“Warning: This is not college.”

Among the many things I’ve been doing since my semester ended is start another MOOC: Nutrition, Health and Lifestyle out of Vanderbilt. Why? Not only does it remind me of my dear, departed sabbatical, I teach food history. In that class we end up spending more time in the present than in any other course that I’ve ever taught and this MOOC is all about the food present.

I’ve almost completed the first week of six or seven so far and it has been very enjoyable. The production values are terrific. The superprofessor, Jamie Pope, is a good lecturer. There’s even a fair bit of history in it. If there’s a structural change between this course and the others I’ve taken, it’s the fact that the multiple choice questions come in the middle of the lecture rather than the end.

What hasn’t changed is the work level. As with the history MOOCs that I’ve taken or observed, there is no required reading in this class whatsoever. I admit to knowing absolutely nothing about nutrition as a discipline (which is one of the reasons I wanted to try this MOOC), but I have a hard time believing that there is a face-to-face nutrition course anywhere in the country that doesn’t have some kind of required reading. After all, reading is an important part of education of all kinds because the act of reading reinforces the learning process. I guess you could argue that the MOOC is nothing but a jazzed-up textbook, but how many other textbooks can you get a certificate for reading?

As I anticipated, Coursera/Vanderbilt is doing practically everything possible not to scare anybody off. Indeed, that’s why some of the lines from the syllabus border on pathetic. For example, after noting that the textbook is not required, the syllabus states that the video lectures provide the “core content for this course.” From what I can tell, the weekly assignments do not require writing (which seems understandable for nutrition), but you can still earn a “Statement of Accomplishment” without submitting any of them.

In one sense, this situation isn’t hurting anybody. 70,000 people are learning about nutrition, gaining knowledge that can improve every person’s life. This is certainly a good thing. In another sense though it may harm a lot a people. This class is on the Coursera Signature Track. While Coursera is clear that completing a class like this earns no college credit, they’re also clear that handing over $30-$100 per course to get your identity and performance verified does have value. Introducing this option, the company wrote on its blog:

We hope that offering verified certification for our courses will open up many new and valuable opportunities for students…

What are those opportunities? Perhaps they just mean professional development, but if you doubt that somebody somewhere is going to try to get college credit out of that certificate then you must have been born yesterday. The same thing goes if you doubt that some college somewhere will be delighted to award credit for that certificate – at a price. [Measured "competencies" anyone?] If enough people take MOOCs on the Signature Track, there may even be a movement to demand it.

If MOOCs could be limited to nerdy edu-tainment, I wouldn’t be writing this. If we could slap a label on every MOOC that says, “Warning: This is not college,” perhaps I would have no problem with them. I know superprofessors believe that they are doing a great public good by putting their lectures online and in a limited sense they are, but MOOCs do not exist in a vacuum. One person’s outreach is another person’s college substitute. That means that one superprofessor’s public service can also be an ill-informed administrator’s deadly weapon against the rest of us and against rigor in higher education in general. To think otherwise is the height of both naïveté and short-sightedness.

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.

“[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.

Everyone their own professor (w/ apologies to Carl Becker).

I. Everyone Their Own Sushi Chef.

Last summer, I tried sushi for the first time. I was in Korea at the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul and I went into a restaurant with a big banner in English that said, “Tourists welcome.” To that point in time, I had been one of those people who said smarmy things like, “I prefer my dead fish cooked, thank you.” However, having fallen under the spell of Andrew Zimmern ["If it looks good, eat it."], I thought it was time to give sushi a try.

Some of it was wonderful. I particularly remember the octopus sashimi because it was easily identifiable, and thanks to this scene from “No Reservations,” octopus had become the ultimate in creative Korean dining in my narrow American mind. Inevitably, some of the rest of the sushi I had there tasted awful to me. Unfortunately, the woman who served me there spoke very little English so I had no way to identify which kinds of sushi I liked, and which kinds I didn’t. I lacked guidance.

