DIY U

So I contributed a free post, adapted from the book, to Forbes magazine’s America’s Best Colleges issue, which I understand is concerned more with value-for-money than other college rankings. Here’s an excerpt:

“The essence of learning is found neither inside nor outside the classroom, neither online nor offline. It’s in the flow from lived experience and practice, to listening, researching, and sharing the fruits of your work with a community and back out to the world again. Now that so much high-quality information is available for free–like the 1,900 courses on MIT Open Courseware–and platforms to allow people to exchange words, images and sound online are exploding in use, many of us are excited about the possibilities of self-organized education that is pared down to this essence, thus affordable, efficient and accessible. But whether or not you attend a traditional university, you will need to trace this path again and again, from experience to theory, from empirical to abstract, from action to reflection, from real to ideal, in order to keep learning throughout your life.

Today there’s a lot of emphasis on getting the best value for money in higher education. This is important. But the most important resource in higher education is free. That’s the motivated learner. That’s you.”

I have a new feature in the September issue of Fast Company which connects with DIY U. I was interested in the idea that TED is creating an education brand that is both OPEN and ELITE.

There are several obvious objections to the Harvard comparison:
-TED doesn’t grant degrees.
However, after speaking to many speakers, attendees, and TED fellows, I feel that association with the big TED conference, in person can confer some of the same benefits as an elite degree. Many participants talked about “having TED on a resume.”
There’s a potential wrinkle here in that the TEDx phenomenon dilutes the brand, not for TED itself but for participants. I spoke to one fellow who was plucked from obscurity to do a TED talk a couple of years ago and while it had great effects on his career, he says that these days when he says he’s done a TED talk people say, “Oh, TED New York? TED DC?” and he has to say, no, the REAL TED.
-TED doesn’t directly sponsor serious research or scholarship. No labs, no libraries.
However, it does connect scholars with donors, directly expanding the resources available for their work; and it gets them massive exposure, indirectly expanding the public’s support for this work. This hinges on the scholars’ ability to make their work vivid and meaningful to laypeople in an 18 minute speech. Should we ask any less of our best and brightest? Is this too trivial a task for a Nobel Prize winner? It shouldn’t be the only way we get resources to researchers because there is important work being done that’s too complicated and boring to be sold in this way, but it’s not a bad question to ask of them.
-TED doesn’t provide LEARNING but simply provides LECTURES.
This is true. Lectures=content and as David Wiley reminds us, content=infrastructure. It’s what you do on top of the infrastructure that counts–the conversations around, before, behind, and online. TED has done a lot to promote and facilitate that, especially by allowing people to adopt the TED structure.
-TED doesn’t pay its faculty!
Hrm. Yes, this is a bit of a problem. Do we want all of the world’s professors to have to operate as intellectual entrepreneurs, pandering for donations or shilling some (ahem) crappy book or another? No! Is there room for a class of really, really good lecturers who make their living in such a way, using free lectures as loss-leaders for the paid in-person appearances? Yes. Charles Dickens, Einstein, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among many thinkers who did not count themselves superior to conducting public lecture tours as a means of supplementing their income.

I’m interested to see what my ed-tech people feel was strong and what was missing from this account.

A strange milestone was marked this week in the history of student loans. The total balance of all outstanding US student loans (given as $730 billion in DIY U, based on OMB estimates) is now estimated by Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org at more like $830 billion–$605.6 billion in federally guaranteed student loans, which have interest rates fixed and in some cases interest subsidized by the government, and a further $167.8 billion in private student loans, with interest rates that hover around 18-20%. Furthermore, Kantrowitz says, $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.

This means the total balance of student loans has just surpassed the total balance of credit card debt for the first time in history. Each makes up roughly a third of the money Americans owe, mortgages excluded.

The good news here is that at least since the credit crisis in 2008, credit card debt has been going down slightly. Americans are saving more and spending less.

The bad news of course, is that student loan debt is much more severe than credit card debt, because it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. That means your only “recourse” if you can’t manage your loans is default and in the case of federal loans, that means being pursued until you die. The federal government can and will seize your tax refunds, Social Security and disability payments until your dying day.

