Stephen Greenblatt will not take questions.

Continuing in John Henry mode, imagine a contest between a living, breathing professor and a MOOC. The professor is teaching a classroom full of students. The other students are watching the superprofessor on video alone in their rooms, wherever in the world they happen to be. Who’s going to win?

Well, I can tell you right now that any history professor who did nothing but lecture in 15 minute chunks, following up on each chunk with a single multiple-choice question, during a job interview would never be hired at any university I’ve ever encountered. Good teaching always involves a give and take between the instructor and the student. When they don’t understand what you mean, you explain it to them a different way. You don’t repeat the same words over and over again (which is all Daphne Koller wants students to hear). That’s just one of many reasons why the live professor would beat the MOOC coming and going. It wouldn’t even be close.

What the MOOC does have is reach, but that’s the product of the medium by which it’s delivered, not the quality of education that MOOCs provide. Do we really want to sacrifice quality for access? If we educate the entire world and do nothing to solve systematic unemployment, the inferior education students get will not be worth whatever the MOOC providers try to charge for it.

That’s why the Harvard MOOC crew is trying to convince themselves of their own humanitarianism instead of just admitting that they’re in it for the money. This is from that Harvard graduate college alumni magazine article I cited the other day but which still isn’t online yet:

“The information glut has killed the Socratic method,” [Robert Lue, Faculty Director of HarvardX] says. “We have too much stuff to tell students, so we don’t have time to talk to students. Online learning will give us the opportunity to return to the primacy of human interaction.”

Problem 1: Socratic method? Really? What are students going to do, interrogate each other? Doesn’t there have to be an actual teacher involved in the conversation for the Socratic method to even apply?

Problem 2: Cutting down what you have to tell students so that they remember the important parts is the most important part of teaching! Indeed, I’ve been struggling with teaching history in a Googlized world for years now. As a result, I teach fewer facts and more skills because you really can look up just about every fact there is on the Internet. If MOOCs really are just jazzed-up textbooks, teaching complicated skills would be the most difficult thing possible to do with them.

With so many good justifications to oppose MOOCs available, perhaps the funniest thing about this Harvard grad college article is that even opponents there oppose MOOCs for elitist reasons:

“I’m afraid that this is going to destroy grad students,” one professor told me. “Not because of what it will do to elite universities, but other places. Why should a community college hire a new PhD when they can pipe in Stephen Greenblatt?”

Because Stephen Greenblatt will not be around to take questions.*

Yes, I appreciate some concern for the welfare of grad students, but nonetheless take a moment and think about the arrogance on display here. This anonymous denizen of Harvard Yard is assuming that Harvard professors are so much better than everyone else that merely their taped presence can improve upon the teaching of a living, breathing human trained anywhere else** – that someone who’s as accessible as the pope or Thomas Pynchon can teach you more than someone you can talk to during every class for the entire semester (and in office hours if that’s not enough). The Western Governors University experience suggests otherwise:

“In reviews of the school, one complaint is repeated ad nauseum, the lack of interaction with an actual professor. Students of Western Governors University often feel as if they are paying to teach themselves. There are “mentors” assigned to each student to help them get acclimated to online classes and assist them in any way they need, but the time between questions and answers is reported to be less than stellar.”

With MOOCs you don’t even get a mentor. How they expect to get anyone to pay for this kind of shoddy treatment someday is completely beyond me.

This is why I’ve decided to go completely over to the position long held by my friend and future debate partner, Historiann. MOOCs are a bubble. They’re like tulips, Florida real estate and Pets.com all rolled into one. It reminds me of the time I bought 100 shares of stock in the restaurant chain Boston Market. “They’re always packed,” I said to myself. Little did I realize that the company was losing money on every customer. I eventually lost everything I had paid for the shares.

Unfortunately, much of the money MOOCs will make will come from already cash-strapped universities, probably from funds that currently pay most of our salaries. Therefore, we non-superprofessors still need to work hard to end MOOC madness before it ends us, despite this new technology’s many obvious flaws.

* I feel bad for picking on Stephen Greenblatt because 1) To my knowledge he isn’t even teaching a MOOC and 2) I liked The Swerve (although I also enjoy Dan Brown novels so take my recs with a grain of salt). Still, having found such a softball question like that one, how could I not swing for the fences?

** Come to think of it, this also applies to professors trained at Harvard. After all, I got this article from a Harvard alum. It must have pissed him off too.

Harvard hates you (and Coursera isn’t all that fond of you either).

Anybody familiar with my fondness for labor history, 19th century American folklore and sarcasm will understand why this is now my favorite tweet ever:

The steam powered hammer freed John Henry for other activities.—
Sunny Stalter (@slstalter) May 16, 2013

If you don’t know who “John Henry” was, The Boss will be delighted to sing you one version of the story. Or better yet, read the book by Scott Reynolds Nelson and learn a little bit about all of them. The key point here for understanding that tweet is that the steam hammer killed John Henry, leaving him no time to do other things at all. While MOOC enthusiasts like to claim that their babies will allow professors to get back to the way teaching is supposed to be, anybody who’s paying the least bit of attention to academic politics in this day and age knows that the bean counters will never let that happen. Economically, non-superprofessors will all be as dead as John Henry because killing our jobs is the primary reason that MOOCs exist in the first place.

