World History MOOC Report 14: In which I am disappointed in Jeremy Adelman.

While I had planned to spend most of last Monday not paying much attention to Jeremy Adelman, things didn’t quite work out that way. It wasn’t that he was too compelling to ignore. Instead, I couldn’t concentrate on writing my faculty development grant with a World History lecture going on in the background. Therefore, I spent almost all of Thursday with him listening to two weeks’ worth of lectures instead. Even though I did a few other minimally important things (like cleaning up my office) at the same time, I’m proud to say that I aced every single one of the multiple choice test questions after each lecture segment.

Some of that success may come from the fact that the MOOC has moved into the twentieth century now so I knew much of the material already. However, I really enjoyed listening to very familiar stories from new angles: World War I as a series of local civil wars, World War II from the standpoint of comparative global supply chains, etc. [Come to think of it, I need to go back and copy that global munitions production chart for my own use.] Honestly, I’ve enjoyed the content of the class a great deal ever since the MOOC has moved into the centuries for which I have a decent frame of reference, namely everything after 1700 or so.

Instead it’s the administrative decisions that have really bothered me. Some of this is Coursera’s fault, but our last class e-mail from Saturday clearly demonstrated to me that some of my problems stem from decisions that Jeremy has made himself.

Vim., who’s at least reading the e-mails even if she’s hopelessly behind on the lectures, made me laugh out loud with this tweet about that same message:

https://twitter.com/Exhaust_Fumes/status/274998129881923585

That part of the news didn’t surprise me at all. Jeremy has shown a great interest in global dialogues, both in other e-mails and here at this blog so this seems like a natural extension of that principle. Nonetheless, the end of that tweet does suggest what students in our class aren’t getting.

Jeremy also announced that he’ll be re-taping some of his early lectures for next time because he didn’t like his performance. I, for one, have always thought his performance has been fine, but I still wish he’d re-tape them all anyway.

I was holding out hope that Jeremy might teach his next MOOC roughly synchronously with the dates that it’s open so that he could respond to the students’ collective concerns. After all, he has shown such an interest in direct interaction with as much of the class that’s looked for him. Why cut that avenue of communication off completely?

But Jeremy also announced in that e-mail that our MOOC has added about 10,000 people since it started. That left me truly shocked as it made me wonder why I’ve bothered to do my assignments on time. If this class is supposed to be interactive, who will the students going back to week one have to interact with? Will the TAs be covering the entire course spectrum at once in order to help those new ten thousand? I kind of doubt it.

More importantly, I figured Jeremy would re-tape all of his lectures because the maps he’s been using since the beginning of the class are ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE TO READ. Jeremy will periodically talk about some important geographical aspect of world history and all I can see on his map slide are some colored arrows and the names of countries. The city names and features on the maps are totally illegible. If that isn’t worth fixing, what is?

Coincidentally, also on Saturday I saw an epic post by Kelli Marshall about student use of laptops in the classroom. This is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, which I also think applies here because if you think it’s bad when the professor is in the same room, think how many people are tuning out Jeremy in the privacy of their own homes? What really got me though was Marshall’s use of this quote from Patrick Allitt about how he handles his (face-to-face) classroom:

Whatever you do beyond the classroom is your own business, but so long as you are here, I am going to assume that you came here with the intention of learning. I am the teacher, and I am doing everything I can to put you in a position conducive to learning.

No matter how much work Jeremy puts into this MOOC, he is not creating an environment that’s conducive to learning because nobody is there for them the same way that Allitt is there for his students. Sure, everyone is welcome to join this global community, but nobody is going to do anything to help them understand what’s going on once they get there unless they seek help themselves, and most students will never do that. Obviously Jeremy wants to run the best MOOC possible, but in the end his ultimate goal is still to have the MOOC machine run itself.

Perhaps this sounds a little old-fashioned, but I think every student, no matter how casual they may be, deserves a caring, trained educator who will track their progress and work to ensure that they’re actually learning. I’m singling out Jeremy here because I’m taking his course, but he is by no means alone on this. Perhaps you run a cMOOC or a plain old MOOC in which you help students teach themselves or maybe even each other. Where does that leave the students who actually need instruction? What if you want to learn more than what your fellow students know?

Well, you can always pay to attend Princeton. I’ll bet you anything that Jeremy is easy to find there, and really helpful too. What I don’t understand is why students who can’t afford the tuition at Coursera’s expensive partner institutions shouldn’t get the same kind of attention from living, breathing professors of their own.

