When Your Online Students are Campus-Based

Source: http://csuw3.csuohio.edu/offices/ist/studentcomputing/mobile_campus.html

As online courses proliferate, one of the more interesting developments is the emergence of the category of campus-based online student.  These are students who are taking most of their courses in the traditional, classroom based format but, for a range of reasons, are also taking online courses.  Some of these online course might be offered by distant institutions; but, increasingly, they may be offered through the student's home university, as the web-based version of a course that is also offered in a face-to-face format.

UT Austin's College of Liberal Arts began to experiment with different forms of online instruction several years ago when they offered Intro to Psychology as a SMOC (Synchronous Massive Online Course).  The SMOC format involved the live streaming of lectures that were recorded in a campus studio.  Students were required to log-in to the class session, at least for the first ten minutes, to take a short MC quiz.  The course design also included opportunities for students to discuss questions in small groups--something that would have been more successful if more students had remained logged into the course after the first ten minutes.

As we went live with Online Rome, to test and revise the design as well as to determine staffing needs, our primary audience was UT Austin students.  The course was offered through the Classics Department, side by side with the face to face version of the course.  For UT Austin students paying flat-rate tuition, the course was fully covered.  The demand for the course was extremely high--somewhat to my surprise given that it was brand new and still in development.  In Spring 2015, we had to cap the course at 100 just to be able to have enough time to finish the development. 

The majority of the students preferred the online class to the classroom course for reasons of flexibility.  Many of the enrolled students were STEM majors who had very complicated schedules and long days on campus.  The much preferred to take a core requirement course online, where they had much more flexibility in completing the work.  The course still had plenty of structure and deadlines to keep everyone on track, but we saw that many students would spend several hours working through a module as soon as it was released.  In fact, in future iterations that we control, we will release the modules well in advance to provide as much flexibility to students as possible. 

One of the unexpected elements of teaching campus-based students was that, for about 20% of the class, they desired face to face interaction with the instructor.  Typically, such interactions are not possible in on online class.  But, when the students are campus-based, it is possible to hold office hours, exam review sessions, and even weekly review sessions.  Based on feedback from the fall semester, we added a weekly review session to the Spring 2015 class.  The vast majority of students did not need or want this extra interaction with the instructor.  But for the 20% who did want it, it made a tremendous difference in their ability to stay on track and feel engaged with the course.  We also live-streamed the review sessions, so that everyone had access to them.

In the end, the instruction of an online course to campus-based students seems to push towards the hybrid. This makes a lot of sense to me.  The hybrid model produces the highest learning gains.  It combines the best of all worlds--the advantages of face to face instruction while leveraging all the affordances of the digital.  It is also something that online instructors are not always prepared for.  They often assume that, since they are teaching online, they don't really need to interact with students face to face.  This isn't really true in any context.  Even in distance online courses, there needs to be significant attention to connecting with students and building a learning community. 

When students are campus-based, they expect that instructors will be available for scheduled office hours, appointments, and structured reviews.  It was interesting to watch as a significant number of students intuitively grasped that, for them, this kind of hybridized model was going to best support their learning.  Of course, many students were fine to work through the modules, submit assignments, and use the provided study guides to prepare for exams--those are the 30% of our students who would be A students regardless of what we did.  But for the students in the middle, the B students who can become A students, the C students who can become B students, they recognized and asked for more direct contact with the instructor.  An advantage of offering the course to campus based students is that, in essence, we can retain the asynchronous online class for those that want it while also providing the hybrid course for those who prefer that model.

Beyond Content: Critical Thinking Online

(Image source: http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/critical-thinking-skills-you-need-to-master-now/)

Probably the biggest misapprehension about online course design and instruction is that the course is an automated version of a pure lecture model of instruction.  This misapprehension includes the wrongheaded reduction of instructors to the role of "content deliverer."  Students are imagined as blank slates whose minds are supposedly filled by all this delivered content.  If this were an accurate model of teaching and learning, in any environment, then it really would be possible to record faculty delivering lectures and put them online.  It really would be possible to reduce the role of the instructor to "course manager/grade accountant."  In this role, the course manager would be responsible for trouble-shooting technology problems, proctoring exams, answering logistical questions that are already answered on the syllabus.  If only it were so easy.

Partly in an effort to discourage anyone from thinking that my Online Rome course could be run without the involvement of at least one content expert at the top, I did not include any lectures in the course.  You will never see me in the role of "content deliver" or "content expert."  We did include some old pre-recorded lectures that covered the basics, mostly because we had them and I was curious to see how much students used them when they were unnecessary.  Those lectures will not be used in the version of the course that is run for UT Austin students, in part to avoid the false assumption on all sides that students will pass by watching those lectures.

