The author is Michael Geist who is described as follows ...
Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has a Bachelor of Laws degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law from Columbia.
Hmmm ... that's interesting. A lawyer with no obvious expertise in education is writing about education. Let's see what he has to say ...
... in recent weeks it has become increasingly clear that the future of education is here, though it is not evenly distributed. The emerging model flips the current approach of expensive textbooks, closed research, and limited access to classroom-based learning on its head, instead featuring open course materials, open access to scholarly research, and Internet-based courses that can simultaneously accommodate thousands of students. The concern is that other countries are becoming first adopters, while Canada lags behind.
Are online courses a good thing, a bad thing, or relatively neutral? There's much to debate.
The main issue, as far as I'm concerned, is pedagogical. Are online courses a good way to teach critical thinking—the primary goal of undergraduate education?
There are tangential issues that often get in the way of dealing with the important questions and I'd like to deal with one of them here.
In a previous post [Is Canada Lagging Behind in Online Education?] I criticized a newspaper article by Michael Geist because he made an incorrect assumption. He assumed that any online course from a "top-tier" university would be serious competition for the average Canadian school. I selected two courses from MIT and showed that the quality of their biochemistry teaching was not a threat.
This point needs to be emphasized. Just because an online undergraduate course comes from Harvard, MIT, or Stanford does not mean that it's a good quality course. In my own field of biochemistry I know of many, many teachers in small schools throughout North America who can teach biochemistry better than famous research professors at the so-called "top-tier" schools.
It still may be true that students will flock to the Harvard, MIT, and Stanford courses and pay those schools for biochemistry credits but let's not assume, without justification, that they are getting a better education.
Today I received a copy of Academic Matters: OCUFA's Journal of Higher Education, a magazine published by the Ontario Federation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). The articles are devoted to technology in the classroom ("Professor 2.0." ugh!). An article by Sidneyeve Matrix [Challenges, Opportunities, and New Expectations] caught my eye. She says,
When Stanford University offers massively open online courses (MOOCs) in science and engineering, in one case drawing over 150,000 participants, people take notice. When the Khan Academy wins significant Microsoft funding, posts 3,000 instructional videos online, and attracts massive traffic, stories proliferate about the future of self-directed, online, informal e-learning. ... Critics ask, what’s the value of having students attend a lecture in real time if essentially the same material is covered by world-renowned professors on professional-quality video courtesy of free services at TED-Ed or YouTube Education? ... Why pay enormous fees to learn from faculty in an accredited university program, when MITx offers free online courseware with options for students to get peer-to-peer and professor feedback, assessment and earn branded certificates of achievement? What is the return on investment for students (and perhaps their parents) opting to earn their credentials at a bricks-and-mortar university when they could join the 30,000 others enrolled at the London School of Business and Finance in their Global MBA program—delivered online via a Facebook app?
There's a myth here that needs exposing. The quality of undergraduate education in the sciences1 should be judged by the content of the course and not the prestige of the university that offers it. Let's not get bamboozled into thinking that just because Stanford and Khan University Academy offer an online course in biochemistry that it's necessarily a good course.
The MIT examples I highlighted in my previous post says that this is a a bad assumption. You can look at the Stanford University Courses and make up your own mind.
Here's the important point: don't just assume that because an online course exists, it is necessarily a good course. You may have legitimate reasons for thinking that online courses are good things, but that doesn't excuse you from actually looking at the quality of an online course before declaring that the producers of such a course did a good job. Putting a bad course online is worse than putting no course online no matter what you might think of online courses.
1. I restricted myself to the sciences because we are presumably judging quality by the ability to teach critical thinking and factually correct material. There may well be degrees and programs where this isn't important. For example, it may not be important who teaches MBA courses since the goal is just to get a degree to put on your CV. In that case the prestige of the London School of Business and Finance may be far more important than whether you are actually learning something useful, or correct.
I think that undergraduate education at most universities is done very badly. There are far too many courses that consist of professors giving standard lectures to large classes with evaluations focused on "memorize and regurgitate" exams. Most courses pay no heed to student-centered learning even though there has been sound pedagogical research showing that student participation leads to better learning. Most courses and programs provide no "value-added" component that takes advantage of being physically located in an enriched scholarly environment. Most courses do not teach critical thinking.
Given the horrible status of most university courses, it's not surprising that they can be replaced by online courses where the student never needs to set foot on a university campus to get the same quality of education. This is not an endorsement of online courses, it's a comment on the poor quality of campus-based courses.
It's interesting to watch his lectures but I think he's avoiding the key question that concerns me about online courses. The question is, should we be delivering traditional "lectures" to students in our classrooms?