World History MOOC Report 3: In which I feel sorry for Jeremy Adelman.

Have you ever seen Tom Hanks in “Castaway?” I haven’t seen the movie since it came out, but I remember thinking, “Wow, that Tom Hanks is such a good actor that he’s worth watching all by himself for an hour and a half!,” when I did. OK, Hanks wasn’t entirely alone. He had Wilson the Volleyball to keep him company.

To put it as kindly as possible, Jeremy Adelman is no Tom Hanks. His weekly e-mail included a story about one of his regular students who’s in the MOOC meeting him in a Princeton dry cleaner and saying something like, “You’re much more interesting in person.” I believe it. Here’s a guy doing his normal schtick in a very abnormal situation. I think that’s why he treats his poor grad student Valeria like Wilson the Volleyball. He wants to do the kinds of things he can do in a face-to-face class but she and the tech guy are the only part of the audience that can talk back in real time. Oh, the perils of being a super professor!

We non-super professors have much more freedom to adapt. The other day, Leslie M-B and I were talking about lecturing in the comments here. The conversation reminded me how much less frequently I lecture in survey class than I did in the past. I changed because I wanted to spend more time teaching skills and less time teaching facts. Jeremy Adelman has no such choice. For example, the most obvious thing to do besides lecture is to discuss the textbook in class, but nobody is required to buy the textbook in this MOOC, let alone read it.* Instead, it’s just Adelman…talking…very…slowly. I have nightmares in which I’m doing something like that, but even they don’t take place in front of 70,000+ people.

This raises an interesting question: Could anyone else do this better? Definitely not this way. As I keep saying, the only way to maka a history MOOC work well would be to blow up the regular course and put it back together again differently. For example, I haven’t visited the forums yet. This is possible because the lectures and the forums are completely separate. Do they have to be? Interaction might help break up the monotony. Even the special guests are separate from the lectures. Why not get someone else in front of the class for Adelman to talk to besides Wilson poor Valeria? Why not run an outline to the lecture on the side of the screen so that Adelman is easier to follow?

This is really rudimentary stuff, but imagine what historians with tech skills and some creativity could do in this format? But alas, that won’t lead to the mind-bending numbers of students that make venture capitalists get out their checkbooks. From this student’s perspective, I guess you get what you pay for.

* Another confession: I changed my mind about buying the text when I found out that Norton wants $35 for a 3-month e-book rental!!! That’s highway robbery!!!

He’s leaving Coursera. That’s how it worked out.

Please forgive me. This post is going to be more than a little self-serving, but as one of the very few people who actually completed Princeton Professor and Friend of this Blog Jeremy Adelman’s World History MOOC I think I’ve earned that privilege. I found this month-old Daily Princetonian article last night on the Twitterz;

Adelman agreed to teach the course for three years after which the University will conduct a thorough review of its performance. He said that he will offer the course next fall on a new startup platform NovoEd that allows for greater student engagement.

Adelman said that he considered the first year’s course a failure.

“Version 1.0 failed. I hadn’t realized how much the rituals of two physical lectures a week were like the spinal cord of the course,” he said. “It was like this blah course.”

Adelman said he also found that students were not engaging in the online discussion forums with non-University students, and many were not watching lectures regularly, waiting until right before the exams.

However, he said that he made adjustments to the course that resulted in very interactive projects and high participation, creating online blogs and project assignments that would be posted online.

Version 1.0 was, of course, the MOOC that inspired my 16-part critique of the class (which you can find here if you scroll down). I’d heard a lot of the stuff in that article exchanging e-mails with Jeremy and talking to him briefly after our AHA panel back in January, but I never heard him describe that course I took as a failure before.

I actually think he’s being more than a little hard on himself. The fault here lies not with the superprofessor or the students, but with the course design. And I’m not talking about the assignments which he has apparently tweaked and improved, but with the whole xMOOC-oriented similarity to his ordinary face-to-face World History class.

If you must MOOC, says me, then you really should blow the whole thing up and start the world afresh.  That means little or no lectures. With respect to history, this would make introductory courses an impossibility since students wouldn’t know the content otherwise. Coursera would hate it, but this structure could put the kind of global dialogue that Jeremy loves so much front and center. Imagine a worldwide research methods course during which students could share their findings with each other! Or even a historiography course in which students explain how historians from different lands around the world have confronted similar historiographic problems.