Rather, the design of the course emphasized active, constructivist learning.  Students learn by answering questions that highlight essential bits of ancient Roman history.  We ask them to think about things deeply and critically.  Oftentimes there isn't one "correct" answer--and that's the point.  We talk a lot about the limits of evidence.  We make it clear that this is a class that goes well beyond memorizing a bunch of random information and regurgitating that on graded assignments.  If that's all the class were, it really should be taught by a robot.  As Mike Caulfield puts it, we are not in the content business; we are in the business of building communities of learners.

In designing the class, we did as much as we could to focus on the development and exercise of critical thinking skills--in the modules, in essays at the end of modules, and on graded activities.  In the first live version of the course, we tried to use short answer questions inside of modules to accomplish these outcomes, but without much success.  A big part of the problem: Canvas isn't really designed to give students feedback on short answer questions inside of modules; and it required that graders have a substantial knowledge of ancient Roman history to give useful and on point feedback.  It also required that students review the feedback and take it in.

In the Spring 2015 version, we retained the short answer questions but emphasized the self-regulating aspect of learning with them.  We provided extensive but general feedback in the comments but relied on students to answer the questions (or not).  We also reviewed the contents of some of the short answer questions later in the module, through an automatically graded question.  The instructor feedback was shifted to the essays.  This produced much better results, both because the students took the essay more seriously and very often produced thoughtful responses; and, because of how we distributed the work, the grading for the instructor was 50 500 word essays/week--a small enough amount that he could give extended and engaged feedback to students.  The students, in turn, were more likely to look at the feedback for a single assignment that felt weighty to them.  The depth of student engagement on the "big issues" has been very impressive.

There is nothing about the online meeting that makes it easier or more difficult to teach and practice critical thinking skills.  It's entirely about devising and incentivizing the right learning activities for the environment.  It also requires that one view the instructor not as a content provider or manger of logistics, but as a teacher.  At every step, critical thinking requires reflection from the student and, at key points, feedback from the teacher.  It is crucial that the teacher has the knowledge to provide that feedback that then pushes the student to think more deeply and critically.

To give just one example of a Q&A from the class discussion board:

A student asks the following question while working through a module: "A question says that this was necessary to confer the powers required to rule as emperor. However, the recording states that this was a self defeating proposal as it conferred power beyond the legal basis law. Given that Vespasian was already emperor, and thus laid claim to supreme power, did this truly do anything beyond codify what he already had? That is to say, was it necessary or just convenient for Vespasian?"

The instructor replies: "Good question, and one without a clear answer. On the one hand, as a non-Julio-Claudian, and a usurper of the throne, Vespasian required the lex to give his position legal standing. On the other, this seems to obscure a reality that had stood behind Vespasian's rise and, indeed, Augustus': the power of the emperor was not based on law, but his irrefutable military supremacy.

In other words, what the lex did was standardize the position of the emperor in a way that made it possible for an emperor to hold power without basing his legitimacy on family lineage. What it didn't do was resolve the ambiguity that resided between the "clout" of the emperor and the notional continued constitutional existence of the Republic (which echoes the contrast between auctoritas and imperium that was apparently crucial to Augustus' reign). The degree to which this was understood by contemporary Romans is debatable; for them, it was merely a standard law that made Vespasian's extraordinary reign consistent within existing fabric of Roman society."

The amount of expertise required to engage with this student's interesting and thoughtful question is very high and goes well beyond the "I read the textbook a week before the students did" approach of some out of their depth instructors.  An interesting thing happens when you give smart kids a lot of information and ask them to think about it: they do.  And sometimes they have questions that don't have an easy, Google-able answer.  Sometimes, to answer their question, you have to have a deep knowledge of late Roman republican history; Roman law; Augustan auctoritas vs imperium, and how that evolved under the Judio-Claudians; and the intersection of law and martial power from Sulla onwards.  This is very specialized learning, the sort of learning one acquires only by writing a dissertation/conducting research in the field or, possibly, after decades of teaching the course.

Learning does not happen by magic.  It doesn't happen just by attending lecture nor does it happen just by opening up and even working through an online module. While many--most of all ed tech VCs--would love to be able to automate professors, the harsh reality is that we can't be automated.  Parts of what we do can be automated, certainly; but WE can't be automated.  We can be replaced by other content experts (who will have different sets of strengths and weaknesses), but we can't be replaced by robots or by a Physics BA who is looking to earn some extra money on the side.

If one thinks of an online instructor as nothing more than a grader and student wrangler, quite a lot of potential learning seeps away as students realize that nobody has the expertise to engage with them.  It's interesting to me that we all recognize them when it comes to a physical classroom; yet want to believe that, somehow, when it comes to online learning, the course itself can magically provide all these ingredients--especially timely and engaged feedback--that are essential for developing critical thinking skills in the vast majority of our undergraduate students.  Technology is not magic.  Learning online is difficult and requires the same interaction with content experts that classroom learning requires.

