“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

You’ve probably already seen that Pew survey of university presidents. I think I saw it nearly everywhere yesterday. The part that made me think of the Upton Sinclair quote with which I titled this post was here:

Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom’s. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching.

My first inclination was to chalk this up to cultural differences. You know what I mean: University presidents are from Mars, the public is from Venus or something like that. But then I read this part of the Chronicle write-up of the Pew survey and realized that there’s something more important going on here:

Mr. Pepicello [the President of the University of Phoenix] believes that online education will spread even faster than most survey respondents indicated. “I don’t see how higher education can’t go in that direction,” he said. “People thought that shopping online or banking online were fads, and yet I can’t tell you the last time I was in my bank. They’re very nice people, and I like them, but I don’t need to see them very often,” thanks to online banking and ATM’s.

This is probably the most craven example of what Matt Damon called “MBA thinking” that I’ve ever seen in print. [Yes, I know the guy is from the University of Phoenix, but you just know half the administrators reading that story just started nodding their heads when they saw that quote.] Coincidentally, the New Yorker has a hilarious profile up of my favorite business goofball, Timothy Ferriss. They report:

In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off.

Automate education and students will have more time to learn the tango in Buenos Aires! Who cares about the jobs lost in the process? Who cares if they don’t actually learn anything? All that time for contemplation and analysis is simply too inefficient!

MfD and I have been back and forth over the last few months about whether it is even possible to teach an online class where contemplation and reflection is possible. I actually think it is. The problem is that the people who are running America’s universities don’t seem to care whether it is or whether it isn’t. They want higher education to work more like an ATM machine. Check out this clip I got from a colleague over the weekend. It’s a rant by Douglas Rushkoff about how awful Blackboard is…unless you want to corner the online education market. How can anyone run a rewarding, academically rigorous online course in this environment?

For-profit education has been like this since its inception, but I think it’s the new austerity that’s turned public higher education into the functional equivalent of the savings and loan industry c. 1981. We create online programs because we’re desperate for the money that additional students bring. We tell ourselves that the education they’re getting is the same as they’d get on campus, even if it’s not, because our jobs depend upon it.

The reason our jobs depend upon it is not that face-to-face education somehow failed the prior generation of students. The reason our jobs depend upon it is that government aid to support higher education, something that used to be considered a public good, is drying up in the new age of austerity.

Excellence without money, to use a phrase I picked up from Historiann, is a losing proposition for everyone involved, at least in so far as it involves our imminent online-only educational future. The majority of university presidents may not see that, but thank goodness the majority of the public still does. That’s about the only thing that gives me hope for the future of universities everywhere.

I should have seen this coming.

It appears as if the ed tech apocalypse is right around the corner.

So a student comes up to me after class this morning and says something to this effect: “I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t playing with my phone during the discussion. My textbook is on my phone.” Then he shows me his phone and right there is Rebirth of a Nation by Jackson Lears.

Now I’m certain this student actually was referring to the book during the discussion, otherwise he wouldn’t have showed it to me afterwards. But what am I going to do when everybody only has to access their textbooks through their laptops or their phones? How will I know they aren’t on Facebook? What happens if they all have different e-versions of the text? Will I have to read the first sentence of the quote and wait for them to tap it into their search engines before we can discuss it?

I have no answers on this issue, only questions.

PS H/t to the Pietist Schoolman for the graphic. I told you it would come in handy fast.

Update: Coincidentally, UD gets at the heart of the problem here.

“It’s in the syllabus.”

I was going to spend this entire day working on a conclusion to a manuscript that’s due soon, but I got sidetracked. My first diversion was an unplanned rereading of Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform in order to spruce up my sections on the Populists and Progressives. [He writes much better than I remember.] The second was the discovery that Ed at Gin and Tacos has made me about as popular as I’ve ever been on the Twitter.

There must be something in this post that captures the zeitgeist of higher education today. Perhaps it’s Ed’s summary of the questions he tends to get from his students:

* Is there a website where I can read the Constitution?
* How do I attach something to email?
* Where can I order the textbook from?
* How do I find articles about ________? (x1000)

While I identify with this to some extent, the ones that get to me (particularly at this time of year) are all the questions that can be answered with the simple mantra, “It’s in the syllabus.” I always go out of my way not to sound nasty when I say that, because I don’t mean it to be nasty. It’s just that the syllabus is the most important document in any particular course they might happen to take. If they aren’t familiar with the syllabus, it’s likely to affect their grade in a bad way to a great extent. Therefore, rather than just give them the information they need, “It’s in the syllabus.” is supposed to serve as a not-too-subtle suggestion that they probably ought to go back and read the thing a little closer. I understand that syllabi are getting kind of long these days, but the books they have to read in history class are even longer. Even the short ones.