I remember trying to explain cMOOCs to Jeremy somewhere in the comments here that I won’t dig up. I hope that helped. Indeed, I’m delighted to see that he’s retained the rights to his own course, thereby making it possible for him to migrate to a better platform than Coursera for the kinds of really innovative pedagogy which he enjoys. I look forward to hearing about the details of the new course. Indeed, at this rate I may have to stop referring to Jeremy as a superprofessor.

Perhaps it’s not the MOOCs themselves are the problem then, but just the “massive” part. Or maybe even just the corporate part. These days, I actually think it might be interesting to design a non-massive, online history course that would supplement rather than replace other traditional history classes. Keeping to that principle would require what’s left of MOOCs to remain in the hands of caring faculty like Jeremy, rather than the folks down the road at Penn who have actually invested in Coursera, hoping to use West Philadelphia as a base to colonize the world.

MOOCs as pedagogical experiments rather than MOOCs as weapons. It could happen. Those nice Canadian people have been trying to do things that way for years. Jeremy’s Canadian. It all kind of makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Can peer grading actually work?

Longtime readers may remember an essay I did for Inside Higher Education last year called “Peer Grading Can’t Work.” It came about as a result of my experiences in Jeremy Adelman’s World History MOOC and I think it may be the second best thing I’ve ever written (after this, of course). Therefore, I was intrigued to learn that Stephanie McCurry’s History of the Slave South MOOC from the University of Pennsylvania/Coursera has tried to fix the flaws that their MOOC predecessors found in earlier peer grading systems.

Since I have no time for anybody’s MOOC these days, Ben Wiggins, Associate Director of Online Learning at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences and Lecturer in Penn’s Department of History and Department of History and Sociology of Science, graciously agreed to describe their peer grading system for MOOC-obsessed MOLB readers of all stripes. I have promised that there will be no rebuttals from me here. I simply asked Ben to come back later and tell us all how their system worked.

***

It is immensely difficult to create a massive open online course in the humanities and social sciences that approximates a traditional brick-and-mortar offering. This should come as no surprise given MOOCs’ origin (or to anyone reading Jonathan’s site). All three major MOOC platforms (Udacity, Coursera, and EdX) have their roots in computer science departments. And even their connectivist predecessors were created by academics in computing, too.

MOOCs emerged from the sciences because the sciences are scalable. They’re scalable on campus and they are scalable beyond campus. Sure, labs and more nuanced evaluation based on shown work are lost in multiple-choice examinations and task-based programming assignments, but the core forms of STEM assessments translate well to MOOCs. The humanities and social sciences, however, resist machine grading. Writing—synthetic expressions of the complexity of histories, societies, cultures, and creative works—rests at the center of evaluation in almost every single discipline and interdiscipline in the humanities and social sciences.

MOOC platforms are not ignorant of the centrality of writing in the humanities and social sciences, but their approximation of the campus experience—essentially relying on peer grading—has left much to be desired. I’ve never liked peer grading in my classroom and I think it’s even worse when also decoupled from instructor evaluation, as is the necessity with course enrollments regularly in the tens of thousands and instruction teams regularly less than half a dozen.

When grading is left to students, the results are mixed. Indeed, mixed may be a perfect term for peer assessments, since, as Jonathan has shown over at Inside Higher Ed, the quality of student grading varies widely. Efforts have already started to calibrate peer grading—Coursera has been a leader here—but this process takes a great deal of labor on the instruction team’s part and requires multiple offerings of the course before instruction team grades and student grades begin to correlate with much significance.

When I came to Online Learning in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences early last summer, the first project that landed on my desk was to guide production on a new MOOC entitled History of the Slave South to be taught by history professor, Stephanie McCurry. I was excited by the assignment since my background is in the historical study of race, but I knew early on, too, that it was going to be a difficult course to construct. How would we keep the discussions respectful and on point? How could we teach historical skills in a class in which we could not assign any closed-access secondary sources? How could we assign essays without instructor or TA grades?

From the beginning of my work on History of the Slave South, that last question gnawed at me. How to construct an effective, enlightening peer review became one of two questions—the other being the translation of lab sessions to an online environment—I began to ask everyone I met with an interest in online learning. The months ticked away on the calendar and the January launch date approached. It was not until the Educause Conference in October that I found a promising lead.