Orienting Online Students

 

Every hiker knows not to leave home without water, an emergency supply of food, a map, and a compass.  A cell phone or an emergency locator beacon can also be useful.  Before setting foot on the trail, hikers will orient themselves to their surroundings and make note of the weather (and, hopefully, they checked the forecast before leaving home).   They will find North and make sure they are headed in the correct direction.

Educators know that orientations are also important for our students.  At UT Austin, we require students to attend an entire week of orientation activities on campus during June and July.  The first week of classes is full of orientation activities.  We orient new graduate students to campus, the department, and the program.  Yet, for the most part, most of us devote very little time to orienting our students to our face to face classes.  Sure, we spend the first class meeting reviewing the syllabus and discussing our expectations for the course.  In a seminar course, students might introduce themselves to one another.  But, really, we don't orient students to the course itself, including what to expect as the semester progresses.  For the most part, this lack of orientation isn't a problem.  The basic experience of taking on class is not that different from another class; and these students have been practicing classroom-based education since before they could use the potty on their own.  What they don't know, they quickly figure out; and if they are truly disoriented, they will seek help from a classmate or us.

The problems come up in spades when we shift learning to online.  Suddenly, the students feel lost, uncertain, unsure--even if, in actuality, their part in the learning process hasn't significantly changed and there is not reason for them to feel disoriented.  The majority of these so-called digital natives behave as if they were plopped down on a different planet that operates by a wholly different set of natural laws when they participate in the online classroom.  They are disoriented and looking for familiar landmarks--which are often not immediately evident to them.  Sometimes they forget good behavior.  The same student who would never shout obscenities to a classmate suddenly posts an invective-laced, ad hominem attack on the discussion board.  When the impropriety is pointed out, they often are ashamed and deeply apologetic.  They just didn't think about it, they say.

When I implemented the blended course design in my campus-based large lecture class, the first semester was an exercise in frustration for me and the students.  Most of it, I realized, came down to issues of disorientation: the students felt disoriented and were unable to recognize the familiar when it was right in front of them.  It really was as if they were wearing a pair of glasses that distorted everything and made even completely normal things seem unfamiliar.  From this, I learned the value of crafting a thoughtful orientation for students in "innovative" courses.  These days, students are much more accustomed to the expectations and workings of the blended classroom, so orientation goes pretty quickly.  The new frontier is the online class, especially the online class at scale (the larger the class, the more potential for disorientation).

In the first live run of Online Rome, we were pressed for time to get the course ready for students (the decision to go live was made by UT days before the start of the semester).  We put together a short orientation module, but hastily.  It worked ok, but throughout the term it was apparent that some portion of the students--maybe 10%--were still confused and disoriented.  It wasn't that we were asking them to do strange things; it was that they were disoriented in the online environment and so were unable to recognize and feel comfortable with standard learning activities.  They felt the need to double-check everything, seek confirmation that they were "doing things right."  All of this disorientation required significant time and effort on the part of the instructor throughout the semester.

Over the winter break, I spent considerable time revising the orientation module so that it did a better job of equipping students with the skills they would need to confidently and successfully navigate the course.  I also worked with the course instructor on the issue of orientation.  This spring, he made regular announcements to the class, reminders of where they should be, upcoming deadlines and other course activities, and general feedback on things like their essays.   The results have been what I expected: the students felt comfortable, knew what was expected, and have wasted little time fretting about logistics.

Eventually, we will be teaching a generation of students who are as comfortable learning online as they are in a classroom; and who require less regular orientations and re-orientations by the instructor.  For now, though, the default learning environment for our students is the face to face classroom.  Anything else requires us to be aware of the constant potential for disorientation.  A lot of time can be saved with a well-crafted orientation module, that lays out for the students the architecture of the course and their role in it.  To give just one example, we focused on the role of self-regulated learning in Online Rome.  We had the students read a little bit about the concept and answer some questions; and then had them apply the concept to a learning activity (answer a short answer question, look at feedback, reflect on how they would modify their response).

Finally, having students perform the sorts of activities that they will be doing throughout the semester is an excellent way for them to evaluate whether the online course is a good fit for them.  If they find it difficult to complete the orientation module on time; or feel alienated in the online environment, they have plenty of time to drop the course and find something that is a better fit for their style of learning.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Bronze coin from Canusium, with laureate head of Janus on obverse and prow of a ship on the reverse

My favorite ancient Roman deity is Janus, the two-headed god of beginnings, endings, and transitions.  His temple in Rome, the first of which was constructed by Rome's second king Numa Pompilius, famously closed its doors when Rome was at peace.  Rarely in the history of ancient Rome were the doors of Janus's temple closed--and by the time Augustus shut Janus's doors (first in 29 BCE), the gesture had become more imperial propaganda than a reflection of reality.  It feels a bit like Rome has been pacified and it's time to enjoy a bit of engaged relaxation, what the Romans called otium.

