The Myth of the Super Professor

Yesterday I wrote about the myth of the bad professor, a myth that has been a central feature of the narrative of a crisis in higher education.   The myth has been a driving force behind the daily calls for the reform of higher education--preferably by Silicon Valley VCs who are entirely outside of the system (and who, on the whole, seem to understand few of the complexities of higher education in the US).  The topic evidently hit a nerve with many because, in about 24 hours, the post had almost 500 hits.  Among other things, I think that points to the fact that so many of us are fed up with the constant attacks on our abilities and efforts.  It is enough of a challenge to inspire often undermotivated students to do the hard work of learning; the last thing we need is to defend ourselves from the politically motivated attacks of those who have never walked in our shoes and who have no idea what is actually happening on the ground.

Yet, to an extent, we have left ourselves vulnerable to these attacks because, in all the years that college teaching has been professionalized, we've never really developed a coherent and consistent system for measuring student learning in our classes.  In many respects, we ourselves are guilty of perpetuating the myth of the bad professor because we have not adequately challenged the myth of the great professor.  If the bad professor is phoning it in, the great professor is the charismatic sage whose students hang on to his (it's usually a he) every word.  When faculty are evaluated for annual raises, tenure, and promotion, student evaluations are consulted; teaching awards are often a result of student nominations and student recommendations.  At no point in this process is any significant attention paid to student learning.  The best professor is the one whose students love him and want to impress him (and, to be fair, are hopefully inspired to work hard in the course because of this love and desire to impress).  But shouldn't the best professor be the one who produces the highest learning outcomes in a cohort of students?  Shouldn't we be evaluating the quality of instruction not on the performance but on the results of the performance?

Most faculty will agree with the research that repeatedly demonstrates that teaching evaluations are not a very effective measure of instructor quality or student learning.  There are a range of age and gender biases at play.  One recent study found, unsurprisingly, a strong correlation between the attractiveness of the professor, the grade the students thought they were getting, and the positivity of evaluation of the professor and course.  We all know these things are true, yet we continue to play along.  One of my favorite stories about gaming course surveys goes as follows: during the semester, slip into the class discussion commentary on each of the survey questions, telling the students exactly how you are doing whatever the question asks (e.g. emphasizing repeatedly your accessibility).  Do this over and over.  By the end of the semester, the students will have internalized the narrative and will rate you and your course highly.  In my own case, I know that if I want to have outstanding course evaluations, I just have to let everyone think they are getting an A up until the time they submit the evaluation--and then use a high stakes final exam to sort them out.  I've never actually done this, but know plenty of people who do.

So what do we need to do to shift the focus from the personality of the professor--and the cult of personality more generally--to evidence-based arguments about instructional quality and student learning?  First, we need to assess our courses and students much more deliberately.  We need to be able to demonstrate in some terms the value added by our courses.  Yes, I know this plays into the rhetoric of the "outcomes" crowd.  It will inevitably undervalue all sorts of difficult to evaluate skills like critical thinking; and it assumes that a course's value is immediately known at the end of the semester (though this second issue could be addressed with follow-up surveys).  Many of us feel more comfortable with the current system, even while acknowledging its imperfections--including me.  At the same time, by essentially allowing ourselves to be evaluated based largely on features of our personality, we are laying the foundation for our demise (because there's always someone else who is even more accessible, entertaining, etc.).  MOOCs perpetuate the notion that good teaching is equivalent to skilled public performance rather than demonstrable learning outcomes.  An important first step in responding to the pedagogical claims of MOOCs is to insist that courses and instructors demonstrate student learning outcomes.