If I hadn’t had sushi, I never would have rented the film “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” on Netflix last week. That documentary about an 85-year-old sushi master, Jiro Ono, was simultaneously boring and riveting. [My wife lasted with it for only 45 minutes, but later she said to me, "I couldn't stop thinking about him [meaning Jiro] all day.”] Perhaps the most obvious takeaway from the film for a sushi novice like me is that preparing great sushi is a lot more complicated than it looks.

Towards the end of the movie, a food critic explains that eating at Jiro’s restaurant is a bit like listening to a symphony. The “performance” has movements and is scripted to the last detail. Patrons get one piece a time in a particular order to heighten taste sensations. The pieces that women receive are slightly smaller than those going to men so that their smaller mouths won’t slow down the production. The chefs are trained to see which hand each patron favors so that the pieces can be put on the side of the plate that each person favors too.

Why should anyone care about this? Sure, you can just eat sushi like I did, but don’t you want to make the most out of a new experience? If you understand sushi the way that Jiro does, you can learn more than you ever thought possible. The film (and this is what got my wife thinking so hard) even tells you something really special about the nature of work.

In order to see this subculture in all its glory, you have to have a guide. You have to get a sushi education.

II. Everyone Their Own Librarian.

When I was in graduate school, I used to play a game I called “Stump the Government Docs Librarian.” While I don’t think my dissertation was particularly good, it was well-researched in large part because I managed to find all sorts of extremely obscure reports that weren’t even in the US Government Serial Set thanks to the wonderful help I got at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Obviously, Google Books and other such databases now make finding these kinds of obscure sources rather easy. One click, and all the greatest libraries of the world are at your fingertips. In the future, as these resources become even more powerful, they could actually put libraries and librarians out of business. As Nick Carr recognizes, this has created a certain amount of tension between the good folks putting together the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and local institutions:

The DPLA leadership is sensitive to this tension, sometimes to the point of defensiveness. In announcing his appointment, [DPLA Director Dan] Cohen wrote, “The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country.” Yet the first sentence of the DPLA charter reads, “The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all.” It’s hard to see how the DPLA will be able to fulfill such a broad mission without treading on the turf of local public libraries.

In this environment, librarians will have to provide a different kind of guidance. While we may no longer need them to help us find particular books, librarians can still help researchers figure out how to find needles in a series of gigantic haystacks. For example, what search term should you put in that database?

Besides interlibrary loan, I rely on local librarians to tell me what databases are available to me at our institution. I also need help learning how to improve my searches. As almost any history professor knows, students generally know almost nothing about how to search the web when a Google search of a single word or phrase does not yield usable results. That’s why I include lots of librarian time in every class I teach which requires a research paper. In fact, as the tech has gotten better, I’ve expanded that time rather than cut it back.

III. Everyone Their Own Historian.

In 1931, Carl Becker gave what may be the most famous presidential speech in the history of the American Historical Association. He called it “Everyman His Own Historian.” Sexist language aside, Becker’s speech was a poignant call for historians to recognize that academic history only has a purpose when it meets the needs of the public:

Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research. Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. The history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history, is living history, that pattern of remembered events, whether true or false, that enlarges and enriches the collective specious present, the specious present of Mr. Everyman. It is for this reason that the history of history is a record of the “new history” that in every age rises to confound and supplant the old.

I tend to think of Becker’s speech most often during the periodic “Why can’t we all write like David McCulloch?” dust-ups that periodically echo through my profession. Nevertheless, Becker was no anarchist. He still envisioned a role for professional historians in a world where one did not have to have a Ph.D. in order to write good history:

[The history profession's] proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it, to correct and rationalize for common use Mr. Everyman’s mythological adaptation of what actually happened. We are surely under bond to be as honest and as intelligent as human frailty permits; but the secret of our success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.

We historians, in other words, should provide guidance to people trying to come to grips with their own pasts. After all, nobody has the time to research everything they need to tell their own stories. Professional historians can provide the kind of analysis and perspective that amateur historians cannot or choose not to offer.

Without that perspective and analysis, not even David McCullough could write like David McCullough.

