Hi My Name is Dan and I'll be Your Server

In a talk on October 14 blogger Audrey Watters described a dystopian future in which there were only 10 universities in the world.  The narrative arc of her provocation was that the rest of the "industry" would be replaced by variations on MOOCs and distance learning.  The real point of her talk (spoiler warning) was that this was not a necessary future, but one that some contemporary educational visionaries' ideas are pointing that direction, whether they know it or not.

I envision a different dystopian higher education landscape.  In my version, the rest of the institutions do not disappear.  Instead, they become "outlets" or "franchisees" of a small number of education "suppliers."  The business model analogy that's most apt, I think, will be chain restaurants.  Think about the food court at the airport or the restaurants in a strip mall or scattered around either suburbia or most city centers. This will happen because small colleges and universities will face the "make or buy" decision and everything will point in the direction of buy -- that is, to outsource the core educational content functions.

The entrepreneurs who run these establishments deliver a dining experience to customers who more or less beat a path to their door.  For better or worse they get a dependably consistent product.  It's challenging for others to compete with them because they have all the advantages of scale and name recognition and proven processes of food preparation.

If you look around at the contemporary practices of the big education companies (mostly publishers) and countless education startups, what you will see are the seeds of an industry that will (or want to) capture the entire constellation of things that happen in colleges and universities with the exception of student faculty contact, student-student contact, and research.  Before long we will likely see a separating out of education per se and research (for better or worse, well underway), then we can move toward a future in which colleges and universities partner with the education franchisors.  The colleges will be able to put a local wrapper on the experience and they'll have faculty and staff to "deliver" it, but the actual content, practices, and raw materials will be provided by the supplier.

What role will faculty and staff play?  Hard to say.  But if the best we can muster in defense of the ways we do college education is some variation on "relationships matter" then we might well find that that's the only part we (the we now is "we faculty") will play will be to serve up the corporate content and help students to get the most out of the experience.

Like Watters' narrative, not a necessary future, just a possible one.  To avoid it, I think we need to pay attention to efficiency and productivity within our institutions.  Otherwise, we'll get lapped by entities that are so much more productive that our claim to difference in kind will be drowned out.

CLAIM: Credit Hours as a Basis for Educational Accounting Will Disappear

There's lots of talk about competencies versus seat time as a means for tracking educational achievement.  I'm not sure if I think of this more as a prediction or a recommendation, but I suspect credits and credit hours will fall by the wayside over the next decade.

This is tricky business for a number of reasons.  Post-Bologna Process European higher education has actually moved more in the direction of a credit system (ECTS) motivated by the principle that students should be able to move around among institutions and across national borders.  Similar concerns exist in the US system where maintaining the pathway from junior colleges to four year institutions is a priority.

The credit hour is also intimately tied to the tuition-driven business model.  Measuring learning in terms of inputs translates easily to designing the college or university in terms of easily tracked outputs and tying these to the main factors that go into producing them: teaching and classrooms.  We can depend on a degree amounting to about 4 years of tuition paid to somebody and it helps to regulate the flow of people through the process.  A side benefit of this is that it also ensures an average level of maturation during the process -- regardless of the effect of the education itself, students are at least about four years older  Accounting for education in terms of credits also makes it possible to avoid the actually difficult tasks of comparable evaluation and certification.

But there are a number of things that weigh in favor of this outcome:

• For better or worse, conversations about the bottom line quality of degrees shifts the focus from time spent in school to what was learned there
• An ever widening distribution of levels of academic preparation will require more and more remedial and introductory level instruction unless the entire model shifts to simply "value added" (as in, the students know more at the end than at the beginning but with varying levels of achievement depending on the starting point)
• The availability of alternative learning venues will undermine our capacity to say, in effect, "you have to learn it from me."
• In the extreme our monopoly on the credential itself could easily be threatened by alternative certification processes.
• The trans-disciplinary nature of the problems of the next fifty years will almost certainly require graduates to solve them via intellectual "mash-ups" that combine knowledge that may or may not come in 14 week sized chunks.
• Organizationally, most institutions of higher learning are not nimble enough to respond to changes in their environments using courses, majors, and traditional departments.  Abandoning credits is one way to acquire some nimbleness without dismantling the entire system.

Of course, the conversation will go nowhere in the absence of a viable alternative.  Contemporary views vary, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that we have not yet figured out what might replace the credit hour.  The ECTS and the United Kingdom's Qualifications and Credit System and Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile all manner of "badges" proposals are among the frameworks that are out there.  Missing from all of them, I think, is an exploration of their impact on the organization of our institutions.  That would seem to be a necessary component if we want to move the conversation forward.

