relation.  Most students don’t take summer school, and the courses are often considered lower quality than those taught during the regular term.  Why not create a genuine third semester during the summer?  Given the available infrastructure, it should be cost effective to expand instruction into this time, even granting the need to pay faculty to teach during the new semester.  It’s true that most faculty use the summer to conduct their research, but the authors have a solution to this also: Faculty should focus on teaching, not research.    After all, not every faculty member is capable of doing cutting edge research; much of the so-called research done is waste, unread and unnecessary.  See, for example, Mark Bauerlein’s recent work.  One implication of this argument is that research does not complement one’s teaching, which is arguable.  Also, I suspect there’s a difference between faculty in R1 institutions that teach two courses a year, and faculty at other institutions who may teach eight or more courses a year.

With respect to rethinking pedagogy, the authors give a brief nod to peer instruction, which was invented by Eric Mazur of–wait for it–Harvard.  I think peer instruction is an excellent innovation, which deserves to be more widely used in contexts where it is appropriate.  One such context is teaching large sections of science and probably social science courses.  But the authors don’t explore peer instruction in any detail.  They simply present it as part of the solution.

The primary pedagogical innovation the authors suggest is adopting something taken from the best of the for-profit institutions: a more centralized organization of what is taught and how it is taught.  Courses should be designed centrally by teams of instructional designers and subject experts (i.e. the former full-time faculty).  Begin with a list of learning objectives for each course. Think about the most efficient way to teach the content, which generally involves training lower cost adjuncts.  Think seriously about adopting some part of the Western Governors University approach, where students face a series of program learning objectives.  When they demonstrate mastery of the objectives, they are done.  Exactly how students learn on their own at WGU is not spelled out.  That’s something I’d like to hear more about.

Next, institutions should simplify their programs, by reducing the number of majors.  Does every university in the state need a major in Classics, for example?  Why not limit the number of Classics major programs so that each is a reasonable size?  Does every university need to offer an M.B.A?  WGU, for example, has only four majors: Business, Information Technology, Healthcare and Education.  Another suggestion of the authors is to create modular majors so that the same courses (or groups of courses) can count for multiple majors.  Think a common instruction to statistics that can work for the business, psychology and economics majors.  Think perhaps of a common introductory course to the social sciences.  Thus, when students change their major, they don’t have to take a completely new set of major requirements.

Something in this vein was described by Michael Rao in an op-ed the other day on articulation agreements between the Virginia Community College System and Virginia four year colleges and universities.

The “disruptive innovation” that the authors identify is online learning, though honestly that’s only a small part of the book.  Their key proposal is to expand the number of students taught by developing online programs in which full time faculty are largely replaced by (trained) adjuncts.   Existing full time faculty are redeployed to teach in the face-to-face programs and to develop courses both for face-to-face and online delivery.  As a result (say the authors), online programs can be taught at much lower cost than traditional face-to-face programs.  Additionally, by expanding the student body through online programs, the overhead expense of the face-to-face instruction can be spread to those who don’t enjoy the benefits of it.  The authors identify Southern New Hampshire University as another institution who has successfully adopted this model.

The unstated assumption here is that there is no loss of quality in the instruction, or that the “system” of course design and training can replace the lost quality.  I’m not going to argue that experienced adjunct faculty who can teach well don’t exist, just that in my experience many adjuncts are relatively inexperienced (e.g. graduate students), and few adjuncts have as deep ties to the institution as full-time faculty do.  I would like to see the evidence on the quality of those online courses.  The authors seem to be arguing that this type of online learning is good enough for those who have no alternatives.  As an economist, I can appreciate that argument but I think that that undervalues the potential of online learning.

Given the tremendous diversity of institutions in U.S. higher education, it’s hard to imagine that the authors’ prescription is appropriate for all of them (aside from the special few who inhabit the highest reaches:  Harvard & its peers).   The authors know little about a school like mine, the University of Mary Washington.  We are a largely undergraduate institution.  The standard teaching load is eight courses per year, and the vast majority of the courses are taught by full-time faculty–we have no graduate teaching assistants.   While promotion is driven largely by one’s scholarship, the vast majority of faculty here (>90% I would guess) care deeply about their teaching and put the majority of their professional effort into it.  That is not to say that we have no room for improvement—just that the authors may not have much to say of relevance to us.