There, Thomas Evans, Evonne Halasek, and Jennifer Michaels, all of The Ohio State University, presented on their experience with peer review in their MOOC on writing. This team had put a great deal of effort into constructing a peer review process that would benefit student learning, not simply replace instructor grading. And though they did not find a magical secret to perfecting peer assessment, they did find some promising directions to take the process in. The one that caught my attention was the success they found in description. Their peer review had students complete three tasks: description, assessment, and suggestion. In this describe-assess-suggest structure, they found high praise from students for the utility of descriptions their peers offered. It acted as a sort of mirror. It allowed students to see if they accomplished what they set out to accomplish. This focus on description immediately reminded me of a tactic I had used in my own on campus courses—the three questions of The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

Written by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere in 1987 (and first translated to English in 1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation builds on Joseph Jacotot’s early-nineteenth-century panecastic pedagogy to argue for the “equality of intelligences.” Jacotot—the protagonist-muse of Ranciere’s text—was subdirector and professor at the École Polytechnique in Dijon and it was there where he crafted a pedagogy of “universal teaching,” which posited that each student is capable of teaching oneself as well as all others. We must free ourselves from the “masters” of traditional classrooms argues Jacotot and echoes Ranciere. Only then can we can achieve “intellectual emancipation.”

All a bit heady, no? And certainly a critique of expertise that does not sit well with historians like myself who reside in an institutional economy based so deeply on demonstrations of expertise.

For History of the Slave South, we did not leave behind the “master.” I cannot imagine a course like this without foundational lecture videos, highly curated texts, and refined discussion questions. Leaving students with no prerequisite knowledge of slavery’s history to teach each other is a scary proposition (though, a MOOC community might do better than “masters” in Texas). However, there is a place for Jacotot’s method in humanities and social sciences MOOCs—in peer review.

To teach his “students,” Jacotot asked them only three questions:

o What do you see here?
o What do you think about it?
o What do you make of it?

These questions, like the first stage of the Ohio State MOOC’s peer review, promote learning through description. This is an ideal method for a peer review in which the level of historical context about the subject at hand varies greatly from student to student. Our first assignment, for instance, tasks students with building tables from the Slave Voyages Database and interpreting them. We can’t assume whether or not a student knows if a peer’s interpretation is “correct.” Indeed, much of the point of the assignment is to expose the limits of interpretation in numerical representations of human lives. In essence, there is no correct answer. So rather than make our MOOC students into an army of pseudo-experts or TA proxies, we’ve tried to make their feedback more useful than judgmental. We’ve stopped calling it peer review or peer grading and, instead, termed it “peer reflection.” We want these reflections to act as a mirror to their peers. We want our writers to view their peers’ reflections as a way to see if they accomplished what they set out to accomplish. We significantly tempered the grading of our writing assignments so that it is now simply an “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory,” “accomplished” scale. It is our hope—and here I must thank Stephanie and her teaching assistant, Roberto Saba, for fully committing to what I’m sure was a strange-sounding pitch with a radical nineteenth-century teaching method at its core—that a peer reflection system based in description will create a more useful experience for our learners.

After months of fretting and weeks of refining, Stephanie, Roberto, and I crafted the following instructions:

When assessing your peers’ work, please follow the instructions below:
1. Identify and describe your peer’s argument; what does it communicate to you?
2. Identify and describe your peer’s use of historical evidence; how does the evidence support the argument?
3. What makes your peer’s analysis persuasive? How could it be stronger?
To receive credit for your peer reflection, you must answer all three questions. Your reflection is required to be at least 150 words long and should not exceed 300.
In addition to this narrative feedback, please rate your peer’s essay as “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory,” or “accomplished.”

We are under no delusions that our peer reflection will ever be as rich as most instructor feedback. But to claim humanities and social science MOOCs as anything even nearing an approximation of our campus offerings, we need to experiment with creative solutions in spaces in which massive, open courses have the greatest limitations. If we cannot find solutions to the conundrums that plague humanities and social sciences MOOCs soon, then the humanities and social sciences will once again falter where the STEM disciplines excel.

PS You can follow Ben on Twitter at @WigginsBenjamin.

MOOC-surfing.

All of the papers from our MOOC forum at the American Historical Association about a month ago are now online at AHA Perspectives. Mine is here. This seems like a good place to thank David Mazel, Ian Petrie and especially Perspectives Editor Allen Mikaelian for helping make that essay the best it could be. However, it is no different than the version you may have already heard by playing the tape of the session.

The same thing is not true of Jeremy Adelman’s paper. You may remember, Jeremy got caught in Amtrak hell during an East Coast snowstorm and didn’t arrive at the room until very late in the program. Since he didn’t have time to deliver a full paper, this is the first place I’ve seen his written remarks.