Now that my part of the Online Rome project has come to an end, at least with regard to the instruction of the online course to UT Austin students, I'm thinking a lot about what's next.  My job was to develop a sustainable, scalable (within reason) online class that could produce high levels of student learning.  It was supposed to be efficient, both in terms of maximizing the efficiencies of technology and, bluntly, in terms of costing less $$ to instruct more students than our current face to face courses do.  I also worked hard to leverage the advantages of the online medium while minimizing the disadvantages.  I spent a lot of time and creative energy to find solutions that preserved quality but also maximized the efficiencies of technology.  I made sure that the instructor's time was spent giving feedback on high value learning activities.  I am very proud of the work I did, together with the course instructor, Dr. Steve Lundy.  We delivered exactly what we promised when I was given the grant.  Part of the final "product" was a trained instructor whom the department could afford to hire; and a plan for training additional instructors.  Every piece was in place for the course to be a good experience for UT Austin students; and a good opportunity for Classics PhD students to get some experience with online instruction.

Quo vadis?  First of all, Steve and I are not done with Online Rome, not by a long shot.  Steve will work with the department on the transition, do consulting work for our Liberal Arts IT Development Studio (who have, thankfully, protected him in various ways for next year), and work with me on some research related to Online Rome.  He will also be instructing the University Extension School section of the course in Summer 2015 and, probably, Fall 2015 (so, you want to take the course as it was designed, from an actual Roman historian?  Pay $350 to register via UEX and transfer the credits wherever you need to, including back into UT Austin).

I am also thinking hard about other ways to connect students to the Online Rome class.  One audience I'd especially like to reach is those in the UT System, who don't otherwise have access to a course like this.  I'm also interested in collaborating with 1-2 large, established online programs to think about how these programs might be able to make this course available to their students, and what an agreement to do so would look like.  As we move closer to a future in which many students will take a lot of the Gen Ed courses online, it will make sense for online programs to partner with faculty from other institutions to share content.  This is roughly the idea behind Unizin--but Unizin positions itself as the clearinghouse and repository.  This is one model; another model is, in essence, a more direct kind of collaboration between individual faculty and online programs.  I am very interested in working with some proven programs and experienced staff to see what a more direct collaboration might look like.

I am especially excited to now have the time to return to writing--about emperors and the senate; about online course design; about higher education policy.  I am currently digging in on two book projects: a traditional classics monograph that looks at the complex and evolving relationship of the Roman senate and the emperors, beginning with Sulla in the 1st century BCE--a project that took shape as a direct result of my work in building Online Rome.  My second book project, Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Ecosystem, builds on my "innovative teaching" experiences over these past three years, with blended and online course design and implementation.  I have a rather unique vantage point: I know the scholarship and theory very well but have also been down in the trenches, designing and implementing and revising the courses, and doing so at scale.  I have had to learn how to manage a budget, manage a project, hire and fire people, and deliver on deadline (this last one wasn't such a problem!).  I've also had a first-hand look at the challenges our current policies and infrastructures pose to the successful implementation of truly innovative courses.  There is a tendency to blame faculty for lacking creativity or being unwilling to take risks.  I've learned, usually the hard way, that these risks rarely pay off, at least in the short run.  I've also learned that, eventually, policies and infrastructure get put in place to prevent the worst abuses/problems.

I'm planning to use this blog as the place to organize and process a lot of the thinking for the Digital Teaching and Learning book.  Blogging is a great adjunct to my writing process, both because I have to figure out how to articulate in writing what is in my head but also because it usually generates comments and insights from people who know much more than I do. These comments and conversations make me aware of issues that I hadn't thought about and, especially, clarify for me the real issues.  Like, for instance, that the central issue with online education is labor.  That has emerged so clearly from my project, at every turn and in every way.  It's all about labor and contingency--and as soon as faculty automate their labor to the point that it seems like they can be cut out of the work, they will be.  It's not an accident that the person my department hired to run the Online Rome is also running another major program that I built, together with another colleague.  We did such a good job that, even to a PhD in classics, it seemed reasonable to replace us with someone who has a very, very different skill set from us or from what the job will demand.  I don't think I would have realized the centrality of labor issues in this whole conversation without people like Karen Gregory.

Down here in the trenches of higher education at the large, underfunded state university, I feel like we are poised on the precipice.  It's a time of great change.  This is unsettling, particularly because much of the change thus far has been for the good of the empowered classes (mostly high level administrators) and has severely harmed our institutions, our current and future students, and the most vulnerable members of our profession.  I am sad to see my senior colleagues so unable to protect the future of higher education, so disengaged with the political and economic realities of higher education that they make catastrophic decisions without even beginning to understand what they've done or why it matters. 