As part of the redesign of my Intro to Rome class this past year, I instituted a thorough system of assessments of the course.  Students had multiple opportunities to comment on all parts of the course.  This was interesting and instructive for a range of reasons, not least of which was because we also had data that allowed for a comparison between their self-reports and direct assessment of various behaviors.  It quickly became clear that there was a significant gap.  One place where this gap was enlightening to all of us was in the assessment of the implementation of an "ethics flag."  Three large enrollment classes implemented the flag in Fall 2012.  One class was lecture-based, 220 students.  The second was a mix of lecture and discussion sections, with 300 students.  Mine was flipped, with discussion as primary feature, with 400 students.  When the students were assessed, they reported the most satisfaction and learning in the lecture-based class; then the mixed class; with my class in last place.  When the flag implementation committee did a direct assessment of their work, the results were exactly the reverse.  They may have "liked" my class the least, but they learned the material much better--not surprising since I was requiring them to engage with it actively rather than passively.  This spring, the discussion section course and my course were offered again and the results were the same, but with a slightly smaller gap and enough student comments to be pretty sure that perceived workload was inversely correlated with student satisfaction. Alas.

When we saw these results, they made sense--but were also an important reminder that student self-reports often reflect their sense of comfort.  Many of them are still far more comfortable learning passively via lecture than in more active forms.  Indeed, as my campus has worked to "blend" a number of gateway courses through the Course Transformation Program, a consistent feature of the blended courses has been lower student evaluations.  There is a clear and indisputable inverse correlation between level of student engagement required and student satisfaction with the course.  What we are learning is that the techniques that produce the greatest learning gains and best prepare students to progress through degree programs and graduate on time aren't necessarily the courses (and instructors) that they love the most.  Often, this is because such courses require significant and consistent engagement.  At the same time, these instructors are clearly doing their job of producing significant learning gains in their students.

The time has come to abandon the myth of the great professor--the lecturer who keeps the audience rapt in their seats, scribbling down his every word, chuckling at his witty jokes, in awe of his brilliance.  Certainly, many professors are skilled performers and many of the students in their classes learn well. But there are plenty of boring, bad performers who are very good at designing courses and whose students learn at very high levels--even if those students didn't necessarily love the professor.   Teaching is ultimately about student learning.  If we continue to insist on defining our best professors as those who are the most gifted performers, but without any way to quantify what this means, we make it difficult to defend ourselves from the accusations of bad teaching.  If we shift to defining good teaching through demonstrable student learning, we make it very difficult for these outside (and sometimes inside) attacks to carry much weight.  Of course, this shift has to start at the highest levels of the university, by creating a system that evaluates and rewards student learning more than instructor likeability.  Likeability matters.  It matters that students enjoy a class.  But, at the end of the day, what matters most is that they learned the course content.

[disclaimer: my students generally like me and give me high course evaluations.  I'm not writing this because of sour grapes.  Rather, after a decade+ of teaching, I've seen repeatedly that the system is set up to incentivize a kind of teaching that does not always serve the students' best interests.  And, at the moment, this system has left faculty very vulnerable to charges that they aren't "good", with no clear way to rebut such charges.]

The Myth of the Bad Professor

Back in my youth (not that long ago...really!), teaching was generally viewed as a respectable profession, filled with dedicated and patient professionals who regularly went above and beyond the call of duty to look after the welfare of their students.  Sure, there was the pot smoking 9th grade American history teacher who had us spend more time doing guided meditations (nap time!) than learning about the Civil War.  But what I remember were the teachers who assigned several essays/week (the grading!) and taught me how to write before I went to college; the teachers who coached us in after school activities and served as advisers to clubs; the teachers whose doors were always open and who offered great advice for college applications. I grew up in California, at a time when California invested in public education at all levels.  For the most part, it worked pretty well and I arrived at college very prepared to succeed.

These days, though, barely a day goes by without some new indictment of the teaching profession.  Teachers are incompetent, unmotivated, phoning it in, living off the fat of hard-working Americans thanks to the power of labor unions.  At least for awhile, it was the schools who were underfunded and failing; but now the blame has been shifted to the teachers.  It isn't state legislatures who are failing students (by slashing education budgets); it is badly performing, unaccountable teachers who are failing.  If students are being left behind, we are told, it's not because of larger socioeconomic factors or underfunded schools; it's because teachers aren't doing their job.

