Will Coursera make us stupid?

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

The main point of the article comes near the beginning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** Most of these links are subscription only.

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

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

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

Seriously, who wants to be a superprofessor?

Ground rules for the MOOC Monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“They mean to win Wimbledon!”

Since this blog is getting kind of popular, I think it’s time for me to scare off as many readers as possible with an extended Monty Python analogy. And rather than go for a scene from a movie that almost everybody’s seen like “Life of Brian” or “Holy Grail,” I’m going to discuss a skit from the Flying Circus that only diehard fans like me can remember (since it comes from the season after John Cleese left the show), let alone quote without watching the whole thing again.

Here’s the video:

And part II:

And part III:

If you want the short version: Giant blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the Galaxy of Andromeda are turning Englishmen into Scotsmen. Why? Because Scotsmen are the worst tennis players in the entire world. When the blancmanges are discovered practicing on tennis courts throughout the country, the Graham Chapman scientist character logically concludes in a very alarmed voice, “They mean to win Wimbledon!”

This is a long way of saying that I thought of that line on Friday morning when I read a similarly absurd but obvious conclusion in the IHE article about Amherst College rejecting MOOCs:

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’” [Adam] Sitze [Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought] said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Gee, ya think? The Amherst faculty are like that plucky Scotsman, Angus Podgorny, fighting off the scourge of the alien blancmanges at Wimbledon before they get a chance to eat us all.

But I also have a more serious point to make here that’s a little less obvious. The blancmanges could only win Wimbledon once all the real competition had disappeared (either by being eaten or being turned into Scotsmen). Similarly, I think Amherst’s liberal arts college model is a threat to the MOOCification taking hold nearly everywhere else in academia.

In order to take over, MOOCs have to worm there way into places where they might not obviously belong. That requires something that has come to be called wrap-around. [Kind of reminds me of a boa constrictor, now that I think of it.] As Michael Feldstein recently wrote:

I was able to ask edX’s Howard Lurie about whether the course design for the blended classes in the SJSU project will be the same as the fully online one. He acknowledged that there would have to be a variant. We’re going to see more of that. To the degree that MOOCs are going to used in this way, they need to (1) have the curricular wrap-around that scaffolds the classroom use, and (2) be designed to be modular so that faculty using them in their own classrooms can customize them to the local needs of their students. In other words, we need to be able to draw different and more flexible lines between where the course-as-artifact ends and human-directed course experience begins.

In one way, this would be a pretty good future. MOOCs as textbooks would restrict MOOCs to the role of tools and professors couldn’t possibly replaced by tools, but what if we don’t need MOOCs at all? Why should we blow up the entire concept of courses [Feldstein calls the concept of the course an "artifact."] just to facilitate a technology that plenty of professors don’t want and won’t use? Indeed, if we’re going to go ahead and question everything, then the need for professors at all would inevitably find its way onto the table.

This seems to be what bothered the faculty at Amherst most. From that IHE article again:

Some Amherst faculty concerns about edX were specific to Amherst. For instance, faculty asked, are MOOCs, which enroll tens of thousands of students, compatible with Amherst’s mission to provide education in a “purposefully small residential community” and “through close colloquy?”

Yes, there’s a reason tuition at Amherst is so expensive. An Amherst education is labor-intensive because faculty there are primarily concerned with educational quality rather than price. Yet partnering with edX has the potential to make Amherst even more expensive! That makes as much sense as blancmanges playing tennis.

For people without access to higher education, the ability to enroll in MOOCs is certainly better than no higher education at all. If you’re already in college, then the question becomes whether the cost saving that MOOCs might offer can offset the inevitable decline in quality. [Claiming there's no decline in quality is just a way to justify the unjustifiable.] Amherst students who have the qualifications and the means to attend that school have little to gain from MOOCs.

MOOC providers are in a different position entirely. If they want to convince the public that their education is not just sufficient, but somehow superior to face-to-face instruction, liberal arts colleges become a nagging reminder to everyone who cares about such things of the road not taken. In other words, they can never win Wimbledon as long as this kind of competitive counterexample remains MOOC-free.

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.

There’s more than one way to remove the sage from the stage.

I’ve spent more than a little space on this blog defending lecturing.  The irony of that situation is that I don’t do very much of it in the great scheme of things anymore.  Since I’m a historian, there are a lot of facts that I feel obliged to cover in my survey classes. Nevertheless, I lecture a lot less than I used to do when I started teaching because I’ve developed other teaching priorities besides pouring facts into students’ open ears over time. With respect to my upper level classes, I hardly ever lecture at all. Most of the sessions in most of the courses I teach are unscripted, reading-inspired classes filled with discussions and a very wide variety of planned exercises.