Is the authors’ proposal worth pursuing for some institutions?  Absolutely.  Is it the answer for all institutions besides Harvard?  I doubt it.

What really disappoints me, though, is that Christensen and Eyring fail to really dig into the fundamental issues facing higher education today:  What should compose a college education for the 21st Century? Should degree completion be primarily about certification or education?  Should degree completion be defined by inputs (e.g.120 credits) or outputs (e.g. some list of competencies)?  How should the role of instructors change to suit this as yet undefined model of higher education?  What should the workload be for a full-time professor?  How can the entrenched cultures in higher education be changed?  For example, how can academic departments and programs be persuaded to take assessment and learning outcomes seriously, to see them as critical tools for improving student learning?  (I’ll note briefly that BYU-Idaho is rather a special case, given the authority of the Mormon Church, whose leaders unilaterally instituted the changes there.  I can imagine few other institutions whose leaders could make such unilateral changes and have them stick.)  How can what researchers have learned about cognition and learning more generally be disseminated to all faculty in higher education?  How can faculty be induced to reconfigure their teaching to incorporate those research findings?

The book that answers these questions would be much more insightful than The Innovative University.

The course will be incorporate the following four elements:

1. Establish high expectations – The literature seems pretty clear that establishing high expectations is critical to student learning.   The approach I’m going to take starts with a “Promise Syllabus.”  The first class session I will tell students

“I assume you’re here, not for the grade or the credits, but because you want to learn macroeconomics.  You may have heard that economics is a difficult subject.  This course is challenging, … but if you do the work, you will learn the material.”

Only a handful of students have been unable to learn this material in my 30 years of teaching.  The vast majority of students who fail, do so because of lack of effort.

I am attempting to integrate some of the findings from Daniel Pink’s book Drive.  Pink identified three factors which lead to better performance for cognitive or creative tasks, such as university teaching and learning:

• Autonomy – if students know what they need to do to be successful, they will perform better.   This is part of “establishing high expectations” as well as some of the elements described below.
• Mastery – the urge to get better at something.   Challenge and mastery drives people.  (How many of you think you’re good at economics?  How many of are a bit concerned that it might be challenging?  It *is* challenging, but you can do it.  This is part of the first week’s discussion including an Economics Concept Inventory I’ll be having the class do.  (This idea is from Angelo 2011.)  The idea is to confront students with a series of key concepts, only some of which they know.  After having students work individually on this, I will create small groups to discuss their individual responses.  The variety of responses should create uncertainty about what is “the right answer.”  That (hopefully) sets the stage for convincing students that they can learn this if they engage with the course.
• Purpose – Do something important; Do real work; make a difference.   This factor will be the hardest to implement at the introductory level, though it works very well for my senior seminar model.  The first thought paper (see below) in my intro course asks students to identify a couple of analytical questions they’d like to be able to answer by the end of the term.  Though not part of the grading, I will also ask them to rate how important each question is to them personally.  I plan to sprinkle the submitted questions in appropriate spots around the course, such as the web pages introducing each Course Topic (i.e. Course Module) .   I’m hoping this will stimulate intrinsic motivation and make the course more relevant to students.

2.  Build the Course on “Backward Design” Principles.   Start your thinking from your Course Learning Objectives: What is it that you want your students to know or be able to do by the end of the course?  Identify explicit learning objectives for each of the Course Topics.   Think carefully about what activities (e.g. lecture, class discussion, laboratory activities, papers, problem sets, etc.) can best help students master the LOs.  Design each section of your course around those.  Figure out how you will know the extent to which students are learning.  These are your assessments.