IV. Everyone Their Own Professor.

If nothing else, MOOCs [You just knew I'd get to them eventually, didn't you?] have brought the “Everyman His Own Historian” problem to every discipline in Academia. After all, why should I pay to go to college if I can listen to all the best professors in the world do their thing for free? In fact, if I run their lectures on 150% speed, I can learn everything I need to know in less time that it actually took for them to tell their stories in the first place! And I can do it at home in my pajamas! How can that not be progress?

Not so fast MOOC maniacs. Even the author of DIY U has noted that MOOCs aren’t an education by themselves. Take it away, Anya Kamenetz:

But I have something to say about MOOCs. Specifically about the quality of pedagogy in MOOCs as offered by platforms like Coursera and Udacity and edX. David Wiley, who has taught me a lot of stuff, said this at least five years ago, actually. MOOCs are content. Content is infrastructure. Infrastructure is just the first step.

MOOCs are content = a MOOC is not a course.

I suspect she and I would differ greatly on how much guidance a student needs after the MOOC starts, but isn’t it better to have more guidance rather than less? What too many people don’t understand is that the inevitable effect of MOOCs will be to take that guidance away entirely for most students.

This is what makes members of the MOOC Suicide Squad members of the MOOC Suicide Squad. When I read this post by Mark McDayter, I said to myself, “He’s solved the Cathy Davidson problem!,” namely how to deal with an educator whose goals you embrace, but whose methods will make those goals harder to achieve. You explain the political context in which those methods must inescapably operate:

Davidson, I am reasonably confident, does not support the gutting of Humanities departments and the replacement of teaching faculty with MOOCs. Indeed, she explicitly says as much. But her adoption of the language of the techno-enthusiasts is not nearly nuanced or critical enough to avoid giving aid and comfort to The Enemy.

Who is the Enemy? There are people who are enemies of higher education in general and people who are enemies of professors in particular. We will never win over enemies of higher education in general, who are often very conservative people who think that students can learn anything worth learning all by themselves with no access to professors at all. However, the enemies of professors in particular don’t always recognize that they are enemies of professors. Our job is to show them the light of reason.

If we professors can’t explain why the guidance we provide is an essential part of the college experience, we deserve the fate that inevitably awaits us.*

* That last link is to a Chronicle of Higher Ed article that’s subscription only as I write this, but you can still see my point here just by reading the headline.

Real college classes have writing assignments and required reading.

Do most MOOCs have required reading? I’ve been conversing with the proprietor of the blog Capitalist Imperialist Pig about that question in the comments here. They challenged me to look at all the excellent readings in two MOOCs, Gregory Nagy’s Ancient Greek Hero and Dan Ariely’s Coursera MOOC from Duke, so I did.*

Here’s the “Suggested Reading” statement for Ariely’s MOOC:

I will cover some of the material that is in my 3 books Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008), The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves (2012).

In other words, there’s no required reading, and one writing assignment which is (of course) peer-graded.

The Nagy course is better on reading. There’s a lot of free downloadable translations of Greek texts that you clearly need to read in order to pass the typical mulltiple choice lecture quizzes. But here’s the assessment and evaluation portion:

Students will be evaluated on assessment performance and participation. Assessments will be conducted each “hour” of the course. These will consist of quizzes on the reading (names, places, who is speaking to whom, etc.), as well as the application of principles and concepts central to the course.

Class participation, multiple choice quizzes and no writing at all.

Do you see a trend yet? Then consider this:

From #UTAustin #MOOC on 20th c. ideas: "While not formally required, prior to or during the course, you might wish to read the book" #USIH—
LD Burnett (@LDBurnett) March 30, 2013

Yes, that’s right. You can learn all about great 20th Century ideas at the University of Texas without having to read about any of them. And don’t forget about Harvard lite (law school edition)!

The trend should be clear now: MOOC providers don’t want to scare off potential students with too much work. Talk about teaching in a strait jacket! This is exactly why higher education should never be privatized in the first place. It degrades the quality of the product…a lot.

