Creating vs Curating Content in (Online) Course Development

As I finalized plans (and the development budget) for creating an online version of my Intro to Ancient Rome course, I've devoted a lot of time and thought to the issue of created vs curated content.  I've also thought about how this issue might have different answers for a blended or hybrid course vs an online course.  In my course design, the guiding principles have been "good enough" and "narrative flow."  In other words, there needs to be a coherent, sensible narrative (and authorial voice--even if the author herself is relatively invisible); and the priority is always student learning rather than bells and whistles for their own sake.  I am working with a relatively small budget of $150,000 (small enough that I can afford to pay myself AND the team of students helping me; we also have to pay the instructional costs for the first semester out of this budget).  Animations, elaborate simulations, even video-taped lectures are expensive to produce.  On the other side of things, with every passing month, more and more content becomes available on Wikimedia, YouTube, and other sites.  Most recently, as part of their Smart History series, the Khan Academy has begun to post short content videos on major pieces of ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture (e.g. the Capitoline Brutus bust). 

These videos are not without their flaws; but they are good enough for my purposes.  The same is true of the many documentaries on topics like the Punic Wars, Caesar and the Civil Wars, Spartacus, and the Julio-Claudians.  Sure, there is some truly awful stuff out there, for instance, this "documentary" on Caligula.  All of the documentaries take our ancient sources like Suetonius and Tacitus at face value when it comes to the supposedly "mad" emperors Caligula and Nero.  Still, these can be great starting points for talking about the problem of creating a reliable historical narrative from biased written sources, and offers a chance to introduce students to some of the methods that real life scholars use (e.g coinage, inscriptions, other kinds of material evidence).

In deciding whether it makes sense to invest precious resources in the creation of some new piece of content, I ask the following questions: how much will it cost?  Animation can be excellent, especially for demonstrating complex social processes like voting or patronage; but truly excellent animation is time-consuming and very expensive.  What is already available and how good is it?  Can it be integrated easily into the course?  Can I create something that is so much better than what is already out there that it is worth the cost?  Or, would it somehow disrupt the flow of the course to curate rather than create content?  Finally, do I want to take the risk that this free content might someday disappear (YouTube links are constantly disappearing.  It is usually possible to find the same documentary elsewhere, but that means updating links every semester and being ready to deal with links going away mid-course).

Overall, for the online course, I've opted to curate rather than create content whenever possible.  This decision is partly time and budget driven; but it's also because I'm curious to see whether it matters.  When the class runs, it will have an instructor who is not me. It will have lots of opportunities for students to interact with the instructor and one another.  I suspect that it will matter little to them whether they are watching a clip from a documentary to learn about the Siege of Saguntum instead of hearing me talk about.

In my blended class, I've taken a different approach--I do use video clips and other online content to supplement or illustrate my class presentations, but I also assign pre-recorded lectures rather than collections of clips.  I do this precisely because, for my campus course, the students see me as the instructor and would find it very disorienting if I were to completely disappear from the stage.  For better or worse, they are still accustomed to a "sage on the stage" model of instruction in large courses.  It's possible to resist that role of sage, but it has to be done carefully.  As well, many of us who teach blended classes have found that students prefer content to be created by us.  It gives them the sense that we care, that we aren't "outsourcing" our job (which many of them still see as, primarily, delivery of content).  I have a sneaking suspicion that online students will come at the course with an entirely different set of expectations, and that their expectations will allow for an approach that privileges curation over creation.  The challenge is making sure that we carry out that curation thoughtfully, and that all the disparate bits are tied together into a clear narrative that students can follow. 

In Fall  2014, when both the blended and the online versions will be running, I'm going to be paying a lot of attention to this issue.  We are going to make the library of content lectures available to the online students, but they won't be necessary for success in the course.  I'm very curious to see how the students use them.  I am also excited to see how they use the different pieces of curated content and whether they view the created content differently from the curated content.

It seems to me that one of the key issues in online course design is knowing when to create and when to curate, especially as more and more content becomes freely available online.  It makes no sense for every course designer to reinvent the wheel, yet there are clearly times when new content needs to be created and it is worth the cost.  I suspect that, over times, some sense of best practices around this issue will emerge for different kinds of course content.  As well, if consortia like Unizin materialize according to plan, it seems that one benefit will be instructor access to high-quality digital assets that are created and shared by partner institutions.  For many disciplines, this has already been done to some extent by textbook companies (just not for my own of Classics).  But I can certainly imagine a not too distant future in which colleagues around the country share animations, simulations, etc. as well as draw on commercially-produced educational content (e.g. History Channel documentaries).

