Like automating your wedding or the birth of your first child.

The best line in that “Grading the MOOC University” piece that came out in the Times over the weekend was obviously the part about the superprofessor being:

“out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.”

That line was also the most obvious.  Nobody had to take eleven MOOCs to figure that out as the entire point of MOOCs is to automate the educational process enough so that student/professor interaction becomes unnecessary. That’s an inevitable consequence of the number of students involved.

That’s why I find it so puzzling that the person who has famously stated that any professor who can be replaced by a computer screen should be wants to be a superprofessor. It’s as if Cathy Davidson wants to be replaced by a computer screen herself.

But, of course, her MOOC is going to be different.  ”Personally,” Davidson writes:

“I’m skeptical of many MOOCs as they are structured now.  This is precisely why I am planning to teach one.”

I’ll bet that’s what the people running the first UK MOOC said to themselves before they started.  From the write-up in the Times of London:

“In contrast to the set up of many programs offered via Coursera, the developers of Edinbugh’s e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers.

The decision proved unpopular with some students…as they had been expecting to see professors imparting knowledge as they would in a lecture theatre.”

As I’ve explained before, a class is not a commune.  Professorial authority is the glue that holds the whole educational enterprise together. Even if you manage to set up the perfect online learning community, students can only teach other students so much. And a college course that amounts to reading texts on the greater WWW and participating in a few discussions on gigantic message boards is destined to be extremely unsatisfying. Watching videotaped lectures would actually be an improvement.

So Cathy Davidson is already taping lectures for her MOOC that will probably land next year.*  She writes:

“And it is hard to imagine that, if you are fortunate enough in every way to attend a face to face university with real profs who listen to your ideas and respond to them passionately and personally, and who include you in their research and who help you on their way into a complicated world using all the best ideas and best methodologies and best tools and best theories available, that you would ever want to give up all that astonishing privileged luxury to take a class online with 160,000 others (even if 90% of them drop out during the term).  If your profs are able to offer the full range of classes you wish to take, if they have kept current in their field, if they use exciting new methods and respect your own ability to learn and contribute in new ways, then they are doing a great job and you are spending your money well. Why would you want to take a MOOC in that case?”

Why indeed?  But why on earth should you ever settle for anything less?  

Instead, superprofessors like Davidson are settling for you. In the name of increasing access to higher education, extremely well-meaning liberals are cooperating in destroying its quality. They’re sending a signal to the people who make higher education budgetary decisions that an automated education is henceforth and forever acceptable. You want to fight permanent austerity? Tough luck. Davidson has already raised the white flag of surrender on your behalf. ["If I had a magic wand...," she repeats like a mantra, thereby implying that real change is impossible almost by definition.] She’s also raised the white flag on behalf of most of the world’s potential college students for generations to come.

Education is supposed to be an exceedingly personal enterprise.  This is why forcing students into MOOCs as a last resort is like automating your wedding or the birth of your first child.  You’re taking something that ought to depend upon the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and turning it into mass-produced, impersonal, disposable schlock.

I’ve read Now You See It, Now You Don’t. Therefore, I know that Davidson is a great teacher. However, given a choice between a Cathy Davidson who’s about as accessible as the pope or Thomas Pynchon and the vast majority of the dedicated people working adjunct jobs in academia (who could get a significant raise and still be cheaper than a wrap-around contract with Coursera), I’d take the adjuncts any day of the week.

And yes, I understand that people in underdeveloped countries need higher education too. However, privatizing our system of higher education so that we can export the mere essence of instruction is a favor to nobody. Everybody else on the planet deserves personal relationships with their professors just like American students do.

Maybe Coursera could start a MOOC about organizing the global proletariat in order to demand better educational choices than MOOCs.  I know that I’d finish that one.

*  Davidson’s post says Spring of 2013, but I think that’s a typo.

“It could not be worse than what we do face to face.”

Yesterday, Mark Palko convinced me to read an Andrew Delbanco article from a few weeks ago that I had previously decided to skip. I’m glad I changed my mind as it is indeed one of the few even-handed pieces about MOOCs around. Nevertheless, like Palko, I still found it kind of annoying. If you check his post about that article, you’ll see that Palko’s problem with Delbanco involves Baumol’s Cost Disease. I suspect Palko’s right, but my brain is so fried here at the end of the semester that I can’t quite put my finger on why.

However, I remain sharp enough to get extremely peeved when Delbanco writes this:

“[S]omething does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera…

Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind.”

While I’ve exchanged a couple of e-mails with Daphne Koller (for a purpose I hope to be able to explain to y’all soon), I don’t know her. She might actually be as noble as Delbanco believes. She might also be (to borrow the name of a new online friend of mine from across the political spectrum) a Capitalist Imperialist Pig. I cannot judge the character of someone who I only read about in the media. Heck, I was a John Edwards supporter at one point in the run up to the 2008 presidential election.

