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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parasites and vultures.

When you want to replace your sink, you call a plumber. When you want to replace higher education, on the other hand, everything appears to be DIY. Of course, you can always go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and get some advice, but the parasites and vultures determined to change higher ed for their own benefit don’t think they need any advice at all despite the fact that we faculty will have to live with the results of their work for the rest of our careers.

As if this wasn’t bad enough already, not only does the sink still leak, I would argue that it’s bloody obvious that the sink will eventually leak a lot more than it did before the changeover started because these interlopers and hangers on don’t know the first thing about teaching. [And no, this is NOT and asset.] To prove that point, just look at evidence from three different parts of the edtech universe:

I. Learning Management Systems

Before “The Year of the MOOC,” I spent most of my time on this blog attacking online education in general. In the same way that George W. Bush actually made me miss the Reagan Administration, MOOCs have made me look much more fondly upon online education too. After all, at least in non-massive online courses, students have access to the professor. More importantly, most of the online professors who I’ve met (both online and in person) care deeply about education. Experienced, well-trained professors can do some really neat things teaching online. Unfortunately, there are plenty of vultures and parasites in this space determined to prevent that from happening.

The bane of the online educator’s existence (and quite a few face-to-face professors too) is the learning management system (or LMS). While I’ve heard better things about some systems than others, my campus is cursed with what surely must be the worst one ever invented: Blackboard. I went through Blackboard training long before I ever developed any interest in education technology, and was immediately repulsed by it. So many unnecessary bells and whistles! So little opportunity to customize the platform! Every time our faculty listserve gets one of those “Blackboard is down” e-mails, which seems to happen constantly on my campus, I smile a little smile knowing that I made the right to decision to avoid Blackboard like the plague.

To my mind, the entire concept of an LMS is an unwarranted intrusion on the prerogatives of professors with respect to everything from course design to giving administrators the ability to “eavesdrop” on every conversation you have with your students. Of course, this problem extends beyond online education. Why do any faculty, particularly those of us teaching face-to-face, need an expensive LMS anyway? Last time I checked, almost nobody on my campus used most Blackboard features. When I started playing around with wikis last year, our tech people actually told me to use Wikispaces because the Blackboard wiki function was so awful.

What makes letting Blackboard or any other LMS provider suck the university’s life blood even more crazy is that there are so many good free (or at least much, much cheaper) professor-centered alternatives out there. The details of this subject are more than a bit over my head, but thanks to ProfHacker (which is also over my head a lot of the time) all my online class-related activities now go through WordPress. Indeed, thanks to the excellent example of one of my better-informed colleagues, I’ve even migrated all my syllabi there too.

This general strategy came in really handy when the Internet on my campus crashed during the middle of finals week last year. As I wrote here at that time:

Don’t keep all your eggs in the same basket. More importantly, maintain control of all of your baskets. Any LMS, almost by definition, threatens that kind of control.

Like farmers in the 1890s (who also make an appearance in that last link), I think we’re all being sold off to large corporations by people who haven’t the foggiest notion of what constitutes good educational practices, let alone good educational practices online.

II. E-Textbooks

I work for an online publisher. What separates that firm from just about every other textbook startup that I’ve ever encountered is that their business model depends upon getting professors to adopt their service, not by imposing themselves upon instructors by courting students or administrators first.

Yes, textbooks are too expensive. Yes, I want students to save money too. No, I will not assign your product unless I actually want to teach your material. Let’s pick on one of the big e-textbook publishers for just a minute: Inkling. This is from their educators page:

Textbooks, in many ways, shape how your students learn. Inkling was founded on the premise that if we can make textbooks better – more engaging, and more effective – we can actually improve learning outcomes for students. We work with publishers and authors directly to carefully rebuild their content to take full advantage of the learning potential of iOS devices and the web.

[emphasis added]

Where exactly do faculty fall in this business model? After all, we’re the ones who assign textbooks. Why don’t you want to work with us too? The fact these companies want to “disrupt” the textbook market is not in and of itself good reason to let any one of them do so, particularly if their real goal is simply to pick the carcass of the publishing industry.

That would explain why so many giant publishers are way out in front of actual students in making the transition to digital textbooks. And, inevitably, e-textbooks aren’t necessarily cheaper either. In exactly whose interest is this transition then?