Should UT Austin Join Unizin?

Ultraman Max, stolen from Michael Feldstein

[Disclaimer: Nobody at UT System or UT Austin cares about my thoughts on this subject.  I am thinking aloud, being intentionally provocative. I might be persuaded to change my mind if someone can come up with arguments that I am missing.]


Back on the 16th of May, the intrepid ed tech consultants/private investigators Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill wrote about the existence of Unizin, a secret consortium of universities in talks to collaborate on the creation and maintenance of a new "learning ecosystem."   Imagine my shock when I discovered that my own institution, UT Austin, was one of the possible partners.  This news was especially surprising to me because it has never, to my knowledge, been raised as a possibility to the faculty--even though we had a semester-long series of "Campus Conversations" sponsored by the Provost's office which centered on  the role of the digital in teaching and learning.  Some staff at the Center for Teaching and Learning were aware that a partnership was being considered.  When Unizin finally made its existence public, UT Austin was not among the founding four institutions (see this IHE piece for a good analysis of Unizin's initial unveiling).  Still, I would not be surprised to learn that participation in Unizin remains on the table. 

The decision to join Unizin (or not) seems like precisely the sort of thing that should be discussed openly with the faculty who will be expected to contribute to the collection of digital assets and who would benefit (so goes the argument) from the learning analytics capacity as well as access to the collection of curricular resources (see Joshua Kim's blog post on some of the basic questions we should all be asking).  The absence of such a discussion in advance of such a major decision echoes the process that led to the University of Texas System spending $5 million and many more millions in course development, production, and implementation to join EdX.  Leaving aside the larger issue of shared governance, this failure to engage faculty in the conversation about a potential partnership with Unizin strikes me as a lost opportunity.  It is common to accuse faculty of lacking interest in anything not related to their research; in reality, many important conversations--conversations whose outcomes will shape our institutional future for many years to come--are taking place far away from the faculty.  Sure, faculty can be challenging to work with.  They have been trained to think critically and to analyze situations from every angle.  When we are talking about expensive and large-scale institutional commitments, however, it makes little sense not to take advantage of this collection of deep, engaged thinkers.  It may take longer to reach a decision, but those decisions are likely to be much more considered and to reflect the knowledge of individuals who are working in the trenches, day after day, to support student learning.  The best (i.e. most likely to be successful) decisions tend to come from consideration of all angles of an issue--if only to help one think through and formulate valid responses to the objections.

The pros of a partnership with Unizin largely depend on faith that the founders' vision of a single, cloud-based infrastructure for storing digital assets as well as user data will materialize in the not too distant future.  The mission statement from the Unizin blog is clearly intended to push all the right buttons with skeptical faculty: "Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As professors and members of the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content, data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential infrastructure that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond."  In other words, this is about not selling our souls to the VCs and other corporate interests looking to make a buck while institutions operate in a permanent state of austerity.

As Kirsten Wheeler notes in her post about Unizin, "Unizin won’t be an LMS or MOOC platform, but will focus on digital content development and data analytics to improve teaching and learning using the underlying technology."  In theory, it makes sense that the creation of expensive digital assets like animations be done once and shared by instructors across different universities.  At the introductory level and especially outside of the humanities, institutional curricula don't vary that much.  A benevolent interpretation of the motives behind the formation of Unizin would see it as an attempt to create a repository of digital teaching materials that faculty at partner institutions can draw on to enhance their courses.  It's a way of inventing the wheel once.  In addition, it's a way of controlling the means of producing the wheel rather than needing to purchase the materials and expertise from external sources.

 Less clear is whether the proponents of Unizin are imagining a scenario in which, say, each partner university provides a unique set of introductory courses that the other partners can then use on their campuses.  For this to be cost-effective, such courses would be run locally by some form of inexpensive labor (TA?  Adjunct?).  Currently, all institutions attempt to develop and staff courses across disciplines.  Even with the shift to grad student and adjunct instructors for many of these courses, public institutions are finding it very costly to maintain a permanent faculty that covers all disciplines.  I can imagine that it is very appealing to think that universities could abandon the goal of covering disciplines broadly--or even all disciplines; and instead focus on building particular strengths and outsourcing course development in other fields to institutions that have those strengths.  So, for instance, UT Austin could decide that it is no longer interested in maintaining a permanent faculty in Classics but, through partnership with Unizin, could continue to offer classics courses to students by using courses developed by Michigan faculty and hiring adjuncts to run those courses.  Well-developed, introductory-level online courses could easily be run by non-specialists; and, at least initially, some faculty would be relieved to outsource the burden of running such courses at the expense of offering more upper-division courses for majors.