I'm a historian--something I'd have never said a decade ago.  But these days, I'm pretty solidly a historian and will be.  I happen to study one of the most interesting periods of history--the end of the Western Roman Empire.  The Roman West in the 4th and 5th centuries tells us that times of great change are also opportunities.  I hope that I will also look back and think that some good things happened, that some unmet potentials were fulfilled.  I have to confess that, at the moment, my optimism is flagging.  I try to remember that change, especially good changes, often happen slowly and painfully.  I don't want to believe that we are in a death spiral but I do sometimes wonder.  I'll keep fighting the good fight for now.

Coin issued by Nero in 64 CE, to commemorate the negotiation of a peace deal with the Parthians.  The coin's reverse depicts the Temple of Janus in Rome, with its doors closed.

The Ruin of Rome, or Something Happened on the Way to the Forum

This reconstruction of the Roman Forum shows what this remarkable civic space looked like in 312 CE, shortly after Constantine took over command as the senior co-emperor (with Licinius) of the Roman Empire.  In 312 CE, Rome and the Western Empire were on the brink of one last great run before irreversible decline set in sometime around the late 6th century.  Below is a photo of the Roman Forum today, from a roughly similar angle on the Capitoline Hill (photo courtesty of Darius Arya).

Even today, amid the ruins and barely identifiable traces of once magnificent buildings, a walk through the Roman Forum is magical.  It is difficult to imagine what the experience must have been like for a Roman living during the height of Augustus's or Trajan's reign.  The sheer majesty of the surrounding buildings, gleaming with gold and marble, must have been spectacular.  The Forum's magnificence served as a daily reminder that Rome was, indeed, the world's capital (caput mundi) and, as the poet Vergil famously said, an empire without boundaries (imperium sine fine).  Rome's former majesty is irrevocably lost to us, even as we catch glimpses of it in the city's remarkable ancient ruins.

I found myself reflecting on Rome's death this week, as I wrapped up the development of Online Rome.  The project has been ongoing for two years, and intensively for the past 12 months.  Working with a small team of content designers (including an MD!) as well as recent PhD with substantial classroom teaching experience and Roman cultural and literary history as his area of specialty, I built a modularized, fully online, aynchronous course that produced impressive results in student learning this past year.  There was a lot of trial and error.  We went live with the course in Fall 2014 with an enrollment of c. 300 students.  This spring, we capped the course at 100 students, partly to figure out how best to staff the course in the future.  While on medical leave, I thoroughly revised every module and the instructor added several new features to the course (some obvious additions, others much more subtle but equally effective).

It was an exhausting amount of work, but when I finished on Monday I was genuinely proud of the final product.  The instructor and I were both very pleased with the performance of the students this spring and were looking forward to modifying the modules and course structure for a 5 week summer course that would have started in June.

From the beginning, I designed and built the course to be instructed by others.  I also made a strong effort to work with the course instructor to ensure that there was a qualified and experienced instructor positioned to take over the project and manage its transition to the Classics Department.  In order for this transition to be smooth, the current instructor and I both knew that he would need to figure out how to teach the course during a five week session; and would need to train others in the tricky ins and outs of managing the course and motivating the students to stay on track.  I had hoped that the Classics Department would hire him as a kind of "course manager" to implement the training process while continuing to offer the course (the student demand has been very high).  I would have been disappointed if the chair had opted to hire someone else, but fine with that decision if the alternative candidate(s) had an equivalent or better skill set in both Roman studies and online instruction than the course's current, demonstrably successful instructor. 

I was stunned to learn yesterday, indirectly and in passing, that the Classics Chair had opted not to implement the "succession plan" that I had carefully and thoughtfully crafted.  As well, different instructors were appointed for the summer session and fall semester--and, though both are skilled classroom instructors, they are either unqualified or under-qualified for the specific tasks that the successful instruction of Online Rome requires.

Besides the apparent personal politics at play in this decision, it also reflects a surprising ignorance about the crucial role of the instructor in an online class.  As any (good) educator knows, the most important requirement for a successful course is the instructor's pedagogical skill, experience, and knowledge of course content.  This does not change when the classroom is replaced by a computer.  If anything, as my team learned this year, the instructor becomes even more crucial to the course's success.  As a faculty member at an  R1 institution, I recognize and accept that we always compromise a bit on this because we have a responsibility to train graduate students.  We also require our graduate students to take a pedagogy class that focuses on f2f teaching before they set foot in front of paying students.  Likewise, they are closely supervised during their first few semesters.

The learning curve is inevitably steep but the damage can usually be managed in classes of 15-20 students.  We do not deliberately put graduate students into teaching situations for which they are wholly unprepared and for which they have no training or experience.  Likewise, given the "buyer's market", it should not present an insuperable problem to find many candidates who are Romanists and have some experience with some part of teaching online/at scale/managing and training a team of TAs.  And yet....