Perhaps more importantly (at least in terms of the constituency for this blog), professors need to be able to make the decision about what kind of materials they even want in their classroom. Every tablet, laptop or similar device is also a portal to the entire WWW. That means there’s no way to tell whether students are staring at the assigned text as you go over it in class or are staring at their Facebook pages.

By now, we all probably have experience with this firsthand. I, for one, resent that this even has to be an issue. It’s my classroom, therefore it should be my choice what learning tools get used there. If I can make students put down their phones, I shouldn’t get any flack for making them buy paper. With the exception of survey textbooks (which I don’t even assign), history textbooks aren’t even all that expensive anyway.

Some of these new providers, like Courseload, are at least opt-in at the professor level. If they have e-textbooks that you actually want to assign and teach from then by all means assign them if you’re willing to put up with digital distractions. This way at least saves most of our prerogatives for now. The real problem will come when administrators and politicians start demanding e-textbooks solely in the name of cost savings, much the same way that they’re suggesting every public university must embrace MOOCs.

Speaking of which…

III. [You guessed it] MOOCs

MOOC providers are both vultures and parasites. They’re vultures because they market themselves to the most vulnerable systems in higher education, saddling them with added costs before any of the alleged cost-savings they promote ever have a chance to kick in. They’re picking the bones before all the meat’s gone because that’s the vulture’s way.

Their parasitic function comes when they partner with elite campuses who want to “extend their brand” and their revenue by getting at least some money that would be spent locally on campus sent elsewhere. [Kind of reminds me of Walmart, now that I think of it.] It’s elite university vs. non-elite faculty and the MOOC providers win either way.

This same kind of parasitic behavior even transcends MOOCs. In this case I’m borrowing Gerry Canavan’s characterization of the following quote from this article on the Minerva Project:

The idea is to scoop up those students who are being shut out, whether it’s a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts. Minerva will admit applicants based on their academic chops alone — jocks need not apply — and students would live in urban dorms scattered across the globe’s great cities. They’ll take online courses designed by highly esteemed professors from other established institutions. Meanwhile, tuition would cost “less than half” the price of the standard Ivy League sticker price (so somewhere around $20,000 or below). That, anyway, is the plan.

[The emphasis is Canavan's]

While not a MOOC, Minerva is like MOOCs in that they encourage the “best of the best” among faculty to perform the same function that faculty at other schools already fulfill. All told, it’s not really half the professoriate killing the other half for free. It’s more like 1% of the professoriate dropping a nuclear bomb on the rest of us. Then we pay the MOOC providers to rebuild on top of the debris.

For all the faults that I’ve ascribed to superprofessors in recent months, at least they presumably know something about teaching. Unfortunately, there are so many other people who have to be invited into the MOOCification process that whatever expertise they have will inevitably be diluted. As Karen Head, who’s building a composition MOOC at Georgia State, has explained:

The preparation of a MOOC, unlike that of a traditional course, requires working with videographers, instructional designers, IT specialists, and platform specialists. For many MOOCs this means that an instructor and a teaching assistant must fill most of those support roles. In fact, one of my colleagues who taught a MOOC actually built a recording studio in the basement of his home. Even with our team of 19, we still needed several other people to provide support.

Jeremy Adelman may just be being gracious here, but it’s still quite telling:

I had fabulous graduate assistants, invaluable help from our teaching and learning center, film editors, and an associate dean of the college upon whose shoulder I could weep. In the sciences, where more performed delivery goes on behind screens of equations and graphs, it is easier to produce videos. But if administrators do not put the capacity and resources behind their humanities teachers to produce discipline-appropriate courses for the web, planet MOOC will remain a haven for carnivores.

I hate to break it to Jeremy, but planet MOOC is full of cannibals. How encouraging faculty to eat other faculty is ever going to fix anything about higher education remains completely beyond me. After all, we’re the teaching experts while the parasites and vultures are just in it for the money.

“I needed access to the professor.”

Longtime readers may find this hard to believe, but I’ve developed a real respect for many people teaching history online. So many of them work hard – really hard – to create the best educational experience they can under difficult circumstances (and often for miserable pay). Then, the “Year of the MOOC” came along and all such efforts became totally meaningless by comparison.