The other major pro of a partnership is the potential for collecting and analyzing student-level data; and using the analyses of that data to improve teaching and learning.  The founders emphasize this point on the Unizin site and link it to better supporting institutions in carrying out their core teaching and research missions.  I am a big fan of evidence-based teaching, and I do hope that, some day, we will have the ability to use learner data in our teaching.  At present, however, we are very far from realizing this dream.  As well, it's a very expensive dream and will require an enormous financial investment in building sufficient infrastructure--human and otherwise--to collect and process this data.  Additionally, it will require that students and instructors are trained in using this data to change behaviors.  With enough of an investment, I am confident that we can build up organizations on campus to collect and analyze this data; I'm far less confident that any of this will be worth the significant investment and especially the opportunity costs.  Our LMSs and other digital tools already allow instructors to track student behaviors and make interventions.  Sure, the current system is clumsy and superficial--but it largely works and does not cost much.  It's not clear to me that more precise data is going to result in the sorts of individual and organizational change that proponents imagine.  This is especially true if, in order to build these new centers for data collection and analyses, we are reallocating resources away from instructional budgets.  Many faculty would argue (rightly, in my view) that the single best way to improve student learning outcomes, especially in introductory courses, is to spend more money on reducing class size.

Institutional consortia do not have a good track record of success (see Walsh, Unlocking the Gates).  The fundamental problem is the absence of a sustainable business model.    The second big problem is the lack of substantial faculty support/buy-in.  Teaching consortia rely on individuals contributing free content or otherwise producing content at low cost.  Faculty are inclined to participate in such an arrangement, but only if nobody is capitalizing on their free content.  I will happily share content with colleagues at other institutions when I know they are using it in their classes.  I would not share content with someone who was then going to use it to make money for himself.  Yet a consortium can't sustain itself independent of foundation funding if it is not capitalizing on its product.  For the time being, Unizin requires a $1 million buy in as well as a Canvas license (purchased separately).  There will undoubtedly be additional charges as the consortium makes deals with other private sector companies to support various aspects of its undertaking.  What do partner institutions get for their investment?  Will the consortium ever be able to sustain itself apart from seeking membership fees and other fees from its partners?

UT Austin is already making the move to Canvas; so the only sure cost is the $1 million membership fee.  But that's not quite the way to look at this.  The decision to join Unizin only makes sense if you intend to invest significantly in analytics; and, more than likely, if you intend to make substantial changes to the current model of lower-division course development (and the role of tenured/tenure-track faculty in this process).   The danger here is that, with no real input from campus faculty, important and hugely consequential decisions are being made about the allocation of resources.  At a public institution, this means that resources have to be shifted from elsewhere to pay for any new effort.  The question we have to ask is: will the payoff be big enough to justify this reallocation (which, more than likely, will involve shifting funds away from college instructional budgets)?  I can imagine a version of the future in which the answer is yes.  At what point is it worth the risk?  What factors need to be in place to maximize the chances that the partnership will help UT Austin fulfill its core teaching and research mission in a way that spending those resources on, say, hiring more faculty won't do?

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Update (6/20/2014) Eric Stoller, "Unizin, Technology Tables, and the Trouble with Silos."  Arguing for the inclusion of Student Affairs issues in the consortium conversation.

Bruce Maas, VP for IT and CIO at UW-Madison on University of Wisconsin's considerations about partnering with Unizin: "Unizin is good for Students, Faculty, and the Private Sector"

Time Sheets and Other Practical Matters

This week I had the opportunity to learn all about the "back end" administration of hiring hourly staff.  As a faculty member, I typically have absolutely nothing to do with the appointments of graduate students as TAs for my larger classes.  Sometimes I am asked if I have a preference for particular students, but more often than not, my preferences are ignored in the final allocation.  I am expected to make do with whatever I am given (which can be a significant issue when dealing with a very large class and a graduate program in which most of the TAs are 1st and 2nd year grad students--and so, especially in the fall, a good part of them are brand new to the university and have no previous job experience).