I would never allow anyone to videotape my classroom time and post it on the web. That's because my goal is to involve the students in the class and generate discussion. I don't want them to be intimidated by a camera and I certainly don't want the camera to record for posterity the interactions between students as they discuss the basic concepts and principles that come up in class. Sometimes I have to tell a student that there question was interesting but not on topic or, even worse, that it revealed a serious misunderstanding. Do we really want that posted on the course website?
Sometimes (often?) I say something really stupid. It's part of the risk we take when we have a course like the one I'm describing. These are not prepared and rehearsed lectures.
Thomas L. Friedman is the Op-ed columnist for foreign affairs at the New York Times. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes (1983, 1988, 2002).
According to Wikipedia, Friedman has an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University (Boston, USA) and a Master's degree from Oxford (UK). He taught a class at Brandeis in 2006 but as far as I can tell that's his only experience with university outside of being a student. He does not appear to be an educator and he doesn't appear to have any expertise in pedagogy.
That hasn't prevented him from writing three opinion pieces on the imminent demise of universities and the glorious future of online courses—especially MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
Much to my embarrassment, the University of Toronto is promoting online courses, or MOOCs [Online courses for anyone, anywhere]. These courses seem to be for information only—you can't get a university credit for them.
I'm not opposed to offering free "courses" for people who don't have easy access to a university campus. In fact, I think it's a good thing. But let's make sure we distinguish between public lectures and serious education. In my opinion, if the quality of an online course is equal to the quality of a course given on campus then all that says is that the campus-based course is lousy. We should not refer to these online examples as "university courses." They should be labelled as "public lectures."
I'll have more to say about this later but today I want to return to an issue I raised before. Is it true that the "best" universities also do the best teaching? I have suggested that the answer to this question is probabyy "no" [On the Quality of Online Courses] [Is Canada Lagging Behind in Online Education?].
Should universities remove online courses that contain incorrect or misleading information?
There are lots of scientific controversies where different scientists have conflicting views. Eventually these controversies will be solved by normal scientific means involving evidence and logic but for the time being there isn't enough data to settle a genuine scientific controversy. Many of us are interested in these controversies and some of us have chosen to invest time and effort into defending one side or the other.
But there's a dark side of science that infects these debates—false or misleading information used to support one side of a legitimate controversy. To give just one example, I'm frustrated at the constant reference to junk DNA being defined as non-coding DNA. Many scientists believe that this was the way junk DNA was defined by its earliest proponents and then they go on to say that the recent discovery of functional non-coding DNA refutes junk.
I don't know where this idea came from because there's nothing in the scientific literature from 50 years ago to support such a ridiculous claim. It must be coming from somewhere since the idea is so widespread.
Where does misinformation come from and how is it spread?
John Hawks is interested in putting his lecture on the internet [My foray into online education]. I'll eventually get around to discussing whether this is a good idea or not. Today I want to question his sources.
John Hawks quotes an article by someone named Robert Tracinski as evidence that online education is the wave of the future. Let''s look at that article.
The Intellectual Activist is especially dedicated to understanding and promoting the revolutionary ideas of the 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand — the great champion of the power of reason, the supreme value of the individual, and the unfettered liberty of a capitalist society. TIA serves as a forum for those who are working to gain a deeper understanding of Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophy and applying her ideas to gain new insights in every field of human knowledge.
My university (the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada) recently developed a new policy and new procedures on undergraduate student evaluations [Policy on the Student Evaluation of Teaching in Courses]. The policy was the work of a committee that began with the assumption that student evaluations were a good thing. As far as I can tell, the committee did not spend any time examining the pedagogical literature to see if the evidence supported their assumptions. As you can see from the title of the policy, the assumed purpose of student evaluations is to judge the quality of teaching.
The university has a website: Course Evaluations. Here's what the administrators say ...
Course evaluations are read by many people at UofT, including instructors, chairs, deans, the provost and the president. They are used for a variety of purposes, including:
To help instructors design and deliver their courses in ways that impact their students’ learning
To make changes and improvements to individual courses and programs
To assess instructors for annual reviews
To assess instructors for tenure and promotion review
To provide students with summary information about other students’ learning experiences in UofT courses
It is essential that students have a voice in these key decision-making processes and that’s why your course evaluation is so important at the University of Toronto.
Your feedback is used to improve your courses, to better your learning experience and to recognize great teaching.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science holds a meeting every February. This year the meeting is in San Jose, California. There are four plenary lectures [Plenary Lectures 2015]. Three of them will be given by prominent researchers who will be talking about science. The fourth is by Daphne Koller, President and co-founder of Coursera.
Coursera is a for-profit company offering "universal access to the world’s best education." What they mean by "best education" is MOOCs offered by professors at the "top" universities. There's no evidence to support the claim that the best undergraduate courses for the general audience are those given by professors at Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard. Indeed, there's quite a bit of evidence that this isn't true.