If you’ve ever read Lisa Lane’s online teaching blog, you know that she’s one of these people who make the very best out of less-than-ideal circumstances. Unfortunately, she’s been getting a little bit cranky lately:

I am increasingly having trouble with the argument that “getting to know your students” is the hallmark of class quality. Instead, quality education should create an environment for the students to get to know the ideas and the discipline. The energy for learning should originate with the student, who needs to study and work hard to figure out both the system and the content. Professors are experts in their discipline, not in engendering character development. Their role is to model their scholarly engagement with their discipline, not their personal engagement with their students. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be good teachers, but it doesn’t define a good teacher as someone who really knows their individual students well. I will “know” a certain percentage of students, in person or online, as it happens naturally. And not knowing every student “well” doesn’t mean not contacting or following up with students who are doing poorly – that’s always appropriate. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be nice – I’m an advocate of nice.

But over the past decade, I have watched my own students become increasingly unwilling to analyze collective feedback in terms of their own work. Instead they want individual feedback only, preferably in a one-on-one environment with me. At 40 students per class section, I cannot meet that expectation. But it’s a symptom of the individualized attention their sub-standard work has been given thus far. They know that the current system is focused on their “success”, and I’m supposed to make that possible rather than them. Instead of overcoming their own limitations (economic class, learning disability, living situation), they are taught that I will take those hurdles into consideration and lower my expectations. Some have internalized the learning problems and even learning styles they’ve been told they possess as individuals, and they see them as justification for lowered standards. I have students who tell me they can’t do the reading because they are visual learners. (I sometimes find myself mumbling “I’ll read it for you”, a line from Monty Python’s bookshop sketch.)

This situation would make anyone cranky. Lisa wants to do right by her students, holding them all to reasonable standards and offering individual attention when possible, but the size of the class and the low standards in other kinds of online classes make that increasingly difficult.

Now blow her dilemma up to cover tens of thousands of people at once. Here’s my friend (and boss) Neil Schlager discussing his experience as a student in a finance MOOC:

As I was banging my head against the wall trying to make my way through the assignments, and as it became clear that the explanations of my fellow students in the discussion forum were not helping, it dawned on me: I needed access to the professor, the one person who has spent decades honing his ability to describe and explain these concepts to struggling students. That, along with his years of schooling as evidenced by his PhD, is in part why he is on the faculty of a prestigious business school like Michigan.

However, in the MOOC environment, such access is not possible.

It’s almost as if the powers that be have engineered a bait and switch. First, they offer faculty the opportunity to teach new audiences online. Next, they make it impossible to actually do that teaching right. It’s like regular online education is a gateway drug to wasting higher education as a whole.

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

Unlike the goal of a cheap education for all, the goal of a quality education for all would be good for faculty of all kinds. As I’ve written before:

In a just world, MOOCs would be like the WPA for college professors. As all these students flood into these gigantic courses, hundreds if not thousands of jobs would open up for trained Ph.Ds to help them understand what their superprofessors are lecturing about every week.

Why can’t we live in a just world? If you have to educate people online, then keep the numbers down to so that students can get the access to the professor that they all deserve. If you have to run a MOOC, then don’t settle for an “Every student for themselves!” pedagogical strategy. Hire all the faculty a class needs so that every student can get all the help they need. What’s the worse thing that can happen? Your MOOC will be a little less massive? Coursera won’t turn a profit quite as quickly?

Don’t let the MOOC machine become entirely free of living, breathing professors – even if only at the other side of a computer screen. Anything else needs to be defined as the lousy education that it is. An online education without guidance is good for nobody but the people cashing the tuition checks and the private companies that partner with them.

FrankenMOOCs and zombie profs.

Aspiring food historian that I am, I’ve been reading Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America. It’s about Fred Harvey, who set up America’s first successful chain restaurant along the Santa Fe Railroad from Kansas to New Mexico during the last decades of the 19th Century.  When he passed on in 1901, his son Ford ran the business.  However, Ford never let on that Fred Harvey had actually died.  As the chain grew further, the railroad literature still said “Meals by Fred Harvey” because that was the name of the company, not because the original Fred Harvey actually had anything to do with the meals anymore.  Yet for decades people assumed that Fred Harvey was still alive.