I’m sorry if this bursts anyone’s bubble, but watching videos on the Internet and maybe writing a few very short essays that the professor never sees isn’t college. Real college classes have writing assignments and required reading. Real college classes require access to the professor. To say MOOCs like these can somehow replace an actual college education is tantamount to fraud.

But that fraud isn’t just going to hurt students left with no access to college but for MOOCs. It’s going to hurt society in general too. This is from UW-Madison History Professor (Go Badgers!) Bill Cronon’s presidential address to the last American Historical Association convention (no subscription needed). [Warning: this story will make any real English or History teacher (and probably more than a few others) cry.]:

Still more poignant and worrisome was the young man who came up to me after a lecture I had just given at another university introducing the major themes of the very long book about Portage, Wisconsin, on which I have been working for longer than I care to admit. I sometimes describe that book as “Michener-length,” though that is a reference few students born in the past thirty years would recognize. So I usually add that I expect the final book to be at least five or six hundred pages long, covering as it does the history of this small Midwestern town from the glacier to now. The illustrated talk I give about Portage is intended to be a crowd-pleaser, with lots of engaging images and stories, and at the end of this particular lecture, a shy young man came up to say how much he had enjoyed it. I thanked him for his praise, but was then mystified when he added that he was very sorry he would never be able to read the book on which my talk was based. I sheepishly told him that although I was taking a long time to finish it, it would eventually be published, and he would certainly be able to read it then. He shook his head and said that was not what he meant. He reminded me that I had described the book as being more than five hundred pages long. Then, with a sad and embarrassed look on his face, he said he was simply incapable of reading such a book, that he had never in his life read anything so long. I was taken aback, but I am quite certain he was speaking in earnest, and that his regret was quite real.

Educating the masses without fixing the problem which that story represents isn’t really educating the masses, no matter what the MOOC maniacs tell you. At least we can blame the delusions of the venture capitalists on self interest. What’s the excuse of everyone in academia who should actually know better?

* These MOOC syllabus links require accounts from the MOOC providers in question. And yes, if you’re wondering, I did get an edX account in order to write this post. [The things I do for this blog!]

Update: A reliable source tells me that I screwed up in my quick read of Professor Ariely’s syllabus. Apparently, there is a substantial list of regular readings scattered around the Internet that I didn’t see. That would make his class more like Professor Nagy’s, a MOOC with a higher workload than most. My apologies to both Professor Ariely and CIP. In defense of my overall point though, I’ll note that the two Coursera world history courses that I’ve been directly involved with have no required reading at all.

Late Update: Since this post is getting a lot of late attention from people who are likely new visitors here, they might also want to read my follow up post on this subject, Some MOOCs are more inferior than others.

For their next trick, they’ll turn lead into gold.

“Will MOOCs Work for Writing?,” asks Chris Friend in Hybrid Pedagogy. The short answer is “No.” Two people who don’t know how to write cannot teach each other how to write. 200,000 people who do not know how to write cannot teach themselves how to write either. There is no such thing as a magic rubric. Teaching writing is labor intensive by definition.

Much to Friend’s credit he doesn’t exactly say “Yes, MOOCs will work for writing.” Instead, he suggests certain aspects of composition MOOCs that can make teaching writing easier anywhere. Unfortunately, the lessons he draws are exactly the kind of lessons that make MOOCs an inferior form of higher education. Due to my now well-known disgust for peer grading, I’ll concentrate on this one:

MOOCs make us rethink or reinforce our conceptions of assessment, pitting the allure and efficiency of mechanized essay grading using machine readers and database-driven plagiarism detection against the more intimate, yet slower, traditional human-scored high-stakes writing. The unsettling spectre of automated essay scoring, applied at large scales, calls us to refine our approaches to writing assessment. Noted composition-assessment scholar Ed White credits the Duke writing MOOC with including reflection, revision, peer review, and challenging reading as pillars of assessment practice, even though the instructor isn’t directly involved in the process. Given most instructors’ distaste for grading, refiguring its role in composition might be the best thing we take from MOOCs.