With the development of the Online Rome class, I have worked extensively with graduate students.  One senior graduate student worked with me last summer and in the spring on some of the "foundation building" work.  This summer, as we build out the course, I have a team of 2 recent PhDs, a current graduate student and an undergraduate student working with me.  A staff member in my College works with me to manage their appointments and keep me in the loop about my role in ensuring that they get paid.  I have not worked an hourly job since graduate school--and even then, I just reported the hours I worked.  Last summer, in working out the terms of my graduate student's appointment, I got a glimpse of some of the complexities that the online course development process is raising (e.g. is it a benefits-eligible appt?  Does it need to be? if so, who pays the tuition reimbursement?)  Our talented administrative staff is learning as they go, and no two appointments are alike.  I have learned to anticipate problems, be vigilant, but also to be patient.

UT Austin switched to an electronic timeseheet reporting system in the spring.  This week I had the pleasure of being trained to teach my students how to report their hours; and then how to monitor and sign off on their hours so that they would get paid on time.  One of the complications, a result of me having absolutely no sense of paying for work by the hour, was figuring out how to translate a total stipend into an hourly wage.  In my world, I work until a task is completed.  I am not paid by the hour (comp time is a concept that I only recently learned about!).  I am pretty good at determining task-based wages but ridiculously unable to think in terms of hourly wages.  This all got even more complicated when I was finally able to shift some extra money to a couple of the students, but only after setting their hourly rate.  So now they have to record about 10 extra hours/week in order to get paid the full amount of their stipend.

In the future, I hope to work with our staff to create a range of standard hourly wages that make sense, especially for summer appointments that have various restrictions if you want to avoid paying fringe (unnecessary because it has already been covered by the academic year appointment).  I am not a fan of paying for work by the hour, but this is the only option we have for these appointments.  So it will be important for faculty like me to learn how to define these appointments, keeping to all the rules and regulations and ensuring that the students aren't left on the hook for things like tuition (which is normally covered when they have a TA appointment for a campus-based course).

From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side to Party Planner?

Instructional designers have characterized the transition from lecture-based teaching to other, more learner-centered modes of instruction as a shift from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side."  In my own experience, at least in large enrollment courses, the shift isn't quite so distinct, and it tends to work best when the course instructor gradually changes roles, all the while training the students in their new role as active participants in the learning process.  This transition can be a challenging one for both instructors and students--and, in fact, many students will energetically resist efforts to put them in the role of active learner.  This resistance, though well-known among practitioners, is rarely discussed by advocates of flipped/hybrid/blended pedagogy.  It often comes as a shock to instructors who are teaching their redesigned course for the first time.  It certainly did to me.  Even more surprising to me was the fact that, while my fellow practitioners all told me that they had the same experience, none of the non-practitioner, blended learning "experts" had suggestions for managing this student resistance/rebellion.  Ultimately, the most useful approach, which came from the assessment specialist I was working with, was to take the complaints seriously and find ways to address them without compromising the overall design and aims of the course. The end result was a much improved course design: only about half as many pre-recorded videos to watch outside of class and much more structure and accountability.  It also led me to realize that it made no sense to redesign a course without also overhauling the course assessments.

I am now in the midst of another significant redesign, this time from blended ("guide on the side") to online.  Mine is a course that is being designed to be taught at scale.  It can certainly be taught to small groups of students, but it also needs to be possible to teach hundreds of students.  I am fortunate to be coming to this project in the midst of the MOOC era.  I have participated in several MOOCs on humanities topics and quickly realized that recorded lectures, no matter how well produced, were not going to be especially effective learning tools.  They are a great way to make content available, as is a textbook and other readings.  But they are not a very good way to engage students who are likely to be inexperienced learners, and especially inexperienced online learners.  For most of the past year, I have been thinking hard about how to design a history course--a course that is, at its base, the story of a culture--independent of lecture.  The other significant challenge: a good part of the course will be asynchronous.  There will certainly be synchronous elements, such as occasional live lectures/discussions and exams; and students will be encouraged to interact with the instructor.  But one goal is to produce a course that has more flexibility than an on-campus course.  The challenge is to find a balance between flexibility and structure.

I have another reason for wanting to avoid an over-dependence on lecture: most of the time, others will be instructing the online course.  As we have all seen with the MOOCs and the Super Professor culture they have helped to cultivate, talking heads can distract from the course content.  The class becomes about the professor instead of the content.  In a basic sense, I wanted a course design that rendered me invisible.  I wanted to leave space for the course's instructor to assert their presence without having to compete with me.  Finally,  I want my course to be about Roman history, politics, literature, art, and architecture; and not about what I'm wearing or whether I crack funny jokes.