My response to that tweet was so pathetic in its attempt at similar humor that I just deleted it before writing this. However, when breaking my brain in a failed attempt to be witty, I realized that the joke here actually understates the direness of our situation. John Henry was competing against the steam drill in a fair fight when his heart exploded. In our case, the steam drill is coming down directly upon our chests. What I mean by that is that MOOCs won’t be displacing us by accident. They’ll be replacing us by design.

You think I’m kidding? Here’s a paragraph from that New Yorker article on MOOCs that I didn’t quote last week:

[William] Bowen spent much of the seventies and eighties as the president of Princeton, after which he joined the Mellon Foundation. In a lecture series at Stanford last year, he argued that online education may provide a cure for the disease he diagnosed almost half a century ago. If overloaded institutions diverted their students to online education, it would reduce faculty, and associated expenses. Courses would become less jammed. Best of all, the élite and populist systems of higher education would finally begin to interlock gears and run as one: the best-endowed schools in the country could give something back to their nonexclusive cousins, streamlining their own teaching in the process. Struggling schools could use the online courses in their own programs, as San José State has, giving their students the benefit of a first-rate education. Everybody wins. At Harvard, I was told, repeatedly, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

[emphasis added]

As I mentioned before, I know Bill Bowen (even though I haven’t seen him in many years). While he is a very nice man, being both an economist and a former university administrator, I can easily believe that this is exactly what he meant.* The question becomes then: When Harvard people say “A rising tide lifts all boats” do they mean the same thing that Bowen does? Do they think faculty should be thrown over the side before that tide comes in?

I think they do.

Exhibit A: After the speech I gave in Connecticut last Friday, a Harvard Ph.D. in the audience slipped me an article. It’s from their Arts and Sciences graduate college alumni magazine. The new issue isn’t available online yet so you’re just going to have to trust me here:

“Thanks to technologies like HarvardX, [Grad Students Wen Yu] and [Ian] Miller suspect, there may be fewer professors in the academy in the future, but they will be much better teachers.”

That last sentiment is so perverse, I’m going to have to take it up in a post all its own, but for now just let the total lack of compassion there sink in for a moment. Sure, we’re going to screw over a lot of other grad students, but we’ll be fine! We’re from Harvard! With respect to there being fewer professors in the future, you just know they’re getting that from somewhere.

Exhibit B comes from former Harvard dean Harry Lewis (who talked to that New Yorker reporter, but was not quoted extensively). In this blog post, he absolves his employer for all blame for MOOC-induced professorial unemployment:

In the case of MOOCs (or other ways of chunking online instruction), Harvard could impose burdensome licensing rules in an effort to protect the scholarly professionals elsewhere. (Just as the Wall Street Journal is now Online but hardly Open.) But of course UC would then utilize someone else’s product, resulting in lower quality instruction at UC, perhaps at a higher price. Would we at Harvard then sleep better, knowing that if any philosophers had been laid off in California, it was not because of OUR MOOC?

Someone else is going to destroy your jobs, he’s arguing, so why shouldn’t it be Harvard? “You’re going to die someday anyway, so why don’t I just shoot you now?”

In other words, my fellow faculty members who teach at universities with precarious balance sheets (which therefore makes them ripe for “disruption”), Harvard hates you. Not content to be the richest of the rich, they want to get even richer by making your jobs no longer economically viable.

What’s doubling infuriating about that line of argument is the way Lewis wraps Harvard’s selfish interest in the patina of a good cause, namely openness. That kind of argument is pretty common amongst the MOOC messiah corps. Just look at Coursera. As Irene Ogrizek writes:

Coursera is a for-profit entity. It, along with other for-profits, is being heralded as an example of corporate innovation that will bolster and transform the global education sector. But the bottom line is that Koller, her partner Andrew Ng, and their backers are in it to make money. Images of desperate South Africans might be useful for generating support, but eventually someone, most likely the South African government, will have to pay for the privilege of collaborating with Coursera. And the profits will go to shareholders and not back into an ailing system that can produce a stampede that can kill a mother who only wants what’s best for her son.

Of course, Sebastian Thrun has famously stated that in the future there will only be a need for ten universities worldwide. Therefore, he’s no pal of ours either. The only thing that separates MOOC providers from Harvard is that they want to destroy higher education top to bottom and rebuild it with nearly all the revenue flowing to them. Faculty will simply be collateral damage as whole universities disappear for the sake of investors, taking nearly everybody’s jobs – indeed whole college towns – with them. But at least we’ll still have Cambridge.

It’s as if the Stanford CS department is trying to build a vast infrastructure, suck as much money as possible out of it, then run it into the ground. Oddly enough, as the Stanford historian Richard White explains in his recent historiographic milestone of a book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, that’s what Leland Stanford and his buddies did to the American railway system over a century ago.

On second thought, maybe that John Henry analogy isn’t so far off at all.

* If you have more time than I do, you can listen to Bowen’s talk at Stanford last year and tell me if this summary is accurate. However, the New Yorker‘s fact checkers are so legendarily thorough, I’d be shocked if his ideas are being distorted here at all.

“Would you like to shoot me now or wait ’til you get home?”

Has a backlash formed against MOOCs? Well, yes and know. Certainly non-stop MOOC-mania has started to become peppered with bad publicity for the first time. However, it’s important to remember an important distinction: There are universities that produce MOOCs now and universities that will consume MOOCs (mostly) later. If schools like Amherst reject being MOOC producers, that’s not a backlash. That’s Amherst being Amherst. If schools like Duke reject giving credit for MOOCs, that does not prevent them from continuing as MOOC producers.

