Why build a better mousetrap when you can kill the cat instead?

I’ve had some trouble picking out technological books for my summer reading list. Jaron Lanier’s book sounded really good when I first heard him on To the Best of Our Knowledge. Then he uttered the word “micropayments,” and he lost me forever. Similarly, I felt kind of nervous about getting Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything Click Here because I read that he picks on some people whose work I really respect (most notably Nicholas Carr). But then Morozov showed up in an otherwise dull New Yorker story about political contributions from Silicon Valley with what may be the best quote I’ve ever seen in that storied publication:

“You might not be able to pay for healthcare or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.”

“Here is a guy who understands my frustrations with technology,” I thought to myself. I bought the book posthaste, read it over Memorial Day weekend and am so glad I did.

If you’ve read the reviews, you know that Morozov’s main contribution to discussions about technology is the re-appropriation of the term “solutionism,” by which he basically means coming up with extremely simplistic technological solutions to problems that don’t (or just barely) exist. More importantly (and I think this is what every review that I’ve seen has missed and which is captured beautifully in that New Yorker quote), Morozov is particularly hard on Silicon Valley types for acting as if their technological solutions are apolitical when in fact they are political as Hell – mostly because they tend to accept the existing distribution of power as a given.

MOOCs, the usual subject of this blog these days, come up early in the book. This is from p. 8:

“The ballyhoo over the potential of new technologies to disrupt education – especially now that several start-ups offer online courses to hundreds of thousands of students, who grade each other’s work and get no face time with the instructors – is a case in point. Digital technologies might be a perfect solution to some problems, but those problems don’t include education – not if by education we mean the development of the skills to think critically about any given issue. Online resources might help students learn plenty of new facts (or “facts,” in case they don’t cross-check what they learn on Wikipedia), but such fact cramming is a far cry from what universities aspire to teach their students.”

Or at least we can only hope.

While MOOCs pretty much disappear from the narrative after that point, it was very difficult for me to forget them because the problems that Morozov spots with Silicon Valley in general apply particularly well to MOOC purveyors in particular. For example, here’s a useful quote from p. 314:

“Our geek kings do not realize that inefficiency is precisely what shelters us from the inhumanity of Taylorism and market fundamentalism. When inefficiency is the result of a deliberative commitment by a democratically run community, there is no need to eliminate it, even if the latest technologies can accomplish it in no time.”

Those two quotes actually go together very well. You can cut the inefficiencies of education down to nothing by putting videos of smiling superprofessors on the world’s computer screens, but then you won’t be teaching most people anything. Education is SUPPOSED to be inefficient because it is never (to use another word I picked up from reading Morozov) frictionless. If students can’t stop and ask questions, they won’t know if they really get the material. Worse yet, they might think they get it even if they don’t.

The other thing I kept wondering as I read Morozov discuss different aspects of solutionism is what problem does Coursera think it’s solving? The most obvious example would be the high cost of higher education, but watching videos isn’t education. That’s why we’ve never heard anyone from Coursera or Udacity actually admit that MOOCs are designed to be course replacements. They’re either supposed to help people in lesser-developed countries learn or help poor disadvantaged non-superprofessors get back to their roots and teach down in the trenches mano y mano. I find these arguments incredibly offensive because 1) People in lesser-developed countries deserve face-to-face educations of their own (steeped in the culture of their own nations) and 2) Most of us are teaching mano y mano already. [If I hate MOOCs, why do I have to defend 400-person lecture courses? Can't I hate both?]

The other Silicon Valley tendency that Morozov covers in great detail is the widespread belief that tech alone can save the world. You know what he means already. It’s the same reason that Bill Gates is so much more dangerous now that he’s not working at Microsoft every day. Through a combination of hubris and already having too much money to know what to do with, everything must be disrupted for the good of humanity. No, humanity will not be consulted because, as that New Yorker quote suggests, the “Internet” isn’t really a democracy. It just feels like one if you have no idea how power is distributed or how it’s actually used.

Let’s go back to my favorite subject in order to make more sense of that argument. Suppose I want to improve higher education. I could build tools to help professors do their jobs better (like Zotero or Diigo or even WordPress) or I could get rid of professors altogether and hope for the best. Why build a better mousetrap when you can kill the cat instead? That way whatever sorry excuse for an education I create solely through technology (namely MOOCs) will look great in comparison to nothing.