From where I’m sitting the buildup of the national student loan balance looks like a massive betrayal of trust. People have been told for decades that this is “good” debt. In fact it’s really, really bad debt. Increasingly, high unmanageable debt burdens are falling on those least prepared to deal with the stresses and costs of college: the so called “nontraditional” adult working class student who is more and more likely to attend for-profit colleges that cost an average of around $14,000. And 40% and higher of these students are defaulting. (The same students default on their loans at higher rates when they attend for-profits, even controlling for demographics.)

This is starting to look more and more like the mortgage bubble. What was first depicted as an exapansion of opportunity now starts to look like a massive scam perpetrated on the socially disadvantaged . The difference is that while the mortgage bubble was happening, homeownership in the US actually rose to an all time high. Whereas while we were adding $300 billion to our national student loan tab, college attainment among young people actually fell.

Someone with experience in the for-profit college marketing business told me that the same online sales geniuses who used to work for mortgage brokers are now employed by for-profit colleges. Their business is the same: fill out the forms, get the money, consequences be damned. Will we stop them this time?

If you are moved to action, check out the good folks at Student Loan Justice , who advocate restoring bankruptcy protection for all student loans.

So I spoke yesterday by Skype to a graduate education class at Northeastern, and one of the questions was about tenure: the tradition of lifetime job security awarded to certain lucky members of university faculty, for the original purpose of protecting scholars with unpopular opinions.

I’m not sure that I agree that it’s important that I take a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive, approach. But I gave rather a convoluted answer to the class so I thought it would be a good idea to clarify, and then by coincidence a critic asked me to do the same thing this morning, so here goes.

The description of what’s happening with tenure is that it’s on its way out. The American Association of University Professors reported back in 2006 that as far back as 2003, part-time and full-time non-tenure-track positions accounted for 65% of all faculty positions in the US, and part-time positions alone accounted for nearly half the total.  That’s positions, not classroom time–if you look at actual classroom hours the percentage covered by non-tenure-track teachers is probably even higher than that. At community colleges, tenure is rarer still; at for-profits it’s unheard-of, so the future is not looking good for tenure hopefuls.

Before we play a violin for university profs, academic labor is not the only type of labor suffering “casualization.” I wrote extensively in Generation Debt about the general devolution of the American labor market toward “crap jobs.” The trend is away from secure, career-long positions with pensions and toward 401(k)s, diminished health care benefits, and freelance, part-time, and contract work. One in six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, and high long-term unemployment is likely to be the norm for quite some time.

Is this a bad trend? In part. It causes unneccessary suffering and anxiety for those who aren’t used to it. It’s unfair, as wealth gets ever-more concentrated at the top in this country and the middle class and the poor are hung out to dry. I also suspect that it’s inefficient, because when companies under-invest in their employees in this way, they are likely to get less productivity and commitment out of them in return, which means they’re leaving human capital resources on the table.

What should we do about it? Political action, perhaps organizing along the lines of the Freelancers’ Union. But even if it were likely to work, petitioning to return to the old system, for higher education teachers or anyone else, is not the best idea. Health care should be nationalized for the lowest costs and the greatest fairness to all, not provided through employers. For retirement benefits,  Social Security, 401(k)s and personal savings–local governments and private companies probably won’t be able to make good on all their pension promises to employees anyway. And all jobs don’t need to be full-time and lifetime-guaranteed to be good jobs. I think it’s a good thing in general for productivity and the sum total of human happiness for people to be able to work part time, quit if they don’t like it–or be fired if they’re very bad at their job.

That leaves the question of pay. I think salaries should be flatter across the economy, so I believe in both higher taxes and a higher minimum wage. Requiring the vast majority of our college teachers to survive on poverty wages–while it shows remarkable continuity with our earliest colonial history–probably isn’t the best idea if we want to elevate the craft of teaching.