In my own experience as a student of MOOCs and other online courses, talking heads quickly become wearisome.  Professors are not actors and we never, ever look as polished on screen.  Professorial charisma does not seem to translate well onto the computer screen.  As well, it's too easy to get bored and distracted when "taking an online class" means watching a series of lectures and answering a few questions.  The guiding principle of my design has been the same one that guides my blended class: "how do I keep each student as engaged as possible at every moment."  In many respects, this is an easier challenge to meet online than in a large-scale blended class.  The first principle in both cases is: speak in declarative sentences as infrequently as possible.  Use the Socratic method.  In a live class, this means that I pose i>clicker questions, peer discussion questions, and class discussion questions in order to elicit content and model the process of creating and thinking critically about a historical narrative.  In an online class, this means producing a series of modules that are question-based, that require students to interact directly with the content to produce knowledge.  In both environments, it means giving them structured feedback but also encouraging them to develop their intuition (e.g. by showing them an unfamiliar image and asking them to analyze aspects of it).

When I think about my role as course designer/creator and builder (with the help of a talented team), I imagine myself as a kind of party planner.  It's my job to set the scene, make sure there is plenty of food and entertainment, invite the guests and make sure that exes aren't forced to talk to one another.  But the experience of the event is up to my guests.  I will be there to replenish the punch bowl and make sure that the event runs smoothly, but I can't experience the party for my guests.  That's on them.  Like a good hostess, I will operate quietly behind the scenes.  A sign of the course's success is that the students have no idea who I am.

Rome Online: First Steps

 Last August, I was awarded a course development grant of $150,000 from the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformational Learning.  My task: to build a fully online version of my successful Introduction to Ancient Rome course (sizzler video here).  I was intrigued--but also mildly terrified--by this task.  As is generally the case with such projects, I had no idea what I was taking on.  I had no idea that I would be not only the course designer but also a de facto project manager.  I have pushed a lot of paper, learned more than I ever wanted to about paying fringe benefits, and had to learn how to supervise and manage a team.   There have been moments of intense frustration with the development process (e.g. being told that it was my responsibility to create a course website and market the course; having a graduate student RA spend significant time on a website; and then finding out that my college's IT unit had now agreed to take that task on).  Rationally, I know that these kinks are to be expected.  My  institution is still working out a process for staffing and supporting projects like mine.  Still, I have "I want to bang my head against the wall" moments. 

Fortunately, as of June 1, the most significant foundation-building (e.g. creating a databank of questions; budgeting and hiring staff; hiring an instructor; creating timelines and deliverables; deciding on the best pedagogy to use; working to get the course listed with our extension school and working with our college's product manager to have it advertised) came to an end and we embarked on the fun part: building the actual modules.  There are still things that frustrate me--most notably, the fact that, at present a UT student cannot register for the course without paying additional tuition.  But it's great to finally be able to see real progress and to feel like we will meet our goal of having the course ready to go live in Fall 2014.

The biggest challenge for me has been learning how to be a project manager and team leader.  As a humanist, I am used to working independently.  I have never had a research assistant and am used to taking responsibility for every aspect of a project.  When I "blended" the Rome class, I did a lot of the work myself (though I did have an assessment specialist give me a lot of help; and in version 2.0 and 2.1, I had significant assistance from [Medical] Dr. Jean Liew).  I got a taste of running a larger-scale project when I taught the blended Intro to Rome class to 400 students.  I had 4 paid TAs, an unpaid TA, and 3 undergraduate graders.  It was a production, and excellent preparation for figuring out how to get the Online Rome class built.  It finally taught me to assign tasks and supervise rather than micromanage (not to say that I'm not still guilty of occasionally micromanaging!).

I was less prepared for the active role I would have to play in agitating for resources in areas like graphic design and instructional technology.  Like many universities, my own is undergoing a transformation as it attempts to provide sufficient support for the many innovative teaching experiments happening around campus.  We have MOOCs on EdX; SMOCs in Psychology and Government; and, now, a series of online courses in development.  It is enormously challenging to have enough experienced and skilled project managers, instructional technology staff, and graphic design/audio/video people to support so many projects. 