Daphne Koller is going to talk about The Online Revolution: Learning Without Limits. Keep in mind that at the end of every article published in Science (AAAS publication) there's a small notice stating that, "The authors declare no financial conflict of interest" or statements that clearly spell out the conflicts.
Why is AAAS asking someone to give a plenary lecture about selling online courses from someone with a clear financial interest in promoting her company?
Science education is important and there's plenty of evidence that universities are graduating students who don't understand science and aren't capable of critical thinking. There are hundreds of people whose main research interest is pedagogy and especially science education. They have proposed solutions to the problem and suggestions on how we should change the way we teach. Very few of them think that MOOCs are the answer and very few of them are trying to market their ideas for profit [ Reaching Students: What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015)].
Why not ask some of those experts to address the AAAS meeting and possibly explain what's wrong with canned videotaped lectures? MOOCs are just ways of transferring the way we teach now to the mass market. But what if the traditional way we now teach (lectures) is wrong? Isn't that a question that the delegates at San Jose ought to think about?
Here's Daphne Koller giving a TED talk. Near the end she talks about the importance of "active learning" (student-centered learning). I'm a big fan of student-centered learning. She implies that having students take online courses from "top" educators is consistent with active learning but she's wrong. It's the exact opposite. In my opinion, it's a step backwards and by promoting MOOCs we are going to make it more difficult to convince professors to change the way they teach. Instead, the ones who are good at delivering traditional lectures will bring in money for themselves and their universities.1 They will be getting the kudos and the teaching awards instead of those who are paying attention to evidence-based methods and trying to improve undergraduate education.
Here's another video. It's an interview with Daphne Koller from June 2013. Listen to the first few minutes and you'll hear a different view of active learning. Here, she explains the concept of the "flipped classroom" where students watch online videos and then come to class to participate in "something that's much more engaging and stimulating, active learning" (4 mins). There's nothing wrong with that except that students could read a textbook instead of watching a video. The important part of the learning is what happens in the classroom and not what happens in the textbook or the taped lecture.
She also explains how they are going to make money (5-6 mins).
Daphne Koller is very fond of repeating the myth that the best courses are the ones taught at the top research universities. (She happens to be a teacher at one of these universities.) I bet she can't prove it unless she's talking about very specialized upper level courses.
1. For-profit companies like Coursera offer kick-backs to the professors and schools that contribute courses.
Another journalist has written about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This one is in The New York Times: Two Cheers for Web U!.
Most of these articles about MOOCs are not very good but this one is different. The author expresses some skepticism and hit the nail on the head when he says ...
But the first thing I learned? When it comes to Massive Open Online Courses, like those offered by Coursera, Udacity and edX, you can forget about the Socratic method.
The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.
But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to discuss the quality of these courses and how you might go about judging whether they are truly teaching the subject correctly.
Here's the problem. Too many people, like A. J. Jacobs, the author of today's article, assume that because the lecturer is famous or from a "top" school, the material must be accurate and up-to-date. As A. J. Jacobs puts it ...
On the other hand, how can I really complain? I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free....
With the exception of a couple of clunkers — my plodding nutrition professor might want to drink more organic coffee before class — most of my MOOC teachers were impressive: knowledgeable, organized and well respected in their field.
Students are not in a position to judge whether a professor is "knowledgeable" about the material being covered in a course. In the case of MOOCs, many students just assume that because the professor is from an Ivy League school then he/she knows how to teach an introductory course properly.
That's a very bad assumption as I've shown when I examined the biochemistry material being taught in the MIT courses Where Are the Best University Teachers?. Same is true for the courses at the Khan Academy.
I'm currently in Boston at EB2013 where I'm hanging out with biochemistry and molecular biology teachers and textbook authors. Many of these experts are not household names but they are the experts in their field, which is teaching. If you really want accurate information about the fundamental principles and concepts in biochemistry and molecular biology then you should take the courses they teach. You'll get a far better education than if you listen to professors from big-name research intensive-universities.
The recent ENCODE publicity disaster is just one example of the fact that top-notch researchers don't necessarily understand the fundamentals of subjects that are just outside of their own area of expertise.
Let's try and put a stop to this myth that the best teachers are professors from Ivy League schools. There's very little evidence to support that myth, especially in fields that I'm familiar with: evolution, biochemistry, and molecular biology,
I was looking at the Vision and Change document the other day and it made me realize that very little has changed in undergraduate education. I really shouldn't be surprised since I reached the same conclusion in 2015—six years after the recommendations were published [Vision and Change] [Why can't we teach properly?].
The main recommendations of Vision and Change are that undergraduate education should adopt the proven methods of student-centered education and should focus on core concepts rather than memorization of facts. Although there has been some progress, it's safe to say that neither of these goals have been achieved in the vast majority of biology classes, including biochemistry and molecular biology classes.