These staffing decisions would also be less concerning to me if I had not made a point of explaining multiple times,  in multiple formats (oral conversation, letters, emails), to multiple people involved in decision-making about the course that the course's future success would depend on appointing a qualified and experienced instructor, at least to serve as "course manager" and work closely to train TAs.  The course was deliberately designed NOT to be "plug 'n play"--I wanted for instructors to be able to own it and make it their own.  There are no pre-recorded lectures and my face is nowhere in the course.  But such a design means that instructors need to do considerable work, especially at the start of the semester.

This deliberate and willful devaluation of both experience/proven success and content expertise raises some important and unsettling questions for academics.  These days, many of us expect our expertise to be devalued by people outside of academia.  We even expect it, to some extent, from our administrators.  But we expect that our disciplinary colleagues, most of all the leaders of our departments, will be the first to defend the value of experience and expertise.  If we don't do it, who will?  Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal asked, "who will guard the guardians?"  This is a very real and consequential question in higher education these days; and goes well beyond pettiness, favortism, and whatever else motivated the poor decision-making regarding the staffing of Online Rome.

First of all, it is crucial that every educator recognize the key role that instructors play in every teaching and learning encounter, whether online, in a classroom, or elsewhere.  Second, we must value expertise in the content of our courses.  Of course nobody can be the world's expert on everything Roman, but at the very least, the instructor should be a Romanist and have done significant work at the PhD level and beyond on things Roman if they are teaching an online Intro to Rome class.  In recent years, my department has moved to staffing our introductory level courses with our best scholars and teachers.  These courses are given to faculty who are experts in the general area as much as possible (e.g. the Greek cultural historian teaches Intro to Greece; the Greek literature scholar teaches Intro to Myth).  An online course should be treated with the same respect for instructor expertise.

Modules aren't exactly textbooks, but they aren't an instructor either.  They certainly cannot replace an instructor, particularly in the constructivist model of learning that I used.  Finally, we must acknowledge that teaching and learning online happen in radically different ways than they do in a f2f classroom.  There is a large body of scholarship on this topic.  There are best practices for teaching online.  It is possible to train people to teach online, just as we do currently for classroom teaching.   To conflate the two media is to make a horrendous mistake and sets both the instructor and the students up for a miserable experience.

Why do we need to do these three things I enumerated in the previous paragraph?  Because, as soon as we start hiring unqualified and inexperienced instructors when we could have hired a qualified and experienced instructor (and, in my case, for the same or lower salary), we are setting foot on a slippery slope.  This devaluation of expertise, this belief that anyone can teach online, that content expertise is not a sine qua non, is exactly the tune that is sung in the edupreneurial world of For Profits and their VCs.  This is the tune that companies like Pearson sing: have the content expert build the course (or, more commonly, review something already built and sign off on it) and then hire the cheapest labor possible to run the course. Sometimes we are forced to make do with an instructor who is not an expert.  That was not the case in this situation.

It is a very short leap to go from hiring the early Greek archaeologist to teach a very difficult course on ancient Rome, a course that draws heavily on primary textual and material evidence; to hiring the English MA or the Psychology BA, if it saves money.  Because, they sing, online courses don't require expert instructors trained in the pedagogy of teaching online.  Anyone can run an online course--just load it up for them, sign up students, and off you go.  It's the ultimate ed tech fantasy but it's just that--a fantasy.

In discussing this situation with a group of friends, one wise academic noted: "In my view, all attempts to automate courses have the goal of letting just anyone teach them. I know you built it so that wouldn't be possible for someone who cared about student learning. But a lot of people don't care about students, or knowledge, or even understand why the people who actually know shit must be the ones to teach it. Sorry to be such a downer on this, but there's nowhere to run . . .."  Of course she is right.  I never understood that, unless I controlled all aspects of the course--including staffing--I was making it possible for the course to be run badly.  In retrospect, I should have demanded some input on staffing even thought that is not usual for f2f courses.  Or required that an instructor meet a basic set of qualifications.  

The particularities of this situation also clearly demonstrate why new models of teaching and new kinds of courses expose the need for changes to the existing infrastructure and traditions.  It might have once made sense for a department chair to decide staffing, fairly unilaterally.  It no longer makes sense, especially when a university has invested significant money to develop a course (at least $300K in mine, counting my time); and especially when few chairs have much familiarity with the world of online education.  To some extent, bad decisions are the result of ignorance, of not understanding what the thing is or how it works.  This doesn't excuse a bad decision, but it does suggest that decisions should be less unilateral in cases where the university has invested significant money and has good knowledge of what is required to maximize student learning outcomes.

I know it is possible to support high quality learning online.  It's hard to do and takes thought, skill, a lot of work, and experience.  The course instructor and I figured out how to do it.  But, once the course left my possession, I lost control over an element that was critical to our success.  And, as my friend noted, by automating things, I made it too easy for others, with a range of motives, to devalue experience and expertise.  For my part, the solution to all of this was pretty straightforward.  I have finished the development work and met the terms of the grant.  The class is handed over in good working order.  It is now the responsibility of the department to recreate the successes that we've had and to do ongoing development and training of additional instructors.  This task is going to be much harder for everyone than it should have been (or needed to be).