But that’s not really what Ed’s post is about. It’s about that study out of Illinois a few days ago which argues that most students haven’t gotten the faintest idea how to use Google, and the part I tweeted really does say it all:

"I simply cannot comprehend how college students can attain this level of information illiteracy." – Gin and Tacos – bit.ly/q2CARD—
Jonathan Rees (@jhrees) August 25, 2011

Now I’ve heard concerns that technologically-challenged non-traditional students who can’t even pay their bills online might have trouble mastering the logistics of an online course, but this was the first time I wondered whether so-called digital natives might have trouble too.

Combine these two problems together for a moment: 1) Students have trouble reading long instruction-like documents. 2) Students might have trouble operating some complicated Internet applications, and don’t really understand how the ones they do use really work. Now move those students off campus, where they can’t get any real help using that technology. [Does Blackboard employ phone techs in India who can explain to students why they can't access their class while they're at home at midnight, trying to learn in their pajamas?] This does not strike me as a recipe for success.

Perhaps all this explains why students taking online course have greater non-completion rates than those who take those same courses in a face-to-face setting. But the online education charlatans don’t really care about that, do they?

“Always something breaking us in two.”

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1900.

Recent visitors to this blog should recognize that my interest in educational technology didn’t come out of left field. For instance, I made fun of a book titled DIY U almost from the very first moment that I read about it. It must be out in paperback now because the author is recycling a big chunk of it in Utne Reader.

Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, but the author’s arguments actually seem less awful than they did the last time I read them. Perhaps it’s the extraordinary awfulness of the stuff that I’ve been reading over the last few months. Perhaps it’s the author’s obvious enthusiasm for the educational technology future. She clearly believes that these developments will help the students of the future learn better.

I still don’t. Looking at my previous post on this book, it seems that this is the exact same paragraph that got me all riled up months ago:

Technology upsets the traditional hierarchies and categories of education. It can put the learner at the center of the educational process. Increasingly, this means students will decide what they want to learn, and when, where, and with whom; and they will learn by doing. Functions that have long hung together, like research and teaching, learning and assessment, or content, skills, accreditation, and socialization, can be delivered separately.

OK, but just because you CAN deliver them separately doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD deliver them separately. Take the obvious pairing here of content and skills. Perhaps you can teach my discipline adequately online if you believe, as Harry Truman did, that history is just one damn fact after another. Make the students read something, then give them a multiple choice test on the content they just read. Voila! You’ve taught your students history. That’s the popular perspective of people who think that a college education is about nothing besides getting a credential.

I happen to believe otherwise. I’ve come to look at historical facts as a means to an end – actually a means to many ends, namely developing a skill set that helps students better understand the world around them today, not just the dead world of the past. That’s why I’m so smitten with whatever the opposite of the coverage model of history survey classes happens to be.

This ProfHacker post calls it “uncoverage.” I’m not sure I like that name, but nonetheless I really couldn’t agree with these sentiments more:

[D]epth and breadth should not be pitted against each other. In fact, breadth is a key component of uncoverage, the weft to the warp of understanding. Breadth means connecting disparate ideas, finding news ways to represent what is uncovered, and extending one’s conceptual reach to the implications of the material.

Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations that go hand-in-hand with coverage.

Teach content and skills separately and you’ll be lucky if you get readily digestible interpretations and prepackaged observations. I suspect students will do nothing but spit back one damned fact after another. It’s no coincidence that Henry Adams was a historian first and a memoirist second.

Do people in other disciplines think like Adams too or are we historians special?

How can you tell good educational technology from bad educational technology?

When I first started teaching at what was then known as the University of Southern Colorado, there were two sets of old maps printed on canvas stored in an upstairs closet which I’m sure dated from about 1960. One set had historical maps for world history. The other set had maps pertaining to American history. Faculty had to drag them out of the closet and move them into their classrooms whenever they had to make a geographic point (and to be fair to today’s student’s for one moment, the last batch of non-digital natives didn’t know much about geography either). I was still teaching the first half of the US survey class at the time so from time to time I had to drag those maps out of storage to make some point, usually about the sheer magnitude of the British Empire.

Then I discovered those plastic sheets with maps printed on them. They went on top of what we around here call an ELMO machine (basically, a flattop projector that displays on a vertical screen) so suddenly there was no need to drag the maps around at all. Not only that, there were pictures of things on those sheets besides maps! Now instead of talking about what a cotton gin looked like (“It’s like a giant rotary mower, only stationary.”), I could actually show a picture of one.