Things are getting even worse in this time of COVID-19 because more and more classes are being taught online and there seems to be general agreement that this is okay. It is not okay. Online didactic lectures go against everything in the Vision and Change document. It may be possible to develop online courses that practice student-centered, concept teaching that emphasizes critical thinking but I've seen very few attempts.
Here are a couple of quotations from Vision and Change that should stimulate your thinking.
Traditionally, introductory biology [and biochemistry] courses have been offered as three lectures a week, with, perhaps, an accompanying two- or three-hour laboratory. This approach relies on lectures and a textbook to convey knowledge to the student and then tests the student's acquisition of that knowledge with midterm and final exams. Although many traditional biology courses include laboratories to provide students with hands-on experiences, too often these "experiences" are not much more than guided exercises in which finding the right answer is stressed while providing students with explicit instructions telling them what to do and when to do it.
"Appreciating the scientific process can be even more important than knowing scientific facts. People often encounter claims that something is scientifically known. If they understand how science generates and assesses evidence bearing on these claims, they possess analytical methods and critical thinking skills that are relevant to a wide variety of facts and concepts and can be used in a wide variety of contexts.”
National Science Foundation, Science and Technology Indicators, 2008
If you are a student and this sounds like your courses, then you should demand better. If you are an instructor and this sounds like one of your courses then you should be ashamed; get some vision and change [The Student-Centered Classroom].
Although the definition of student-centered learning may vary from professor to professor, faculty generally agree that student-centered classrooms tend to be interactive, inquiry-driven, cooperative, collaborative, and relevant. Three critical components are consistent throughout the literature, providing guidelines that faculty can apply when developing a course. Student-centered courses and curricula take into account student knowledge and experience at the start of a course and articulate clear learning outcomes in shaping instructional design. Then they provide opportunities for students to examine and discuss their understanding of the concepts presented, offering frequent and varied feedback as part of the learing process. As a result, student-centered science classrooms and assignments typically involve high levels of student-student and student-faculty interaction; connect the course subject matter to topics students find relevant; minimize didactic presentations; reflect diverse views of scientific inquiry, including data presentation, argumentation, and peer review; provide ongoing feedback to both the student and professor about the student's learning progress; and explicitly address learning how to learn.
This is a critical time for science education since science is under attack all over the world. We need to make sure that university students are prepared to deal with scientific claims and counter-claims for the rest of their lives after they leave university. This means that they have to be skilled at critical thinking and that's a skill that can only be taught in a student-centered classroom where students can practice argumentation and learn the importance of evidence. Memorizing the enzymes of the Krebs Cycle will not help them understand climate change or why they should wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic.
In a previous post I mentioned an article by Sidneyeve Matrix who advocates changing the "traditional" form of undergraduate university education by incorporating more technology [Challenges, Opportunities, and New Expectations]. In that post, I concentrated on one of the arguments for online courses [On the Quality of Online Courses].
In this post I want to bring up one of the arguments for introducing new technology into a course. I'm going to pick a quote from Sidneyeve Matrix's article but she's not the only one who brings it up.
There’s a torrent of research demonstrating the costs and benefits of using social, mobile, and digital technology enhancements to teach; yet it’s inconclusive whether these result in higher student outcomes. Of course, there are multiple bottom lines to consider. What’s undeniable is that even though digital divides exist, today’s students expect to see some technology used in their classes. It follows that we can expect increased engagement and higher student satisfaction when profs power-up. In my experience, exceedingly positive end-of-term student surveys and reviews in my ed-tech enhanced courses document a beneficial halo effect.
The first statement is true, as far as I know. There are no sound pedagogical reasons for incorporating social media and other technologies into a course. That means there must be other, not-pedagogical, reasons for change.
The third statement says that it's "undeniable" that students expect to see some technology in their class. What does this mean? Will they be satisfied if they see a power point presentation and a website? Do they expect their professors to befriend them on facebook or follow their tweets? We don't know. The statement is devoid of meaning.
However, what seems to be "undeniable" is that there are some professors who think that it's important to give students whatever they want. These professors seem to think that it's the students, not them, who are the experts on undergraduate education. Is there any evidence for that?
Of course not. The reason for giving students what they want is clearly spelled out in the last sentence. If you give them what they want then you'll get good student evaluations.
In fairness, she also mentions "engagement." If student engagement is one of your goals—it's one of mine—then that's a reason for exploring technology options. That may, or may not, be associated with student satisfaction. My experience suggests that it's not. I first started an online discussion forum for students in 1987-88 using a usenet forum running on a VAX. Very few students used it but the ones who did liked it a lot.
Over the last 25 years, I've tried various ways of encouraging student engagement on the internet including, in the last iteration, trying to get students to read and comment on blogs. The result is always the same. A subset of the class has a great time "engaging" and a larger subset resists all attempts to draw them in. The most effective way to encourage, and reward, engagement is to do it in class with the students right there with you. The downside is that a good chunk of your class are miserable because they don't want to "engage" in their own learning. They would rather be passive learners.