If K-12 teachers are bad, college professors are even worse.  They only care about research.  They devote as little time as possible to undergraduate education.  Their "grading standards" are irrational. They only care about money--and especially about making more money than their colleagues.  They use grad students as pawns to carry out their personal, interdepartmental vendettas.  Managing faculty is like herding cats (ok, this one might actually be true).  These caricatures have given rise to a large set of personalizable "professor" memes on http://www.quickmeme.com.  It's not funny to praise a professor for doing a great job of inspiring and facilitating learning in trying times.  No, it's far more funny to seize on outdated caricatures of professors assigning their own textbooks to make a profit off of their students; of professors assigning too much work (or, alternatively, constantly canceling class).  I'm sure that every university still has a few professors who live up to these caricatures.  What is missed in all of this, however, is the extent to which classroom teaching, even in large lecture classes, has improved substantially on campuses across the country in the past decade.

The myth of the aged, rumpled (usually male) professor reading his yellowed, dog-eared notes is just that....a myth.  Sure, this character used to be common--I can think of a number of such characters who taught my undergraduate classes (including one professor who still used purpled exams produced on a mimeograph...in the early 90s).  But I suspect that, even on R1 campuses that put a bounty on research productivity, most instructors are, in fact, very good teachers.  Many are outstanding.  It is certainly true that many of us would benefit from additional professional development, in part because quality teaching can benefit from expertise with educational technology tools well beyond an LMS.  Many of us would benefit from a system that placed more value on high-quality undergraduate (and graduate) teaching.  Still, given the current state of affairs, the remarkable thing isn't how many bad professors there are out there, but how many good ones.

As Melonie Fullick so aptly articulates, "What I find deeply uncharitable (and inaccurate) is to generalize this experience even to the majority of university teaching faculty. I’ve given academic lectures in various classes, and I can assure you there’s no reason to assume the speaker is simply “transmitting” information. One of the main underlying issues here is the assumption of passivity in the students, and of a transmission model of communication that has long been critiqued by communication theorists. Another is the generalization about faculty approach, as if those doing the speaking aren’t working to make their presentation engaging and responsive—and as if there’s nothing but lecturing going on in a course."

This is an important point, especially when it comes to large enrollment courses.  The bad lecturer is the straw man invoked by the MOOC Incs and others who want to "scale up" classrooms in the thousands.  The argument goes roughly as follows: "If most classroom-based, large enrollment classes are terrible--because, according to our caricature of the bad professor, they must be--then we can at least select out the "best" lecturers (whatever that means), put them on video, and stream them over the internet."  So we take something that we have deemed bad, claim that it is bad because of the professor's incompetence rather than the context (one person trying to teach hundreds of students), and then purport to solve the problem by finding competent professors.  This logic completely elides the fact that, as research has demonstrated, students don't learn more or better from good lecturers (in fact, they sometimes learn less well because they have a false sense of confidence/mastery).  It ignores the fact that teachers don't create learning, we facilitate it.  The failings of the lecture class are, for the most part, a consequence of the large numbers.  Increasing those numbers exponentially is very unlikely to fix the problems and far more likely to exacerbate them.

Perhaps even more worse, though, is the damage that this "myth of the bad professor" does to faculty morale.  It encourages the general public, including students, to view professors as disinvested  narcissists who are a drain on taxpayer money.  Far from being a noble vocation, teaching at a public university leaves one open to the lampoons of politicians eager to justify their disinvestment in higher education.  In reality, professors (as well as K-12 teachers) are doing more with less, year after year.  They are working harder than ever, largely because they genuinely care about their students and believe that education is a social good.  In the meantime, legislators and even institutional administrators hang on to the myth of the bad teacher in order to justify a shift to very large-scale, lecture-based education using the so-called best professors.

If we can leave behind this myth of the bad teacher; if we can recognize and acknowledge all of the creative, engaged teaching that is happening at campuses large and small around the country, we might be able to begin the challenging work of brainstorming different solutions to the "large enrollment, lecture-based courses don't work very well to create learning" problem.  Specifically, in large enrollment classes, we might be able to experiment with ways to exploit ed tech to minimize the structural problems of the environment; through careful assessment and redesign, we might be able to find alternative models that work very well to teach larger numbers of students effectively.  To do this, though, will require the direction of money and technical support to campus-based teaching.  It will require recognizing that the teaching faculty are a university's greatest asset.  Furthermore, they are an asset that deserves to be respected and supported, not universally caricatured as incompetent, disinterested in undergraduate teaching, and easily replaced with videotaped (or live-streamed) lectures of select Super Professors from around the country (and world).