Put off by too many canned presentations where the technology didn’t work, I was late coming to PowerPoint but I’m very glad to be there now. Thanks to Microsoft (I guarantee you I don’t write those words very often), I’m no longer dependent upon publishers for the pictures I want to show in lectures. The entire Internet is my slide library, just as it is everybody else’s.

When Spencer Crew of George Mason University visited us a few weeks ago for our teacher colloquium, I developed a terrible case of slide envy. For example, he had a picture of a clipping of Black Panthers serving breakfast in a Baltimore ghetto. Now I’d been talking about the more nurturing side of the Black Panthers ever since I saw Bobby Seale speak back around the time I was still using an ELMO machine. So he and I traded slides and now I can illustrate that point beautifully!*

I think the nature of the improvement apparent in this anecdote applies well to other educational technologies as well. Certainly, PowerPoint is more convenient than maps. I also have a much better choice of material than I did when I ordered every publisher’s plastic overlays and picked only the ones I liked most. But I think the quality that’s most important here is the increase in instructor control over time. If I get to design the slideshow exactly the way I like it, I know that I am running the technology rather than letting the technology run me.

Let me offer up one more example to illustrate that point. I’ve written any number of times here now about killing my survey textbook and using Milestone Documents, a subscription website with primary sources, instead. This may seem strange coming from someone who purports to hate e-reading, but in fact it gives me much better control over my curriculum than if I used a paper alternative.

Let me illustrate that point with another anecdote: This semester, I’m also using Milestone Documents as a reader for my upper level course on America from 1877-1945. [Best. Period. Ever.] While designing my syllabus last week, I was looking for something about Prohibition because I assigned Daniel Okrent’s awesome book on this subject, Last Call to the class for a text this time around. Seeing none, I shoot Neil Schlager of Milestone Docs an e-mail which said, in part, “You guys should really have the Volstead Act in your collection.” Yesterday, I get an e-mail back telling me that it’s up on the site and ready for classroom use.

Now I’ve sent enough e-mails like that to Neil this last year that they put me on the editorial board over there, but that’s beside the point. The advantage of the Milestone Documents model is that when they get enough documents up there, every history professor can get access to the precise historical materials that they already teach. No extra pounds to lug around that students won’t read anyways. No useless revisions of the text designed solely to destroy the used book market for that particular text. The teacher is in control, and the students can even use their subscription to read around other documents if they’re so inclined.

Hopefully, you get my point. This post is getting a little long so I’ll end it here. Perhaps I’ll make this a two-parter and talk about a few more illustrations of this argument that are swimming around my head at the moment, but I’d like to see what you all think of it first.

* There has to be some way that history professors can get together and trade PowerPoint slides without running afoul of copyright laws. After all, it makes no difference to me if someone else uses the same slides that I do. After all, we should hope that the same students won’t take the identical survey course twice from two different instructors.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

While I feel bad about kicking Britney’s excellent post off the top spot on this blog, I do think this kind of hysteria needs to be addressed quickly and directly:

Tenure won’t save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic.

Of course, online education is part of this imminent doom scenario:

Many governors face enormous fiscal shortfalls, forcing them to choose which public employees to anger. Tenured professors, I suspect, have a lot less political clout in most states than do policeman, nurses, prison guards and public school teachers. If online education keeps improving, then I predict that some governor is going to propose firing most of the tenured faculty at his public colleges and replacing the high-priced teachers with online courses. Since Republicans consider academia to be a creature of the far left, many Republican governors would undoubtedly take joy in decimating the traditional higher education market.

Well, I don’t buy it. The fact that the author, James D. Miller, is an economist only makes me more suspicious. That entire profession is absolutely incapable of distinguishing between the quality of two similar goods. The assumption here is that online education will keep improving, but there’s only so much that online education can improve. Just to cite Britney’s example again, you can put all the bells and whistles you want on an online learning platform, but if students are still signing onto it at different times the discussions are bound to be poorly guided because you can’t pay a professor to sit at a terminal all day and wait for their students to sign on and comment.

Only towards the end of this essay does Miller begin to get to the heart of what’s really going on here:

Students gamble on the future when they fund their education with debt. Our current economic difficulties, however, are making Americans pessimistic about the long-term fate of our economy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if many parents are no longer willing to let their kids load up on debt. That is especially true if the parents have sent another child to college only to see him moving back home after graduation and taking a job that didn’t require a college degree. Unfortunately for professors, every capable kid who doesn’t go to college reduces the stigma of not pursuing higher education.