In order for professors to engage in podcasting or online lectures or tweeting, or supporting their colleagues who opt to publish in open source journals or participate in online conferences, they must see real benefits and an immediate, significant return on investment. Perhaps for some profs evidence of increased student satisfaction and engagement will win them over.
I hope that "increased student satisfaction" will never be a primary motive for change. It may be a secondary benefit but that's not the same thing. Our job is to teach effectively. If the proper teaching methods don't "please" the students then our job is to convince them that they need to change their minds about what gives them pleasure. If they can't do that then they might have only two choices: (1) be miserable throughout their stay in university, or (2) drop out.
Option three: (3) make the professor change the course in order to cater to the student's view of how a course should be taught, is not a reasonable option.
Many of these debates and discussions about the use of new technology in the classroom assume that there's resistance from old professors who are uncomfortable with new technology and/or social media. That may be true of some professors but many of my mature colleagues have been computer literate since before many young professors were born. Many of my colleagues have been using email for thirty years. They have had webpages, including course webpages, since the web was created twenty years ago. In spite of the fact that they are not intimidated by technology—what science professor is intimidated by new technology?—they have not radically transformed their way of teaching in the past several decades. Why is that? Is it because they have the wisdom and experience to know that new technology is not the best way to improve undergraduate education?
I discuss a recent editorial in Science that advocates expanding university education in order to prepare students for jobs.
I believe that the primary goal of a university education is to teach students how to think (critical thinking). This goal is usually achieved within the context of an in-depth study in a particular field such as history, English literature, geology, or biochemistry. The best way of achieving that goal is called student-centered learning. It involves, among other things, classes that focus on discussion and debate under the guidance of an experienced teacher.
Universities and colleges also have job preparation programs such as business management, medicine, computer technology, and, to a lesser extent, engineering. These programs may, or may not, teach critical thinking (usually not).
About 85% of students who enter high school will graduate. About 63% of high school graduates go to college or university. The current college graduation rate is 65% (within six years). What this means is that for every 100 students that begin high school roughly 35 will graduate from college.
Now let's look at an editorial written by Marcia McNutt, President of the United States National Academy of Sciences. The editorial appears in the Nov. 11 issue of Science [Higher education for all]. She begins by emphasizing the importance of a college degree in terms of new jobs and the wealth of nations.
Currently, 75% of new jobs require a college degree. Yet in the US and Europe, only 40% of young adults attend a 2-year or 4-year college—a percentage that has either not budged or only modestly risen in more than two decades— despite a college education being one of the proven ways to lift the socioeconomic status of underprivileged populations and boost the wealth of nations.
There's no question that well-educated graduates will contribute to society in many ways but there is a question about what "well-educated" really means. Is it teaching specific jobs skills or is it teaching students how to think? I vote for teaching critical thinking and not for job training. I think that creating productive citizens who can fill a variety of different jobs is a side-benefit of preparing them to cope with a complex society that requires critical thinking. I don't think my view is exactly the same as Marcia McNutt's because she emphasizes training as a main goal of college education.
Universities, without building additional facilities, could expand universal and life-long access to higher education by promoting more courses online and at satellite community-college campuses.
Statements like that raise two issues that don't get enough attention. The first one concerns the number of students who should graduate from college in an ideal world. What is that number and at what stage should it be enhanced? Should here be more high school graduates going to college? If so, does that require lowering the bar for admission or is the cost of college the main impediment? Is there a higher percentage of students entering college in countries with free, or very low, tuition? Should there be more students graduating? If so, one easy way to do that is to make university courses easier. Is that what we want?
The question that's never asked is what percentage of the population is smart enough to get a college degree? Is it much higher than 40%?
The second issue concerns the quality of education. The model that I suggested above is not consistent with online courses and there's a substantial number of papers in the pedagogical literature showing the student centered education doesn't work very well online. Does that mean that we should adopt a different way of teaching in order to make college education more accessible? If so, at what cost?
McNutt gives us an example of the kind of change she envisages.
At Colorado College, students complete a lab science course in only 4 weeks, attending lectures in the morning and labs in the afternoon. This success suggests that US universities could offer 2-week short courses that include concentrated, hands-on learning and teamwork in the lab and the field for students who already mastered the basics through online lectures. Such an approach is more common in European institutions of higher education and would allow even those with full-time employment elsewhere to advance their skills during vacations or employer-supported sabbaticals for the purpose of improving the skills of the workforce. Opportunities abound for partnerships with industry for life-long learning. The availability of science training in this format could also be a boon for teachers seeking to fill gaps in their science understanding.