What I don’t understand though is why media outlets are so willing to run every MOOC provider’s press releases practically verbatim, while those faculty who question the sanity of our glorious nearly all-online future are treated like Teamsters in tweed. Through some extraordinary form of ideological jujitsu, all market-related entrepreneurship (inside higher ed and out) has become noble almost by definition, while any workers defending their own economic self-interest has become inherently suspect even though that’s what Adam Smith would have wanted us to do. Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

I think all faculty who quietly sulk down the road towards their own technological obsolescence deserve their fate. It’s not our fault that college is too expensive. If it were, 76% of us wouldn’t be working adjunct. Yet we’re going to let the same people who have set so many American universities on the brink of financial ruin decide what the future of higher education must be?

To make matters worse, an awful lot of these folks seem to know nothing about education either. Bob Samuels recently offered the most obvious example of this phenomenon that I have ever encountered:

It is rare that people in power actually say what they think, but the current President of San Jose State, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, recently exposed what many university leaders really believe. In response to a question concerning the questionable educational value of some of his institution’s new online classes, Qayoumi said the following: “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” This shocking statement implies that the current modes of education at his own university are so bad that nothing could be worse.

As Eric Rauchway then noted on Twitter, “US universities consistently rank among [the] world’s best.”

What’s so noble about turning American higher education over entirely to people who don’t understand the strengths of the very system they administer? Nothing at all. Somebody has to stick around in order to explain when and why the people running our universities have no idea what they’re talking about.

Will the last non-super professor in academia please turn out the lights when they leave?

In 1892, William Weihe, the former President of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union, testified before Congress that his union:

“never objects to [technological] improvements and makes allowances in every particular where there are improvements…[W]henever there is an improvement made by which certain men will be done away with, then their jobs will be done away with. There is no objection.”

By 1909, his union had effectively disappeared, relegated to a couple of small specialty mills in Ohio.

I realize that I’ve been kind of shrill lately, but this kind of complacency just scares me to death. Yes, skilled iron and steel workers faced a particularly steep hill to climb during the late-nineteenth century because mechanized steel production was a huge improvement over hand puddling, but the question in education is not whether MOOCs and online education are superior to face-to-face instruction. [When Harvard and Princeton start giving actual credit at Harvard and Princeton for their MOOCs, then maybe we can begin to question that assumption.] The question is whether MOOCs and online education are sufficient to serve as substitutes for the face-to-face instruction that so many of us provide.

It’s easy to guess how I’d answer that question, but imagine you’re a college student who’s been convinced that all he or she needs is a degree rather than an education in order to make it in life. Which path are you going to choose?

What faculty need to understand is that a lot of other players in this discussion, particularly the ones who don’t actually teach for a living, are using similar criteria. In other words, they couldn’t care less whether the future of higher education actually teaches students anything or not. Some of these people are interested primarily in efficiency and improved test scores. Some of them are interested in their bottom lines. Some of these people just hate universities.

For purposes of the primary audience for this blog, it is also worth noting that precious few participants in this discussion have any interest in the economic situation facing college professors, adjunct and tenure-track alike. Much to my continued alarm, the people ignoring our economic concerns includes an incredibly high number of actual college professors. They seem to think it is not their place to object to “improvements,” and are willing to make allowances for any such changes even if they work against their own self-interest.

Perhaps if more of us actually understood that there’s a target on all our backs, this shocking degree of complacency will finally change.

One of these days these MOOCs are gonna walk all over you.

If you think this blog is depressing to read, then imagine how depressing it is to write. To be fair, academia today really is depressing (at least if you actually try to understand everything that’s going on in it), but at least my friend Kate has given me a good excuse to get depressed about something new:

There’s no other way to say it: just keeping up with an academic job means that I habitually shortchange the people that I really love, and I’ve made very little contribution to the community where I live, even on things that are important to me. Half a kilometre from my house is a community garden; right under my nose is a mountain of email, grading, a wildly overdue book contract and administration. Take a guess.

I’m not an exception in this. Looking around me I see colleagues figuring out how much work they can secretly do while their kids are watching TV, how many emails they can answer or papers they can grade at the soccer game, how many family occasions they can miss or somehow multitask, whether or not they really have time to go to the gym. Then there are quieter conversations about alcohol, fatigue, shame and depression.

By all means read the whole thing. It will really help you put everything in perspective. So does this interview with the journalist (ex anthropolgist) Sarah Kendzior:

Realize that people in academia have a warped and limited view of what constitutes “success.” Academia has been described as a cult, and when you leave a cult, you have to shake off its values and judgments. Only in academia is working four adjunct jobs for less than 10K a year “success” while working a non-academic job that provides personal satisfaction or a living wage “failure.” A profession that exploits people’s fear to staff its positions is not one to which you owe loyalty.

Of course, it’s not just fear that academia exploits. It’s also your willingness to sacrifice the kinds of things that Kate describes in the name of education. This goes triple if you’re one of the 76% of university faculty who are adjuncts. You don’t even get a living wage to do what you do, yet your teaching is mostly judged with the same standards as those of us who do.