This helps explain why I’m so fond of Peter Knupfer’s new article in the teaching section of the Journal of American History (subs. only). He offers an entirely different path towards removing the sage from the stage, one that depends upon faculty expertise and lots of access to the professor. Here’s a small taste:

My iteration of the seminar was not about my research, however. Indeed, it was deliberately oriented toward a different object, asking a different question: “whether,” as Gilbert C. Fite has asked, “as teaching scholars we are trying to train professional historians or attempting to increase the general level of historical understanding in our society.” I centered the seminar on two problems: How does history serve the public? and How do historians select and communicate with disparate audiences? The seminar’s work products were keyed to the answers to those questions and took the students into the community. The first question is predicated upon the beliefs that history is useless if it is not shared, that it has a public purpose beyond the interests of a close circle of friends or family, and that it seeks to improve the world at large. That is why the projects in this course were explicitly not family histories or explorations of a student’s particular past.The second question pushed the students to develop their own historical questions and to define their intended audience; this was a learner-centered task that cast the instructor in the role of consultant, not of sage on the stage.

[footnote omitted]

I already run our research seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels, but unlike Knupfer, I haven’t been making nearly enough use of local resources in those classes. His article offers many suggestions for doing this that are both technologically adept and pedagogically sound.

On the other hand, anybody who know’s the slightest thing about the digital humanities really won’t find anything all that new here.  And that’s the really important political point that I want to make about this article. Too many people who attack the “sage on the stage” have no idea what professors actually do all day.  In my case, my survey class is only a third of my teaching work. Most of my classes are already a lot closer to Knupfer’s already than to the stereotype that MOOC enthusiasts put forward to advance their agenda.

The great irony here is that most commercial MOOCs want to replace lecture classes with more lecturing.  In disciplines that are generally less lecture-centric than history, I suspect there’s a very good chance that a Coursera MOOC will have more lecturing in it than whatever class it happens to replace.

But that, of course, is not the point.  The point of MOOCs is to disrupt destroy higher education for the sake of millionaire tech investors, not to actually teach anybody anything.

“[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.

Some MOOCs are more inferior than others.

“Our consortium’s members collectively decided to add intention statements to our syllabi, stating that our courses are not equivalent to a semester-long college-composition course. The main reason for that decision is not that we believe our courses have inferior content but that there is simply no way to adequately evaluate the writing of thousands of students—something we would need to be able to do to certify their work.”

[emphasis added]

- Karen Head, Georgia State University, “Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress,” Wired Campus, 4/3/13.

The part of that quote in bold would make me smug for obvious reasons except for the fact that the conclusion is so incredibly obvious. The real question is what Coursera and the universities creating composition MOOCs do next. Do they leave writing-based courses to the physical campuses or do they trudge on anyway? I’ll admit my knowledge of the accreditation process is pretty limited, but my guess would definitely be the latter option. After all, MOOC students will still probably be able to take a competency test and get credit somewhere.

But let’s not forget the earlier part of that same sentence. I strongly suspect that the content they’re generating there at Georgia State and elsewhere isn’t inferior. Whether the course itself turns out to be inferior is a much harder question to answer.

I got caught in a bind earlier this week trying to judge MOOC quality on the basis of the number of assignments a course has. Yes, some MOOCs do have required reading and writing assignments. This makes them better than the two history MOOCs that I’ve dealt with that have neither in one case, and only one in the other. However, this does not make taking these harder MOOCs the equivalent to taking a similar course given by those superprofessors on their home campuses. Why? Well, for one thing, “there is simply no way to adequately evaluate the writing of thousands of students.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that the best way to judge the quality of a college class is in the quality of the instruction, of which the number of assignments constitutes a small part. This also includes lecturing, but also a lot more. After all, 50% of my annual performance review depends upon how good a teacher I am, not on whether or not some students fall asleep during my lectures. There’s so much more to quality teaching than lecturing: course design, assignment design, grading, how you deal with students one-on-one in your office, your understanding of group dynamics…I could go on for hours along these lines.

And that’s where MOOCs – not superprofessors, MOOCs – in my admittedly biased view fall down on the job by definition. By separating content delivery from actual instruction (which might as well not even exist if the student doesn’t take advantage of all the MOOC has to offer), every single solitary MOOC ends up being inferior to a similar face-to-face class given by a competent instructor. That doesn’t mean that non-super professors are always better teachers than the “best of the best” that Coursera recruits. It simply means that people like me, or even regular online educators who operate at a human scale, offer students the whole experience. Superprofessors can’t.

This should be obvious, but for some reason it’s not to a lot of MOOC enthusiasts. Here’s one who understands this difference, Debbie Morrison at Online Learning Insights:

College students benefit greatly from instructor feedback, including when it’s provided in a small online learning community where interaction exists between students and instructor and students and students. In a Massive Open Online Course, [or even a F2F class of 100+ students] it’s impossible to provide the required learning conditions for this type of interaction.

It’s as if the superprofessors are wrestling with one arm tied behind their back. Sure they can make that one free arm do some impressive things, but it’s going to be awfully hard for them to grip anybody.