Really, the only sure sign that I’ve seen of any institutional backlash from a potential MOOC consumer is that eloquent letter from the San Jose State Philosophy Department. Perhaps this explains why Michael Feldstein decided to attack it:

The collective effect of these rhetorical moves is to absolve the department of all responsibility for addressing the real problems the university is facing. By ignoring the scholarship of teaching, the department missed an opportunity to engage the MOOC question in a different way. Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community.

Seriously, you can’t learn more about education technology anywhere than you can over at Michael’s blog, e-Literate. However, that post is probably the clearest indiction that I have ever seen that faculty have to look out for their own interests rather than depend on friends in any other part of higher education to fight for them. After all, it’s not the San Jose State Philosophy Department’s fault that the California legislature won’t raise taxes. More importantly, it’s not Feldstein’s job that’s under threat of being unbundled. I’ll call this the “Wait ’til you get home” option because we all know what the outcome of this kind of dialogue will be: unbundling and unemployment.

On the other hand, there’s the “Shoot him now! Shoot him now!” option, which I warned about in my first Inside Higher Education piece almost a year ago. Sadly, things have only gotten worse since that time. Perhaps the best indication of that is the hysterical (in more than one way) Pearson-authored report, “An Avalanche Is Coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead.”

I must confess that I didn’t bother to actually read this report until I wanted to find new evidence to illustrate this way of thinking. You won’t be surprised to learn that it really is as bad as it sounds. “In the new world the learner will be in the driver’s seat,” the authors write at the end:

with a keen eye trained on value. For institutions, deciding to embrace this new world may turn out to be the only way to avoid the avalanche that is coming.

Of course, if the learner is in the driver’s seat, faculty aren’t. In fact, since you can literally pick up online instructors from anywhere on the planet with an internet connection, professors will have far less power in Pearson’s utopian future than they do even now. As the authors remind us:

For traditional universities, a dramatic rethink of how faculty use their time and how they interact with students will be central to future success.

Adapt or die. Nothing more. Nothing less. The fact that this report was published by what claims to be the UK’s “leading progressive think tank” literally makes me sick to my stomach.

Luckily, a third way of thinking about MOOCs is coalescing. I’ll call it the “End Duck Season altogether” option. From where I sit, it’s taking many forms. For example, you can humiliate Elmer for knowing absolutely nothing about hunting. I think Bob Meister did this very well in his recent open letter to Coursera’s Daphne Koller. It’s not like he’s saying, “Your MOOCs suck” (even if sometimes they do).

Then there’s a sort of arched eyebrow accompanying the question, “Have you people really thought through the implications of what you’re doing?,” approach. Aaron Bady’s masterpiece, delivered at UC-Irvine last week and published on his blog yesterday, will remain the gold standard in this genre for a very long time. By all means read the whole thing, but here’s my favorite part:

Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.

So, for example, when Georgia Tech creates an entirely online master’s degree in computer science and charges $134/credit, it is no longer open. That means it is not a MOOC. It’s simply a cheap graduate degree with coursework graded by machine. The cloud of MOOC hype is designed to distract attention from the fact that the pedagogy involved here is actually a big step backwards.

Another way to prevent Elmer Fudd from shooting you in the beak is to attack the basic assumptions behind his weapon of choice. This guest post at Historiann’s place is particularly brilliant in that regard:

At the moment, the classism of the MOOCs is most clear in the central unexamined assumption – that the “best” teachers are at the “best” universities. Now, it is true that the most prominent scholars tend to teach at the most prominent universities, but the skills of teaching are widely distributed – and the difficult job market of the last thirty years has ensured that there are outstanding scholars at many colleges and universities around the country. Indeed, those who teach students who arrive at college or university with less preparation have often spent more time honing their pedagogical skills in order to engage their students and address the challenges that their diverse backgrounds, socio-economic levels, and intellectual strengths present. However, the high cost of developing MOOCS means that only faculty at America’s most elite universities have the opportunity to employ those technologies. The wealthy and powerful thus become the purveyors of knowledge and culture to those less privileged across America and around the world. MOOCs are not, in fact, cheap, but the money goes to technical staff at the elite university, rather than to instructors at less resourced ones.

[emphasis in original]

The authors also attack MOOCs along gender lines, an argument that I have been woefully bereft at developing here at this blog.

Whatever way you want to go about trying to end open season on college professors, you need to recognize that you’re going to get attacked for being uncivil. That doesn’t mean that you’re not being polite. All it means is that the MOOC enthusiasts are angry because you’ll no longer accept their monopoly on determining the parameters of the MOOC debate. If we can accomplish that change, then maybe we’ll have a real backlash against MOOCs on our hands.

A theory of the (academic) leisure class.

“The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organised industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation.”

- Thorstein Veblen, from The Theory of the Leisure Class,1899, p. 198.

The other day, Mills Kelly titled a post with two excellent questions, “To MOOC or not to MOOC? What’s In It for Me?”. He came up with two answers: altruism and book sales. In the ensuing Twitter discussion, I noted that some superprofessors do actually get paid by their home campuses for their labor. However, I then got reminded that that sum is generally chicken feed compared to the amount of labor that goes into creating a MOOC.

