teaching

Today's Thomas Friedman column notes the growing craze at major universities for massively open online courses, or MOOCs: "The Professors’ Big Stage".

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.

The theme of the column is that education must change, because:

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

Most great teachers are not at Harvard. It does seem possible that a ratchet effect will kick in, making free online courses better and better, until bad college professors must change their game. There is a visible lack of institutional quality assurance on most college courses.

On the other hand, there already is a strong competition among college professors in textbook authoring. We haven't seen a ratcheting effect, with better and better textbooks. Instead, we've seen textbooks metastasize with unneeded features, supplements, and cumbersome licenses. MOOCs are free, for now, so maybe they'll avoid the pressures that affect the textbook market.

An article on the way MOOCs are (or may be) changing university priorities: "What MOOCs Will, Won’t, and Might Do".

He says many faculty members have been more focused on research instead of teaching in the past. Open education classes are changing that. Because of MOOCs and Princeton’s upcoming participation in Coursera, “The conversations about teaching (at Princeton) have gone from 0 to 60 on our campus,” he says. Princeton faculty who used to brush off discussions geared toward improving their teaching are now eager to have such discussions, he says.

Much discussion of this concept around right now. I think that there is great potential here, to redirect resources to allow each faculty member to teach the material in which she or he is most expert, and to enable students to learn introductory material from the best teachers. But that would really take a shift away from the idea that you need a single faculty member in the classroom 3 hours a week for a whole semester.

Another teaching-related post today, this one pointing to a post by Marc Bousquet: "Robots are grading your papers!" It's about the sterile repetition of the same style of writing in college courses. As the linked post discusses, research is showing that algorithms can produce the same grades for such work as human graders. What does this mean about the typical college-level writing assignment?

It seems possible that what really troubles us about the success of machine assessment of simple writing forms isn’t the scoring, but the writing itself–forms of writing that don’t exist anywhere in the world except school. It’s reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already-mechanized forms–writing designed to be mechanically produced by students, mechanically reviewed by parents and teachers, and then, once transmuted into grades and sorting of the workforce, quickly recycled. As Evan Watkins has long pointed out, the grades generated in relation to this writing stick around, but the writing itself is made to disappear. Like magic? Or like concealing the evidence of a crime?

Is this the same as my feeling last week that instructors shouldn't assign work they don't want to read ("Against onanistic essays")? Grading by computer does require clear objectives and outcomes, which probably increases the overall learning. We want students who can surpass the form, but they need to be able to understand and meet the form first.

UPDATE (2013-01-16): The rest of the article has some really good insight about the nature of teaching scholarly writing. For example:

So why don’t we teach that relationship to scholarly discourse, the kind represented by the skill of summary in Howard’s research? Why don’t we teach students to compose a representative review of scholarship on a question? On the sound basis of a lit review, we could then facilitate an attempt at a modest original contribution to a question, whether it was gathering data or offering new insight.

The fact is, I rarely run into students at the B.A. or M.A. level who have been taught the relationship to source material represented by compiling a representative literature review. Few even recognize the term.

Bousquet also draws attention to the way that hackneyed conventions of journalism have contributed to poor teaching of writing. I think his take is elitist and counterproductive in some ways, but he is certainly correct that good models for nonfiction writing are not widely used in the teaching of writing.

Many professors and instructors are starting semesters in the next week or two, me among them. As I'm preparing materials for my spring course, I'll post a few things that I've found useful to shake things up in class.

Many readers will remember my post from last year, "Best practices and tips for Twitter in the higher-ed classroom". It has been consistently one of my top posts since I wrote it last year, and I've gotten some Twitter traffic for it this month. I thought it would be worth a link in case anyone is thinking of adding Twitter interaction to a course and may not have seen it.