This is clearly a form of college education that focuses on job skills and even goes as far as suggesting that industry could be a "partner" in education. (As an aside, it's interesting that government employers, schools, and nonprofits are never asked to be partners in education even though they hire a substantial number of college graduates.)
Do you agree that the USA should be expanding the number of students who graduate from college and do you agree that the goal is to give them the skills needed to get a job?
The entrance to his building is littered with the gaudy red, blue, yellow and green bicycles that Googlers tool around on. I'm at the secret headquarters of the not-so-secret Google X, where the way-out-there projects of the search giant turn into reality. The gregarious play master, Sebastian Thrun, leads us into a well-worn conference room. The chairs are a shade of green not found in nature and the disrupting clang and cheers from a rousing foosball game waft in through the door. Mr. Thrun, 45 and slight in stature, is sporting a gray T-shirt of a local start-up and speaks softly with German-English diction.
Thrun and his Google colleague, Peter Norvig, taught an online course on artificial intelligence that attracted a huge number of students. Apparently there were 23,000 students who completed the course. That's amazing. But there's more ...
Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education—way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10 times cost advantage to drive change.
So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. "What I see is democratizing education will change everything," he says. "I have an unbelievable passion about this. We will reach students that have never been reached. I can give my love of learning to other people. I've stumbled into the most amazing Wonderland. I've taken the red pill and seen how deep Wonderland is."
How in the world do you pay attention to 23,000 students and give them a grade that reflects what they learned for only $23,000? The only way you could do that is to have all assignments and tests evaluated electronically and that's no way to teach properly. (You also need very cheap servers, internet access, and software and Thrun and Norvig have to work for free.)
Classes are currently focused on computer science since that’s what the team already knows how to teach. Examples include: Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. As one of the inventors of Google’s self-driving car, Sebastian is perfectly suited to teach a class on how to program one. Udacity plans to expand to other subjects with the goal of building a full university online.
All classes are currently free, and the goal is to keep it that way. When asked how it will make money, Sebastian pointed out that recruiting good technical talent is something that companies pay for. Udacity knows who the best students are and could pass them along to companies looking for new hires.
Somehow I doubt that Udacity will be offering courses in philosophy, French, or art history. I don't even think they'll be teaching biochemistry since very few of our undergraduates move directly from a Bachelor's degree to jobs in biotech or pharmaceutical companies.
Sebastian Thrun thinks he's going to "democratize" education but, if he succeeds, what he's really going to do is dumb down and cheapen education. The only thing in his favor is the fact that today's universities are doing the same thing so creating online courses is probably no worse that what students are currently getting in the classroom. If someone can offer the same quality of "education" for much less money then what's the point of attending classes?
Eva Amsen has an article in this week's issue of The Bulletin—the newspaper published by the University of Toronto (not a student newspaper). You can read her description of how this article came to be published by checking out her Nature network blog [Teaching course and article on OpenCourseWare]. The article is online at The Bulletin. Scroll to the last page.
The article is about OpenCourseWare in general, and the MIT experiment in particular. MIT, and a few other schools, have made a commitment to put course material on a website and make if freely available to anyone who wants to use it. All one has to do is follow the guidelines of the Creative Commons License. MIT retains the rights to the material even though students and other lecturers are free to use it. MIT strips out all material that is copyrighted by third parties; this includes textbook figures and photographs and images taken from other websites. According to the MIT OpenCourseWare Website, it costs between $10,000 and $15,000 to publish each course. The costs will be twice as high if videos of the lectures are posted online.
Eva's article mentions some of the benefits of OpenCourseWare. Not all of them are believable; for example, one third of freshman students claim to have chosen MIT because they were influenced by OpenCourseWare. This probably doesn't mean what one might think.
Eva is a graduate student in our department so she asks, "Why is the the University of Toronto, one of Canada's leading universities, not part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium?" I'd like to address that question, making particular reference to biochemistry courses.
Let's begin by looking at the OpenCourseWare site for the Department of Biology (MIT doesn't have a Biochemistry Department) [Biology].
The first thing you notice is that most of the material is quite old. Some of the courses are from 2004, only one is 2007, and none are 2008. Let's check out the Spring 2006 course in Introductory Biology to see what OpenCourseWare is really like. Two clicks take you to complete audio lectures. You can listen to the lectures or read a transcript of the lecture. There is no supplemental material to speak of and no figures to see. I don't find this very helpful.
Contrast the MIT website with a typical university website like ours at the University of Toronto. We have more than 2000 course websites but the vast majority are restricted to University of Toronto students [Course Catalog]. If you could access the introductory biology course you would find complete powerpoint lectures with all figures and plenty of additional course material. All of it is up to date.
In some department the course material is not password protected [Dept. of Biochemistry] but it is not advertised and outsiders are not encouraged to visit the site. Complete lecture notes with figures are made available to the students. In my opinion, these notes are much more valuable to students taking our courses than the MIT OpenCourseWare lecture notes because we can post the figures without having to be wary of copyright infringement (especially if access is restricted).