Rethinking Gen Ed/Undergrad Ed: A Tale of Two Meetings

Image from elitedaily.com

During the past two weeks, I've had the opportunity to take part in two different but overlapping conversations about the future of undergraduate education.  The first came on the UT Austin campus, when I attended a full-day symposium--Campus Conversation--dedicated to the complicated but important question of how a research university like mine can do a better job of integrating research and discovery into the undergraduate curriculum.  In some ways, I think the charge of the symposium was too narrowly conceived.  It struck me as an important question, but also something of a defensive response to legislative threats to the value of research that doesn't make money.  My students can benefit from my activities as an active and engaged scholar without themselves "doing research".  If we define research in broad terms, as something more like question-driven learning, then I'm fully on board.  If we mean that all freshmen should be treated like miniature versions of ourselves, I'm a bit less enthused.  In the same way that graduate programs have run into trouble by assuming that the end goal of graduate training was solely to produce imitations of ourselves, it makes no sense to treat all undergraduate as future researchers.  It DOES make sense to leverage the power of curiosity and digital tools to structure our courses around questions to be answered, problems to be solved.  I will say more about this Campus Conversation in a separate post (and I've written a quick overview of it, with links, here).

The consensus of the faculty was that we need to find ways to re-imagine our undergraduate courses and curricula to engage our students in meaningful, authentic learning experiences.  How we do that, given the current state of budgetary austerity under which we are operating, is a different and more challenging question.  The problem with meaningful and authentic learning experiences is that they tend to require a lot of resources, especially human resources.  Indeed, it is the human interaction--the interaction of teacher and student (or, in other terms, novice and expert)--that stands at the center of the learning experience and drives it.  It is exactly why, even as we experiment with taking certain kinds of learning out of the classroom (i.e. basic content acquisition), the interactive piece of learning--online or f2f--becomes all the more necessary.  In "The Power of the Personal", Daniel Chambliss observes: "Time and again, finding the right person, at the right moment, seemed to have an outsize impact on a student’s success—in return for relatively little effort on the part of the college."  In other words, the secret sauce of student success seems to have student-faculty interaction as a main ingredient.  Automation has a place to play in the 21st education at resource-starved institutions, I would contend; but faculty, especially tenure-track faculty (not because they are superior to non-TT faculty but because it says something about the institution's commitment to them and their subsequent willingness to give back to the campus community), are the sine qua non of meaningful learning experiences and student success, both narrowly and broadly conceived.

Today and tomorrow, I am in Washington DC as a member of a Digital Tools sub-committee for an AAC&U project on re-imagining general education for the 21st century.  The project, called GEMS, is in the planning stage of submitting a proposal to the Gates Foundation.  In this meeting as well as the two earlier ones, we have spent a lot of time talking broadly about general education and its role in the undergraduate curriculum, especially at a time when many students "swirl" around, collecting credits from a variety of institutions until they have enough of the right kind of credits to graduate.  I'm not that old, yet I come from a generation that arrived at college with perhaps a handful of AP credits. I passed some graduation requirements by taking exams--essentially, a form of competency-based education that has always existed.  But I remained a residential student for 4 years, taking full credit loads.  I grew up not far from a community college and even had to take a course there in order to graduate from high school; but few people in my graduating high school class took community college courses with the intention of transferring them and counting them towards their college graduation requirements.  My generation went to college and entered into an essentially closed ecosystem.  That ecosystem is no longer closed.  My UT Austin students take courses at community colleges, at other UT System campuses, and online to "get done with" their GE requirements.  As an institution, we have little control over their lower-division curriculum at this point, even as we lament the ways that this change has not served our undergraduates all that well.  Frequently we encounter upper division students who have weak writing skills, little sense of how to construct an argument from evidence, and a general lack of basic content knowledge.  Oftentimes, they have to retake introductory pre-reqs in their majors in order to be prepared for upper division courses.  This prolongs their time to degree and costs the institution as well as the student.

Given this widespread change in how students go to college, it is clear that general education is in need of reform; and that we need to have more cooperation between institutions, more agreement on what we think are the learning goals and outcomes--the Degree Qualification Profile--of a successful student.  I hesitate to use the word "standardization"; but, in fact, that's partly what we need.  But we also need to use this as an opportunity to get general education right--at least for this generation of students.  My sub-committee, the Digital, has spent a lot of time trying to identify our task.  What, exactly, is it that we expect the digital learning environment to support and facilitate.  Today, continuing a conversation that began in June, we reached the conclusion that, in the end, what we were talking about was how the digital would support and, ideally, enhance, authentic learning. 