Pity the poor superprofessor! Spending all those countless hours setting up their Massive Open Online Courses:

There are also significant labor costs that come with offering MOOCs. A recent Chronicle survey found that professors typically spent 100 hours, sometimes much more, to develop their massive online courses, and then eight to 10 hours each week while the courses were in session. This commitment amounted to a major drain on their normal campus responsibilities.

What the Chronicle fails to mention is that those hours come only at start-up – filming, planning, meetings, etc. The entire point of a MOOC, the root of its appeal from a management standpoint, is that once you get it the way you like it, you literally never have to change anything again. I’m not saying that the machine runs by itself, but it certainly will never take 100 hours again. The MOOC would never be profitable to anyone if it did.

The superprofessor, in other words, leads the team building the machinery, then steps back and does minimal work until the money starts flowing. This literally seems to be the lesson that two Berkeley Superprofessors report over on the edX blog:

You will always find ways to improve your material, but remember, you can always revise your lecture recordings later—this Fall we will revise our lectures for the third time. Balance your desire to perfect the material with the need to juggle all the other commitments most faculty must manage.

We’re conscientious, but you don’t have to be. More advice from these guys – “Consider delegating:”

[Y]ou may find it too time-consuming to keep up with the forums. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most MOOCs don’t have formal office hours or other means for students to get direct help, so the forums are even more critical to the student experience.

They mention the pioneered-by-Coursera tactic of recruiting “community TAs” from the student population to do the hands-on work of teaching for you, but the deserves-to-be-infamous New Yorker article on MOOCs out this week also notes that graduate students are intimately involved in the edX MOOC-making process. Because, after all, in the future every professor will have their own MOOC for fifteen minutes.

That same New Yorker article also begins to answer Mills’ question about what’s in it for the superprofessors:

Michael D. Smith, the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told me that Harvard plans to start paying mooc teachers when revenue begins flowing.

Are they going to shaft the superprofessors who started MOOCs before the investment pays off? Of course not. The MOOC you create now will presumably run for the forseeable future, so the MOOC providers will have to give their creators something. The Penn MOOC article that I linked to over the weekend offers a better analogy: patent policy. A professor creates something that has a market value and then you and your employer split the proceeds. Since humanities professors don’t usually have the potential to get marketable patents, MOOCs become a way for the few well-paid professors in impoverished fields like History or English to become rentiers. MOOCs can make you part of the academic leisure class.

While I realize that my theory bears a startling resemblance to the philosophy of Tim Ferriss, I’m not saying that most superprofessors crave the four-hour work week. It’s more like rich professor, poor professor. Their MOOCs are a direct assault on the rest of our livelihoods. The president of Stanford made this abundantly clear in a piece quoted in that New Yorker article:

“As a country we are simply trying to support too many universities that are trying to be research institutions,” Stanford’s John Hennessy has argued. “Nationally we may not be able to afford as many research institutions going forward.”

If that’s not a declaration of war, I don’t know what is. Superprofessors, despite their often-stated desire to bring industrial higher education to the lesser-industrialized world, are the weapons of mass destruction in this war. They may be aiming to educate people in Africa, but the rest of us faculty will become the collateral damage of their life of comparative leisure.

MOOCs, in short, are nothing but the logical extension of corporate higher education. Karen Michalson explains the ideological background behind the MOOC offensive better than I ever could here:

Corporate culture has now taken over academic culture and destroyed it. The Chinese did something similar with Tibet. European colonists accomplished this in North America. Overwhelm an area with a population that adheres to a different culture and language than the original inhabitants and watch the original culture die, or at least become so weak and marginal you have to squint to see it.

In America, everything is an enterprise, so why should our universities escape that fate? Everything is thought of in terms of a business, and anything that resists that thought category is carved and distorted until it does – albeit freakishly – pass for one. The model is all. The only way to measure value is money. If it doesn’t make money it doesn’t have the right to exist.

But some things have no business being businesses. Just because the capitalist model of competition and free markets sometimes results in better consumer products doesn’t mean it results in better higher education.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face that a living, breathing professor is better than anybody’s taped lectures. They won’t care. The big dogs want to stay “sheltered from the stress of…economic exigencies” even if it kills the rest of us in the process.

The “Down With MOOCs” World Tour, 2013-14.

My grades are in, the post I promised on Friday is up at the Academe blog and now I have (different) work to do. I need to prepare to take my show on the road.

Cheap Trick is big in Japan. I’m told that I’m big in Connecticut. This would explain why the Connecticut AAUP invited me to be the speaker at their annual spring meeting on May 17th in New Haven. Looking at the registration form, it appears that today is the last day for that. Therefore, if you’re in that area and want to come by you should let them know immediately.

Stop #2 will be on Thursday, June 13th at 2PM at the national AAUP’s annual conference in DC. My topic for both presentations will be the same, “Should Professors Be Afraid of MOOCs?” In the interests of drama, I will not reveal my answer to that question. You’ll have to come by and hear it from me directly.

Following a longstanding principle, I promise I will not read my speech/conference paper like a script. I do, however, need to write something, so if you don’t see as many missives as usual in this space during the next few weeks you’ll know why. Indeed, since I might actually want to write some history this summer, I’m hoping the number of posts here goes way down for the length of the season.