People who want to disrupt higher education don’t care one whit about the quality of higher education. They want to disrupt higher education because that’s where the money is. While they will inevitably fail at making higher education better, recent history suggests that this inevitable failure will not prevent a few people from getting very rich at the expense of faculty and students worldwide.

One of us.

I have a post up about the late George McGovern’s historical career over at the blog of the Historical Society.

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

Usually I depend upon Thomas Frank for this sort of thing, but Howard Fineman has read the newest conservative bestseller so that the rest of us can ignore it. Here’s the part that speaks to the main subject of this blog:

Our superior culture of risk, [Ed Conard] says, is fostered by comparatively low personal taxes and light government regulation. And that, in turn, has yielded growth rates way above those of Europe and Japan. “The Internet is the key and they have produced NOTHING–no Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Apple, Microsoft–NOTHING.” Bottom line: leave the market alone.

Of course, for every Facebook, Google and Amazon this culture produces, there are several Pets.coms. Indeed, social media companies that once looked like the future are already tanking on Wall Street. Yet, as Historiann recently noted, successful, established universities are falling all over themselves to sign up with private companies so that these firms can host brand-extending MOOCs despite the fact that those firms currently have no revenue stream at all.

Where’s the money going to come from? There are no good answers.

When your typical venture capital fund comes in and buys a company, they monetize their investment by selling off the pieces, sometimes even when that company is already profitable. This is what’s led to all those ads with steelworkers explaining how Mitt Romney shipped their jobs off to China. Unfortunately, college professors aren’t particularly sympathetic figures. Therefore, tearful explanations of how Coursera left us unemployed won’t evoke any sympathy from anyone.

However, the second line of attack on the Mittster’s business career might be much more useful in our situation. Besides outsourcing American jobs, Bain Capital has made scads of money whether the companies they’ve taken over have been successful or not. Create the next Apple, the risk takers get rewarded. Act like this, they still get rewarded:

And on Thursday, the 800-pound gorilla of the group, Facebook Inc, reported tepid results that shaved some $10 billion off the company’s market cap. The stock has gone straight down since its botched May initial public offering and now trades over a third below its $38 IPO price.

“The VCs, the private equity guys at the early stages, already cashed out and made their fortunes,” said Peter Schiff, chief executive of Euro Pacific Capital. “Everybody else who ran to buy the stock at the IPO at a sky-high valuation ended up holding the bag.”

In the case of higher education, the VCs backing Coursera and Udacity are only part of the problem. What about the administrators who sign their universities up with these companies, or worse yet, spend tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money pursuing a homegrown version of the flavor of the month? They can point to their “record of innovation” then move on to greener pastures before the effects are felt.

Seriously, if you really want to disrupt higher education, don’t you think it would be a good idea to make sure that there are different people with different attitudes in charge when you’re done?

Higher education is dying already. Therefore, we’ll just finish it off for you.

This breathless post about that Coursera announcement in Forbes is just too much. Here’s my favorite part:

“Quizzing is an absolutely critical part,” [Daphne] Koller [of Coursera] says. “If someone is explaining a complicated concept, the video will pause a few minutes into it, and ask you a simple comprehension question: “Are you getting what I’m telling you?” When we check with students, we find they consistently say they want more of these.

Quizzes. The front lines of the education revolution. You heard it here first.

To be fair, this is at least a much better argument:

“I believe that what we have is in many ways superior to face-to-face teaching in a large lecture class,” Koller maintains. In a physical classroom, she observes,”when the professor asks a question, “80% of the students are still scribbling the last thing you said, 15% are on Facebook, and then there’s the smarty-pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anybody else has had a chance to think about it.”

This argument seems an awful lot like another story that passed through my Google Reader feed today: “John McCain: I Didn’t Pick Romney Because ‘Sarah Palin Was The Better Candidate’”

Abraham Lincoln wasn’t available? How about Richard Nixon?

Perhaps the better question in both cases is, “Why are our choices so unbelievably limited?” Ironically, in both cases the answer is the current state of the modern Republican Party.