That’s one of many reasons that we faculty are almost all part of the same sinking navy, even if adjuncts are much, much closer to the waterline than the rest of us. To make matters worse, the captains of our respective ships have no qualms about throwing anyone overboard. No gratitude. No loyalty.*

The best sign of that attitude is that too many of the powers that be are chomping at the bit to replace you with a MOOC – often nothing but a videotaped superprofessor and a discussion forum in many cases – because they want to save money. As if they aren’t saving enough money on adjuncts already, who, as Karen Gregory points out, are likely to feel most of the initial impact of MOOCification anyway. Unless you’re a superprofessor who signed a non-exploitive contract, there’s no guarantee that you won’t be next. Perhaps that might even explain why so many smart and gifted teachers are willing to become superprofessors in the first place despite the obvious flaws of MOOCs as instructional tools.

How long can these superprofessors play with fire?  ”You keep thinking you’re never going to get burned,” sang Nancy Sinatra back in the day. Unfortunately, so many of us are working so hard that we might not even notice when that happens to us, assuming we haven’t been burned already.

* Don’t even start with me on higher ed being just like any other business. Academia is not just like any other business. In fact, it’s not a business at all. It isn’t supposed to turn a profit, and even if it was who says that systematically shortchanging your employees is the best way to make money?

“[W]ith this bird everything is settled.”

The remains of the last known Passenger Pigeon at the Cincinnati Zoo.

“[W]ith a real nightingale we can never tell what is going to be sung, but with this bird [a mechanical nightingale] everything is settled. It can be opened and explained, so that people may understand how the waltzes are formed, and why one note follows upon another.”

- from Hans Christian Andersen, “The Nightingale,” 1844.*

I. The Game of Writing.

Last Thursday, the NYT ran an article about recent innovations in mechanical essay grading. You’ve probably read it by now, but you know the gist even if you haven’t. Geeks everywhere want to spare faculty the burden of grading student essays so that we can concentrate on other things. [Technology isn't just benign, it's good for everybody!] I always thought that grading essays was the thing that we humanities professors were supposed to concentrate upon, but then again what do I know?

As this blog has become all-MOOCs, all the time, here is the part of the article that I found most interesting:

Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback.

“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

There is so much packed into those two extraordinary paragraphs that I barely know where to start.  When MOOC providers champion “the value of instant feedback,” my first question is “value to whom?” I do a lot of grading of written essays in the course my job, and I can tell you that the reason this process often takes so long is because I couldn’t possibly give instant feedback to students even if I wanted.

Good essay questions are about ideas. The essays students write should be about ideas too.  That means I have to sit and think about the ideas that students write in order to grade those questions. Instant feedback is therefore only a good thing if you think that writing assignments are something to get past rather than an opportunity for learning or, God forbid, reflection.

And then there’s that Koller quotation, one of a long series of quotes by Coursera’s founders that have continually left my jaw scraping the floor.  Suppose I ask my students to explain the historical impact of the New Deal.  What exactly is the “right” answer?  I always tell my students that I don’t grade on the basis of what their argument is, I grade on the basis of how well they defend it.  How is any artificial intelligence going to evaluate the inevitable issues of morality that good historical questions invoke from students?  It won’t, of course, and that should be a problem.

Perhaps more importantly, when students keep revising and resubmitting, who exactly are they trying to please? Programmers?  What do they know about good writing?  What values do they bring to the table?  Objectivity is not neutrality, as Thomas Haskell once explained.  As I write these words, this comment is at the top of the “Reader Picks” section of the comments under that NYT article:

Last year when my daughter was in 7th grade, her teacher started using computer essay grading. She would write her essay at home, using the computer, and would get a score. My daughter loves to write but got frustrated because the computer insited on correcting the grammatical errors of portions of the essay in which she used poetic language. In order to get a higher score, she begrudgingly changed her essay.

In short, computer grading destroys precisely the kind of creative thinking that writing is supposed to encourage.

Oh yeah, machines also aren’t very good at determining the accuracy of facts, which might be a problem in…you know…history courses.

II. Feedback Schmeedback

Reading that Koller quote also made me wonder exactly what kind of feedback students get when their essays are machine-graded.  After all, when I force students to play the game of writing , I make them write drafts.  On those drafts, I leave lots of comments. Those comments, in turn, serve as a guide to help students do better on their final papers.

So what kind of comments do students get back on machine-graded essays? Are they just blundering around in the dark?  That sounds a lot more frustrating than fun.  That NYT article suggests that the machines “provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on topic or not,” but what does that mean exactly?

In order to answer these questions, I did what any good 21st Century cyber-citizen does, I asked Twitter.  Follow that link through a long series of tweets and there are some excellent responses (to go with the inevitable less-than-140-character wisecracks).  Nevertheless, I still felt the need to dig deeper into this issue.

From what I can tell online, it appears that the big debate in the world of machine-grading is whether the scores that machines spit out match the same scores awarded by human graders.  Nowhere could I find anything about the machines giving comments, let alone comments that might actually prove useful.  It’s all about numbers, as if the quality of any piece of writing could ever be reduced to a single digit and a couple of categorizations.

Almost none of these computer science geniuses seem to understand that humanities disciplines are humanities disciplines because the answers to the kinds of questions we ask don’t have easy answers.  This is from Slate, published last year, discussing the problem of applying this technology to my actual field of expertise:

Compare and contrast the themes and argument found in the Declaration of Independence to those of other U.S. documents of historical and literary significance, such as the Olive Branch Petition.