Nonetheless, I’ve gone and gotten myself a cause so I’d like to help by more than just blogging about it. If you represent an impoverished academic organization that wants to help me add dates to my “Down With MOOCs” World Tour, I’ll go just about anywhere in exchange for expenses. If your worthy organization isn’t impoverished, I’ll still work cheap as I’m in the humanities (so very little money looks like a lot to me). Just e-mail me at the address in the right column of this page. I’ll announce more dates here as they come by (and I’m hoping to hear about a very interesting one very soon).

Image courtesy of the Connecticut AAUP.

Dear Superprofessors: This is how a labor market works…

I know I’m late to the party on this, but that letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department really is quite wonderful. I’m going to try to take up its implications with respect to academic freedom and shared governance over at the Academe blog as soon as I get my grading done, but what I want to discuss here is the way that those nice folks in California actually called out Sandel, not just their administrators.

You can see this most clearly at the very end of the letter:

“We respect your desire to expand opportunities for higher education to audiences that do not now have the chance to interact with new ideas. We are very cognizant of your long and distinguished record of scholarship and teaching in the areas of political philosophy and ethics. It is in a spirit of respect and collegiality that we are urging you, and all professors involved with the sale and promotion of edX-style courses, not to take away from students in public universities the opportunity for an education beyond mere jobs training. Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Sandel, to his credit, responds the way faculty everywhere would hope he would:

“The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.”

The question then becomes what happens when the rubber meets the road. I’ve observed a common attitude among superprofessors that they’re unquestionably providing a service for humanity by taping their lectures. I think it seeps down from the propaganda of the MOOC providers. For example, there’s a prime specimen of this in today’s Washington Post:

To be clear, Lander himself does not suggest that his videos should replace what biology faculty do from day to day. But MOOCs such as his might offer some professors elsewhere a chance to spend less time preparing and delivering lectures and more time working hands-on with students.

“Everything in education should be about the value that can be added by having the real teacher there,” Lander said in an interview. “The mistake is the idea that this [MOOC] replaces the teacher. That’s crazy.”

Yes, but your MOOC empowers crazy people. As the SJSU Philosophy Department niftily explains in that letter:

“Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.”

So, Michael Sandel and other superprofessors, what exactly are you going to do about this? Are you going to stall and make believe that budgetary austerity does not exist anywhere in academia or are you going to stand on the side of the other members of your discipline and your profession? If the folks at SJSU are too distant for you, how about your own graduate students? Are you going to make them compete against your own taped lectures for teaching work long after you’re retired or dead?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Will Coursera make us stupid?

In 2008, the contrarian tech writer Nicholas Carr wrote an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Upon recommending it to a roomful of teachers the other night, I noticed that this article is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. I think of it as a kind of prequel for Carr’s less-famous book, The Shallows, but since I probably can’t convince you to read that before you get to the end of this post I’ll work off his article instead.

The main point of the article comes near the beginning:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

In short, the Internet has a negative effect on everyone’s attention span and Google thrives on that effect.

First, all reading gets chopped down to discreet chunks. Next, all the lectures get chopped down to fifteen minutes. Then students watch those lectures at double-speed so that they can get on to what they really want to do (assuming their not Facebooking in another browser window already). You know where I’m going with this, but that would be a far too easy post to write. Therefore, I’ll go in a Carr-inspired rather than Carr-analogous direction.

Carr is more than smart enough to recognize that there are advantages to having the Internet (and by implication, Google) available. “For me, as for others,” he writes (or is this so old now that I should write “wrote?”):

the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

This is the reason I’ve changed my teaching methods in recent years. When I was growing up, history used to be all about how many facts you can memorize. In some places, I’m sure it still is. Certainly, students still have to know something about facts. You have no idea how depressing it is to ask a class who Robert Wagner was and get the answer that he used to be on “Hart to Hart.”* But Senator Robert Wagner is important not just for the sake of knowing who Robert Wagner was or what he did, but for knowing what he represented and still represents in America today. You are never going to get that from just a Google search, and, alas, you’ll never get that from a Coursera MOOC.

Read the last eight months of this blog if you want to understand my problems with Coursera’s format, but I’m not just talking about the format here. I’ve learned not to stake my life on a quick reading of anything MOOC. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the courses that they offer seem to be introductory. [Seriously, are there any prerequisites for any MOOCs anywhere? Wouldn't that mean that they'd no longer be open?]

Granted some of those introductory courses might be very difficult (like machine learning, for instance), but what do you do if you want to take your MOOC education to the next level? At Cal State, you can pay tuition and get on-campus courses, but if MOOCs are really the future of higher education, what’s going to happen to all those less popular upper-level courses that we teach every semester when most schools go all MOOC, all the time (kind of like this blog)?

Unfortunately, specialized classes are very un-MOOCish. After all, fewer people are going to be interested in Agricultural Economics than Introduction to Micro almost by definition. Fewer people means less opportunity to make money from whatever data they’re willing to give you. Perhaps more importantly, the way that upper-level courses tend to be taught (at least in my experience) serves as a stark contrast to the MOOC M.O. These courses are often structured around required reading, that reading tends to be deep reading, and it requires the active participation of a professor in order for students to be able to apply the principles they learned in intro courses to this new material in the most interesting ways. To put it another way, does anyone assign Milton in Intro to Poetry?

That’s why giving the impression that you can get the equivalent of an entire college education by scratching the surface of absolutely everything is a fraud upon the learning public. Yet the public is conditioned to think that way by the way that the WWW is structured, a mile long and an inch deep.