A short note about a very depressing story.

You probably already read this article from today’s NYT about a generation of students hobbled by debt. Or perhaps you didn’t because you’re an academic and figured you already know everything there is to know about this subject.

Well, I don’t want to write about debt per se. I want to write about the future. This particularly disturbing part from the center of the article might actually affect you personally someday:

Mr. Kasich questions why all state universities need to offer every major, like journalism or engineering, instead of parceling those programs among the schools.

“It’s not just inefficiencies,” said the governor, an Ohio State graduate. “It’s, ‘I want to be the best in this.’ It’s duplication of resources. It’s a sweeping change that is needed across academia.”

No, Governor Kasich, it’s called a liberal arts education. But that’s what happens when you defend a college education in purely economic terms – that logic may come back and bite you on the butt.

The same thing goes with online education. Make it easier for your students to take courses remotely from anywhere, they might just stay in cyberspace and never come back. If they don’t do it on their own volition, perhaps people like Governor Kasich won’t give them a choice about the matter.

Online education doesn’t kill. People do.

I hope Phil Hill eventually forgives me for this post as he was being incredibly nice to me on Google+ yesterday and all I’m going to do here is carp. He began with a discussion of Naomi Schaefer Riley. Here’s how he transitioned from her to me:

The higher education community is very effective at placing certain topics, or at least certain opinions, off azlimits. That is to the detriment of the community and to its reputation in our society.

Contrast this situation with ed tech or online education. In that case, there is a vigorous debate allowed and encouraged. There are many proponents of the increase in online education, but most of them listen to and engage opponents of online education. Likewise, read Jonathan Rees (@jhrees)- he is a vocal opponent of most of online education. But he attacks on the issues and explains his position.

Let me begin the carping with Naomi Schaefer Riley too (w/o links, as I’m sure most readers are bored of the subject by now). Naomi Schaefer Riley got fired from Brainstorm not because she’s a racist, but because she didn’t meet basic standards for academic discourse. If you’re going to suggest that an entire discipline deserves to be wiped off the map because of the quality of its scholarship, you should at least have the courtesy to read the scholarship. “Read the dissertations,” went the title of the first post. When the second post made it clear that she hadn’t, the Chronicle ultimately had no choice but to let her go.* In other words, Phil, she did the exact opposite of what you say I do regularly.

At least I try. It was about a year ago that I transitioned from poorly-read history and labor blogger to better-read edtech and labor blogger because I realized that most professors hadn’t the faintest idea what was happening to higher education right under their very noses. Therefore, I decided to get a hold of everything I could about education technology in general and online courses in particular and see if I could tease out the implications for what I do semester after semester.

I could definitely see why Phil would call me a “vocal opponent of most of online education,” but that’s not how I see myself. If Phil’s and my mutual online friend Kate has taught me anything it’s that my beef isn’t really with online education per se. It’s with the motivations of the people in the United States who have the power to implement it. To paraphrase the NRA badly, “Online education doesn’t kill. People do.”

Take Mitt Romney, for example. Just yesterday he told a crowd in Michigan (via Political Animal):

I will improve schools and universities and colleges with greater choice, greater accountability, and greater application of the technologies that have transformed so much of our economy.

Based on Mitt’s record at Bain Capital that sounds like an open door for online adjuncts in China. It also reminds me of the Republican Party’s plan for government in general. First they take it over. Then they run it into the ground (profiting handsomely along the way). Then they run again on a platform of more of the same because government doesn’t work.

I know from my extensive reading that an awful lot of people working on online education in this country have the purest of motives, but they aren’t the ones who control university budgets. Those people seem more interested in sabotage to me. Perhaps not sabotage of education in general, but certainly sabotaging the prerogatives of faculty.

* None of these thoughts are original to me, by the way. See, for example, this post by Zunguzungu in order to watch the entire train wreck unfold in 140-character bites.

This is how they’ll make you teach online.

California has been at the forefront of the destruction of some really excellent things in this country since 1978. That was the year that Proposition 13 passed, which has led directly to our current obsession with austerity. Today, it’s destroying the Cal State system, which might just be the canary in the higher education coal mine.