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If this post resonated with you, please also read Melonie Fullick's excellent post on the same topic (written back in October 2012).  In her wise words: " Do we even have a way of “measuring” student learning to show what works? The context of all this is not a neutral one, it’s not just “let’s improve learning by finding out what will help the most”. The loss of resources including government funding has created serious material pressures. The urgency of the rhetoric about “change” should also remind us that there will be winners and losers in the education game, and futurologists have stakes in predicting something that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy—because prediction inspires present action."  Exactly.  And, as Fullick points out, much of this is driven by the basic assumption that on the ground university teaching is of poor quality, but with no data to support such a claim.
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More on the connection between the myth of the bad professor and the replacement of professors by large-scale modes of course delivery in this post by The Homeless Adjunct.

The Starving Children in Africa Argument

Several days ago I tweeted that I was filled with rage at reading the Christensen Institute white paper on hybrid innovation.  I was a little surprised when, later that day, I noticed that someone had responded that they found the report heartening.  If the conversation had stopped there, I think I would have just assumed this was one of those "costs of playing on social media" moments.  Unfortunately, this person then suggested that I don't have any understanding of the state of education in Third World countries (I do, actually); attacked me for being elitist; and told me to come out of my ivory tower.  I was deeply offended and angry, as much because anyone who actually knows me know how unfair such accusations are.  At the same time, it started me thinking about something that I think is important: what is my responsibility as a professor at the University of Texas, Austin but also as a global citizen?  Where do my own priorities lie?

I've heard variations of the argument that MOOCs do and will dramatically increase accessibility to education, in the US (in places like California) as well as in Third World countries.  I have issues with this argument.  Certainly, inaccessibility is a real thing.  Still, I'm not sure that it's a good thing to make accessible something that, so far as we know, does nothing to actually improve learning on any kind of large scale.  I fear that, in fact, MOOCs might make the situation worse because it will *seem* like there is learning to be had when there isn't, really.  I'd also argue that it is a kind of bait and switch game: tell people that education is the game-changer, that they live in a meritocracy.  But then, even armed with significant learning, they find out that it's really about networks, connections, and other intangibles.  In some ways, this moment reminds me of evolution of graduate education.  It used to be that it was largely inaccessible to all but the most well-connected and wealthy.  Then it became much more accessible.  Suddenly the job market became impossible and the myth of academia as a meritocracy has been pretty soundly battered.  All to say, I'm not at all convinced that making learning more accessible is going to do a whole lot except raise the bar and put those invisible networks even more firmly in play for those who can afford to pay for access to real, live professors and a residential college education.

But back to my priorities....  I am tremendously concerned about the state of access to education around the country and world.  But, most of all, I am concerned about these issues in my own backyard of Texas.  MOOCs are wonderful for outreach and continuing education; their value as any kind of enhancement to a college education are far from clear.  I am deeply concerned that, in the name of outreach and continuing education (not to mention, making superstars of some of their faculty), "the best universities" will continue to produce MOOCs that threaten my own students' access to a high quality, meaningful education.  Accessibility is important, but so is maintaining the high quality of the education our public university students are receiving.  If we do not protect that, if we slide too far down the slope, we will find that degrees from our institutions are utterly unable to compete with degrees from any private institution.  That's already something of a concern.  With the hype around MOOCs, their recent incursion into several public universities, and other kinds of "scaled up" teaching experiments going on, it's a real possibility that we will permanently damage our "brand." 

It makes me terribly sad that children in Africa are starving for learning; but, for now, my responsibility is to fight for the interests of my students--current and future--in Texas.