Of course, to blame only Coursera for potentially making us stupid is patently unfair. From their perspective the customer is always right (even when they’re not) so their business plan is a reflection of the values of their best paying customers, namely university administrators. As Bob Samuels argues:

“[T]he push to base university funding on degree attainment rates applies a factory model of production to the complicated world of instruction. Instead of pushing for innovative creativity, we are re-imagining education as a technological machine that spits out graduates at a faster rate. Yet, students are not widgets, and faculty are not assembly line workers; instead, we need complex solutions to complex systems.”

Unfortunately, we won’t find those solutions to our problems by Googling “MOOCs,” “Higher ed reform” or even “Edtech flavor of the month.” In fact, I don’t think we’ll find those solutions on the Internet at all. Some might say that makes me contrarian too, but that I would argue is the whole problem with higher education right there.

* In case you’re wondering, that’s a true story.

“You may say to yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?’”

The Chronicle of Higher Education has become the trade paper for people who want to carve up the jobs of professors like a Thanksgiving turkey. How do I know this? They published this chart for the same reason that Fortune publishes the Fortune 500: to flatter its most powerful readers.* Thinking about it, I can’t say that I blame them. After all, they’re not going to make any money catering to the interests of professors. We’re a dying breed – dinosaurs in the age of Massive Open Online Courses.

Well, maybe some of us are. This kind of talk, for example, drives me to drink:

MOOCs aren’t trying to replace university education. MOOCs provide additional benefits (in terms of access, low commitment, and teaching practice) that can be used alongside traditional teaching, or as a general education resource.

Yes, MOOCs can be used alongside traditional teaching, but will they? Have you seen that chart I just linked to above? What makes anybody think that any of those giant corporations and VCs are ever going to be content investing millions in just another educational tool? That’s not how capitalism works.

That’s probably why the Chronicle seems Hell-bent on convincing all of us non-super professors that resistance is futile. Most of the writers in their current explosion of MOOC articles take the “let the nice warm water wash over you” approach to getting faculty to let their guard down.** Only Karen Head, an untenured assistant professor and my new hero, explains the possible ramifications of this attitude:

Will you be able to publicly express your concerns if something about your MOOC seems pedagogically unsound? If your university doesn’t have the technological capacity to support you, will you have to solve the problems yourself? Who will pay your video-production costs? (Our MOOC has spent $32,000 on production so far.) Will you be able to challenge administrators who want to control your content? Will you be forced to submit to evaluation schemes that would allow your course to carry credit?***

Now suppose you’re a tenured superprofessor. What are you going to do if you’re unhappy with the MOOC experiment? What if you’re one of the 72% of superprofessors who don’t think your MOOC is worthy of credit, but you don’t have the shared governance arrangements to do what the faculty at Duke just did and say no? What do you do if MOOCs really do turn out to be crappy classes that you’re ashamed to be associated with?

You go back to your elite, tuition-paying students, of course.

But where does that leave the rest of us? I think that’s why the Chronicle is trying to convince us to lay down our arms now. It’s still early enough to sound the alarm in most disciplines before a consensus that an automated education is acceptable forms. [I still know of only two major MOOCs run by historians.] By the time those superprofessors with an ounce of dignity and even the slightest sense of solidarity all say to themselves, “My God, what have I done?,” it really will be too late for the rest of us. We’ll be unemployed, the MOOC providers will simply find another Ph.D. frontperson for whatever they want to call higher education and ordinary students will be left holding the bag.

* Except for Cathy Davidson, whose reaction to being included on that chart is more like, “I don’t support MOOCs. I just enable them.”

** Most of these links are subscription only.

*** Here’s another part of that (subscription only) Karen Head article that I didn’t see excerpted anywhere yesterday:

Days before enrollment opened for our course, one of our IT specialists advised me to change my public e-mail address because there is a good chance that some students may try to reach me outside the course platform. This has the potential of overloading my inbox, making my regular university duties harder to manage. This conversation quickly led to a consideration of other potential privacy issues. Might students call me at work? What if a local student decided to come to my office at Georgia Tech? What about my general privacy and personal safety? Those were questions I had never considered. Suddenly this adventure had a darker element.

I hope the worst outcome is the sobering, hourlong conversation I had with the chief of Georgia Tech’s campus police. The director of security for my building suggested that I temporarily move my office to a more secure location, in a different building on the campus. I had decided that all of this was ridiculous until some unknown person began repeatedly calling me. He refused to leave messages, saying only that the call was in reference to MOOCs, and he pressed my staff to give out my personal mobile number.

Seriously, who wants to be a superprofessor?

Ground rules for the MOOC Monster.

So a giant, hairy, orange monster has shown up at the door to your classroom. Maybe you invited it, but more likely your dean or provost invited it into your department for you. What are you going to do? Are you going to let it inside and risk being eaten alive or are you going to try to bar the door?

Recognizing that plenty of people are not in a position to bar the door, I thought I would suggest a few ground rules for living with the MOOC Monster. After all, monsters are such interesting people. Maybe you and it can learn to get along. And rather than making these rules facetious (like “Don’t let him eat anybody,”) these are (mostly) serious:

1) The Monster is not allowed to get between the professor and the students.  In other words, every student must maintain access to the professor.