How can college teachers make more money? If we could convince fewer people to get PhDs, it might dry up the supply of adjuncts and thus raise their wages. University teachers might be able to earn more by selling their services directly through platforms like Nixty and Knewton and Namaya. Or they might be able to earn more money by teaching more. BYU-Idaho, which is entirely focused on teaching undergraduates, has raised its faculty salary above industry standard but requires its professors to teach year-round–four credits per semester for 3 semesters. If we actually rated and compared colleges based on how good they are at undergraduate teaching, perhaps we could elevate the status of good professors as well as their pay.

Ultimately, if higher education succeeds in becoming more efficient, it will require fewer professors, because labor is the biggest expense in the system. But as David Autor’s work at MIT has shown, the jobs most likely to be eliminated by technology are midlevel clerical-type jobs. More prestigious, higher-paying jobs at the top of the scale can actually be created by increasing use of technology. In a world of increasing “unbundling” of the functions of the university, I could see the former job of the university professor splitting off into curriculum experts (who also have to be very good at the technology); mentors, or learner-experts; researchers; and assessment experts. In a world of increasing reuse and sharing of courseware, a good university should reward its teachers for creating course content that is adaptable, reusable, and reused.

What about academic freedom? I’m confused. I just don’t get it. I’m a journalist. Journalists, if they’re any good, air unpopular opinions all the time. Do they need tenure to protect their jobs, which are usually at for-profit publications that depend on the goodwill of advertisers? Is anyone worried that they get fired occasionally for disturbing the powers that be? It certainly happens. They even get killed sometimes.

164th New York, standing in inspection formation, ca.1863 from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

So prompted by a nonprofit that had some questions for me, I put out a call on Twitter for places to find excellent learning resources online. Chapter 7 of my book includes a resource guide that covers the best known places like MIT Open Courseware, the Open Courseware Consortium, Connexions, OER Commons, ItunesU,
http://academicearth.org/ and Youtube EDU. Here’s a bunch more that didn’t exist when I was writing the book or that I just didn’t know about. Thanks, Twitter folks!

I think what the world may still be waiting for is a centralized repository with a critical mass of users and community features, so that learners and educators can vote up or down, comment or modify the best stuff…and maybe a marketplace of commercial service providers on top of that to sell you a printed/curated/digitally remastered version of the material to meet a specific need, or to connect you with educators, or with assessors that can help you figure out how to get credit for a particular course…ok, I’m dreaming now.

STARTUPS
http://einztein.com/ Going into beta testing later this year, a place to find and vote on the best courseware resources online.

http://www.saylor.org/ Just started, but promising:organizing free courseware into academic programs or majors.

http://nixty.com/ Very interesting idea: designed as a platform to help educators create courses around open courseware, and help learners assemble portfolios of courses.

Smithsonian Commons (prototype) http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype/
A nascent attempt to make the nation’s archives freely available to the world.

DIRECTORIES
http://iberry.com/ A small nonprofit maintains this very large open courseware directory for higher learning. Cool community features: anyone can submit or comment on a link. They also have a section on learner support networks built around open courseware.

http://freelearning.ca/ A collaborative initiative of British Columbia’s colleges featuring lots of cool stuff, including a Kayak-like Google search box that combs lots of OER sites for learning resources.

Learning is For Everyone An organization for homeschoolers presents this curated list of resources by subject, from arts to economics and K through adult.

Muskogee Public Schools K-12 Open Ed Wiki Just like it says. A list of resources for K-12.

SUBJECT SPECIFIC

(history)  http://www.gilderlehrman.org/

A multimedia resources site for teachers on 19th century black history http://www.craftingfreedom.org/. This site follows the lives of nine African-Americans born into slavery in the 19th century, with videos and lesson plans. It happens to be by my aunt, Laurel Sneed. I imagine there may be hundreds on this model, lovingly crafted repositories of resources that are openly available to teachers.

(web design) http://interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/

http://teachingwithted.pbworks.com/ A wiki about teaching with TED.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/ New York Times content for teachers.