Brown University computer scientist Eugene Charniak, an expert in artificial intelligence, says it could take another century for computer software to accurately score an essay written in response to a prompt like this one, because it is so difficult for computers to assess whether a piece of writing demonstrates real knowledge across a subject as broad as American history.

This may explain why Coursera offers peer-grading for one set of its courses, and is so enthusiastic about machine-grading essays for some others.  Indeed, doing this work I realized that the machine-grading problem is just about the exact equivalent of the peer grading problem.  They use these strategies because of the economics involved, not because they’re the best things to do for students.  That’s what makes quotes like this (from the same NYT article) so incredibly infuriating:

“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”

Notice the slight-of-hand involved there?  Computer graders are much better than multiple-choice tests, not human graders.  Maybe they are, but who says those are our only two options?  As Mark B. Brown has argued, the fact that we’re even having this debate is an acknowledgement of permanent austerity.  In order to prevent professors and students alike from getting up in arms about this entire discussion, the MOOC enthusiasts and computer science geniuses that enable them have to redefine what education means.

III.  ”[W]ith this bird everything is settled.”

My goal as a teacher is to get students to decide for themselves what they think about history.  Do the proponents of mechanized grading even care about such things?  The kind of feedback that students get on machine-graded essays (or on peer-graded essays for that matter) suggests no.

As Mark Cheathem has strongly suggested elsewhere, machine-graded essays and scare tactics go together like wine and cheese.  ”You must automate everything!,” the profiteering vultures tell us, “Otherwise, the country will fall behind!”  [Isn't it really interesting that this strategy transcends national boundaries?  You'd think that the international professoriate could all just slow down together and keep ourselves employed, but I don't have my hopes up.]  If you think this argument is effective on seasoned professors who should really understand the concept of source bias better, imagine how effective it would be on undergraduates.

I can just hear the pitch now:  Don’t learn anything about critical thinking.  Critical thinking can actually impede your job prospects.  It’ll be just like The Organization Man all over again, only this time they’ll have studies to back them up:

[D]uring the great IT boom, the returns to cognitive skill rose.  Since then, the process has gone into reverse: demand for cognitive tasks is falling. Perhaps this is because installing robots consumes more resources than maintaining them, or perhaps it’s simply that the robots are doing an increasing number of those cognitive tasks.  But whatever the reason, we no longer want or need so many skilled workers doing non-routine tasks with a big analytical component.  The workers who can’t get those jobs are taking less skilled ones.  The lowest-skilled workers are dropping out entirely, many of them probably ending up on disability.

There are 115,000 janitors with college degrees in the United States.  Therefore, anybody who gets one must be a sucker.  Of course, not having a college degree will pretty much doom your chances of getting one of the remaining jobs that require critical thinking (and its corresponding pay level), but who wants to stand in the way of a newly emerging cliché?

What we do know is that cheapening education this way will assuredly put a lot of humanities professors (especially already-underemployed adjuncts without the protection of tenure) onto the unemployment line.  I say if we fall for these scare tactics and accept the values that mechanized grading represents, then we deserve to be there. Instead, we need to make the case that the skills we teach are important irrespective of how much  money students can earn by using them.  Kind of like listening to the song of a real nightingale.

Certainly, mechanical nightingales have yet to replace real nightingales out in the world. After all, they’re far too expensive. However, the values that the mechanical nightingale represents have done enormous damage to other bird species. Take the Passenger Pigeon, for example. Tens of thousands of those birds used to darken American skies:

Now they’re gone.  I, for one, feel like I’ve missed something, even if looking at a huge flock of birds has no commercial value.

In short, everything about the Passenger Pigeon is now settled – not in the same way that everything about the mechanical nightingale is settled, but settled nonetheless. Devalue critical thinking skills to the point that machines grading essays becomes acceptable and everything about education will be settled as well.  Our students will be settled like the mechanical nightingale is settled, singing the same song every time.  We humanities professors will be settled the same way that the Passenger Pigeon is settled, lucky if someone bothers to stuff us and display us anywhere since we’ll become forgotten relics of a bygone era.

But at least we won’t have to waste our time grading papers.

*  I am, of course, not nearly well-read enough to pick that reference out of thin air.  I got it from one of my favorite books of all time, Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows. Also, this post wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a slew of my tweeps, especially Cedar Riener, Mark Cheathem and Rohan Maitzen.

Half the professoriate will kill the other half for free.

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

– Attributed to American financier Jay Gould, 1886.

One of the really awesome things about being an academic is that we all share information with each other about how to do our jobs better. Some call it mentoring. Some call it the scholarship of teaching and learning. I like to think of it as the natural side effect of not working with a bunch of assholes.