When I first read this, it made me think of Betty Crocker (who would get letters from lesser-skilled housewives and sometimes their frustrated husbands) even though she was a fictional character.  Then I saw the news about the superprofessor from UC-Irvine leaving his MOOC in mid-run and thought of Fred Harvey again:

Mr. McKenzie’s microeconomics course, however, will continue—just without him. “The very able course managers have everything they need to post the remaining lectures, course assignments, and discussion problems, week by week, as scheduled,” the professor wrote. “However, I will not be involved.”

Now, it seems quite clear that this class had many problems, many of which were the fault of the superprofessor himself.  Nonetheless, there’s still two principles involved here that every professor who wants to receive a living wage really ought to defend.

The first is the idea that every course in a university curriculum needs to be updated regularly.  Obviously this guy will never be teaching a MOOC again, but the idea that your class can go on without you ought to strike fear in the hearts of professors everywhere, super- or otherwise.  While an Elvis impersonator can still play Elvis’s music after his death, the material that any professor teaches should reflect current scholarship.  As Gerry Canavan explained the other day in a post that is well worth reading in its entirety:

The pedagogical justification for MOOCs derives from a misunderstood belief in the surety and fixidity of current academic knowledge when, in fact, the entire point of the academy is discovery and dialogue. That is: the MOOC assumes we know what there is for us to know, and the only question now is how to package that knowledge in its best possible form for widest dissemination.

I think this point is particularly important for history classes since lay people tend to assume that since the past is past it therefore never changes.  Anybody who knows what the word “historiography” means knows that this is not true at all.  While Frederick Jackson Turner may have been the greatest historian of his era, having Zombie Frederick Jackson Turner teach today’s students would be a terrible disservice to everyone involved.

The other principle here concerns the right to control the fruits of your own work.  In the wake of this disaster, Derek Bruff (who’s facilitating the MOOCs coming soon to Vanderbilt) retweeted the link to something useful that he wrote last week:

Amy Collier, who supports online learning initiatives at Stanford, pointed out to me during the MROE workshop that an awful lot of people, including me, refer to these MOOCs as “Coursera courses” and not, say, “Georgia Tech courses” or “Vanderbilt courses.” I’ve used “Coursera course” as a shorthand to refer to the open online courses that Vanderbilt on the Coursera platform, but, thanks to Amy, I’m coming to see that such language is perhaps misleading.

I blogged earlier this month about the challenging design and production process required to launch one of these courses, a process undertaken largely by Vanderbilt faculty, students, and staff. Sure, Coursera assists with the course preparation and provides an online platform for the courses, but the heavy lifting is done by Vanderbilt. It’s also Vanderbilt that is responsible for setting the bar when it comes to the academic quality and rigor of these courses. We decide the content, design the assessments, and determine what merits a “Statement of Accomplishment.”

No disrespect to Derek (who is simply ruminating on the nature of his job), but in the old days nobody would ever refer to a course with a possessive other than an apostrophe “s” after that professor’s last name because nobody had any control over the content of that course but that professor.  Yes, in some ways this particular superprofessor is not the most admirable guy (although I certainly applaud his fondness for maintaining academic standards), but this could easily serve as an opening shot in an intellectual property war that faculty are likely to lose.

Regular online instructors would likely be the first targets of this effort, but they’ll come for the rest of us next.  When I sat in on a Moodle pitch once, their guy claimed that everything posted on Blackboard belongs to Blackboard.  I’ve never had that verified, but I can certainly imagine some campus claiming that everything posted on their LMS belongs to them.  Fred Harvey lived on because his family cultivated and benefited from that image. That’s not the same situation for faculty. After all, you’d have no control over whose brain they might insert into the carcass of your course.

“NO FUTURE, NO FUTURE, NO FUTURE FOR YOU.”

“Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy, including the state schools. In the end, I am excited to see that happen.”

- Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School, 2013.