Thus, one of the biggest downsides of OpenCourseWare is that the notes have to be stripped of figures. Why should our department go to great effort and expense to create a parallel site for external viewing when we know full well that the stripped down notes are practically useless? There has to be a compensating gain, right?
Eva argues that the gain is significant.
While the implementation of OpenCourseWare asks for extra work from its faculty in preparing high-quality, legally distributable course materials, this works as an incentive to produce better teaching materials. As a result, making course materials available online can not only raise an institution's visibility but also its quality.
I don't believe this for a minute. The quality of lecture material on the web is highly variable and the fact that it's freely available does not to seem to have much effect on quality. If the argument holds, we would expect the biochemistry lectures at MIT to be outstanding examples of high quality lectures.
Let's check it out. The introductory biology course from 2006 (the latest one on the web) has ten lectures on "foundations." Three of them are on biochemistry. The first one [Biochemistry 1] is all about cancer cells. The material is present at a high school level, at best. The second lecture (Biochemistry 2) is not available on the website. The third one [Biochemistry 3] is on enzymes. Here's how it begins ...
OK. So we’re going to continue with the discussion about biochemistry, and specifically focus on enzymes today. Professor Sive introduced those to you briefly in her last lecture. I’m actually covering for her today. This is one of her lectures but she has given me her material, so hopefully it will go fine. She wanted me to remind you a little bit about energetics, specifically that a negative Delta G in a reaction implies that the reaction can occur spontaneously, that is if the products have lower energy than the reactants. And so given enough time this will happen in that direction.
It's pretty much downhill from then on.
I checked out a lot of lectures on the MIT biology OpenCourseWare site and I don't see much evidence that the faculty has taken the time to prepare high quality lectures. Furthermore, if I had to evaluate the quality of teaching at MIT based on the OpenCourseWare, I don't think it would enhance the reputation of the university.
One of the main arguments for OpenCoureWare has been altruistic. The idea is that a really good university should make its lectures available to the world so that lecturers at "lesser" universities can copy it and use it in their classrooms (an argument that is also condescending). In my experience, the lecturers at smaller schools often give much better lectures in biochemistry than those at the big research intensive universities. If I'm looking for a really good textbook reviewer, for example, I'm much more likely to find one at the University of Maine or the University of Nebraska than at Harvard or Berkeley.
If every school puts up their stripped down versions of lectures, you can be assured that there will be some real gems out there. On the other hand, you can be certain there will be lots of garbage as well. OpenCourseWare may end up being just another way of cluttering up the web with useless information, or worse. If every school participates in the consortium, for example, you would probably find 100 incorrect definitions of a gene, or the Central Dogma, and 100 false conception of free energy at the top of your Goggle search. What's the point of promoting that?
Do you want to learn about enzymes on the web? Here's where you go to get free and accurate information from people who know what teaching is all about [Enzymes] [Enzymes] [Enzymes] .
Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to "disrupt" higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses. So what went wrong?
After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The "godfather of free online education" says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU [San Jose State University], "were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit." It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.
Thrun's goal was to market lectures by "elite" professors at places like Sanford1. His new company, Udacity, was going to make tons of money by selling lists of successful students to private companies who are looking for talent. Guess what? It turns out that there are lots of disadvantaged students in introductory courses at SJSU who don't learn from lectures given by elite Stanford professors. Who would have guessed?
In case you've forgotten the hype that Sebastian Thrun created when he formed Udacity, read: Sebastian Thrun Will Change Education. And watch the video.
1. My position on this is that the professors at Harvard and Stanford are not necessarily the best teachers. In my field of biochemistry, for example, we have direct evidence that professors at MIT do a horrible job of teaching biochemistry [Where Are the Best University Teachers?]. In my experience, the best biochemistry teachers are often located at small colleges where they pay attention to the latest pedagogical literature and actually read the textbooks they use in class.
Watch two medical educators from my Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. They are being interviewed by Steve Paiken of The Agenda. They rightly deplore the traditional lecture style of learning that's common in my university but their solution is more online learning.
The real problem with medical education is that much of the first two years is based on the "memorize and regurgitate" model that we know is ineffective. The best way to change the system is to use evidence-based methods that emphasize student-based learning. The idea is to teach medical students how to access information and how to interpret it rather than have them memorize facts. When teaching biochemistry, for example, it's pointless to ask medical students to take an exam based on structures and pathways that they will forget the day after the exam.
These two physicians are in charge of reforming medical education. They want to please the students by creating a new way of teaching that emphasizes the way "millennials" want to learn. (Short online courses, no lectures.) You'll watch the entire show without hearing any references to the pedagogical literature and what's known to work. Is there any evidence that undergraduate medical students are experts on medical education? (Hint: ... no.)