Orienting Students to the Flipped Class: What Worked for Me

I have only seen very preliminary data about the student surveys we did in my flipped Rome class at the end of the spring semester.  One decision we had to make before we even administered the surveys was whether we wanted to include the descriptor "flipped class" in the section that asked for the students' reactions to their experiences in the class.  After some internal debate, I decided to go ahead and include the term, but also a short definition of the term ("flipped class, that is, a class that includes acquiring knowledge of some content outside of class and practicing course content in active ways during class time").  I knew that it would confuse my students because they had never heard their class described this way.  I didn't realize that the very first question would be "Did you know you were in a flipped class?"  Oops.  Apparently this generated a fair bit of discussion on this class FB group, wondering what was going on!  However, the semester was over; they had done well; and I think they realized that it didn't really matter what label someone put on their experience (in fact, part of why I agreed to use the more jargony term was precisely so that, if they took another flipped class, they would understand that it would be similar to what they had already done).  Ultimately, in order to be able to make good comparisons to the fall cohort, it made sense to ask the spring cohort the same set of questions.

I'm sure I'll have more particular things to say when I see the full range of feedback from the students on their experience in the class.  Interestingly, though, even though they couldn't have known they were in a flipped class, only slightly fewer of them indicated that this was the case than in the fall cohort (when we repeatedly talked about what a flipped class was, used the terminology, and even generated enough resentment for a group of students to start a "I hate the flipped class" thread!)  Additionally, the average ranking for every aspect of the flipped class experience was higher for the spring cohort than the fall, again despite the fact that they had never heard their class described as such.

I'm told that, on the whole, they had very little to say about the questions related to the flipped class aspects (outside of class videos, i>clickers, peer discussion, etc.) and spent most of their time responding to questions about the ethics component of the course.  In part, this was likely because many of them were finalizing their ethics portfolios around the time they were completing the survey.  But I suspect that there's another, more important force at work: the flipped class was completely normalized for them.  Because I never completely flipped it; because I eased into the flip gradually over the semester; because I always kept a bit of the "sage of the stage" in place even while putting a lot of the onus on them to keep the conversation going during class, it didn't strike them as particularly unusual.  If anything, they liked the fact that it emphasized active learning, that I regularly involved them in discussion with each other and as a group despite the rather large size.  Whereas the fall cohort had pretty strong feelings about the flipped class model--con and pro--the spring cohort treated the class structure as something unremarkable.

If, as I think is the case for post-secondary, large enrollment lecture courses (and, likely, even many smaller seminars), it is actually counter-productive to make a production of the course design to the students; if, it turns out, student buy-in can be achieved in ways other than making them fully aware of the pedagogical designs at work, then what *are* the necessary components for a successful student experience?  One word: orientation.  The students must know what to do, how to do it, and why they are doing it (at least in part).  Instead of spending my second class day discussing the flipped class with 400 students, I focused on orientating the students to the course; the teaching team; and the tools that we would be using during the semester (e.g. quizzes, worksheets, videos, discussion board).  I talked about each activity we would be doing, how it would work, and why it was a part of the class.  I discussed "best practices" for watching the pre-recorded lectures: take notes, shut down all other windows, sit at a desk.  I explained what peer discussion was and why they learned better and retained more information when they had to explain it to one another. 

Over the first three class sessions, I rolled out the class tools.  First I got them oriented to how a typical class would run and the sorts of things I expected from them, including classroom etiquette.  Then the TAs and I modeled an online discussion.  Only then did I have them try it--and on the first discussion, when a couple of students "trolled" other students, we jumped in immediately with rebukes.  For each activity the students did, they got substantial feedback from me or a member of the teaching (e.g. on the ethics worksheets, which we collected and my TA commented on).  Finally, the teaching team and I put clear boundaries in place: we were happy to help them find an answer to their question but expected them to be self-sufficient.  By the time they took the first midterm exam, it was very clear that the students knew what to do and what was expected of them.  It was not at all a surprise that, throughout the semester, the spring cohort far outpaced the fall cohort on midterm exams and final course grades.