Cathy Davidson tries to do this all the time over at the HASTAC blog, including online peer review of the peer-grading assignment for what would be her first MOOC. Now, I’ve already explained my attitude toward peer-grading elsewhere so I won’t pick on her again here. Besides, what I find more interesting about this post is how she hints at the Coursera superprofessor selection process. Davidson begins the post with, “I’m a finalist for teaching a Coursera MOOC next year on “The History and Future of Higher Education.” It continues later with, “If Coursera accepts the course, it will run next Spring.” This kind of competition among the “best of the best” must feel like trying to get into Yale for grad school all over again.

One of the very rude questions I keep asking about MOOCs is, “How much do superprofessors get paid?” If the ability to run your own Coursera MOOC is indeed a competition, the answer to that question is almost certainly zero. Superprofessors could still receive financial incentives from their home campuses in order to teach MOOCs, but try bargaining with a private employer when there’s a line of people waiting to get the same job. They’d have more in common with Walmart workers than they do with other professors.

If superprofessors really do work for free, why isn’t Coursera having recruitment problems? In a word: ego. Margaret Soltan has stated this flat out. For added evidence, there’s this is from yesterday’s NYT:

“I’m 70, and frankly, at my age, to reach more students in one course than I have in decades is astonishing, and I love it,” Dr. Nagy said.

That’s from an article about Harvard asking its alumni to serve as unpaid teaching assistants for an edX MOOC on the Ancient Greek Hero.

Who benefits when the professor and the teaching assistants all work for free? The MOOC provider, of course. It’s digital sharecropping at its exploitive best. Who suffers when everyone in higher education works for free? A new study offers a possible answer:

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.

His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.

The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”

But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.

In other words, while a few already well-paid superprofessors get their egos stroked conducting experiments that are doomed to fail, “second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges” risk closing because Coursera and its ilk have sent higher education price expectations through the floor and systematically devalued everybody else’s work. And they get to do all this while dispensing a produuct that they know is inferior! Jay Gould would be proud.

In the meantime, thanks for nothing, superprofessors. I may not work with a bunch of assholes on my campus, but MOOCmania is starting to look like a pretty good test of whether Academia in general has enough assholes in it in order to destroy itself.

At least there’s still time for most of them to see the error of their ways.

Why STEM MOOCs are a bad idea too.

Jonathan Poritz is back! This makes me happy not only because it alleviates any guilt I feel over not live-blogging the Annette Gordon-Reed speech I’ll be attending later this morning, it means that everyone gets a different perspective on this whole MOOC thing. As I know less than nothing about teaching math, I was absolutely chomping at the bit to read the argument that follows:

So Jonathan (Rees) is allowing me to have another post in his blog, on a tangent from my previous guest post about the CopyrightX MOOC. My topic today is the old canard that MOOCs are more appropriate/effective/desirable/efficient for STEM classes than they are in the humanities and social sciences, because there are clear-cut right answers in STEM so these MOOCs can use computer grading to scale to great size.

There are so many problems with this point of view that it isn’t even wrong. (Well, OK, it is wrong. Let not the Internet trolls misinterpret.) Why this quackery infuriates me goes back to what I think education is about. Bear with me for a moment while I condemn all of current STEM education.

Let’s have a go at this in the particular case of mathematics, since it’s my field. People say there is a fair bit of memorization in mathematics. Do you remember learning the times tables? [I clearly remember Mrs. Sullivan at Littlebrook Elementary School saying that she particularly liked 7x7=49, because 49 only comes up in the times tables as that particular number times itself ... "How stupid!," I recall thinking, "that's true of the square of any prime!" I was a math geek at a young age, I guess.]

Later one gets to algebra where, for example, students are taught these days to do multiplications like (a+b)*(c+d) by FOILing it out: “FOIL” stands for “firsts outers inners lasts”, so you get a*c+a*d+b*c+b*d. I learned this technique when I taught “College Algebra” (don’t be deceived by the title, the course content is what we used to call “high school algebra”) at my current institution and the students were confused when I said the words “distributive law of multiplication over addition” while doing a calculation like that at the board– one of them said “oh, you’re just FOILing it out.”

Then in pre-calc, you would have to memorize some trigonometric identities. In calculus, perhaps some formulae for derivatives or integrals of particular functions. In more advanced math classes, perhaps you would memorize a few useful power series, or the definition of a mathematical object called a vector space, or the detailed statement of the Fermat’s Little Theorem.

Along the way from memorizing tables of numbers in elementary school to definitions in college, you were probably taught some algorithms: rote procedures like computer programs or cooking recipes which take certain inputs and produce certain outputs. The pattern of numbers you write on the page to do multiplication of numbers with several digits is an algorithm, as is something like “bring the power down out front and subtract one from the power” to take the derivative of a power function, or “always put a +C at the end of an indefinite integral” (with an implied “or your teacher may take off a point from your solution”).

Nearly all students actually like following algorithms, in my experience as a teacher. Thinking is hard, after all, and isn’t it nice that someone has done all the thinking for you, and figured out if you just keep your brain comfortably in the off position but follow these particular steps you will magically arrive at the right answer, which you can put in a box at the bottom of the page and get full credit.

(I do think there is a large element of magical thinking in this attitude, in the sense of magic as pre-scientific and pre-modern. An authority figure told you what to do, and it is your job to perform that action without asking why. Not unlike a ritual invocation or public declaration of fealty to your feudal lord, or some other pre-modern formality.)