The problem with higher education is not in higher education itself. The problem is that economic restructuring is making it more difficult for students to find jobs when they graduate whether they actually learned anything in college or not. Suppose the social stigma of not going to college disappears. That’s not going to help anyone actually find the best jobs that remain in America if a large percentage of the god ones have moved to China. College may be a gamble, but it still remains most people’s best hope for the future.

And from a tenured professor’s perspective, running for the escape hatch screaming is absolutely the last thing most of us should do (unless, of course, they’re miserable in academia, but that’s a post for other people’s blogs). Do you actually think you’re going to have MORE job security outside of academia than you will within it? As Tim Burke points out:

Tenure itself costs little, by the way. Or more precisely, it costs nothing compared to the idea that you’d just keep extending the contracts of strong teachers and researchers until retirement. The cost of tenure is institutional and programmatic, not financial: it keeps a university from responding rapidly to changing trends in knowledge. Arguably, this is a good thing independent of its costs. Some believe that an important responsibility of academia is the conservation of intellectual traditions as opposed to chasing momentary trends. Tenure is only a financial cost if you want to follow the growing norm in white-collar labor of firing people when they’re in their fifties even if they’re still doing great work simply to save on their salaries. Maybe that is what some people want, to have everyone in the same miserable situation except for the billionaires. I’d rather see if the whole society can’t go in the opposite direction and increase job security for most people.

To me it seems like Miller wants all of us to get out of the frying pan and into the fire. Why don’t I just put all my investments into gold and build a bomb shelter in my backyard? I think that course of action would be about just as rational.

When the cat’s away…

In the three and a half years or so that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve never had a guest post…until now. Britney Titus graduated from CSU-Pueblo last spring, and will be starting our history MA program next week. [Yes, we've had that talk.]* What we on the faculty love most about her is her infectious enthusiasm for history and learning. You can actually see it spread from her to other students in class during discussions.

One sign of that enthusiasm is her willingness to read this blog voluntarily. Britney has been sending me the occasional e-mail on various topics posted here, but I don’t think she’s ever commented. When I got an incredibly long one earlier today, I asked her to adapt it into this post. Take it away Britney…

**********

When it comes to the online education debate, it seems as though one of the most important factors has been left out in the discussion: the student. What a student needs and wants has largely been determined by administrators, who often have the preconceived notion of online education being the next big thing that will attract even more students to their university. They fail to realize what the student really wants, and, more importantly, how online courses are going to affect the student’s overall educational experience.

I have a friend who is attending a college based in Colorado for her master’s program, but she takes a lot of online courses. She brought up a good point to me the other day. Her school offers all of its courses online, so she has students from Massachusetts who are taking the same online course as her right now. The problem, she said, is not only the fact that there is no personal connection with people she will never see (making the discussions somewhat awkward because there is no common ground between people that live on opposite ends of the country), but also that there is really no authoritative body when taking an online class.

Sure the professor can get online later and say, “oh this is right and that is wrong,” but while they are engaging in the discussion they are all fighting and talking about things out of left field because there is no professor actually there. My friend says she does not get anything out of the discussions because there is no guidance or direction for what they are talking about. The professor does start out the discussion with a question, but by the end, the students have ended up so far off topic that they do not even realize the objective behind the discussion, let alone actually learn anything from it. It is not so much that the online education environment does not have the possibilities for discussion, but the discussions are misguided with the absence of an actual educated professor being present to direct them. They only conclude with everyone being confused about what the correct answer is, which they will probably find out five or six hours later and by that time they have already forgot what most of the discussion included.

What is even more disheartening is what the students are learning in the end. I asked my friend how she was doing in the class grade-wise and her response of, “I have an ‘A’, but I don’t know why,” immediately infuriated me and propelled me to write this post. Not only is my friend not learning anything in the course, she is not receiving the benefits and joys of learning. Being a student myself, I thrive on the feeling I get when I have worked so hard to get that ‘A’ and can look back on five months and say to myself, “wow I learned so much.” The fact that my friend is not only spending countless hours on pointless discussions, but also not understanding the objectives behind the learning demonstrates the ineffectiveness of that online course.

What scares me even more than my friend’s experience is the idea that this environment is beginning to trickle down to secondary schools. I noticed recently that my old high school district is offering K-12 education online. If kids are going to start online education that early, what will make them want to go to an actual college later if they’re already sick of online learning? I am frankly a little exhausted both at the collegiate and lower levels by administrators deciding what students want. Do they go out and actually ask, “Do you need/want an online alternative”? In K-12, it is the adults making the decisions for these kids. Yet, how are they ever going to experience the passion and personality of discussions in the classroom if all they do is grow up in cyberspace?