Most of the essay explains the changes he made between the first version (the one I took) and the second version of his World History MOOC. Some things went better. Some things went worse. What I find extraordinary, however, is his theory as to why one important aspect of his MOOC got worse in version 2.0:

There are now 108 partners and almost 600 courses. There is a tendency to study (if you can use that word) extensively, not intensively.

This has changed the learning ecology because students online are less engaged in the active learning components than they once were when there were fewer courses. The online forum discussions, where Russians spoke with Brazilians, Americans with Indians, were once a vibrant and exciting component, but they’ve lost their energy. Whereas I once feared the forums would be Babelian, with many different voices talking past each other, my fear now is silence. Version 2.0 was, as far as student interactivity is concerned, a shadow of version 1.0.

[Emphasis added]

Honestly, I didn’t think Version 1.0 was all that interactive in the first place, but that’s not why I find this theory so interesting.

Jeremy is reminding us that no MOOC is really free. Students pay with their time (and, trust me, Jeremy’s class takes an enormous amount of time to even complete in a half-assed manner). With MOOCs of all kinds competing for the attention of the mostly white, male retired physics professors of the world, anybody expecting to rack up tens of thousands of eyeballs can’t ask too much of their students. Nobody wants to feel like a shirker, so thousands of students will undoubtedly rather enroll in the easy MOOC with no reading or writing requirements that they know they can complete than the hard MOOC that they’ll just surf through occasionally on the way to greener pastures.

Of course, since students pay for MOOCs with their time, they have to be the kind of students who have time to give. If Daphne Koller had her way, we’d all imagine the typical MOOC student as some impoverished under-schooled 18-year old with no access to schooling. In fact, those are precisely the kinds of people who would be least likely to afford the time, let alone the Internet connection to watch superprofessors do their thing. That’s why the typical active MOOC student is highly-educated and career-oriented. They have the time and especially the incentive to take advantage of everything that MOOCs have to offer. Lack these incentives and you’ll either a) Never watch a lecture to begin with or b) Give the next MOOC over a shot at keeping your attention.

I think Ann Little’s point about the problem of teaching controversial subjects in MOOCs also plays into this overall argument. While I covered it in my initial notes from the session, here’s the explanation in her prepared text:

The demands of the MOOC—particularly its massiveness—work against introducing students to the latest, cutting-­edge research and conversations happening in our profession because MOOC professors will be asked to offer only the broadest and most inoffensive courses out of fear that courses on certain subjects—­slavery or genocide; gender and sexual minorities; nonwhite people in general—won’t sell.

These are also the kinds of courses that are the most difficult to teach, even on a face-­to-­face scale, because of the various political views and life experiences of our students. As someone who teaches courses on women’s history, gender, and the history of sexuality, I have serious doubts about how much breadth and complexity MOOC history courses can offer.

Sexism? Too depressing. Change the channel. Racism? Too depressing. Change the channel. Genocide? Are you kidding me? I only want to take happy MOOCs! After all, life’s too short to spend the whole time bummed-out by history. Of course, the happy/sad dichotomy will more likely work itself out as a slow slide into banality as pressure from providers or university administrators to attract more possibly monetizable eyeballs leads superprofessors into injecting more and more of the MOOC equivalent of T&A into their classes.

Come to think of it, how long will it be until MOOC providers begin to inject actual T&A into their MOOCs? After all, if we’ve learned one sure lesson here in the early history of the Internet, the only way anyone can be certain to make money in this new medium is to sell pornography. Hopefully most of the superprofessors of today will quit long before that moment arrives. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect a few of them will go off and start their own edtech companies.

“How should historians respond to MOOCs?”: The movie!

Watch for the dramatic entrance by Jeremy Adelman about three quarters of the way through the picture:

My notes are here and additional thoughts here.

“Andy Warhol, silver screen. Can’t tell them apart at all.”

Andy Warhol was a practical joker. I’m not sure anyone ever saw him laughing, but I like to think of his work as a giant parody of industrialization and mass production. Consider the famous paintings of all those Campbell’s soup cans. They’re different, but they all look the same. More importantly, Warhol has decided that this is art. It is, but only in the sense that Warhol wants you to find beauty in sameness and uniformity. There may be some there, but this kind of shock only works for a limited amount of time. If you don’t believe me, just try to watch his eight-hour movie of the top of the Empire State Building (and nothing else).

Do the same in the realm of education and the results will be deadly. Is a MOOC a class or the image of a class? Do MOOC purveyors understand the difference? Do administrators? Does the MOOC Messiah Squad even care?