So just because something more awful than peer-grading exists, we should give up on the idea that every student deserves access to the professor? How cowardly. It’s obvious from the rest of the post that Friend cares deeply about effective education, but the “third way” on MOOCs that he proposes (somewhere between loathing and irrational enthusiasm) is a recipe for disaster.

While some of us debate the possibility of whether the impossible is actually possible, accepted standards are gradually changing so that every aspect of higher ed can be automated, whether or not that’s a good idea (and if you care about quality, it almost always is a bad one). God forbid if we actually start bringing peer grading (as opposed to just peer evaluation) into the physical classroom. Then it will be even easier for the powers that be to eliminate professors entirely as the difference between face-to-face instruction and a MOOC would then actually be minimal.

With all due respect to all the lovely people who are trying to use cutting edge technology to make composition (or other writing-based) MOOCs possible, I don’t need to conduct an experiment to know whether you can turn lead into gold, even if Bill Gates wants it to be so. And while the MOOC enthusiasts continue to fiddle, Rome burns on.

Bang your head (Peer grading edition).

While most people here and elsewhere seem to have appreciated my essay about the futility of peer grading from Inside Higher Ed last week, I have seen enough serious critiques that I want to defend myself here.  While I certainly understand why any superprofessor would want to teach the best MOOCs they can teach, I nonetheless offer what follows as a reality check.

Debbie Morrison, who is open-minded enough to read this blog even though it might well be the polar opposite of hers, rebuts my argument by citing research which suggests the circumstances under which peer grading can be effective:

1) When learners are at a similar skill level.

2) When assignments are low stakes [i.e. when a course is taken for professional development of personal interest...]

3) Where credit is not granted

4) When learners are mature, self-directed and motivated.

5) When learners have experience in learning and navigating within a networked setting [if the review is completed in an open and online setting.]

6) Learners have a developed set of communication skills.

The breakdown in peer grading occurs when the learning environment cannot provide the conditions as mentioned above.

Now that’s all well and good, but the sheer massiveness of a MOOC combined with Coursera’s obligation towards its investors to eventually turn a profit pretty much assures that every single one of those conditions will be violated at one point or another.  More importantly, the rich university administrations that produce course content as well as the poor university administrations that long to replace their faculty with videotaped superprofessors and poorly-paid teaching assistants have every incentive in the world to break every one of those conditions too.

The other critique I particularly appreciated appeared very late in the week at the bottom of the comments to my original article.  Its author signed in as “EnglishTeacher,” and went through the same peer grading process I did as a student in Jeremy Adelman’s course.  They write:

“No one has ever claimed that MOOCs do, can or should replace the full learning experience available to those fortunate enough to be able to be in an engaged on-campus classroom.  And no one has ever claimed that students can take the place of humanities professors.”

Actually, Daphne Koller of Coursera just claimed that students can do a BETTER job at grading essays than humanities professors about a week and a half ago.  With respect to taking over the rest of any particular professor’s job, if the superprofessor provides all the content and student peers do all the grading, what exactly is left?  Not bloody much.  Yes, we can go from desk to desk like my high school math teacher used to do while we worked through our algebra problems, but what kind of wage is that going to get us (particularly as most professors don’t have union representation like so many secondary school teachers do)?

I admire everyone who wants to experiment with new technology to make higher education better for their students.  I really do.  Unfortunately, while those people bang their heads against a wall as part of a futile quest to build a better mousetrap than the one we already have, the powers that be will still be doing their best to make us all technologically unemployed whether robots can do our jobs any better or not.

In the end, the value of peer grading comes down this:  Who can do a better job at grading students essays, peers or professors?  If the answer is “peers,” then why do professors exist at all?*  If the answer is “professors,” then why are so many people wasting their time trying to figure out a way to make the wrong answer right?  As David Golumbia has explained:

MOOCs are being deployed specifically as part of an economic argument whose consequences for liberal arts education are designed to be explosive: they are designed to make liberal arts education emerge as too expensive for us to afford.