But modernism, when it works, is all about asking why and contesting arbitrary authority. So I might encourage a child today: by all means, memorize some of the times tables, it could be useful if you have to calculate a tip in a restaurant or want to know how many pecks of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked … but ask why, the answer might be interesting. [In fact, your teacher might concede that the symbols for the first ten numbers are arbitrary but that multi-digit numbers are an invention, there are other ways to do things like base two (good for computers), base 60 (which the Babylonians used, apparently ... you can see why they gave us 360 degrees in a circle), or Roman numerals (terrible for all arithmetic, no wonder the Roman empire fell).]

Because of students’ — well, all human’s — laziness, it can be much more accepted by the students to learn the rote, algorithmic [pre-modern] mathematics. It’s a lot easier to teach, as well: nothing is ever new in the classroom or the textbook, you simply run through a description of the algorithm and ten examples in class. Approaching the material in this way as alienated factory workers tightening the same bolt every time means that the learning is mostly a matter of muscle memory, not higher critical thinking, so it requires a great deal of repetition.

Hence the piles of homework every day, graded on the sole criterion of whether the number in the box at the bottom of the page is correct or not. Likewise the proliferation of computerized instruction and homework systems for math in K-12 in the US.

Since it is so easy to teach, to flagellate the students with this kind of homework, and to assess, math fit wonderfully into the whole No School Left Unpunished system of George W. Bush, repackaged but not dismantled as the Race to the Top under Obama, with disastrous consequences: my students come out of the public schools in southern Colorado *hating* mathematics, thinking it is both abstract and rote, that there is nothing beautiful or intriguing or interesting there, merely piles of factoids and algorithms to memorize.

[Sadly, the same computerized systems are proliferating in colleges as well, although there are some other issues factoring into the situation: On my campus, contingent math faculty are paid a criminally low wage per class. As a consequence, they must teach way too many sections to make ends meet. Given a chance to lift the entire weight of homework grading off their shoulders by using a computerized system, who wouldn't fall to the temptation? I do not fault them for this, nor can I, since I've used the same programs when teaching our College Algebra, so as not to rock the boat, and to have the time to do the other things required of me. Although I do fault professors who say that college algebra is a "drill and kill course", so we shouldn't fight to change it.]

When is he going to get to MOOCs, you cry. Here we go: I contend that we are doing a terrific disservice in how we teach math in K-12 by frequently taking the easy way out of teaching algorithms without thought. To some extent this is also happening in some courses at some universities. And this is exactly what those who suggest MOOCs can do “well” for STEM courses see as a great MOOC/STEM combination.

It is a mistake to teach math this way in K-12, which was easy to fall into because it seems cheaper and easier to assess (yay NCLB!). It is a mistake to teach math this way in colleges and universities, which was easy to fall into because of the economics of underpaid contingent faculty. When fans of the MOOC lifestyle talk about the ease of automatic grading of homework and quizzes for the eager masses in math classes, they are making a virtue out of the worst current trends in mathematics education.

Jonathan (Rees) has pointed out the profound flaws in the peer grading and peer evaluation used by MOOCs to attempt to accommodate all comers without imposing impossible burdens on the MOOC staff. Automated systems, in MOOC mathematics at least, seem to offer another cheap way to scale up to thousands of students without much taxing server space or bandwidth, while offering the illusion of the real classroom experience.

As Jonathan (Rees) has written:

So online educators of the world, let me propose a truce: Instead of arguing about whether online education is good or bad, let us simply agree that all students, online or otherwise, deserve access to a professor. Not a teaching assistant. A professor, someone with enough knowledge and experience to help every student overcome the inevitable stumbling blocks on the road to educational enlightenment.

Let me add a corollary to this proposed truce: students need that knowledgeable and experienced professor and not just a computer program. Just because a solution to a math or science problem can be judged correct or incorrect does not mean a student who gets on that green check or red X will be learning how to think like a mathematician or scientist. For real education, in STEM as well as humanities and social science, in person or on-line, students need the professorial access Jonathan (Rees) proposes.

I should point out that much of what I have criticized here in the context of mathematics instruction is true in all the rest of the STEM fields. Here’s one example: A colleague of mine who teaches an intro-level biology course on our campus says that a very large part of the content is plain facts which the students must cram into their heads. This may be correct, but I don’t see why a potential student in a disadvantaged geographic location who wanted to learn this material wouldn’t just read a book, preferably a free one on the ‘net, rather than signing up for a MOOC. For a course which also teaches students to think about biology, to put ideas together in new ways, surely automating homework is just as impossible as it would be in a creative writing MOOC.

This story of the felicitous synchronicity of STEM and MOOCs doesn’t hold water. All of Jonathan (Rees)’s critiques of peer grading and poor interactivity for the masses in a MOOC on social science or humanities are equally true in STEM fields, and to say that at least STEM work can be graded by a computer program is to believe that STEM fields could be done by robot: If you can write a program to grade homeworks and tests for a MOOC, then I bet I could write a program which would get perfect marks on all those assessments. I don’t want to teach, nor do I think my students should or do want to learn, material which could equally well be done by a few hundred lines of Java code. Teaching them that way only cheapens what we do when we do STEM or teach it well.