In the fall, it was clear to me that a major source of student anxiety was simply disorientation caused by the disconnect of being in a massive auditorium yet not being the passive recipients of lecture.  Even students who did well, who followed instructions, reported feeling a sense of disorientation.  As an instructor, I was shocked at the amount of helplessness I saw.  Far from being empowered students, the flipped large-enrollment class seemed to cause many of them to be even less able to be independent, self-sufficient problem-solvers. It wasn't the flip per se, but rather, that the flip was happening in a physical space that many of them associated with an entirely different kind of learning.

Humanities professors like to say that we've been flipping classes since antiquity.  Well....yes and no. It's nevertheless true that humanities classes often involve the assignment of some kind of reading that is then reviewed or discussed in class. This works pretty well in graduate seminars and moderately well in upper division undergraduate courses. It doesn't really work at all in a large enrollment course (by which, for the current point I am making, I mean any course in which not every student can speak during a given class).  Once students have a bit of anonymity, they don't see the point of doing assigned work.  When students don't do assigned readings, class discussion grinds to a standstill.  Professors eventually give up and resort to spending most of class delivering content, with pauses for some discussion of points they have raised (the good ones do, at any rate; others will just lecture for the class period while the students dutifully scribble down notes....or, more likely, demand the PPT slides and study from those).  

The issue, as all faculty know, is one of class size (which is why there is such tremendous irony in the embrace of MASSIVEoocs as the solution to all that ails public higher education).  With a small enough class, we can hold students accountable--and they know that and so will often prepare assigned readings.  In large enrollment classes, on the other hand, it is nearly impossible to hold individual students accountable for thoughtful, daily preparation.  In such courses, in fact, students often take the view that they will EITHER come to the class OR do the readings, but not both (this view was clearly expressed in student surveys from the Fall 2012 version of the flipped Rome class).  Thus, it requires a significant shift in student expectations and habits to get them to, as it were, do the flip.  By relying on experiential rather than conceptual learning--in other words, by asking them to do something rather than understand exactly why they should want to do something--I seem to have found a way to get a class of 400 to make this shift. 

I can imagine a time when the flipped/hybrid model is more widely practiced in large enrollment classes at universities, when it would make sense to announce at the start of the class that the course will use that course design.  For now, however, that information means nothing to my students.  The only effect it seems to have is negative. It stirs up anxieties and causes students--to whom I am a complete stranger teaching content that is completely foreign to them--to be overly worried about their grades, about being subjects in a mad professor's teaching experiment, and worse. So, for now, I'll remain a stealth flipper.

Orienting Students to the Flipped Class: What NOT to do?

 

The research on implementing the flipped class model is in strong agreement that it is essential to explain the concept of the flipped class to students.  It is argued that, in explaining to the students the different pedagogical approach, they will be more likely to understand their own role in the teaching/learning dyad and give their "buy in".  Since the flipped class model has been especially embraced in K-12 education; and by math and science teachers, the research reflects the particular experiences and contexts of these teachers.

When I decided to flip my large enrollment Intro to Ancient Rome class, I read as much as I could about the flipped class model, in an effort to discern a set of "best practices" that I could use for my own implementation.  It was difficult to find any research that was directly applicable to my course, in large part because the research focuses almost exclusive on small class; on problem-based classes; and primarily at the high-school level.  Still, it made sense to me to spend some time introducing the flipped class model to my students and explaining to them how their learning experience would differ from a traditional lecture class learning experience.  I would tell them how much better this more active model was for their learning (sort of like those tablespoons of cod liver oil my grandmother forced my mother to take every day); and they would eagerly embrace the opportunity to be fully participatory agents of their learning.  It turned out that this was exactly the wrong approach for my particular group of students (I've written about this here).

In retrospect, I have a pretty good idea of why the orientation to the flipped class has to take a rather different form for college-aged (and older) students, especially for a course that is being taken almost exclusively by non-majors to fulfill a core requirement.  And especially in a state where nearly every student got to the University of Texas because they were in the top 10% of their graduating high school class and have internalized extreme grade anxiety.  Any whiff of change or experimentation raises hackles....and worse.  As well, especially for female professors, it's probably not a good idea to tell a room full of 400 undergraduates that you are trying a new pedagogical method.  They tend to assume that you are doing this because you don't know how to teach, and that you'd very much benefit from their advice.