As I reworked my course materials to be consistent with Backward Design, I learned a few interesting things.  Lecture notes, like writing, make us possessive.  We put so much into them, we hesitate to discard them.  This is especially true since, when most of us started teaching, writing lectures was about filling a semester’s worth of class time.  Backward Design requires that we revisit the notes for each class session and ask:  Is this necessary for reaching the next learning objective?  If not, it should be discarded.  From this perspective, I found at least a few lectures that no longer seemed important.  To  date, I’ve reviewed my notes through the first exam.  I’ll have to do the rest during the semester.

 3.  Give Regular assignments with frequent, but low stakes assessment.  One of the points, Kuh (2008) makes is that students need to be actively and regularly engaged in course material to learn best.   Students need regular formative, ideally low-stakes assessment so they can know how well they are learning, and so they can make adjustments before the midterm exam, by which time without such feedback they may have dug themselves into a big hole.  My course will have three types of assignments:

• Weekly “minute” papers in which students identify those concepts which we covered which they don’t think they’ve mastered.   If they feel they’ve mastered everything we covered, they say so.  If they email me the assignment, they get a small number of homework points.  I don’t grade these papers.  I use them to help me understand what students are getting and what I need to explain again.  This may be an example of the sort of simple, straightforward tasks (e.g. a clear set of rules with a single correct solution) which Pink finds respond predictably to (financial) rewards. E.g. Read the chapter, get the points!
• Aplia problem sets, for each chapter in the text.  The problems are automatically graded by Aplia.  This is formative assessment for the students who see how well they are doing.  If they score a passing grade, they get a small number of homework points.  Text book problem sets are notoriously poor.  Aplia’s are not ideal, but they seem to be better than the rest.
• Periodic Thought Papers.  These are about half a dozen assignments which ask bigger questions than the Aplia problem sets do.  Questions posed include: Did Hurricane Katrina result in price gouging?   What is the state of the economy (and how do you tell)?  What is the role of government in the U.S. economy?

  4.  Build regular reflection into the course.  Angelo and Chew each emphasize the importance of metacognition to achieve deep learning.  One way to obtain this is by having students reflect on the meaning or importance of what they are learning.  This is the least developed aspect to date of my course, but I do have a couple of ideas:

• The first Thought Paper asks students Why are you taking this course, What are your goals, and What are two or three analytical questions you’d like to be able to answer from this course by the end of the semester.
• In-class reflections– This is something I haven’t tried before but I plan to take a few minutes of class time at the end of each Course Topic to ask students to write down:   What were the most important concepts in this topic?  How are they connected to something you already know?  How are they relevant (or how can you connect them) to your life?

Two questions that I will be pondering this term:  The course starts slowly, but then becomes more difficult as we explore more complex topics.   As the semester progresses, students seem to underperform, more than I would expect can be explained by the difficulty of the material.  Could it be because we’re rushed at the end?  If so, what can I do to fix this?  Second, in recent years, students have mastered one of the two main analytical models in ECON 201: the model of supply & demand.  They have done less well on the other model (which comes later in the term): the income-expenditure model.  Why is that and how can I fix the latter?  Do I spend less class time having students work through examples with the second model?

Some may argue that this rethinking the design of my course is like applying Band-Aids to a compound fracture, which at best its merely addresses the surface issues.  That employing phrases like “Backwards Design,” “Autonomy,” and “Reflection” doesn’t really change the fundamental character of a course.  What I’m  attempting here, though, is to think carefully about each component of my course, using criteria that I haven’t used explicitly before.  And remember, this is an experiment with an introductory level course.  I wouldn’t use the same approach with a senior seminar.

Class starts at 10am tomorrow morning.  I guess I’m ready.

References:

Branford et al, How People Learn, 2000.

Dan Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, 2011.

George Kuh, High Impact Educational Practices: What they are, who has access to them and why they matter, 2008.

Thomas Angelo, “Seven Levers for Higher and Deeper Learning:  Research–based Guidelines and Strategies for Improving Teaching, Assessment & Feedback.” Preconference Workshop at the 2011 Annual Meetings of the Educause Learning Initiative.

Stephen Chew, “Improving Classroom Performance by Challenging Student Misconceptions About Learning,” paper: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2666   April 2010, and videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL85708E6EA236E3DB

If one plans to teach a standard course in the traditional face-to-face way, it’s easy enough to adopt a text and then decide how much of the text one can reasonably cover in the length of a term, defined as X minutes per class meeting times Y class meetings a week times Z weeks in the term.  Most texts contain more material than can be covered in a single course to allow the instructor to take the approach/cover the material they think is important, so the content of the course is essentially defined by the amount of contact time.  I suppose it’s possible to “cover” all the content in a text, but in my experience it’s rarely possible for students to learn it all.

Which brings up the interesting question at hand:  What content defines an online course?  The approach taken by most of the participants in our project is to take an existing face-to-face course and convert it to an online environment.

Most would agree that an online course consisting of the text and all the assignments and examinations from a face-t0-face course does not make for a quality learning experience, certainly not one comparable to a quality face-to-face course.  After all, a significant part of a course is the lectures or class sessions.  This may be one of the straw men behind the widely held view that online courses are inferior to face-to-face.  (This is not to say that most online courses are like this, only that for people who don’t teach online, this may be the model of online teaching that comes to mind.)

Which raises another interesting question: How does one “move” lectures online?  More precisely, how does one take what is done in the classroom and provide a comparable learning experience online?  Well, that depends on what exactly is done in the classroom.  Clearly a 50 minute class session is not 50 minutes of lecture.  What then does it consist of?   It’s probably some combination of:

• Introductions: Welcoming the students and reminding students where we are in the syllabus, what we did last class.  Answering any questions students have about the previous material, upcoming assignments, anything else.
• Direct Content Delivery, e.g. lecture.
• Indirect Content Delivery or Content Construction, e.g. Class Discussion or similar student collaborative activities.
• Problem solving or laboratory activities (individual or collaborative).
• Closing: Wrapping up the session, giving students assignments, reminding students of previously assigned tasks or upcoming events/quizzes/exams.

How can these things be done online?  This is one of the key questions our group is exploring and not one that I’m going to answer in any detail here.  One direction that I think worth pursuing–in recent years, I’ve thought carefully about how to make the best use of scarce class time.  My conclusion has been that in general, spending class time to lecture from the book is not the right choice.  Rather, I lecture only on things that I know students have difficulty learning on their own.  I imagine the same approach, though not necessarily the same answers will work for online teaching and learning.

So let’s return to the original question I posed: Suppose one created an online course that one had never taught before?  How would one define the course content?  How would one determine how much of a text should be covered?

I suspect that since we don’t have the scaffolding of contact hours, we need to use something more substantive.  What ultimately defines a college course is the collection of things (knowledge, skills and experiences) a student should learn by the end of the course.  For example, what should students learn in an intermediate microeconomics course?  While that’s a standard course, taught in every undergraduate economics department in the U.S., exactly what is taught almost certainly differs from one department to the next.

I think the only way to determine the course content (and some readers are going to hate this) is to clearly define the learning outcomes of the course.  This is true for face-to-face courses, but it’s even more true for online courses, especially those which one has never taught before in a face-to-face mode.  The learning outcomes need not be mechanistic, but I believe the instructor needs to be able to articulate what they are, ideally to at least the second level of detail.  For example, one of my two course objectives in my intro course is for students to learn how to analyze issues & problems the way an economist would.  A second level learning objective (i.e. a specific example of the course objective) would be for students to learn how to analyze the effects of a change in demand or supply on the market for some good or service.   These second level learning objectives essentially define the course.  Once one articulates those, one can determine what learning activities are necessary for students to learn the objectives.  Those activities comprise the content of the course.

This was particularly true in my principles of macro course.  One result, or at least one concurrent event, was that the students didn’t do very well in that course.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that it was entirely my fault.  The instructor can create a course environment in which the incentives are designed to promote behaviors that enhance student learning.  But ultimately the students have to decide the extent to which they will follow through.

I saw some evidence that students were not following through last year.  One thing I observed was that a lot of students missed class on a regular basis, which is unusual in my courses.  I noticed something else.  A couple of years ago, I started the “Do over” in which I allow students to come in after an exam and explain the right answer on the questions they got wrong, for which I give them half a point.  This gives students an opportunity to earn back half the points they got wrong on the exam.  If someone scored a 50, after the do-over they can get a 75, a substantially better grade.  In past years, the majority of students (perhaps 90%) attempt the do-over.  Why not?  I give them the right answer and they just have to figure out and explain why it’s right.  On the first exam last year, only 39% of the students came for the do-over.  After the second exam, which is more challenging, only about half came by.  Maybe this group didn’t care that much about how they did in principles of economics.

If students haven’t been putting in the effort, as the teacher I have a responsibility to rethink the course learning environment.  One of the things I’ve been hearing about over the last year is “High Impact Learning”.  The seminal work seems to be George Kuh’s High Impact Educational Practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter, AAC&U, 2008.  Pretty much every source I found identified nine items as “high impact practices.”

1. First Year Seminars and First Year Experiences
2. Common Intellectual Experiences
3. Writing-Intensive Courses
4. Collaborative Assignments and Projects
5. Undergraduate Research
6. Diversity/Global Learning
7. Service Learning and Community-Based Learning
8. Internships
9. Capstone Courses and Projects

After reading this list in multiple places, I began sense them as being portrayed as “silver bullets.”  Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I don’t believe in silver bullets.  The curriculum at our institution includes most of these practices, some more successful than others.  I have to say that simply offering internships, for example, is no guarantee that they will be quality educational experiences, better than the average course.  The same can be said about the other items on the list.  What I really want to know is what is it about these practices that leads to deep learning.  Or to frame it differently, how can I improve what I do in my existing courses to enhance student learning.

Kuh’s report (p. 24 of the pdf; p. 15 of the printed report) identifies several elements of high impact teaching.

• Students need to devote regular time and effort to what Kuh calls “purposeful tasks”.  Instructors probably need to think carefully about what sorts of tasks are purposeful.  Students can’t coast or take the course on “cruise control,” they can’t simply attend lectures and hope to cram for exams.  Or if they do, they won’t learn deeply.
• The course design should include a high degree of interaction between the student and faculty and his peers.  What is meaningful interaction?  Ideas might include:
  • Careful peer review of one’s writing, or
  • Good class discussion in which participants prepare in advance.

  Students need to feel that they are among colleagues who take the course seriously. They also need to feel that the instructor cares about their learning.

• Interacting with diverse individuals, approaches, ideas.  This requires students to challenge their own ways of thinking, their own assumptions, etc.
• Frequent (and low stakes) feedback.  Students need to know on a regular basis whether or not they are on the right track, and how well they are doing.  This implies regular, meaningful tasks with timely assessment.  A student once told me he “only buys the textbook if he finds out he needs it.”  I asked how he answers that question and he said he waits to see how well he does on the course’s mid-term exam.  Frequent and low stakes feedback requires something other than the traditional mid-term exam/final exam grading scheme.

Tom Angelo, in a preconference workshop at this year’s ELI Annual Conference, suggested another element:

• Regular reflection on what one is learning.  Faculty should take time out from lecture to enable students to ask themselves: What does this mean?  What does this mean in my life?  Why should I care?  As Angelo said,“It’s only in moving from the moment to the reflective that we get deep learning.”   For more on deep learning, see Gardner’s recent post.

How can I reinforce these elements in my courses this fall?  Stay tuned.

The trend towards outcomes assessment, which I support, threatens at least one dimension of higher education, and that is experience.   When students live at home, they miss an important aspect of college, which is the experience of living on one’s own in a community of one’s peers.  Some may argue that this “growing up” should not be counted as part of higher education (and that the state should not subsidize it anyway.)  We know there’s a great deal of learning, even academic learning, which occurs outside of the classroom.  Students who live at home undoubtedly miss out on some of this.  There’s another aspect of higher education which involves experience.  Do transfer students obtain the same education as students who attend an institution for all four years?  Do students who are admitted to college with many AP, IB, or dual enrollment credits obtain the same education?  (It’s not unheard of at my institution for students to come in with at least one year’s worth of credits.)  Many who trumpet assessment would say yes–the less time spent in residence, the more efficient one’s education.  But I wonder.

I would like to argue that there is an experiential component to higher education, both in terms of the time, and in terms of the courses.  Even though students may be able to learn the content in less time, they may not obtain the experience.  Does summer school offer the same experience as regular terms?  I have never taught summer school, but I’ve often heard faculty who do, observe that summer terms offer less time for students to process what they’re learning and less time to complete the assignments due to the compressed nature of the courses.  Is writing a matter of simply expressing what you know, or is it a means of working out what you know?  Does the writing process require time for one’s ideas to mature like fine wine?  If so, then doesn’t compressing the process risk drinking the wine before its time?

While we tend to think of individual courses as being about content (knowledge and skills), I think that there is an experience component to individual courses also.   Probably every course is a mix of the two elements.  Some are more content-based; others are more experience-based.  Consider an introductory course in some discipline versus an individual study or a senior thesis in the discipline.  In the former, the content is critical, while in the latter the process probably matters more.  In my experience, the latter are almost graded in a pass-fail manner.  In other words, what matters most is completing the experience.

Assignments are context-dependent.  How one responds to an assignment depends on the experience one has had in the course.   Students get a sense of what the instructor is looking for, and respond appropriately.  Students respond based on what the teacher emphasized in the course.  There is no such thing as objective grading (though admittedly some disciplines can be closer to this than others).  Many of us would be uncomfortable having someone other than the teacher grade assignments, because the result would be necessarily reductive, in other words, it would emphasize the subject rather than the specific content that is conveyed in the learning experience.  (There is something to be said for calibrating the teaching and grading in multiple sections of the same course, but that is a different story.)

Senior economics majors can do more than first year economics students can.  Part of that is no doubt that they have learned more in the economics courses they have taken, but some of it is that seniors have assimilated what economists do, which goes beyond what is taught explicitly in courses.  Why do seniors who take introductory courses, for example to satisfy a Gen Ed requirement, find intro courses less challenging when they’ve had no more background in economics than their first year classmates?  Because there’s something to college that goes beyond the facts of the courses one takes.

What is it that one obtains in an experience-based course?  Is it legitimate college learning?  Part of it is the opportunity for working more independently.  Part of it is in the practice of a discipline.  Perhaps experience is how we describe the higher-order learning that is difficult to articulate.  This may relate to Gardner’s argument in a recent post.

Think about it for a minute. If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation.

This isn’t a completely novel idea.  It’s similar to the model used by Western Governor’s University, though WGU is not the only model consistent with this idea.

Pearlstein argues that this would make the way we organize students in cohorts, for example 1st grade or 12th grade, essentially obsolete, since though  students would work in parallel, the would progress at their own rate.  In a way, that’s what higher education is already doing. While we think of a bachelor’s degree as taking four years, increasingly students are taking more time or less than that.  What determines graduation is the accumulation of sufficient and appropriate course credits.  So the designation of first year or senior is less meaningful than perhaps it once was.

What particularly struck me  from the article,  though, was a throw-away line, a quote from Salman Khan:

[G]rading will suddenly become simple: Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  How do you feel about the idea of all of your students earning As in your courses?  Does that make you feel uncomfortable, or does it make you feel excited?  The answer to that question, I think, identifies what kind of teacher you are.

Khan’s idea is a form of “competency-based learning.” and it has the potential to radically change how we view higher education.  The way college works now is that students take 14 week courses (the length of a “semester”), and they are evaluated on how much they’ve learned by the end of that period.  Some students get As, more get Bs, more get Cs, and some fail.  But if you think about it, isn’t 14 weeks an arbitrary period of time?  What if it takes someone 16 weeks to master the material?  Why shouldn’t we let them do that?  Would an employer care?  I suspect not, since right now what they seem to care about is whether or not a potential employee earns a degree, regardless of how many semesters it takes.

Some of you are no doubt thinking this idea is crazy.  Every student can’t earn an A.  If they did, it would diminish what an A grade means.  Only a select few, the best students, should earn an A.  Okay, what does an A mean?  Is it a statistical notion, e.g. the top 10% of students?  Or does it mean mastery of the material?  I want to argue for the latter.

I’m not advocating grade inflation.  I’m not a particularly easy grader, so I’m not arguing that we simply define A work as what most of our students achieve.  Rather, I’m suggesting that teachers should think carefully about what mastery means in the context of a specific course.  Then, if students can master the material with additional time spent studying it, why not change higher ed to allow that?

Perhaps, deep down, you think that some students just aren’t bright enough to earn an A. I used to think that way, but Khan has thrown a wrench into that thinking. (I’m not saying that every student is happy or even willing to do the work to earn an A.  That’s a different issue.)  Why do you think that?  What does an A mean to you?  Does it mean mastery, or does it mean the grade only the best students get?  I had a student some years ago, who graduated earning As in every course but one.  That course she took in her first year.  When she asked the instructor where she fell short, he replied, “No where, but I reserve As for majors only.”

If you agree that A means mastery, why don’t you think that everyone should be able to master the material?  What does it say about you as a teacher if not all of your students can master the material?  Could it mean that you’re not willing to put in the effort it would take to help them master it?

Maybe we should reward our best students, not by giving them As (and relegating the rest of our students to lower grades), but by allowing them to demonstrate mastery in less than 14 weeks, and then moving them on to higher level courses.  (This could also mean Master’s-level courses for our undergraduates.)  Wouldn’t we be doing them a service if they complete the degree in less time? Then we could use the “time” saved (in terms of teaching effort), to help the weaker students.  In the end, all students (or at least most) master the material, though admittedly this would make it harder on graduate schools to discriminate between applicants.

By defining college-level work as mastering the material what I am actually proposing is grade deflation, since the passing grade is now an A.  We would need to provide support for students to learn at their pace–they couldn’t just cruise (or “ride the escalator” as I tell my students) until the end of 14 weeks, take the credit and move on–they would have to actually master the material.

Is our primary responsibility as professionals to be teachers or graders/sorters/screeners? If we created a system that led to mastery, wouldn’t that be a better outcome for  students, the higher education system, employers, nearly everyone?

I don’t claim to have the answers to all these questions.  I realize there would be massive problems of implementation.  But I think the questions are worth grappling with.  Don’t you?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you must watch Race to Nowhere, an independent film on what’s wrong with school with parenting with society today in the U.S.

It’s 90 minutes well worth your time.  If you go to the bottom left of the webpage, you can find a screening near you, but hurry because soon it’ll be too late.

It is almost time for my Spring seminar—that’s the course where I try out most of my crazy new teaching ideas, such as the Global Financial Crisis project from two years ago.  This semester the seminar will explore the question “Does the occurrence of the Great Recession signal a failure of macroeconomics as a discipline?”  The seminar will explore the history of macroeconomic thought since 1930 as a way to develop our understanding of macroeconomics so that we can construct an answer to the question as a collaborative final project.  You can see the course website at http://econ488.umwblogs.org .  It is very much a work in progress.  As a seminar, the course will involve reading, writing and discussion, both in-class and on student blogs, using the quasi-collaborative design I’ve employed in past seminars where we structure the course as a research team to explore “The Question.”

What I’m trying to do differently this year is invite interested outsiders to participate in some meaningful way.  Credit for this idea probably goes to two people: Gardner Campbell through his New Media Studies Seminar, and Bryan Alexander who expressed interest in the topic of the seminar since its inception in my head a year or so ago.  I have invited a few economist friends and a few non-economist friends to participate as I think both might bring something to the table.  But what exactly?  My vague idea is that they could help by asking interesting questions, questions which prompt my students to look more deeply at what we’re exploring.

So here is my question for you:  In what ways could interested outsiders participate meaningfully to the seminar?  I’m looking for specific ideas, such as comments on student blogs or course discussion pages (as we finish each segment of the course outline, we will post a summary of class discussion—see the right side bar of the course site).  Can you imagine other ways outsiders could contribute?

No rush; I’ve got seven days to get this figured out.