What if flipping the classroom does more harm than good?

My first full-time job out of graduate school was a one-year gig at a small liberal arts college. When I arrived there for my interview, the department chairman told me straight out that I was the fourth candidate they had interviewed since none of the others was comfortable teaching both halves of the U.S. History survey class.  I assured him that I was. I remain so to this day.  

Happily for me and my students alike though, I no longer have to teach both halves of the survey. While I teach a course on American slavery sometimes (a remnant of my early specialization in American labor history), I’m much better after 1877, and am most comfortable teaching anything between 1877 and 1937.

Anybody who teaches World History reading this is laughing hysterically at me right now. Sixty years? They need to know six centuries, if not longer. More importantly, rather than specialize in a single country on a single continent, they have to follow the story of humankind all over the world.  What’s impressed me most about the world history superprofessors I’ve been exposed to is just how well they do this since their breadth of factual knowledge is so great.

In Philip Zelikow’s case, his Virginia students can ask him tough questions about the MOOC lecture content they watch in their dorm rooms during a weekly hour-and-fifteen minute discussion section. That must be tons of fun for him.  All that boring lecturing is already in the can, so now he can engage in an intense give-and-take with a lot of really gifted, motivated students.  But what about the people who’ll eventually flip their classrooms with Zelikow’s MOOC lectures on other campuses? What are their discussion sections going to be like?

What started me down this train of thought was the line I wrote the other day about my old algebra teacher, Mr. Manzer, going from desk to desk as we worked through our math problems.  What, I wondered, would a flipped college history classroom look like?We don’t have worksheets, we have texts.  My students (hopefully) do their reading at home, then (among many other things) we discuss the texts in class.  If they have to watch videos at home, when will they have time to do their reading?  Getting them to do one thing at home is hard enough, so what will happen if I try to make them do two?

And what happens if the students ask content questions about subjects that the non-super professor knows very little about? Since Adelman and Zelikow teach discussion sections based upon their own lectures, they can certainly answer questions about anything they said on tape.  Hire a poorly-paid proto-TA and hopefully students will get an expert on some aspect of World History, but they won’t necessarily get an expert on the aspects of World History that any particular superprofessor chooses to emphasize. Being underpaid is bad enough, but being an underpaid adjunct trapped teaching somebody else’s content is my definition of a living Hell.

We teach what we love not only because we love it, but because we bring more enthusiasm to our favorite material and therefore presumably teach it better. Do we want English professors teaching novels they don’t like? Economists teaching theories with which they vehemently disagree? Of course not. That’s because separating content selection from pedagogy is a recipe for bad pedagogy.

Yet the MOOC cheering squad is determined to do it anyways.  Josh Kim, in a well-meaning but incredibly naive column writes:

What students (and their parents) will pay for is what cannot be gotten from a MOOC. They will pay for interaction with the faculty member. They will pay for relationships with educators. They will pay to be able to enter into the process of knowledge creation.

The large lecture class designed around the delivery of curriculum is dead. MOOCs have killed this model of education, and good riddance and about time. The classes that will replace the one-way learning large lecture courses will be superior, but more expensive in every way.

We will look to build in robust methods of formative assessment into our course designs (following the examples of the MOOCs). No longer will a system of mid-term and finals (summative assessment) feel adequate – particularly when quizzes for learning are so embedded into the MOOC design.

We will place an increased emphasis on active learning. On faculty and student interactions that are flexible and personalized to the needs of the learner. We will devote resources to flipping the classroom, moving content delivery out precious “face-to-face” time, reserving in-class time for interaction, exercises, and exchanges.

But unless students attend a university with its own superprofessors, they won’t get that face-to-face time with the person who knows the most about the exact content that they’re learning. All they’ll get is a surrogate who’s had the most important prerogative of any professor – the ability to decide exactly what content they want to teach – stripped away from them. You can be the greatest teacher in the world, but you’ll never teach somebody else’s material nearly as well as you’ll teach the material that’s nearest and dearest to your heart, not to mention your particular area of expertise.

Mr. Manzer might have benefited greatly from flipping his classroom because, as I understand it, everyone pretty much teaches the same algebra everywhere. History, on the other hand, is going to be at least a little different in every professor’s classroom (as well it should be, for both pedagogical and cultural reasons). For world history, it’s likely to be very, very different from classroom to classroom.

Too bad the people pushing MOOCs on all of us don’t really give a damn.

What if superprofessors aren’t really all that super?

I’ve been taking some flack in various places for my continued use of the word “superprofessor.” While I used to think the term was mocking, I would argue that it has become such a regular piece of the edtech lexicon that whatever irony it once held is now gone. That’s a shame, because the word “superprofessor” should serve as a wonderful reminder of the class system that exists in higher education already – the one that the biggest edtech enthusiasts around don’t mind perpetuating. After all, Clayton Christensen will still be able to teach as many classes about disruption as he wants even after MOOCs turn the rest of us into glorified teaching assistants.