How does Clayton Christensen sleep at night?  Instead of suggesting that he enjoys watching professors (not to mention countless thousands of other university employees) lose their jobs, let’s stipulate that he’s excited about all the wonderful things that MOOCs and other forms of online education are going to do for students.  Of course, Christensen can’t be talking about the quality of the education that students will receive.  As the New Yorker explained his thinking a while back:

“He realized that, whereas in a regular classroom students could learn only in one way-the way the teacher taught them-online learning offered students who thought differently from their teachers a way to get help. What’s more, recorded lectures and online learning were much cheaper than teachers in a room, so they had the potential both to bring otherwise unavailable courses to underfunded schools and to disrupt not-underfunded schools, like Harvard. Few people at the not-underfunded schools agreed with him-they couldn’t imagine that an online course could ever be as good as the old-fashioned kind. They didn’t realize that a low-end product didn’t need to be as good as a high-end one to drive it out of a market.“

[emphasis added]

So assuming that Christensen isn’t just a sadist, he must think the price advantages of MOOCs and online education for students will more than make up for whatever defects it faces with respect to educational quality.

But educational quality isn’t measured only by how much students learn.  It also depends upon the climate in which that learning takes place.  Sure, it’s possible to film superprofessors lecturing and deliver that content online, but there are so many other basic cornerstones of a university education that MOOC providers have yet to figure out.

For example, consider grading.  I’ve participated in peer grading of writing assignments.  It doesn’t work.  Nobody in a MOOC has any incentive to do it well.  Besides, if students knew how to write they wouldn’t be taking a humanities classes in the first place.  What about computer grading writing assignments instead?  Laura Gibbs, writing on Google+ this morning, answered that question this way:

I am searching for software that can accurately check for what IS objective – punctuation, for example. There are rules – but they are rules based on MEANING (Let’s eat Grandma v. Let’s eat, Grandma) – and because those particular rules are based on meaning, even though they are objective rules (all humans know we are not going to eat our grandmothers), the computer cannot even do that much. The computer cannot understand the meaning, so it cannot apply the rules.

Even if she’s wrong, how far in the future is that going to be?  Will most people forego English classes for several decades in the interim?  If it happens quickly, how expensive will that kind of computing power be?

Or suppose you want to take a class that can’t be taught on a computer?  This includes whole disciplines:  Music, Art (outside of computer graphics), lab science, etc.  I asked my last Provost about online lab classes once (he’s a chemist by training) and he described to me a scenario in which students got packages through the mail and mixed dangerous chemicals in front of their computer screens.  Listing all the reasons why that’s never going to happen would take me all day.

Or what if students can’t attend online class at all because they don’t have good Internet access or don’t even own a computer?  The amazing Tressie MC pointed out the other day that:

Technology is great. It can be easy to forget when you live in a world of high iPad concentration that not everyone in this country has reliable access to the high speed internet that makes these cool devices and systems so, well, cool.

Much of rural America still struggles with access to broadband internet. And if there is a racial/ethnic/class divide in educational access there is just as serious a rural/urban divide. In eastern North Carolina where my family is from it is not at all uncommon for a family to share the expense of a satellite dish because the infrastructure for cable is not there.

Education for all, in other words, isn’t really education for all.

Sure, all these problems might be solved someday, but what happens if Christensen’s dream happens before any of these problems are solved?  Or suppose you don’t want to major in business or computer science?  Or suppose you teach English or history at a community college somewhere?  I’ll tell you what happens: No future, no future, no future for you.

Clayton Christensen, on the other hand, will still be doing fine.

“Teamsters in tweed?” I wish.

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

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

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

I say they should behave more like Teamsters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duty now for the future.

I had no plans to post anything today until I ran into @Zunguzungu’s thorough Twitter fisking of this depressing NYT article about Udacity’s deal with San Jose State to create MOOCs for their remedial classes. Like Aaron, I am appalled by the idea of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown cold-calling Sebastian Thrun to whip their higher education problem rather than talking to anyone who actually works in California’s university system. However, I have two related points about all this which, if I remember all of Aaron’s tweets right, he didn’t make.

1. They’re not just outsourcing education, they’re outsourcing professors. From the article:

“The Udacity deal could blunt some faculty opposition, because the effort will continue to involve professors — but it will also use online course assistants, or “mentors,” hired and trained by Udacity.”