I thought of this when I read Anne Corner’s comment from my first post on the MOOC session at AHA 2014:

I also particularly liked Ann Little’s comments about not being controversial. That, of course, is half the fun of history and explains why Coursera seems a little bland.

Being a little bland might not be a problem if you’re teaching math. After all, the process is the same wherever you are and whoever you happen to be. This is most decidedly not true with respect to history.

Perhaps I saw the great Tressie MC make this point about MOOCs somewhere at some point, but I know I haven’t made it before. That’s why I was so glad to hear Ann argue the difficulty of teaching controversial material in MOOCs because it reminded me of something. Education isn’t education if the “customer” is always right. Education is supposed to be challenging in every sense of the word. If you’re signed up for seven MOOCs and you have to decide which one you want to invest your time in, are you going to pick the one that makes you feel uncomfortable? Of course not. And where does that leave diversity requirements or distribution requirements or even foreign language requirements?

MOOCs that don’t bring in the eyeballs will have to cater to the lowest common denominator or end up on the dustbin of history. I’m not just talking about required reading or writing assignments here. I’m talking about the material covered in the course overall. As Ann Little implied during our session, if the students want nothing but Whiggish history, then Coursera has every incentive to pressure their superprofessors to give it to them.

So what’s a superprofessor to do? Problem #1 is to make sure that the superprofessor is even involved in the course in the first place after all their lectures have been taped. Assuming they are there, what incentives are they getting to be as challenging in every sense of that word? If success in MOOCs means completion or even engagement, then not much at all. Will they still be adored by their worldwide audience if the superprofessor make them feel uncomfortable? Somehow I doubt it.

Sometimes I get the feeling that superprofessors are like Andy Warhol in the way that they both understand fame. Unfortunately, unlike Andy, most superprofessors do not produce art and do not appear to be joking. No disrespect intended to the two I just shared a podium with. They’re both nothing if not humble in the face of their new teaching-induced celebrity, and I’m sure it’s that celebrity that helped us pack the session last week. But, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, perhaps the medium has become their message.

When you get a chance to watch the tape of our session, you’ll notice how happy I was when Jeremy Adelman walked into the room. When you meet somebody you’ve been watching on the screen for a really long time you want to like them, and are disappointed when you find out that you disagree with them on some issue that’s important to you. This is why I know longer want to investigate the politics of quarterbacks.* When you listen to Jeremy’s and my comments, you’ll see that his and my attitudes towards MOOCs aren’t all that far apart anymore. That’s why I like him now more than ever. But the relationship between students and they’re professors is supposed to be different from this.

One of the side trips I made during the AHA convention was to see Robert Brugger, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press. Now that it’s out, I wanted to thank him for putting me through hell during the editing process for Refrigeration Nation because the result is a much, much better book. I think I learned more about writing from him than I did from my dissertation advisor. There were times when I wanted to throw in the towel, but I had skin in the game (so to speak). He invested his time in me because I invested my time in what he (and their excellent outside reviewers) had to say.

Students will never get that treatment in the world where their professor is nothing but a presence on the silver screen. Students will never get that in the world where their education is stamped out of an assembly line, like so many soup cans or Brillo boxes. But you say that this nightmare scenario will never happen? Are you sure? Once you say that an industrialized higher education is acceptable for some people under some circumstances, it will be very hard to draw a line where MOOCs are not acceptable to anybody who can’t pay for the best that academia has to offer.

* I have this persistent horrible sinking feeling that Peyton Manning is not a Democrat. John Elway certainly isn’t.

MOOOOOOOOOCS!!!: #AHA2014 edition.

So we did our panel yesterday. The nice people at the History News Network (aka David Austin Walsh) did indeed film it, but they say the tape won’t be online until next week. In the meantime, I thought I’d just dump my (probably not all that accurate) notes from the presentations online while I’m breakfasting at Starbucks on my way to the library again, with just a couple of introductory remarks of my own for each speaker:

1) Philip Zelikow

For those of you who may have seen any of his MOOC, Philip really is that poised. He says he did multiple takes while filming those lectures, but I’m telling you he couldn’t have needed all that many. I was so grateful to him for coming because (for reasons I’ll explain below) without him most of the session would have been like the sound of one hand clapping:

MOOCs different from regular online courses.
14 weeks (the length of both his and Jeremy’s course) is highly unusual.
UVA does MOOCs for outreach.
“These [meaning MOOCs] are not cheap” if you want to do them well.
Huge #s are meaningless. How many people actually try out the course?
His course had 94 separate video segments. If the narrative arc worked some were as long as 30 mins.
90,000 people signed up.
15,000 people gave the course the old college try.
10,000 stuck with it.
5,000 of those were online auditors (weren’t taking the tests).
2,500 more were downloading and watching the segments offline.
“Most gratifying teaching experience of my entire life.”
Someone even sent him flowers [Unsolicited, of course].
This was an overload. As a dean, he isn’t even supposed to be teaching at all.
Advantages of MOOCs:
1) Allows for more elaborate integration of media.
2) Students can freeze on maps.
3) Students can learn at different speeds.
4) His students get the follow-up explanation from him, not the TA.
“In a way, I’m doing the TA sections.”
TAs are doing history labs, something new that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Students self-report that they work 50% harder in his flipped course.
Is the pure online material useful? Yes, students in and out of UVA said it was highly enriching.
Flipping class is highly satisfying for everyone involved.

2) Me

Well, of course I couldn’t take notes on my own paper and (as I explained earlier this week) I can’t post it yet. For now, I’ll just say this: labor historian at heart that I am, I made the “MOOCs as scientific management argument,” comparing the “unbundling” of the historian’s job in the classroom to having Frederick Taylor stand behind you with a stopwatch. Break up any job, and you can pay the people performing the component parts less – often much less. The folks who were livetweeting me seemed to think I was being combative, but I really do understand that nobody interested in MOOCs welcomes the virtual equivalent of academic Taylorization. My fear is that if we really do leave everything to the market, we’ll get this outcome nonetheless.

3) Ann Little

It really is a privilege to be able to hang with Historiann in the non-virtual world. For those of you who have never met her, she does indeed talk like she writes in the sense that she is both incredibly astute and hilarious at the same time. Funny story: I was going to avoid using the word “superprofessor” with two of them in the room because I thought it was too inflammatory, but Ann just dove right in. Therefore, I lapsed repeatedly by the end of the session too:

What MOOCs can’t do well:

1) MOOCs obscure the real work of teaching.
2) MOOCs make it difficult to teach controversial content.
3) Compares the upcoming MOOC and in-class version of Stephanie McCurry’s slavery class at U Penn. [The MOOC version is much easier.]

Professors face attacks on their politics first to soften us up for later budget attacks.
Quotes my Provost on us only working three days a week.
Will superprofessors be too afraid to cover race?
Students need to hear other people talking about controversial material.
Given a say in the matter, would students only pick Whiggish studies of progress?
Would polarization occur in a gender or sexuality class?
Would the discussion boards in a class like that look like the angriest corners of the Internet in general?
How will McCurry monitor the shocking nature of the material on the discussion board?
McCurry at Penn: Six books, primary sources and discussion section.
Her MOOC appears to have nothing but online primary sources.
Real education requires skin in the game from both sides, both the teacher and the student.

4) Jeremy Adelman:

Jeremy’s plan was to take Amtrak down from Princeton to DC in the morning, but there was that big snowstorm in the Northeast the night before. I was getting optimistic travel updates from him by e-mail the night before, but they kept getting more pessimistic as the reality of Amtrak under stress began to sink in. I was kidding him about making a dramatic entrance from the back of the room, and it turns out that’s exactly what he did – straight from Union Station, about 25 minutes before the end of the session. I don’t think he even took off his coat before he started talking:

“My attitude is experimental”
Starts with the fact that he doesn’t want to ban students taking notes on laptops.
Didn’t want to have an adversarial relationship with his students.
[This explains his interest in the flipped classroom.]
Interested in the promise of global learning.
His hope was the world could talk to itself.
Papers were the part of the MOOC that worked the least well.
Forums worked in the sense that there was global dialogue.
The problem was that there was less dialogue between Princeton students and the world.
Second version of his MOOC had Princeton students blogging for the global audience.
Princeton students didn’t want to go out and engage the planet.
From flipped classroom at Princeton, students got a lot out of lectures for the first time in 25 years.
Most MOOCs give certificates. We gave nothing. Going to change that.
Lifelong learners take relatively passive attitude toward learning.
Going through college without learning how to write is a problem.
Jeremy also announced (quite offhandedly) that he’s leaving Coursera.

That’s it for me for now. Hopefully, I’ll get some time to write something more reflective about this next week, but my semester starts a week from Monday and I still have syllabi to write (during those three days that I’m actually working).

Two days at the Library of Congress, studying baking powder.