See also

1. Carey, Kevin. 2012. "Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?" New York Times December 9, 2012
2. European Commission. 2013. European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) 
3. Fain, Paul. 2012. "More Cracks in the Credit Hour." Inside Higher Ed December 5, 2012
4. Schneider, Carol Geary. 2012. "Is It Finally Time to Kill the Credit Hour?" Liberal Education Fall 2012, Vol. 98, No. 4
5. Tsigelny, Igor F. 2011. "Educational Credits in the USA and Credit Transfer from the UK and European Union." Analytical Reports in International Education Vol. 4. No. 1, November 2011, pp. 87-93
6. WES staff members. 1999. Working with ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) 
7. Young, Jeffrey R. 2012. “‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8.

State of the Art

Came across this email to myself from a spring 2011:

I found it to be a surprisingly uncritical book review masquerading as an essay. Several of the books mentioned along the way are terribly flawed and yet all we get is some gentlemanly disagreement about tenure or salaries. The stuff that's passing as social science-ish commentary on higher education should alarm us.

I don't recall what book that was; unfortunately, many plausible candidates.

Facilitating Course Level R&D in an Educational Bureaucracy

My institution developed an online tool for proposing new courses and/or revising existing courses.  It is called the Course Approval and Revision Process (CARP).  The software presents 8 screens on which the instructor has to enter information that goes into a course database.  The sections are:

1. Basic Course Info.
2. Related Courses
3. Instruction Schedule
4. Grading & Restrictions
5. Learning Goals
6. Measures of Student Learning
7. Assessment Plan
8. Library Resources (Optional)

Who or what is this operation for?  It is built around the needs of a committee (the Educational Policy Subcommittee of the Faculty Executive Committee) that reviews courses before they are set before the faculty for approval.  A few other entities have also found themselves "represented" by the software.  These include the learning assessment operation run by the Office of Institutional Research and the General Education committee.

Fundamental Design Flaw

This system is designed to serve the bureaucracy.  For it to function, instructors have to be coerced to transform what they do in thinking about a course into the form that CARP can digest.
The right design would be to produce a tool that instructors would find useful and from which CARP could transparently extract what it needed.

How It Works in Practice

Instructors need to specify things like course title and description, what sorts of instruction it will include, how often it will be offered, whether there are pre-requisites, and how it will be graded.  These constitute items 1 through 4 above.  Then, items 5, 6, and 7 are about assessment.  The program picks up learning goals from the institution and from the department's records in the assessment database.  That's actually pretty useful as it means each person who proposes a new course gets to see how lame the existing learning goals are.  Unfortunately, since the goal is to get the course approved, the result is usually just that the instructor picks a few.

Then, for each goal checked, the instructor has to specify "measurable criteria."  Fortunately, the software does not yet have any AI components that can reject work in progress; one can move on by entering "TBA" as long as one repeats it enough times to hit the minimum text length requirement.

Then you haver to enter an "assessment plan."  This means describing assignments that will be used to measure student learning and then a plan for assessing student learning.  The difference between these is pretty vague, but they do have examples.  Here is what you learn about assignments:

The purpose of assessment is to improve learning. The focus of the learning is the established goals. The assessment plan is the way in which the course will be measured to determine the level of learning in the course relevant to the goals and criteria that are established for the course in order to improve the learning in the course. What evidence is collected (e.g., papers, exams, presentations, etc.)? How is the evidence evaluated against the goals for the course (e.g. rubrics, performance evaluations, etc.)? How will the evaluations be recorded (e.g., scores tabulated, written summaries, etc.)? On what basis will conclusions be drawn about the learning taking place? What will be done with the findings?

And here is an example of the assessment plan.  Or, no, we will not quote that here because it is so lame we can just describe it:  final papers will be rated on a four point scale for each learning goal.  The aggregate results will be discussed at a department meeting and plans will be made to improve.

That last step is called in the assessment business "closing the loop."

But what if this process were actually designed, start to finish, with actual teachers in mind?  What would it look like?  That's where we will go next.

Course Level R&D

Where do new (innovative, exciting) courses come from?  How do we encourage the continuous improvement of existing courses?  What do we even mean by that?

The improvement of an existing course might mean:

• adjusting the topics covered by the course so as to be more up to date, more useful to students, better coordinated with other courses (reducing duplication or improving sequencing)
• making it more attractive to students to increase enrollment
• making it more fun for those who take it
• making it more effective for those who take it
• making it easier to teach

Some of the ways that these things could be achieved are sometimes mistaken as being course improvements in and of themselves--using the latest teaching techniques; using more technology--but we are only interested in this as possible means to the above ends.

The usual source of the kind of changes we have in mind are: imitation, inspiration, and mandate.  An instructor adopts what sounds like a good practice from a colleague, suddenly gets an idea for a cool thing to do in the class, or she is told by a chair or dean to start doing X.