OTHER

Around Venezia from Icam on Vimeo.

Video from Openculture.com
http://www.openculture.com/ Clearly a well-edited blog and site bringing a TEDster sensibility to chronicling “the best” cultural & educational media on the web. I am going to bookmark these and would look here for highbrow entertainment as much as for “lifelong learning.” Also! A list of language lessons in various languages. Love!

Got more? Post in the comments!

Well, this is deflating. Here I have been extolling the teaching benefits of various widespread technologies, many of which are not particularly new, in the grand scheme of things (Blogs, about 10 years old. Video games, at least 25 years old).  I have also been accused of not giving traditional universities or professors credit for being great innovators.

Many of them are. But these survey results would seem to indicate that the vast majority are not. They use their Learning Management Software (at least the gradebooks and syllabus features) but when it comes to anything else, they don’t bother.

Many folks on Twitter asked “How do we change that?”

Here’s some thoughts.

“The first step may be teaching the teachers how to use those tools” said @Hutchirish on Twitter.

I actually disagree.  I think that the beauty of the current generation of social media is that anyone who’s motivated can pick up the basics of these tools in a couple of minutes. Remember, we’re talking about a highly educated, intelligent group of people here. There are 70 million blogs out there and 120,000 are being created every day. There are 500 million members of Facebook and several million on Twitter, and almost 190 million households will soon have videogame players. How many of these millions of people had to be explicitly instructed in the use of these technologies?

I don’t think professors aren’t using these technologies because they don’t know how. The reality is a little more complicated.

@Chanders writes, “You’re prepping to teach a class you’ve never taught . You’ve a month. What should you do: learn social software or class content?”

I actually think this is a real question, not a rhetorical one; and it’s a much broader problem with university teaching in general. I think it’s far more important to know how to teach than to necessarily know all the content the course is supposed to put across, because teaching is not supposed to be about feeding forward information.

Whereas pre-K-12 teachers, in order to be certified, receive at least nominal instruction in the practice of instruction itself, from what I understand it’s possible to get a PhD or an MFA or even just be a graduate student on the path to a degree, and get stuck in front of classes full of undergraduates with zero instruction in how to teach. Nor, from everything I understand about how the professoriat works, are professors generally subject to any kind of organized professional development on teaching practice. I don’t remember my parents going to weekend workshops on how to conduct writing seminars at Louisiana State University.

Nor generally do they get rewarded directly for how well their students perform or master information (although they may catch flak via student evaluations if their students don’t LIKE them). In fact all of the work they do to prepare for their classes, if they are lucky enough to be tenure track, is considered to be taking away from their real work of publishing and scholarship. (If they are adjuncts, the work they do to prepare for their classes is likely to be done on the train or during downtime on their shifts at their second job!)

Consider that this system, which doesn’t prepare professors to teach, doesn’t particularly reward them for teaching well, and prefers that they do other things rather than getting better at teaching on their own time–consider the arrogance of the fact that this system considers itself the best kind of teaching there is. Once you get through 12 years of being taught by folks trained and certified in actual pedagogy, only then you are deemed worthy of studying with real scholars–ie, people who know only the content of their own field. And it is held to be self-evident, by the professors themselves, that whatever they come up with to do in their classrooms with no oversight or instruction about how to do it–is a far, far better learning experience then some stupid research-based learning software or some dumb award-winning video lecture by the most fascinating and brilliant expert in the world. Do you prefer wandering into a random regional theater and sitting through an original play by the local Corky St. Clair or Netflixing a five-star film of your choice?

So, the reason most profs don’t use blogs, or wikis, or Google Docs, or videoconferencing or video games or even clickers in their lectures, is probably because they don’t see why they should, they’re not being supported to learn why they should and they wouldn’t be rewarded for it even if they did. It’s an exceptional minority who will endeavor to innovate and be excellent under those circumstances.

If you want to change that you probably have to change the circumstances.