I was struck by this focus on authentic learning today, in part because I realized that we all see essentially the same thing: we need to find ways to make student learning more authentic, more discovery-oriented.  Our group would argue that the digital is essential to this curricular transformation, not because it replaces the human element of learning but because it enhances it.  It highlights exactly what it is that we faculty bring to the classroom.  It makes sacred that time when we share space with our students.  It means that we can "offload" most content acquisition to other spaces and spend the time in class engaging in higher order thinking and analysis.  It means that we can be there for the hard stuff, helping to prepare our students for an adult life and working world that will require them to be nimble and adaptable, to constantly learn new and complicated skills.  If they are going to be prepared for this workplace, we need to think hard about how and what and where they are learning.  We need to understand that the notion of students being graduates of individual institutions means something very different today than it did even a decade ago.  Things won't change much for the Harvards and Reeds of the higher education world; but for the rest of us, they have already changed and we are already trying to catch up to the new reality.  Tomorrow's task: articulate in clear terms the role of the digital in this catch-up game, as it pertains to general education courses.

Going Live!

At 8 am on 2 September 2014, Online Rome went live for UT Austin students as well as for the ten students who enrolled in the course via our extension program (UEX).  Since then, we have released two more modules. The total enrollments: 15 UEX students and 295 UT Austin students.  In addition, I have 190 students in my blended instruction campus course.  I am most relieved that we managed to go live and get the first three modules released without any major problems.  This is a small miracle, given that a week before classes began I was pushing to postpone the course release date to January.  No marketing had been done, registration was opened extremely late, and the oversight of the online courses had moved from one dean to another in early August. 

Our biggest shock thus far has been the amount of student interest.  Given the lack of advertising, even to UT Austin students; and the very late registration opening (the Friday before classes began), we were expecting somewhere between 15-25 UT Austin students.  I was persuaded to wait on pulling the plug with the argument that this would be a good opportunity to beta test the course with a small group.  With 300 students, though, we can't afford any screw-ups.  If I've learned anything about teaching at scale, it is that any minor error has the potential to cause enormous confusion and chaos.  It was a mad scramble to staff the courses appropriately and also to get all the usual course documents prepared for the instructors.  In the first few weeks of the semester, I focused a lot of attention on making sure that we communicated regularly to the online students, and that we were exceptionally responsive to their questions.  As expected, there was a bit of disorientation but I think we were able to resolve it pretty quickly and get everyone down to work on the modules.

And then there was the matter of getting the modules polished and out the door.  We had nearly all of the content finished, but still needed to add short podcasts.  Thankfully, my new project manager is an audio engineer.  I sent him scripts and recordings of me reading all the strange Latin names and terms; he found people to record the podcasts in their studio.  I wanted there to be a multiplicity of voices, and we have that.  My technologist also worked hard to get the first three modules out during these first weeks of the semester.  I did a lot of proofreading, editing, and decision-making while she worked on the packaging of the content. 

The only major issue we've had was with copying the Canvas course site from one course to another.  For some reason, this process is buggy and required us to go in and re-edit the copied site.  Otherwise, apart from some broken links, we've had few questions from students.  They seem to be doing what we want them to do: working on their modules.  They will have their first discussion this week, on Piazza.  In order to facilitate better discussion, we've divided them into groups of about 50.  The quality of these posts should tell us a lot about how well they are learning in the online environment.  It should also serve as a check for them.

My biggest issue is trying to figure out how to manage the scale problem.  The course design is constructivist and high touch.  So far, I've decided that we will make every effort to give generous amounts of feedback through the first three modules.  This will get them to the first midterm.  After that, I am thinking about introducing a couple of things: first, instead of the instructional team grading and responding to all short answer questions (there are quite a few in each module), we will respond to a selection of questions and then post general feedback for the others.  Second, I will have them respond to a peer's short answers.  I am thinking that I might do the first form of response for the modules that lead up to the second midterm; and then the third form for the modules that lead up to the third midterm.  And frame this transition as part of the design (which, in fact, it is): by the end of the semester, we want them to have progressed from passive recipients of feedback to active givers of it, whether to themselves or to their fellow students.  I was motivated to think harder about this issue because of the size of the class, but I actually think it's one of those situations where a problem is actually a stimulus to a better solution.

It is going to be a very long semester for me.  Thankfully, I have my sine qua non, Dr. Liew, helping me every step of the way; a very strong instructional team; and a great project manager who is doing his best to take tasks away from me.  Still, it takes a lot of time to prepare the modules for release.  We have to work very carefully to ensure that no errors are introduced and to ensure that everything is set properly.  But we are also focused on quality.  My team of students who worked on the modules this summer did an excellent job of preparing drafts.  Now we are revising, beefing up content, adding graphics, and creating introductions, summaries, podcasts, etc.  It is interesting but mentally draining work.  On the bright side, we are creating a durable artifact, and much of the work that we are doing this fall will not have to be redone in the near future.