If this is the wave of the future, I fear that future doctors are not going to be any more informed that the current crop. They will still not be capable of critical thinking.
The way we teach needs to change, but not this way.
We learned back in 2012 that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to transform higher education. People all over the world, especially in underdeveloped nations, would be able to learn from the best university professors while sitting at home in front of their computers. Several companies entered the market with high expectations of earning enormous profits while altruistically educating students who couldn't afford to go to university.
Here's an interview with Don Tapscott where he tells us what's wrong with universities and why they need to become more student focused [The future of education: reboot required]. The main theme is that today's students are wise in the ways of the internet and that will force universities to change.
I think the net generation will be a key driver for change. They have the knowledge and tools to challenge the existing model, and I see a growing generational clash.
I also think some administrations will recognize that the writing is on the wall.
If students can pass a course by never attending class and watching the lectures online, why should the student be restricted to only those courses available at that university? If it's online, why not choose from the courses offered at other universities. I also see a lot of the old guard faculty retiring soon. That will help generate fresh thinking.
There are several issues in this debate. They need to be sorted and clarified. First, many of the "old guard" faculty are among those who are most upset with the current system. At my university, they are the ones who are advocating change. Younger faculty in science departments just don't care about undergraduate education. They have much more important things on their minds. The situation isn't much different in the humanities except that there's a somewhat higher percentage of younger faculty calling for change. Many of them are postmodernists and the changes they're advocating aren't necessarily desirable.
Who is Don Tapscott and why is he an expert on university education? Here's what Wikipedia says [Don Tapscott].
Don Tapscott (born 1947) is a Canadian business executive, author, consultant and speaker based in Toronto, Ontario, specializing in business strategy, organizational transformation and the role of technology in business and society. Tapscott is chairman of business strategy think tank New Paradigm (now nGenera Insight), which he founded in 1993. Tapscott is also Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
This brings me to a second point that needs clarification. People whose main concern is business and management aren't necessarily qualified to have an informed opinion on university education. That includes 99% of the faculty at the Rotman School of Management, here at the University of Toronto.
The third point that needs to be made is that there is widespread agreement that current university education is in bad shape. It should not be possible to skip lectures and still get an "A" in a course. It should not be possible to graduate with a degree when you have never physically attended a university. The fact that we are doing a bad job of teaching students how to think does not mean that we should abandon that goal and make it even easier for students to avoid intellectual challenges. We need to fix the problem, not surrender.
The fourth point concerns technological change. Tapscott is apparently one of the true believers when it comes to the internet and how it's going to change everything. I think he's wrong but that's not the point I want to make. The thing that annoys me the most is the assumption that universities are behind the times when it comes to technological change and that professors are luddites who don't know anything about computers and the internet.
There may be professors like that, but not in science or engineering departments. I suspect that they're rare in the humanities as well. This may come as a bit of a shock to Don Tapscott but some of us old fogies have been using computers for over forty years. We've been on the internet for thirty years. We know about electronic databases, listserves, social networks, webpages, and blogs. Some of us even have cellphones, iPads, and GPS—and we know how to use them. We have HD televisions, stereo systems that will blow your socks off, laptops, and—believe it or not—power windows in our cars.
We've been incorporating these technologies into our courses for over two decades. (That's before our entering class of students was born.) Our children, and the current crop of students, may be the first generation to grow up with personal computers and the internet but when they come to university they will be meeting the generation that invented those technologies.
Give us a bit of credit. We've been experimenting with new technologies long enough to know how they are affecting university education. We are not stupid. If they were capable of totally transforming university education then we would have discovered that by now. Fact is, these technologies have been around for decades and, while they are very useful supplements to education, they are not a panacea and they cannot replace everything that happens on a university campus.
Students need to be provoked, challenged, and stimulated. They need to be thrust into an environment that's outside of their comfort zone. They need to hear things they don't want to hear, even if it makes them angry. They need to see for themselves what kind of scholarship goes on at a university. They need to do a research project and that requires a mentor.
They need to meet graduate students and postdocs and professors who aren't teaching one of their courses. They need to play varsity sports, join the debating team, attend meetings of the student Secular Alliance, meet students from different cultures, protest, volunteer at the local hostel, play in the school orchestra.
This is all part of a university education and you can't do it by sitting in your bedroom at home staring at your monitor.
The article on the CBC News site makes reference to two videos. I'm including them here in order to provoke discussion. The first one is a classic example of the kind of superficial thinking that passes for knowledge among today's generation of students. Although that's not its intent, it illustrates perfectly what's wrong with university education. There's no evidence of critical thinking. The students are holding up sound bites of meaningless phrases.
The second one is similar except that the students are much younger. It's an example of brainwashing. They are "digital learners"—but what the heck does that mean? It doesn't mean a damn thing.