I came to Vancouver on Sunday to give a speech and wandered into a delightful bookstore called MacLeod’s. It’s a classic–crammed with piles and piles of used books from fancy leatherbound volumes to mass-market 1970s paperbacks. I picked out 3 books inside of five minutes and I knew the longer I stayed, the more I would end up buying. I seek out bookstores wherever I travel, because they just make me happy. I come from a family of writers and my parents’ house has so many books in it that a contractor once told them the weight was causing a structural problem.

All of which makes it ironic, I guess, that I just wrote a piece for the New York Times arguing, in the words of Judy Baker, “The traditional printed textbook, homogenized, vanilla version, is basically the Hummer of higher education.” It would be preferable both for teaching and for costs, for professors to draw on and contribute to free and open digital repositories of learning resources. In the more than 40 comments to my piece, the objections to this point of view can be summarized as follows:

1) Who is going to reward the creators of these learning resources? To the extent that it’s part of teaching practice, it should be covered by their salaries. If there are more specialized curriculum experts they can be paid for that, as part of the “unbundling” of teaching functions.

2) Printed books still have advantages over online versions.

2a) There’s still a digital divide and poorer students or those in foreign countries may not have access to high-speed internet or appliances.

The latest Kindle costs $189, which is as much as a single textbook can cost. High-speed Internet access is rapidly becoming a requisite for participation in modern life and a college education is no exception.

2b) I just don’t like reading on a screen.

This is probably the toughest one for me. I love paper books too. But I don’t think students should be forced to spend $1000 a year on them.

Lately the NYT has been alive with stories and commentary about college students cheating using amazing new technological techniques like CTRL-C and CTRL-V.

I came across Goodhart’s Law in my web wanderings several weeks ago and it’s been knocking about in my mind ever since. Basically it states that when you attempt to pick a few easily defined metrics as proxy measures for the success of any plan or policy, you immediately distract or bait people into pursuing the metrics, rather than pursuing the success of the policy itself.  The mythical example is Soviet factories:

“When given targets on the basis of numbers of nails produced many tiny useless nails, when given targets on basis of weight produced a few giant nails.”

This is hard stuff because it’s human nature to want to distill big complicated goals down into a few easy to understand numbers, and it seems efficient from a change-making perspective as well. Yet we can all see the bad outcomes from an overreliance on the numbers: Police districts (ok, on The Wire) manipulating murder cases to come out better on COMSTAT ; School districts and states lowering standards and encouraging learning disabled kids to stay home on test days, so they look better under No Child Left Behind tests. I also see how it works in my own life: I have a log on my iPod nano of how many times I’ve used the stopwatch to time my regular 2.8 mile run over the bridge. But then I started to turn it on when I go to the gym, or on lazy days when I only run half as far, because it makes the stats (number of times I worked out this month) look better.

In the case of college cheaters, we methodically train students for years to define their worth and their tasks in school extrinsically by grades and test scores (see No Child Left Behind, above). Then we give them boring assignments–test questions that aren’t updated from year to year, and papers that don’t require introspection or individual response. Then we pretend to be shocked when they respond just like Stakhanovites in a Soviet factory, turning out more and more of shoddier and shoddier product.

The answer is simple: we’re measuring the wrong things.

Remember the Woody Allen joke? I cheated on my metaphysics midterm–I looked into the soul of the student sitting next to me.

If professors were looking into students’s souls, and truly asking students to look into their own souls, then cheating might be less of an issue.  Would you still turn in a shoddy, cut-and-pasted paper  if it wasn’t just between you and your professor–your work was out there on the web for friends and family members and future employees to see?  What if it was a collaborative project where you were responsible for other team members’ grades as well as your own? The interpersonal stakes are certainly raised then. Or what if the topic of the class was one that you chose to study, one that was close to your heart? What if there was real trust and a bond between you and your professor?

I really liked what Alfie Kohn had to say about this on the Room for Debate blog, and I plan to download one of his books.