[emphasis added]

Raise your hands if you think Udacity’s “mentors” will have tenure. The privatizers are simply following in the footsteps of the exploitive labor system that public higher education has already pioneered.

By the way, in traditional higher education, course design usually involves nobody but professors. The glass isn’t half full, it’s half empty.

2. This news is a disaster for higher education of all kinds, especially non-MOOC online education. From the article again:

The cost of each three-unit course will be $150, significantly less than regular San Jose State tuition.

Now Aaron was right to remind everyone:

Remember when everyone was talking about how Udacity was providing education for free? NAPSTERIZATION.—
Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 15, 2013

But I think the more interesting comparison is in the other direction – between the price of this MOOC deal and other online courses. Until the year of the MOOC, I spent months and months bitching about the faults of regular old online courses in this space. One of the things I kept wondering is why online courses aren’t cheaper than regular face-to-face courses. Apparently, now they are – in this instance at least.

If you can get the same credit from a $150 MOOC that you can in an online course which costs much more because it has a living, breathing professor at the other end of the computer screen, which one are you going to take? In the regular online course versus face-to-face course, at least those of us on campus have the advantage of direct contact with students and football games to occupy their Saturday afternoons during the fall. If you’ve already compromised your education by moving it online, the only thing left to haggle about is price and universities with online arms that cost as much as on campus classes are going to find themselves in a terrible bargaining position.

If both these points have a theme it’s that we have a duty now for the future to prevent MOOCs from destroying a higher education system that has taken years to build up. Sure it may look like we’re whipping today’s problems good, but we’re really only whipping ourselves.

PS The Devo theme of this post is no accident. As Jeff Cowie explains in his magnificent Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (p. 343):

“[Devo's] Dadaesque anti-agitprop, as frontman Mark Mothersbaugh put it, was a sort of “guerrilla behavioralist experiment,” and the band’s music, as they repeatedly said, was “the important sound of things falling apart.”"

“The manager’s brain under the workman’s cap.”

I realize that I’m not supposed to admit it, but my favorite author – fiction or non-fiction – is Tom Wolfe.  Yes, his writing has far too many exclamation points and the white suit is a ridiculous affectation, but Wolfe has always been focused like a laser on the absurdity of America’s class divide.  So imagine my joy when I saw that he’s written the cover story in the first all-online edition of Newsweek and, as Nick Carr explains, a major sub-theme in the piece is technological obsolescence:

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are “evaporated property.” Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as a lament. “Substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls and the machines in a factory,” he said, “takes the life out of the idea of property.” The new owners, i.e., the stockholders, lose the entrepreneur’s, the founder’s, will “to fight, economically, physically, politically, for, ‘his’ factory and his control over it and to die if necessary on its steps.” Instead, at the first whiff of a problem the shareholders bail out and sell their share of the ownership to whoever will buy it on the stock market… and couldn’t care less who it is.

Now I haven’t read Schumpeter since grad school, but this sounds right to me. Schumpeter was also the guy who popularized the term “creative destruction,” but I don’t remember him having the same joy over that process that I sense when I read anything by or about Clayton Christensen. Sometimes, evaporation or destructive is simply destruction.

This is certainly true when you apply the same principles that ruined the American manufacturing sector to higher education. As the Worst Professor Ever once explained it:

I know it seems cool to ”disrupt” education if you’ve never had to stand up there and teach. But if you have, I think you can appreciate the irony of computer use being “disruptive” not in the newfangled positive sense of the word but in the old-fashioned sense, as in, not enabling good teaching to happen at all.

Bob Samuels, who just spent the day at a conference on the future of online education in California – ground zero for the creative destruction of a once-great higher educational system – describes the exact mechanism by which most of us proffies could eventually be displaced from our jobs regardless of the performance of the technology which replaces us:

For me the major underlying theme was that outside parties want to help make higher ed more efficient and cost-effective by taking apart these institutions. In what they call “debundling,” many of the providers discussed how one person would design a course, another person would present the course, another person would market the course, and none of these people would be involved in research, community service, or shared governance.