Tomorrow I’m off to Washington, D.C. to spend two days at the Library of Congress, studying baking powder. This is for my biography of Harvey W. Wiley, the first head of what would eventually be called the FDA. I’ve been writing the chapters one food at a time, and while I thought studying alum would lead me to adulterated white flour it turns out Wiley spent most of his time on alum arguing with the baking powder interests. Perhaps I’ll even figure out what baking powder does without having to watch an old episode of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats.”

Oh yeah, in the middle of those two days I’ll be at a convention full of historians talking about MOOCs with my old friend Historiann and my new friend (and former frequenter of the comments of this blog), Jeremy Adelman. I would post my paper here, but they tell me we’re all going to be in the teaching section of AHA Perspectives in February so you’ll have to wait ’til then to read it (a month later if you’re not a subscriber). I did, however, just give my permission for HNN to tape my session. If all the paperwork went through, I’ll link there in a new post when I see it up.

If you’re around, I might also run into you at a couple of receptions. I think I might leave the Manuscripts Reading Room early on Thursday to go to this one, which strikes me as an excellent idea. And hopefully somebody will tell me where the Wisconsin reception is this time around. Maybe the chair could tweet it this year…hint, hint? Or did Scott Walker outlaw discretionary spending altogether?

“Unbundle yourself!”

As you might imagine, Mitchell Duneier is my new hero. In case you missed it when everyone on Twitter was sharing this story this morning, I’m quoting the Chronicle:

Mitchell Duneier once was a MOOC star. But today he’s more like a conscientious objector. Worried that the massive open online courses might lead legislators to cut state-university budgets, the Princeton University sociology professor has pulled out of the movement—at least for now.

After teaching introductory sociology through Coursera last year, Mr. Duneier extolled his experience in a Chronicle commentary. The New York Times featured him on its front page, and Thomas L. Friedman wrote about him in a column. One of Coursera’s founders, Daphne Koller, plugged his course in a TED talk.

But Mr. Duneier has now ceased teaching his sociology MOOC. The change of heart happened, he says, after Coursera approached him about licensing his course so other colleges could use the content in a blended format, meaning a mix of online and face-to-face instruction. That could save the colleges money.

“I’ve said no, because I think that it’s an excuse for state legislatures to cut funding to state universities,” Mr. Duneier says. “And I guess that I’m really uncomfortable being part of a movement that’s going to get its revenue in that way. And I also have serious doubts about whether or not using a course like mine in that way would be pedagogically effective.”

Now let’s get all the players straight here before we move on: Duneier created a MOOC at Princeton, the MOOC producer, for Coursera, the MOOC provider. Coursera wanted to license his content to two other schools, Maryland and Akron, (MOOC consumers) so that their professors could use parts of Duneier’s MOOC in their courses. Duneier is against this because 1) This might encourage state legislatures to cut funding to those schools and 2) He doesn’t think this is good pedagogy.

While it doesn’t come up once in the article directly, this is really an issue of flipped classrooms. While I don’t know if Professor Duneier did it at Princeton, but other superprofessors (including his Princeton colleague Jeremy Adelman, who’s quoted at length at the bottom of the article) have used their own lectures to flip themselves. Students watch videos of the professor’s own lectures, then discuss that material with the same professor in class.

You don’t need a MOOC provider to flip your own class. [See Jen Ebbeler’s blog if you want stories from an example.] However, MOOC providers stand to make a lot more money if you do this with their content rather than generating content of your own. This is where trouble could be brewing.

This really shouldn’t be controversial: Whether you flip and how your flip should be the choice of the professor, not administrators. And I’m not just talking academic freedom here, I’m talking professional survival. This, to me at least, was easily the most chilling part of that whole story:

William E. Kirwan, Maryland’s chancellor, told The Sun, in Baltimore, that “there are two things we’re seeking: new strategies that will improve learning outcomes, and lower costs.”

“We can’t have one without the other,” he said.

Where do you think the cost-savings will come from: Buying and operating the tech? I don’t think so. That’s practically a promise to use tech to slash labor costs in the future by separating educational content generation from the act of teaching it. And Kirwan doesn’t have to order faculty to unbundle themselves in order to make it happen – he can simply start new classes in which using MOOCs is a requirement of getting the job in the first place. At first, those will probably be the classes that will be taught by adjuncts. In the future, it’s just about anyone’s guess.

It’s time for more superprofessors to pay attention to what’s going on around them and act accordingly like Duneier has done. Hopefully the terms of their mostly secret contracts (assuming they even have contracts) will still make that possible.