Public education does not mean education only for the self-motivated or the quick to pick up on things. Public education means education for everybody. That means every student must be able to ask questions of somebody who knows the answer. TAs are helpful in this area, but even students caught in a 500-person face-to-face lecture hall still require access to the professor. In theory, they have it. MOOC students, on the other hand, certainly don’t. Instead they’re barred in the syllabus from e-mailing the superprofessor or the superprofessor holds a lottery so that students have the privilege of participating in a Google chat with them. This is not good customer service.

Neither is pawning the inquisitive off on other students and calling that a “learning community.” Yes, there are plenty of things that students can learn by working together. There are also plenty of things that they can’t. Anybody who thinks that the entire college experience can be transformed into an interactive group activity is either an edtech entrepreneur or rolling too many of their own jelly babies.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the Achilles Heel of endeavors like these is peer-grading. That’s where the lack of access to the professor hurts the learning process most because correcting essays is where most writing-based instruction occurs. Rather than quote myself, I’ll offer up an extended excerpt from this post at Degrees of Freedom:

But when paid graders have to go through thousands of submissions for AP History (for example), they are not simply e-mailed a rubric and a bunch of essays and told to get on with it. Rather, they are all flown into the same location and put through hours or days of training to ensure they are all grading consistently.

This usually includes sharing examples (called exemplars) of essays representing each score on a rubric (giving graders models to work from). It will also include mechanisms for sharing and confirming scores between graders and bringing in additional evaluators to break ties or settle disputes.

The point of all this activity is to squeeze as much inconsistency out of the process as possible so that the major source of subjectivity in a rubric-graded scoring exercise (idiosyncrasies between those doing the grading) is minimized.

Needless to say, no such training or collaboration is available when I’m scoring 3-4 essays from my home in Boston (and applying my own extra rules – such as the non-native English one mentioned above) while someone else is scoring their 3-4 from their villa on the Turkish coast (and applying his or her own idiosyncratic rules as they work).

This is not good customer service either. Indeed, if you actually care about learning, this kind of crapshoot would probably drive you to drink. Perhaps, just perhaps, the MOOC Monster could be a model party guest while visiting a math classroom, but if the course has anything to do with writing I don’t see why we shouldn’t kick the creature out before it comes in and trashes the place straight away.

2) The Monster must be kept on a leash. The professor must hold that leash at all times.

Technology, the cliché goes, is neither good nor bad. That depends upon how it’s used. How it’s used depends upon how much you know about where you plan to use it. Over the weekend, Michael Feldstein, fresh off a conference full of edtech startups and VCs wrote:

The prevailing attitude in the Valley seems to be, “Hey, we built the internet. How hard could education be?”

That’s right. Education is your career, but the capitalists of Silicon Valley are convinced that they can do your job better than you can. I wouldn’t trust my history classroom to a psychology professor (nor they to me, I hope), yet the guy who used to run Snapfish.com and his venture capitalist buddies are convinced that they can recreate the Ivy League online. It would be hilarious if so many people weren’t assuming that this sort of thing was even remotely plausible.

If you need brain surgery, call a brain surgeon. If you want an education, then there better be some educators involved or you’re probably flushing your money down the toilet. I’m not talking about the venture capitalists here. If gullible administrators willingly give them guaranteed contracts then their profit is in the bag. I’m talking about the students. Professors serve as quality control for higher education endeavors. If your professor is about as accessible as the pope or Thomas Pynchon, then you can’t perform that function no matter how well-meaning you happen to be.

I am not a Luddite (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I try to learn technologies that I think will be useful to me in my life or in the classroom. I eschew technologies that won’t help, or which I know I can’t control. Also over the weekend, Derek Bruff asked, “Why isn’t the digital humanities community building great MOOCs?” I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious. Its members want nothing to do with a technology that they can’t control.

Come to think of it, the fact that MOOCs don’t do anything to improve the quality of education may have something to do with it too.

3) The professor is the one who gets to decide if the Monster has overstayed its welcome.

In real terms, I’m talking about assessment here. I hate assessment. I think it’s nothing but a fishing expedition for an excuse to punish higher education by defunding it, thereby making it even less effective than it already may be. Yet, for some reason, MOOCs seem to immune from all this assessment talk that dogs face-to-face classes. “Don’t mind the 90% dropout rate,” the MOOC enthusiasts tell us. “It’s a new technology. We’ll figure it all out down the road.” Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. I still want to know why MOOCs deserve a pass while face-to-face classes don’t.

I think this is where that whole “Be a maker not a hater” business comes in. I have no problem with making things. However, if a professor can change their assessment rubric to value outcomes rather than individual student learning, they are cooking the books. Of course 95,000 students are going to do something, but doing isn’t necessarily the same thing as having every student learn what they need to know.

The digital humanities allows us to stretch the nature of our disciplines and of what students need to learn in college. I’m certainly fine with trying some of what this new subdiscipline has to offer in some of my classes. In fact, I just got a small grant from my university to try a class along these lines next spring. However, too many edtech startups and superprofessors are running down what most of us do every day in an effort to justify whatever disruption makes them rich, famous or both. Perhaps whatever tech that happens to be hip that week is a good thing. Perhaps it isn’t.

I say let the people who do the teaching be the judge.

***

But what if we can’t? What if the powers that be won’t let us kick the MOOC Monster out of our classrooms? Congratulations, if you understand that this is the likely outcome of laying ground rules for the MOOC Monster, then you understand that professors are employees, not entrepreneurs. Everything we do takes place within an industrial relations system in which most of us have very little power.

Nonetheless, I think there’s value in forcing the MOOC pushers to go on the record with their anti-education views. These simple ground rules aren’t unreasonable. They are reflections of the should-be-uncontroversial principle that educators know what’s best for education, not VCs or tech geeks. To argue against these rules would clearly reveal that the actual agenda of the MOOC “Revolution” does not involve improving the quality of education for anyone. Maybe then we professors might start paying more attention to the threat that the MOOC Monster embodies.

Monsters may be interesting people, but you can’t engage them in meaningful conversation if they’ve just swallowed you whole.

The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.

“Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself.  Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison.”

- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, p. 319.

There’s been something of an explosion in professor-as-student MOOC blogging lately. The first one I ever saw was Laura Gibbs writing about the Coursera Fantasy MOOC. My posts on Jeremy Adelman’s World History MOOC (scroll down a bit) benefited immeasurably from Jeremy Adelman’s active participation in the comments. Steven D. Krause is blogging the Duke Composition MOOC, which is an immeasurable service to people like me who don’t see how a composition MOOC is even possible. There’s even an online site now with nothing but MOOC news and reviews (called, fittingly, MOOC News and Reviews).

What all these efforts have in common is a desire to explain the mechanics of how MOOCs work, and to make earnest suggestions for their improvement or improved use on campus.  Krause, for instance, suggests this scenario:

“What if a student could put together a portfolio from one of these MOOCs and use that body of work to place it into a particular level of first-year writing or out of the requirement entirely?  I don’t see how Coursera makes a ton of money from that, but it at least is a use for Coursera.”

Aye, there’s the rub.  While this does indeed seem like a reasonable use for a composition MOOC, Coursera and its ilk will never be satisfied with such a small, comparatively non-renumerative market.  After all, the company has investors to please.  That’s why the MOOC monster will never be satisfied until it takes over all of academia.

You can see more than a tacit acknowledgement of this in the rhetoric of people who urge faculty to dip there toes into online waters before the sharks take over the entire ocean.  Pat Lockley, writing in Hybrid Pedagogy, compares educational technology to the development of the machine gun.  ”If you’re willing to hold the revolver,” he argues, “then you must be willing to hold the machine gun.”  [Having just made it through David Graeber's amazing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, all this talk about economics and guns seems particularly apt.]   “To do nothing,” Lockley suggests, “is to let…others have dominion over your pedagogy.”

Well…sort of.  I agree, in the sense that if faculty keep their heads in the sands and keep teaching the way they’r professors taught, they’ll likely be overwhelmed by technological developments that will ruin the economic viability of college teaching of all but the most super of super professors.  I also agree that if you use technology, it can significantly improve the teaching of any subject.  However, to conclude from this analogy that MOOCs are higher education’s one inevitable future is a mistake of historic proportions.  ”The real story behind MOOCs,” explains Tarak Barkawi at Al Jazeera English:

“may be the ways in which they assist management restructuring efforts of core university practices, under the smile-faced banner of “open access” and assisted in some cases by their “superstar,” camera-ready professors.”

In other words, bring in the machine guns and we all may just end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

Longtime readers know that when it comes to the war against MOOCs, I am hardly a pacifist.  Of all those MOOC narratives I listed in the first paragraph to this post, I think mine is the closest to being unremittingly hostile.  Yes, I think MOOCs are good for teaching a limited number of things in a limited number of ways, but I believe that no matter how many tweaks you put on them they will never be ready for prime time.  In other words, they can never be allowed to replace real college courses.  Every student deserves access to a professor, both for personal and pedagogical reasons. To abandon that principle, particularly out of naked self-interest, is simply a recipe for disaster.

That’s why we have to keep on MOOC providers to do the kind of things that are good for education, but not necessarily good for their bottom lines because they certainly aren’t doing those things now.  When Laura Gibbs examined the Coursera Science Fiction and Fantasy MOOC after taking it, she found that it hadn’t really changed at all. The moment when I got closest to trolling Jeremy Adelman rather than critiquing his MOOC occurred when he explained to the class that he was only going to reshoot a few of his lectures again because despite the fact that you couldn’t possibly find a more dedicated teacher in this world, he still expected his MOOC to run itself.

When you think about it though, this attitude makes sense.  Coursera is a business. Businesses are in the business of making money.  Reshooting lectures or redesigning courses takes time, money or both.  Since Coursera has a virtual monopoly on humanities MOOCs, there is no competition nipping at their heels.  Their staff, therefore, can devote the majority of their time to expanding their offerings rather than doing quality control.

There’s a part in Debt where David Graeber notes that in order to complain to a king about their policies you have to speak the king’s language.  In this case, the language of all our rulers is money.  Pleas about the need to improve the quality of education might as well be Greek to them.  We can make all sorts of reasonable suggestions about how the quality of MOOCs can be improved, but the private companies that provide those services have no incentive to take them seriously as long as we treat their coming as inevitable, the only outcome of higher education reform even worth considering.

This poses a potential problem.  Inviting an insatiable, giant, man-eating, tennis-playing blancmange to your party is stupid enough, but if you have to be that dumb then at least lay down some ground rules.  For example, don’t let the monster eat you out of house and home. Don’t let them eat any of your other party guests either.  If the monster can’t abide by those simple ground rules, then somebody is going to have to keep a weapon around in order to slay the beast because I can pretty much assure you that it will not go quietly.