Thank God there was a student reporter present at a forum where this dude from Cal State-Fullerton actually laid out their evil plan on the record:

The discussion began with Keith Boyum, CSUF interim executive assistant to the president who gave an overview of online learning in the U.S., with some special reference to the CSUF campus.

“This university, as every university, is embracing online learning, and we simply don’t know where it’s going to go in the future,” said Boyum.

Boyum outlined the different types of education a student can receive. From traditional learning, which includes absolutely no online activity, to online learning, where 80 percent of learning is via the internet.

“It is a great opportunity, we think, for enhancing learning and shedding costs … Online learning is an essential part of our future. It will grow,” Boyum said.

[emphasis added]

His specific example was the library, but yes he also discussed faculty labor costs:

Presently, the delivery of online instruction is not cheaper in the terms of faculty labor costs, it appears to be more expensive,” Boyum said. “At the same time, other costs may be diminished, and we owe ourselves and the taxpayers a healthy investigation of exact ways to do that.”

What does that mean? A sneak attack.

No classroom space? You have to teach online. No money to pay the air conditioning bill? You have to teach online. We spent too much money paying the football coach’s salary? You have to teach online. Don’t like it, then you can teach somewhere else or quit. You think tenure and academic freedom will protect you? You can keep your job and say anything you want in class. You just have to say it online.

Online education is only the future at Cal State and every other school in the country it resembles as long as we let administrators keep saying it is over and over again and go completely unchallenged. I hate to be a downer here people, but rolling strikes aren’t going to stop this trainwreck. If they could, then Boyum wouldn’t have been willing to say anything publicly about what the future holds for Cal State-Fullerton.

In order to fight this, you have to shout to the hilltops that there are alternatives to the fatal combination of online education and permanent austerity. Take higher taxes on the rich, for example. That could allow any state to keep public education public. This seems like the most obvious solution to just about everything that ails us today, but apparently believing in that makes me a dangerous radical these days.

Maybe it’s time for every professor to find their inner FDRs. The job you save may just be your own.

What if students stop going to college?

You’ve probably already read this terrific Tenured Radical post on the subject of conservative attacks against higher ed. Labeled as an essay about the “conservative war on professors,” she’s actually talking about a much wider conflict:

The attack on higher ed is well underway, and has been a consistent feature of conservative coalition building for the last 60 years. It is not symbolic, and the practical groundwork has already been laid for scoring big victories should a Santorum or a Gingrich reach the White House. The stage has been set in the decades-long refusal to raise corporate taxes to support education, the dramatic expansion of imprisonment as an alternative to educating the poor, the shifting of federal funds into military spending even as we wind down two budget-busting and immoral wars, and the current insistence that colleges and universities, and the tenured faculty who teach there, are alone responsible for the high cost of tuition.

The leadership of the Republican Party no longer wants to spend anything on anybody unless they’re already rich and or at least already tend to vote Republican. Most professors aren’t part of that constituency (and those who are will get private support from the American Enterprise Institute or some giant pharmaceutical manufacturer) so Republicans (and the occasional “pro-business” Democrat) refuse to invest in higher education at all. Ed explains the results of such policies in general:

So why, one might wonder, can Congress or state legislatures spur economic growth by cutting spending? The fundamental problem of the business and the government is the same: not enough revenue coming in to meets its obligations. Firing people and shuttering stores is a knee jerk response that promises meager short term benefits at the cost of substantial long term losses.

In the higher education sector specifically, this means that college will inevitably become both more expensive and of lower quality. Online education accelerates this trend further by depriving traditional education even more necessary funds in order to create the infrastructure needed to treat students like numbers.

Here’s what scares me: What if the point of these attacks isn’t to rally the base, but to convince as many students as possible not to seek higher education in the first place? After all, why pay so much for an expensive, impersonal product when there’s no jobs to be found when it’s over? Perhaps that’s why tuition discounts have apparently lost their ability to attract new college students. Maybe they’re just no longer interested. In the future, even more students might forego college not because it’s unaffordable, but because they think it’s no longer worth the risk or the effort.