I have tried to turn this scarcity of available human resources into a strength of the course design.  I rely very little on high-production video or graphic design.  The focus is entirely on helping students to construct knowledge, through a kind of virtual Socratic method: the content is divided into 8 modules, with each module containing a series of different kinds of questions (multiple choice, mark all correct, matching, short answer, etc.).  I use short lectures (3-5 min) only in instances where I am supplementing assigned readings (e.g. relating the story of Regulus's gruesome death) or connecting discrete bits of content that would otherwise seem disparate to them (e.g. explaining how the Roman military and governance changed in the aftermath of the 2nd Punic War).  A few other advantage of avoiding lectures with high production values: they are extremely expensive to produce and age very quickly (as I learned when I recorded lectures for the blended Rome class).  As well, it immediately makes the class about the content instead of the course creator, and it means that an instructor can step in and "own" the class without competing with the course creator.

Each module ends with a mastery quiz, requiring a grade of 90% to move on to the next module.  There are three midterm exams.  I am still deciding how I want to weight different activities in the course in the calculation of the final grade.  A lot will depend on who registers for the course, I suspect.  I am trying to think of a good way to emphasize low-stakes assessments--as I do in my blended class--while still ensuring the integrity of the grades.  One idea: having oral parts to each assessment, done via Skype.  This won't work at scale, but it might work in the first few iterations of the course when enrollment is likely to be smaller.

The other major challenge has been pedagogical.  What are the best practices for "translating" a large-scale, classroom-based course into an online environment?  There is a fair amount of scholarship on the pedagogy of teaching online to relatively small groups of students.  But what if you need to design a course that could be taken by 200 or 400 students?   What if it needs to be designed in such a way that a graduate student in Classics could run it?  I find myself flying relatively blind as I try to create an online class for a narrative topic like Roman history, that does not rely primarily on lecture to "deliver" content.  How do I design a course that models the way that a Roman historian would think and learn, but without actually performing this modeling live (or on video)?  Fortunately, I have learned a lot about how students learn Roman history in a scaled environment in the course of teaching the 400 student blended version of the course.  I suspect that, in these first few iterations of the online course, we will learn a lot about how they learn in an online environment.

Along the way, I've learned a few things.  First of all, there are two huge expenses in creating an online class: paying salaries, especially my own and especially fringe benefits (side note: skyrocketing health care costs have something to do with stagnating faculty salaries); and video/animation.  I made a choice fairly early in the process to avoid video and focus on issues of course design first, before adding bells and whistles.  I can imagine all sorts of concepts that would benefit from animation and, I hope, I'll someday be able to incorporate some of that into the course.  It was also important to me to involve graduate students in the design and production process.  In order to be able to afford to pay others, I ended up paying myself the equivalent of 2 weeks of my annual salary for the entire project.  I worry that, in the present system of accounting, faculty and graduate students end up being too expensive to hire as creators, unless they donate their time (as I know many faculty course designers are, in fact, doing).  Something needs to change to prevent the wholesale outsourcing of online course design (and instruction).  It certainly makes sense to outsource certain parts of the design and production process, but to my mind, a tremendous opportunity for institutions to benefit from faculty creativity and innovation; and faculty to sharpen their intellectual and pedagogical skills by working in an unfamiliar medium is lost if the entire process is outsourced.

Five, Four, Three... We're Rolling!

After a summer off-camera, I stepped back into the film studio this morning to film a 90 second "sizzler" video for my Introduction to Ancient Rome course.  These are the education equivalent of the nmovie trailer, but we are advertising our class (and ourselves).  It also shows the extent to which the line between education and entertainment is blurring.  Once the sizzler is ready, it will be posted on YouTube.  It's not intended to advertise the campus-based, blended version of the course--that one fills up very quickly every semester and has a long waiting list.  Rather, this is to advertise an online version of the course, which I'll be developing on the Canvas platform for launch in Summer 2014.  The current plan is to open it to UT System students, but perhaps also more widely to auditors.

There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating one of these sizzlers.

Festina Lente: Re-imagining UT Austin

Over the next semester, I am going to be writing opinion columns about the landscape of higher education in Texas and the consequences for the UT Austin campus.  This is the first, introductory column, where I describe the project (and reference the Roman emperor Augustus!)  I'll be visiting classes around campus, talking to instructors, and getting feedback from students in an effort to try to figure out what works and what doesn't, in both online and onsite classrooms.  I'm very excited about this opportunity, not least because it will give me an excuse to learn a lot more about what is happening in campuses around the UT Austin campus.