Imperium Sine Fine

After the news of Coursera's new incursions into university education (and especially public, erstwhile state-supported state institutions who are struggling to find new revenue models), this comic seemed apropos.  I suppose we can all just hope that somewhere, after all our trials and travails (not to mention the temptation to stay in Carthage with Dido), we will find a Rome where we can build a new and great city, an imperium sine fine.  Oh, wait, but that's what the MOOC Incs are trying to do.  Hmm....

The MOOC Monster Morphs

Yesterday Coursera announced that it had formed partnerships with ten state universities and university systems.  These partnerships are distinct from the deals cut with elite, MOOC provider institutions (some of the details of the contract are discussed here).  These deals are about making Coursera's platform the exclusive provider of online content to these  institutions. That is, as Phil Hill points out, MOOCs as courseware and are entirely about the push to monetize their product (see also Mike Caulfield's blog post on this topic, his Educause post, and The Ed Techie).  The contracts allow for faculty at these partner schools to be producers of content; but the main intention is for these cash-strapped, formerly state-supported public institutions--and their students--to consume content that is produced especially by the more elite Coursera partners (e.g. Penn, Duke, Brown, Yale, Michigan, Cal Tech, etc.). Thus, the contracts have detailed provisions for "adopted" and "guided" courses on these new partner campuses.

Steve Kolowich describes a typical scenario, "In a typical case, the company would charge the university a flat fee of $3,000 for "course development." After that, Coursera would charge a per-student fee that would decrease as more students registered for the course. The first 500 students would cost the university $25 per student; the next 500 would cost $15 per student; the university would pay the company $8 for each student beyond that.  Payments to Coursera for use of "adopted" courses—those developed elsewhere—would be similarly tiered. Under the contract, if the university charged each student in a course the same tuition rate, it would get to keep a greater share of tuition revenue as it enrolled more students in the course."

One obvious thing here: the fee structure encourages extremely large classes.  After decades of pushing to reduce student-instructor ratio at public institutions, we are apparently embracing the Massive.  It is difficult to see how these universities could offer much by way of additional interaction with instructors or classmates without driving up the cost of these courses substantially.  State universities have long known that large lecture courses are a sub-optimal form of instruction.  Instead of trying to improve on that, to "hack the large lecture", they are giving up entirely and handing over the keys to private ed tech companies like Coursera.  Sure, for now, administrators can say that they have no plans to use Coursera content to remake entirely the residential college experience; but my suspicion is that it's only a matter of time before the temptation becomes to great--a temptation driven by a combination of state disinvestment in higher education and the false belief that MOOCs are the only answer to the real problems of cost and efficiency at public institutions (the comments on Kolowich's article are worth reading for additional concerns about the logistics of implementing Coursera MOOCs on campuses and across state systems).

Why am I pretty confident that this is how it will play out?  Because it is incredibly expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive to produce a MOOC (my own institution is finding this out as they prepare to roll out the first set of UTx MOOCs in the fall).  Administrators are cutting these deals with Coursera to cut their instructional budget, not to spend more money developing content in-house.  Indeed, if it was about developing content in-house, there are a number of other and better platforms that could be used (e.g. Instructure's Canvas).  What we have here is Coursera bringing in partners to act as consumers of the content that their producer partners are creating.  Coursera is the middleman who will take a cut of revenue on both sides of the transaction (As Ry Rivard reports, "A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.")

Why is Coursera pursuing these partnerships, which involve the implementation of their content on campuses?  Because they have realized that, far from providing education to those without, the MOOCs appeal largely to people who already have degrees, who already know how to learn (and more to the point, who are unlikely to become paying customers).  Daphne Koller tries to put a more altruistic spin on things, claiming that the move into public institutions is about helping to solve problems: "If you're looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you're going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with," Ms. Koller said.  She continues in this vein in the New York Times coverage of the new partnerships: “Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs.... Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

Fortunately, Coursera is there to facilitate this process.  Unfortunately, there is absolutely no evidence that anything they are doing is going to do more than make a few people very wealthy and further disadvantage the very population they claim they are trying to help.  Koller and her associates seem not to grasp that education is not a commodity and it involves much more than making content accessible (cf. William Bowen's remarks in the same New York Times article: “We have encouraged Coursera to work with the large state university systems, and the large state university systems to work with Coursera, because that’s where the numbers are, and that’s where there are the biggest issues in terms of cost, completion and access,” said Dr. Bowen. “It’s still exploratory, but this partnership has the potential to make real headway in dealing with those issues.”)