If they don’t succeed in killing desire, the destroy higher ed crowd could always kill demand involuntarily. God help us all if the banks or the government ever cut off the spigots that are student loans. Henry Ford, for all his problems, understood that the most important reason for mass production was to bring prices down so that even his factory workers could afford the product that they’re making. I pick on Ben Nelson of the Minerva Project, but he is the first online higher ed entrepreneur that I’ve ever encountered who’s at least trying to undersell something. Without access to affordable student loans, every university above the level of a community college has already priced itself out of the market. Absent that assistance, the current budget crisis at American universities is going to look like the good old days. Building another climbing wall in the gym isn’t going to help.

In its quest to turn the clock back to the late nineteenth century, the modern Republican Party wants to hasten that day of reckoning. War on professors? Try war on higher education. No, scratch that. How about war on practically everybody? Professors are just convenient targets to entice most Americans to take their eyes off the ball.

I’m only paranoid because everyone’s against me.

No disrespect intended to Eric Rauchway, but beating up on Rick Santorum for lying about the number of state schools in California with American history courses is like shooting fish in a barrel. All you have to do is precisely what Eric did, namely Google and count. This kind of disgusting Republican argument (from the Chronicle, via College Guide), on the other hand, is harder to dismiss out of hand because it’s a matter of priorities rather than facts:

Governor [Tom] Corbett has appointed a committee to advise him on how colleges should be financed and how they could better serve the needs of Pennsylvania’s employers. In addition to insisting that tuition has risen too fast, the governor has questioned whether the state’s four-year colleges are doing enough to improve Pennsylvania’s economy. He argues that Pennsylvania needs to produce more skilled-trade workers, like carpenters, electricians, and plumbers, and fewer schoolteachers.

Last summer, I wrote:

[T]he primary reason that I don’t go totally Luddite on this entire profession is that if given the opportunity, I don’t think the average bean counter is going to remake the university very well at all.

I still think that’s right, but in my desperation for optimism I think I missed something that Tom Corbett makes abundantly clear. As a higher education reformer, he doesn’t care whether he remakes the university particularly well or not. If all you care about is how well higher education serves the needs of Pennsylvania’s employers, then you might as well give the state’s college students their education entirely online because you certainly don’t care about subtle nuances in any humanities course. If you think the biggest job-training problem in your state is that there aren’t enough plumbers and electricians, then you certainly don’t care if higher education becomes entirely vocational.

How can you possibly negotiate with someone like that? They see college professors as an opposing political interest group that needs to be destroyed. That’s why when debating the politics of higher education, too many of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Eve of destruction?

Why do so many people these days get their jollies contemplating the destruction of my job? Take, this guy, for instance:

I think what you see happening now with the massive open courses is going to fundamentally change the business models. It’s going to put the notion of value front and center. Why would I want a credential from this university? Why would I want to pay tuition to this university?

I don’t know…perhaps because you want more than a vocational education. Because you think you’ll learn more in a class with fewer than 10,000 people in it. Because you want to move out of your parents’ house as soon as possible. Because you’re interested in the humanities. [As far as I know, it is still very difficult to study the cello online.]

Then there’s this guy:

The high school senior who stood up at Mitt Romney’s town hall meeting here today was worried about how he and his family would pay for college, and wanted to hear what the candidate would do about rising college costs if elected. He didn’t realize that Mr. Romney was about to use him to demonstrate his fiscal conservatism to the crowd.

The answer: nothing.

Mr. Romney was perfectly polite to the student. He didn’t talk about the dangers of liberal indoctrination on college campuses, as Rick Santorum might have. But his warning was clear: shop around and get a good price, because you’re on your own.

“It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that,” he said, to sustained applause from the crowd at a high-tech metals assembly factory here. “Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And hopefully you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

Daniel Luzer explains why this answer is, as the English like to say, bollocks:

Since 1980, the cost of public universities, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. And so if the state doesn’t fund the public colleges very well, as the former governor of Massachusetts might understand, students just pay more for college. There’s no “shopping around” and “going to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education” that will fix that problem.

Sign everybody up for MOOCs and taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill for anyone’s higher education and higher education as we know it will be dead. Force students to pursue the ever-elusive excellence without money and the effect will be the same. It will just take a little longer.