As Bill McKay once intoned, "There's got to be a better way!"

And as teachers by vocation we should be really interested in exploring these.  

An App Proposal

What if there were an application environment that would allow an instructor to organize her materials, present the material to students, track their performance, perform experiments, engage in continuous course revision, collaborate with others teaching the same course at her institution, a related course at another institution, and those teaching this course's pre-requisites and courses for which this course is a pre-requisite, AND have a current version of the course always on file with the central administration.

Features

1. Standard course management system (CMS)
2. The "Lecture Studio" - a platform for lecture/presentation preparation
1. Standard lectures and slide shows but also video/audio, clickers, etc.
2. Record a screen capture
3. Record a video
4. Record an audio
5. Slide library
6. Graphics library
3. Exercise/problem bank
1. Templates for problem production (allows show/don't show answer)
1. Graphic production tools and data driven problems
2. Shared problems
3. Item testing facility
4. Community with others teaching same or similar course
5. Syllabus management system with revision and forking capability (GitHub for courses)
6. Course module management: break courses into free-standing modules with clear pre-requisites and "antigens" that help determine where they will fit.
7. Integrated web bookmark organizing (social bookmarking by others teaching same course)
8. Integrated custom textbook capability
9. Integrated with library databases (contract with content providers to make journal articles available on course by course basis)
10. Integrate with your Zotero bibliography (and your associated PDF library) making it easy to include correct bibliographic information in course materials AND to assemble readers.
11. Narrative evaluation diary
12. Maybe throw in a good calendar function too.  One that had the capacity to track hours spent on teaching.
13. Social media window?  You-tube channel channel?

First stage of development to be a clustering of existing sources in an orderly fashion.  Start to develop organizational tools that would help someone deploying them keep things coordinated, organized, and minimize transaction costs and duplication of effort.

And in this corner, Minerva, goddess of wisdom...

Another online education venture in the news yesterday as "The Minerva Project" announced it had recruited Steve Kosslyn (most recently director of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and before that Dean of Social Sciences at Harvard) as first dean (http://bit.ly/ZQ1JYT). 

The "Minerva Project (dot com)" : http://www.minervaproject.com/ has been around for about a year now. Their advisory board includes Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, and Bob Kerrey, ex- of the New School. Unlike Coursera and EdX, their model seems to be a little more of a direct competition with the "college experience."

They have a focus on quick progress to advanced courses that starts with a fixed introductory curriculum ("During their freshman year, all students will follow the same core curriculum focused on subjects including multimodal communications and complex-systems analysis.") and movement among several physical campuses around the world. Some sources have price point about $20k and initial recruitment focus on brightest minds in the developing world. Iniital campus (2015) to be in San Francisco.

It would behoove us (faculty) to stay on top of developments like this. The alternative is that we are going to hear about it from boards of trustees and college presidents who have been wowed at conferences and in the higher-ed-admin-media (a phenomenon we might call UVAitis). Consider this from Kerrey:

"What he's got is one of the best private-education ideas I've ever heard," says Kerrey. "I think he's going to be successful, and as a consequence, university presidents across the country are going to be able to say to their boards and their faculties, 'We have to change.' He's going to have a very, very positive impact on all of higher education in America." Leigh Buchanan, "A True Elite Education at Half the Price," Inc. Magazine, 30 October 2012 (http://bit.ly/ZPXqgj) 

Sources 

• (http://bit.ly/ZQ1JYT) "Minerva Project Wins Leading Stanford Scholar," EdSurge Blog Tony Wan, EdSurge 12 March 2013 
• (http://bit.ly/Z1NHPx) "Minerva Project: Positioning and EdTech Questions" Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, April 4, 2012 
• (http://bit.ly/ZPYdOc) "A New "Elite University" Gets $25 Million in Seed Funding," Inside Higher Ed, Audrey Watters April 3, 2012 
• (http://bit.ly/ZPYBfK) "An Idea Too Sensible to Try, Until Now," Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2012

King & Sen on (Trouble) Future of Universities

Gary King (Harvard) and Maya Sen (Rochester) apply solid political science analysis to the challenges facing contemporary higher education. They consider market threats, political threats, and the potential for wise responses by universities and colleges.

Other papers from the symposium:

• Editor's Introduction 
• "Chin Up; Chest Out; Don't Panic" by Michael Laver 
• “Let's Not Railroad American Higher Education!” by Henry E. Brady 
•  “Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Innovation, Adaptation, Preservation” by Nannerl O. Keohane 
• Comments on “The Troubled Future of College and Universities” by Virginia Sapiro 
• "Paying the Piper: Higher Education Financing and Academic Freedom” by John Mark Hansen

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King and Sen on Using Social Science to Improve Teaching

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