Peer grading, like the MOOCs it facilitates, is designed to make the unacceptable acceptable.  It is a strategy created to fit the contours of permanent austerity rather than for the benefit of our students.  So while I agree that pigs look better with lipstick on them, that doesn’t mean the pig becomes any less porcine.

Should anyone choose to keep banging away at the peer grading problem anyway then be my guest.  Just remember that you have been warned, not just about your prospects for ultimate success, but also of the larger political context in which that banging must inevitably occur.

* By the way, I expect the resignation letters of all humanities professors who answer this way to be tendered as soon as they have time to pack up their offices.

MOOCs are to reading as Kryptonite is to Superman.

I went to a meeting last week with a room full of scientists.  At one point, the guy at the front of the room lamented the fact that nobody wants to read anymore.  ”You have no idea,” I said reflexively to no one in particular.  On second thought, I realized that they did have some idea as they’re probably trying to coax their students into reading boring textbooks.  I can at least pick interesting monographs.

Either way, we’re all at least on the same team.  So is Philip Zelikow (sort of).  From the WP article I cited on Friday:

“For about 80 U-Va. students, there are required reading, quizzes, written assignments, a midterm and a final exam.  That is all fairly standard.”

Indeed it is.  Zelikow also runs sections with his students, which is why that article is all about his flipped classroom.  Zelikow’s MOOC students, on the other hand, are required to do none of these things, which is a shame as Zelikow has an excellent reading list. Those books are only recommended for his MOOC students (as was Jeremy Adelman’s textbook) because they have no incentive to actually do the reading since they’re only being tested on the MOOC lectures.  University of Virginia students read books and watch lectures because they’re getting real credit from a real college for doing so, but only the most committed MOOCer would ever do all of that. Requiring everybody to handle a UVa workload would make Zelikow’s MOOC a lot less massive.

I’ve seen plenty of people claim that MOOCs are just like textbooks.  In fact, they’re not like textbooks at all.  They may perform the same function of conveying information, but watching videos requires a lot less effort on the part of students and therefore results in a lot less reward.  As a guy from the Gates Foundation told the Chronicle back in November:

“In that way, Mr. Jarrett said, MOOC’s may turn out to be a high-tech replacement for a textbook.

“We think in the short term the blended, flip-the-classroom model is going to be the one that’s most effective for the first generation, low-income students, the kind of students that we work for,” he said.”

[emphasis added]

Let me get this straight:  First generation college students get to earn degrees without reading, while kids whose parents know better get sent to real schools with required book lists?  What kind of education is an education without reading?  A lousy one, of course, but Coursera’s future profits depend upon a steady stream of eyeballs, not on whether the brains behind those eyeballs actually learn anything.  Therefore, the “customer” (who isn’t actually paying anything) is always right.  It’s this give-the-people-what-they-want mentality behind MOOCs that make them death to textbooks.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind one bit if MOOCs only killed textbooks.  Textbooks are boring and almost nobody reads them – including the professors who assign them.  However, if MOOCs ever manage to killing reading in its entirety, I’m going to pack it in and find another line of work.  After all, how can you teach college history without monographs or English without novels?  In fact, how can you teach anything above an introductory course in any humanity without assigning required reading?

Of course you can’t, but maybe that’s precisely the point.

A tool for a professor-centered edtech world.

This one’s for all the historians out there, and perhaps all my readers who still think I’m a Luddite. Because this where I want to tell you about something I’ve been working on and see if any of you out there want to help.

I’ve mentioned Milestone Documents here many times before. A few years ago, when I decided to teach my American survey class without a textbook I started using their service as a replacement. For a $20 semester long subscription, students get access to a wide variety of online primary sources, all well-introduced and edited down to a size that most college freshman will actually read. What I like most about teaching this way is that my assigned reading perfectly compliments what I actually teach. I just go down their list of documents and link to each one I want students read on my syllabus.