I wish I lived in the world in which Clayton Christensen thinks I live. He and his current co-author seem to think that I can pick my own courses, that my research actually gets me rewards and that there’s no such thing as adjunct labor. Now that would be a really awesome place to work! More importantly, if I was actually one of Shirky/Christensen’s Teamsters in tweed I’d be much-better equipped to fight the profiteering vultures who are deliberately trying to destroy my profession while simultaneously trying to make that process seem like an act of God.

The great irony here is that the kind of rhetoric that Christensen and his co-author use in that piece is designed to facilitate that system in some places while destroying it everywhere else. As Sara Goldrick-Rab explains:

To me, the picture Broad painted was not so much of higher education at a “crossroads,” but rather a disturbing vision of colleges and universities frantically trying to pull up the drawbridge and create a new moat for their protection. They want to keep those unwashed masses of unkempt, post-traditional students off their campuses; they want to prevent federal “intrusion” into colleges and universities. If they can’t meet costs by raising tuition (the public won’t stand for it), they shift to protecting the elite survivors of today’s downturn (the “A institutions,” Broad called them) by generating MOOCs that can be launched into the cloud to create a virtual wall between the chosen and the rest.

Perhaps the desire to board the good ship luxury ship before it sails explains the rush to MOOC-ify everything as fast as possible. When superprofessors at “A” institutions get their MOOCs up and running so that the machine runs itself, they’ll be too important to do menial jobs like grading. For the rest of us, grading will be all we have left.

Do professors at “A” institutions deserve to be treated differently? With two Coursera trainwrecks under our belts now, it seems pretty darned obvious that those two superprofessors at least were hardly the best teachers available. In fact, the number of Coursera partner institutions is getting so numerous these days, that it seems likely that practically any tenure-track professor could become a superprofessor in the near future if they are willing to respond to the incentives that Coursera and/or their home institutions offer. You don’t even need to have any online teaching experience to set yourself up with a class of tens of thousands! Does anybody else besides me see a problem with that?

Unfortunately, the whole point of being a superprofessor is to deliver a decidedly non-super class. Christensen et. al. make this perfectly clear when they write:

Eventually, the disruptive innovation changes the very definition of quality in a marketplace.

Ooooh, I didn’t know they taught cultural relativism at the Harvard B School. One of them must have picked that concept up from a really super liberal arts professor somewhere. Too bad those folks are about to become an endangered species.

“Teamsters in tweed?” I wish.

Beating up on Clay Shirky is something of a sport amongst the people I follow on Twitter, and that sport was particularly popular last week when this article came out.  The line that got the most derision had nothing to do with MP3s or Napster or even MOOCs.  Instead it was this:

“But when someone threatens to lower the price [of education] then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.”

Now that sentence is freighted with an enormous number of assumptions (all of which are insulting to Teamsters), but Shirky’s real purpose here is to shame his fellow faculty members.  He seems to think that the proper response to MOOC-ification is for all of us to sit back and let “progress” run its course.  That’s easy for an Internet expert with a job at NYU to imply, but what’s a community college professor who’s about to become a glorified teaching assistant supposed to do when MOOCs threaten his or her ability to pay their bills?

I say they should behave more like Teamsters.

Perhaps Shirky picked the phrase “Teamsters in tweed” for alliterative purposes, but I think he deliberately wanted to invoke the violent reputation of that union as a means of creating enough guilt to stop faculty everywhere from sticking up for themselves.  Or maybe he’s arguing that resistance is simply futile.  Even if it is, that resistance is absolutely crucial if displaced faculty ever want to get anything in exchange for their displacement.  The only intelligent thing to do when someone wants to make your job obsolete is to organize.

Does this kind of talk make me sound like a Teamster?  Good.  If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifteen-odd years of being a professor it’s that most administrators think that the class divide ends at the edge of campus.  It doesn’t.  [Go talk to an adjunct sometime if you don't believe me.]  Yet the powers that be generally want to act as if every professor is part of a big, happy family even when they’re not.

Running a university during the age of permanent austerity means convincing faculty to put in the greatest amount of effort at the lowest possible cost.  Yelling “Think of the children!” every time people in power want to cut somebody’s salary (using technology to do so or not) is simply a business strategy.  What just kills me is how well this con works on most of my colleagues across academia.

As I’ve written over and over at this blog, the wonderful thing about the online education/MOOC debate is that by sticking up for ourselves we professors ARE thinking of the children since a lousy higher education for almost everyone is of no use to anyone, especially the students who pay for it.  That doesn’t mean my job is special.  It simply means that the quality of the service I provide is just as important as the price when determining its longterm value.

While this rant may seem a tad radical to some readers, all I’m really saying here is that labor and management need to sit down together and work out issues of mutual interest from a position of mutual respect and relative equality.  The Teamsters call this process “collective bargaining.”  In academia, unless we’re lucky enough to work in a union shop, we call it “shared governance.”

Shared governance?  Hasn’t the Internet made that obsolete?  Well, it will if we aren’t willing to fight for it.