A log off button simply cannot replace the act of students walking out of the classroom still talking about the discussion that took place ten minutes ago among their peers and professor. At least some students, despite administrative interference, really don’t want that option anyway, even if it includes learning while in their pajamas.

* By the way, if you happen to teach in a history department with a Ph.D. program that can actually place people in tenure track jobs, have I got a transfer student for you (in about two years)!

Poor Mrs. Drudge.

My friend Bob Rydell of Montana State told me about this clip, which they’re using at the exhibit he curated for the National Building Museum. The scene is from the “The Middleton Family Visit the New York World’s Fair,” (1939) and the exhibit is on the world’s fairs of the 1930s. The editing is my own, and it actually kind of fits the new theme of this blog:

The functional equivalent of eating through a tube.

A new option has arisen, called online learning portals, that might make college superfluous. For example, a company like Learning Counts allows students to create portfolios that document their knowledge and skills. College professors examine the portfolios and certify what the students know and what they can do. This can, of course, lead to college credits. But it can also lead to a classic “cutting out the middle man” phenomenon: students bypassing college and taking the certifications directly to prospective employers. After all, in a real sense a college education is merely a means to an end, and if a better means turns up … well, you get the picture.

- Bob Roper, “Online learning tests campuses,” Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, July 31, 2011.

Wow. When I wrote about education as a means to an end I never expected to read someone taking that so literally! Where’s the joy in an online learning portal? Now remember this quote, while I continue this post by discussing a completely different subject…

While I haven’t noted it lately, I may be the only vegetarian in the world who’s an Anthony Bourdain fanatic. No Reservations is pretty much the only thing I watch regularly on TV these days (at least until Fringe comes back) because I desperately want to travel more and because I can treat all the meat-eating on the show as a cultural/historical learning experience.

This is a clip from a recent show where Tony visited the legendary Spanish restaurant El Bulli before it closed:

If you watch to about four minutes in, you’ll see the part where Bourdain notes that the chef, Ferran Adria, really enjoys himself while eating. “I love that you’re having so much fun at your own restaurant,” Tony notes. Apparently, Adria used to eat the ever-changing, 52-course menu each week in order to make sure that the diners enjoyed it as much as he did. This seems like a no-brainer to me since customers were undoubtedly paying big bucks to eat there, but apparently it’s rather novel in the restaurant world.

Like an expensive dining experience, higher education ought to be infused with a lot of customer service and at least a little bit of joy. Learning is not just something we do to get a job. It’s supposed to be fun. You might not like all of the 52 courses you get served during your expensive college banquet, but ideally both the chef and the diner should enjoy the experience.

I’m not a big fan of the student as customer model, but if technology destroys the authority of professors in the classroom to look out for educational matters, perhaps it is appropriate to ask why students should settle for compromises when getting an education that nobody would ever accept while eating out. If you went to a restaurant that cooked your meal in one gigantic pot a thousand miles away, you’d send it back. If they gave you warmed-over versions of last year’s meals, you’d send it back. If they handed you a clicker and said “Press ‘A’ if you want more pepper,” you’d leave the restaurant immediately.

Perhaps you don’t like black truffles. Suppose McDonald’s is your kind of place. That’s fine if it makes you happy. Food is a means to an end too (that end being not starving), but think of all the wonderful dining experiences you’d be missing! If you don’t care about the taste and texture and smell of your food, you might as well get all your nutrients through a tube.

I bet getting your nutrients through a tube would be much cheaper than actually eating if the packets hooked up to the other end of those tubes from your arm were mass-produced. Think of the time that would save! No more trouble finding a place to park! No more sitting around chatting with your friends while they cook your dinner in the kitchen! [Making someone's meal to order is so inefficient.] No more need to tip the waitstaff to bring your food around! No more need to cook at home will leave plenty of extra time for watching TV! [I could watch even more Bourdain!]

If we’re really, really lucky, maybe someday they’ll figure out a way for us to get all our nutrients over the Internet. Happy happy, joy joy.

I like “technoskeptic” much better than “Luddite.”

I’ve got another post brewing in my head which I’ll write up as soon as I can find the time and the Internet connection simultaneously. In the meantime, others are doing this whole technoskeptic thing much better than I do. To see that work, I’d start with Leslie M-B here, then go to Historiann and, while it doesn’t explicitly cite technology as the problem, I’d still top it all off with Gary Trudeau.