While I was delighted to ditch my textbook, a lot of other professors have been reluctant to do so. Therefore, Milestone Documents has begun the process of putting together secondary materials of their own, something they are calling a “textbook layer.” However, this one will be like no other textbook available. It’s going to be written in discrete pieces, like their documents collection. That way professors can assign the parts of the book they teach, and ignore the ones that they don’t. Of course, those pieces will be organized by themes. The professors who assign them will be able to pick not only the parts of the textbook that they teach, but the appropriate primary sources too. Best of all, access to the textbook layer and the original Milestone Documents will cost only $30 per student per semester, just $10 more than access to Milestone Documents by itself.

I’m the Editor-in-Chief of the US History II textbook subject area and need help on two fronts: Milestone Docs needs authors to write the individual textbook entries and review board editors to help make the whole thing coherent. Indeed, while I’ve been calling this a textbook, from an editorial standpoint this process will bear a greater resemblance to a big encyclopedia. Since I’m not the employer I can’t talk payment rates, but I can assure you that compensation for authors and editors will be competitive with other encyclopedia projects out there.

So if you specialize in post-1877 US History and are interested in joining us, e-mail a cv and short note to me at the address at right and cc it to Neil Schlager, CEO of Milestone Documents (Neil [at] milestonedocuments.com). With respect to the editorial review board team, we’re looking for people of various specialties who have substantial teaching experience at the college level, but grad students are more than welcome to join us as writers. If you specialize in other survey areas, including US History to 1877, World History or Western Civ, send your cv directly to Neil and he’ll put you in touch with the Editor in Chief for the appropriate area.

Research isn’t part of Professor Pushbutton’s job description.

“Universities are also generators of new knowledge, a fact that is entirely overlooked by the desire to automate teaching and turn it over to Professor Pushbutton.”

- Historiann, December 6, 2012.

Today is when grades are due here at CSU-Pueblo. Normally, I would have had them done days ago, but since I’ve been on sabbatical this semester I’ve had no grading to do at all. Therefore, today marks the official end of my period of personal privilege. I far exceeded the necessary chapter of the new project I promised my employer in order to get the time off. In fact, after I publish this post, I’ll be turning in the manuscript for my previous project (via Dropbox, which I think is pretty cool).* That’s the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries which I described in this space when I first got that contract.

Why should the taxpayers of Colorado fund this sort of thing? The answer to that question is surprisingly simple: Because it makes me a better teacher. For one thing, I teach both the undergraduate and graduate history research seminars at this university. If I didn’t have time to conduct research I’d be pretty bad at teaching it, don’t you think? Equally importantly, I teach the same subjects that I study. The whole refrigeration book has helped move me towards the subfield of food history, which I want to start teaching next fall in part because it will hopefully bring in students by the boatloads (assuming my reputation as a cranky vegetarian doesn’t scare them all off). I even wrote a book based on what I’ve learned in ten+ years of teaching the second half of the U.S. Survey. I’ll start using it in January to help my students learn that material better.

Anybody who’s been reading anywhere near as much press about MOOCs as I have these days has seen a variation on this line by Coursera’s Daphne Koller:

With an online course, students get the benefit of having constant interaction with the material, as well as learning at their own pace; in-class time is then freed up to give students more opportunities for interaction with their instructor.

The not-so-subtle implication of this argument is that faculty aren’t spending enough time teaching in the classroom already. The thing is – and this is what non-professors, especially faculty-bashing politicians, never understand – what we do outside the classroom informs everything we do inside the classroom. When content creation is farmed out entirely to superprofessors there’ll be no need for us to go anywhere to gather knowledge because we won’t need that knowledge in order to do our vastly downscaled jobs. As Tenured Radical explained last week:

In fact, if you look closely, practically everything that is wrong with academia is the fault of the faculty. It is as if no economic contractions have occurred over the past four decades.

Research is, of course, one of the problems associated with the position she’s mocking here, not one of the solutions. But without research to inform our teaching we become expensive teaching assistants, and teaching assistants don’t get sabbaticals.

* Actually, I would have the whole thing turned in today, but the Baker Library at Harvard has missed their own deadline to get me my last illustration so the whole thing won’t actually be submitted until I get that picture. Today is for formatting files and printing out the paper copy for eventual mailing, but I figured that’s close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades