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Open learning online

August 8, 2009 By

Not every American can go to college, but what if college comes to them? (Note: Sentence recast to please Stephen Downes.) The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the potential for “open” classes offered  online.  The Obama administration has proposed a $500-million online-education plan as part of its community-college aid.

The government would pay to develop these “open” classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years — a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project’s free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost — at MIT, about $10,000 a course — has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The Chronicle interviews Mike Smith, back in the Education Department as an advisor, who wants to create “a 21st-century library” of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students.

The courses created would reach students through multiple devices, such as computers, handheld devices, and e-book readers like Kindles. They would be modular, and therefore easily updated. Both nonprofit and for-profit entities could compete for the money to build them.

Federal aid would ensure the courses are available to anyone,  Smith said.

Here’s one possibility Mr. Smith describes: Macomb Community College, in Michigan, takes an open statistics course and puts it into its catalog. The students don’t meet face to face, but there’s a webinar every week or an open discussion online among the professor and students. Macomb gets the course free, adds value to it in the form of interaction with its professor, and charges for it.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative is a model.  While students can use the online courses for independent study, “researchers have found the material can be even more powerful when combined with live instruction.”

Carnegie’s materials have already changed how Logan Stark’s professor at California Polytechnic State University approaches her widely feared biochemistry-for-nonmajors class. Anya L. Goodman used to work from a prepared lecture, starting with the basics so she didn’t lose anyone. Now she puts the burden on students to learn the basics online. She focuses class time on clearing up misconceptions, applying the materials to real life, and working in small groups.

“They’re more attentive,” she says. Especially when she comes in and tells her students, “Here’s what you guys already don’t know.”

High-quality courseware would make it much easier for people who are working and raising kids to take college courses cheaply and conveniently.  It would make it easier for high school students to try advanced or specialized classes. It would lower costs, something higher education never seems able to do.

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College bubble

May 31, 2009 By

The higher education bubble is bursting, writes David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute. “Between 2000 and 2005, the average wages of college graduates declined after adjusting for inflation,” he writes. College graduates have flooded the market. There may be jobs for the CalTech math major with a 4.0 grade point average, but not for the graduate with “a 2.8 communications degree from San Francisco State University.”

Not only are students not getting the economic payoff they expect, Frum writes, many aren’t getting a good education.

It’s often at the costliest universities that students are able to graduate with a degree in English without ever having read Shakespeare, a degree in history despite ignorance of the Civil War, or one in art history without ever having encountered the Renaissance.

In their own ways, universities indulge in some of the worst faults of the corporate sector, overcharging their customers in order to allow managers and staff to engage in wasteful or destructive activities that could never be justified on their own.

Universities need to rethink their practices, Frum writes.

Why does it take four years to complete a BA degree? Maybe liberal arts studies make more sense later in life?

For that matter, “maybe tough high school exit exams would serve the needs of employers who currently insist on a BA not for its own sake but as proof that a student was not too lazy or aimless to get one.”

Frum is responding to a Chronicle of Higher Education column arguing that four-year colleges need to become much more efficient to compete with online institutions and community colleges.

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Do vouchers matter?

May 12, 2009 By

School vouchers don’t matter in the larger policy debate, writes Kevin Carey of Education Sector in Chronicle of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.’s program didn’t “create new competition and provide incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs to bring energy and resources to the enterprise of educating students.”

No new schools have been built as a result, no groundbreaking programs created, competition spurred, or innovators attracted. It’s basically just an exercise in seeing what happens when you take a couple thousand students out of pretty bad schools and put them in a range of other schools that are, collectively, somewhat better. Answer: some of the students may be doing somewhat better! I think we already knew this.

Remarkably, the D.C. voucher program is being taken seriously even as, right here in the same city, charter schools are actually creating the whole range of market responses that vouchers are not.

A better education for 1,700 low-income students is nothing to sneer at, counters Jay P. Greene.

While Carey doubts 17,000 vouchers would have motivated Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day to “up and build annexes in Anacostia,”  Greene responds that most voucher students attend non-elite private schools that might expand “if you offered them 10 times as many spots and long-term security of funding.” And D.C. charter schools wouldn’t be offering much competition if they’d been limited to 1,700 students and one third the district’s per-student funding.

Reason TV has video of the D.C. school voucher rally, which pushed President Obama to announce that currently enrolled students will continue to receive vouchers through high school. No new students will be allowed to enter the program.

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‘Holistic’ decisions are unreliable

April 19, 2009 By

“Holistic” assessment is unreliable, said Scott Highhouse at Wake Forest University’s “Rethinking Admissions” conference. Highhouse, a professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Bowling Green State University, warned that research shows personal interviews don’t predict who’ll succeed on the job and who’ll flop. The audience was not happy to hear that, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One social psychologist in the audience asked Mr. Highhouse about the importance of personality traits, such as conscientiousness, that seem to correlate highly with student success.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Mr. Highhouse said. “How to measure conscientiousness in a way that is standardized.”

He’d titled his talk, “Don’t Shoot the Messenger.”

I worry that an emphasis on interviews, essays and “community service” claims will reward bullshit artists rather than performers. Take Susan Boyle.  She doesn’t know how to package or present herself.  But she can perform.

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Recession education

April 16, 2009 By

In the recession, does advanced education really pay off? Slate’s Emily Bazelon asks 20somethings how they’re planning their futures.

“College and graduate school are generally a good bet,” she starts. “But it doesn’t tell you that every single degree pays off financially at every single point in time.”

As Jonathan, a college graduate in North Carolina who had been working at a used-book store, puts it, “I have a B.S. in sociology, and its value bears a strong similarity to its initials.”

She cites a Chronicle of Higher Education story, which advises would-be graduate students in the humanities: Just Don’t Go. Hide out in grad school to avoid the recession and you’ll emerge in your 30s with no experience and no money, Thomas Benton advises.

Even those with practical degrees are hurting in the short term, writes Bazelon.

Gordon, who is 29, has an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from Boston University, three years in IT, and an MBA and a master’s in information systems. How much more sturdy and practical can you get? But after a year and a half, he lost the job he got after graduation. He has $60,000 in student loans even though he had full scholarships for both undergrad and grad school (living expenses). That comes out to $500 a month for the next 10 years.

He fears that his degree is “underwater.” Experts say the educated will do fine once the economy recovers, but when’s that going to be? And will an MBA bounce back to its previous value?

My daughter’s earning a law degree from the University of Chicago in a few months.  She thought her class was the last to get seats on the gravy train, but the train has derailed. The law firm that offered her a very well-paid job, starting in the fall, has now offered her six months’ pay to defer her start for a year. She plans to do Legal Aid work without pay to gain experience. (The non-profits that used to pay a minimal wage to new lawyers have realized they don’t have to.) If the law firm job has vanished by then, well, she’ll cope. She doesn’t expect a return to the cushy days of yore.

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Change vs. classics

March 6, 2009 By

Teaching civic engagement and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity is a high priority for college professors, concludes a new UCLA report, The American College Teacher.

While 57.8 percent of  professors want to encourage students to be “agents of social change,” only 34.7 percent said teaching the classics is very important,  notes Chronicle of Higher Education:

Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the research institute, said the gap between those who value teaching Western civilization and those who value teaching students to be social activists reflects a shift in emphasis from the abstract to the practical. “The notion of a liberal education as a set of essential intellectual skills is in transition,” she says. “It’s also about social and personal responsibility, thinking about one’s role in society, and creating change.”

In transition? Or just going to hell?  I suspect the agents of change in the world will be people who’ve developed their intellectual skills.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, says he believes faculty members should teach the classics. “I teach American literature all the time, that’s what I do,” says Mr. Nelson, who is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But he says that to many professors, teaching the classics has become part of a “conservative agenda” that they don’t want to be part of. Conservative critics of academe, he says, “have poisoned the well for these subjects because they’ve gotten politicized and become symbols of a reaction against the progressive academy.”

Change vs. the classics is a false dichotomy, points out Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass.

The classics are works about social change, in one way or another. That’s true of Greek tragedy, of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Defoe, of enlightenment philosophers, of romantic poets, of Victorian novelists, of modernist writers. Some register upheaval in their form, some in their content, some do both. Some try to provoke change, some try to register and reflect on it, some try to resist it. But great literature is always hooked into the great tensions of its time — even as it is also hooked into a longer tradition.

Intellectuals should decide what to teach based on reason, not emotion, O’Connor argues.

In other words: If professors can’t teach Antigone (loyalty to family and religion vs. patriotism) for fear of making a conservative smile, that’s just stupid. And stupid is not supposed to be the strong suit of academia.

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