Here’s the links from my presentation:

Speak! The Miseducation of College Students

Tim O’Reilly on Education as an Open System (vide0)

Open Courseware Consortium

iTunes U

TED

Academic Earth

Khan Academy

Einztein

Saylor

Flat World Knowledge

Open Learning Initiative

“Online Programs Push for More Interaction”, Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2010

National Center for Academic Transformation

2Tor

StudyBlue

UMWBlogs

Excelsior College

Straighterline

Behance

Koda

I thank the folks who asked me for these resources and who told me they got something valuable out of the presentation. I also thank John Fontaine, Jonathon Lunardi and the rest of the team at Blackboard for inviting me and treating me very, very nicely. Still, I have to say that I was kinda disappointed by the first question that I got, the gist of which was “Why should we, the technologists, be charged with making change in higher education? Shouldn’t you be talking to the students & the faculty?”

Well, yes, I do talk to students and faculty (visiting at least six campuses this September/October), and parents and college counselors and anyone else who will listen, but technologists have special tools and capacities to make change and so therefore it is both your responsibility and your opportunity to do so. That was the thrust of my entire presentation so it was disappointing to note that it didn’t come across to everyone, as evinced by Tweets like this one and this one.

I’ll quote Josh Kim from Inside Higher Ed on this point:

“Technology will be one of the essential factors if we hope to bend the educational cost curve…The leadership within our institutions, the presidents and provosts and deans and chairs etc., should be asking the CIOs and the academic technology directors about how we can increase productivity. And people in educational technology leadership positions should be making this our number one priority. We all need to participate and succeed in bending the educational cost curve.”

I’ll be first to admit that the speech I gave yesterday was not the best speech I’ve ever given, and it’s unfair to characterize an audience by a few naysayers. Still, I have to contrast this attitude with the glowing, excited reception that took place at Sakai a few weeks ago. I have to wonder if the most important reason to advocate openness is the difference in outlook and culture between a community of developers and a group of clients of a product/service.

Update: to expand on my last sentence per request: it’s the vending-machine analogy. If a university as a whole, and CIOs in particular, are labeled “clients” of a service like Blackboard, isn’t it more likely that they’ll conceptualize “technology” as a service to be consumed, a set of tools that either works or it doesn’t to do a predetermined group of things. It’s a very narrow, external-locus-of-control way of thinking about the role of tech in higher education. Two different audience members expressed this attitude to me as coming from faculty, namely “if I put my syllabus up on the web, I’ve “done my job” as far as technology goes.”

On the other hand,  if the institutions and the CIOs are engaged in developing the set of tools, ideally they’ll be thinking actively about the return on that investment and the possible ways to use tech to reinforce all kinds of institutional goals, not just those that are predetermined or pre-defined.

Obviously, this is just an ideal, and the Sakai folks talked to me about resistance from faculty too, and I don’t want to be accused of idealizing openness, but there it is. That’s the difference I’m alluding to.

Tom Robischon (pictured) writes:

“My enthusiasm is fired in large measure by my history of pursuing educational alternatives over the 47 years of college teaching.  College had been such a transformative experience for me–at a state college derisively called a cow college because of its agriculture specialization.  But I had the unusual opportunity to choose about 65% of my courses, and I came to love learning–for its own sake.  That’s what led me to go into academic life after I received my doctorate from Columbia.  (It was in philosophy, and “philosophy bakes no bread,” we were warned in grad school.)  I wanted the institutions where I taught to produce opportunities for students to also go through self-transformations.  Some of my students did, but I wanted every student in the school to go through it, but higher education, I was to discover, was more thought than action.  I used to think a warning should be posted outside faculty meetings: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here!”"

And a college counselor at a private high school writes:

“I concur that higher ed has been undergoing a sea change and will continue to do so for a number of years. As somebody who has worked inside and along the ivory tower since 1986, the never-ending transformation has been very interesting.

For the past couple of years, I’ve advised my students (I’m currently employed at a private high school) that it is not so much where you go but what skill set you develop during your time in college. Internships, research and study abroad are the experiences I push for each and every student. Of course, they look at me and say, “Nice, but I just want to get in and THEN I will figure it out.” So much for planning ahead. Sigh. . .”