There is undoubtedly a place for MOOC content in the classrooms of public universities.  I suspect that it will be most effective in courses that benefit most from short concept lectures and lots of instructor and TA-guided in class problem-solving (as was the case for the Introduction to Electrical Engineering course that San Jose State piloted using MITx content).  I have a much more difficult time imagining this model succeeding in a history or philosophy or government course.  That's part of the problem with this conversation, in fact.  The MOOC Incs seem unwilling to concede that the process of learning (and, therefore, the pedagogy) differs from discipline to discipline.  They have created a one size fits all product and seem blind to the flaws of this approach. Ifstates are willing to credentialize whatever Coursera and the other MOOC Incs offer (and however low they set the bar), however, the absence of real learning will only be a problem for the student, uh, customer (and, of course, those charged with playing the role of instructor in this scheme). 

Paul LeBlanc, the President of Southern New Hamphire University offers a pretty reasonable guess on how this will ultimately play out: for all the idealistic claims of the founders, the push to monetize will win out and, eventually, content production and, likely, a large part of course delivery and curation will be in the hands of private companies.  In the inimitable words of Tressie McMillan Cottom, "If you can divorce yourself from your ideological leanings you have to recognize the elegant beauty of a perfectly executed hustle."  Indeed (and don't miss her awesome "Disruption playlist")!  It remains to be seen exactly how this will play out on the campuses of these new partners as well as future public institution partners.  My educated guess: not very well apart from a narrow selection of highly technical courses.  But even then, institutions will realize that their students require intense, f2f engagement with content specialists if they are going to actually learn the course content.  Content delivery is the easy part of teaching; facilitating learning is the hard, expensive part and none of the MOOC Incs have indicated that they have any ideas for solving that particular problem.

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See also Jonathan Rhees' perceptive comments on the ways that the MOOC INCs, including Coursera, have contributed to the decline--in some places, utter destruction, of shared governance at colleges and universities.

5/31/2013: Alex Usher, Coursera Jumps the Shark (further expanding on the point that this new set of partnerships indicates Coursera's return to the stratosphere, efforts to compete more directly with established for-profit Ed Tech companies like Pearson)
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6/2/2013: Kate Bowles, Business as Usual ("Education is a goldfield for opportunists, and MOOC providers are on it, head-to-head with LMS platforms who are also diversifying into hosted open learning. Both are able to exploit the fact that traditional higher education institutions acting competitively—which seems to be the only way we know how to behave—can only provide services at a scale calibrated to traditional staff-student ratios. And this is why the growth potential in these new markets is still tethered to the resourcing costs of academic labour.  The disruptive intervention by which commercial platforms have secured their startling competitive advantage is simple: they have done away with service labour costs.")

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6/3/2013: Luke Walzer, "Assessing Coursera, the LMS" ("The most troubling aspect of the MOOC hype has been how quickly this approach to teaching and learning with technology has been seen by a variety of constituencies as a tool/excuse for slashing public funding for higher education....The second most troubling aspect of the hype is how poorly informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning so much of what’s happening in the xMOOCeshpere has been.")

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6/3/2013: Lisa Lane, Why DeMoocification Won't Work ("As much as I don’t want to say this, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that MOOCs will die on their own. I can’t think of any trend which saved large institutitions money and trouble, then died a natural death.")

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6/8/2013: Report of the New America Foundation, The Next Generation Universities ("a handful of "Next Generation Universities" are embracing key strategies that make them models for national reform. The report The Next Generation University comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation's higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.")