There’s a famous (at least to people like me) Big Bill Haywood quote in the late David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor about the manager’s brain being under the workman’s cap. In order to rectify that situation, management searched “for ways in which to cut the taproot of nineteenth century workers’ power by dispossessing the craftsmen of their accumulated skill and knowledge (p. 46).” I think that debundling is the way that university administrators have found to do the same thing to us.

The question remains then whether dispossessing the vast majority of the professoriate of their accumulated knowledge is a side effect of the disruption of higher education or a deliberate strategy. As you might imagine, I vote deliberate strategy. Here’s why: 1) MOOC providers of all stripes are already famous for having no business plan. Only the labor cost cuts of teaching tens of thousands at a time are immediately tangible. 2) The privatization of online higher education of all kinds due to lack of capital makes it possible for those entities that take over this function to collect their revenue whether they can actually teach anyone well or not. Living, breathing professors who are willing to explain exactly why the emperor has no clothes are perhaps the only obstacle left between them and a steady stream black ink.

It’s disruption purely for the sake of financial gain. Any effect that disruption has on the quality of higher education – good or bad – is simply an afterthought. At the first whiff of a problem, the VCs will go find another industry to sack and all of us – faculty and administrators alike – will be left holding the bag. Do you think I’m being overly alarmist? I don’t. Comparing what’s been happening in the world of finance for the last thirty years to what’s happening in higher education now should be a no-brainer because the exact same entities are involved. Like Vanessa says, when Goldman Sachs is organizing higher ed conferences, it’s time for proffies everywhere to hold onto their brains for dear life.

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

You’re on your own, kid.

Despite being on sabbatical, I spent much of Election Day at a training session for people in my department who will be teaching online soon. No, I haven’t changed my mind about anything. However, my friend Robert Bromber was our guest speaker so I definitely wanted to hear him out.

Robert is now head of the Education Technology Branch at the Marine Corps University, but he used to work in our department. He’s the one who set the table for my decision to ditch my textbook by spending his entire survey class teaching against the then-required Alan Brinkley codex. He’s the first person who suggested to me that I have students email draft papers so that we can go back and forth many more times before they’re due than if we only exchange written work during class periods. This time, he suggested that in order to get students active on online discussion boards, you should give them more credit for comments that come earlier in the week. I’m going to apply that idea to my next class blog to see if it can help me overcome my participation problem.

We invited Robert in because he’s been teaching online for something like a decade now and he’s very, very good at it. Yet long before this blog took a technological turn, Robert taught me that it actually takes a lot more time to teach online well than it does to teach face-to-face. For example, you have to spend a considerable amount of time to plan out your course before it even begins in order to lay down the necessary infrastructure. Being overcommitted as it is, not taking on another huge project like re-learning Blackboard and trying to teach inside of it is yet one more reason that I’m sticking with face-to-face instruction. Nonetheless, Robert has reminded me that online instruction can be done well if the instructor puts a lot of effort into it.

All this made me wonder why people who do teach online well aren’t incredibly angry at MOOCs. After all, MOOCs do exactly what they do, but they do it very badly almost by definition. One of the things Robert stressed is that people teaching online can’t do everything themselves. You’re more like a facilitator than an instructor in an online course, he argued. You can’t call up every student who doesn’t get that hard concept you’re teaching and talk them through it. You can’t read every single comment in every discussion thread, let alone respond to them. The machine sometimes has to run itself.

But in a MOOC, the machine has to run itself almost entirely. Superprofessors can barely read any of the comments in a forum with 82,000 potential participants. They can’t answer e-mails or else they’ll be overwhelmed. In fact, if the superprofessor had five TAs, they wouldn’t be able to answer all the e-mails either. It’s like trying to get in touch with Amazon if you have a problem with your order. No operators are standing by. Send us a note, and maybe we’ll get back to you in a week if you’re lucky.

Robert told us that studies have shown that the ideal number of students in an online class is 18. That’s apparently just enough to make forming a community with its own personality possible, but not enough to be overwhelming for the instructor or the students. Even in a face-to-face course with 500 students, there are presumably TAs who are providing the personal touch that makes actual education possible. In a MOOC, you’re on your own kid.

Sure, there are a lot of self-motivated people out there who can excel in this environment. But what’s going to become of the people who can’t if 82,000 students at once ever becomes the new normal? Will anybody left in higher education actually care?