Udacity's New Method: replace teaching faculty with undefined "mentors" to save on tuition

From Financial Times, Nov. 26, 9:02 pm we have a letter from Sebastian Thrun of Udacity  It can be found at 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/36d6eee8-5388-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html

The letter is titled "With mentoring, we can do 20 times better than ‘Mooc 1.0’"

 
Thrun there claims that Udacity is not dropping out of MOOCs but instead is evolving the concept.   The Spring pilot at SJSU failed, but he refers to a second pilot in the summer in which the average pass rate was 71 per cent, which is the same as face-to-face courses at SJSU.   He stresses that the cost was %10 of the normal cost, although how he comes up with this number is not clear.  He then says "If these results were to hold for all college classes, we could soon say goodbye to student debt" implying that one of the main reasons to go with Moocs is that student cost will go down dramatically.  Did students in fact pay less for these classes in the summer than they do for normal classes?  I have seen no evidence of a student discount or any reason to believe that students will be paying less for Udacity courses than for regular courses.  Thrun also mentions that "We achieved our results by teaming up students with personalised mentors who provide feedback and help when needed" and suggests that these mentors are what make Mooc 2.0 so much better than Mooc 1.0.  Usually at SJSU we call such mentors "teachers" and "professors."  Who are these personalized mentors?  What status do they have in the profession?  Who pays them?  How much are they paid?  If classes are going to be cheaper and yet each student will have a personalized mentor does this mean that the mentors will be paid very little per student?  How many students did each mentor mentor?  If the answer is 1000 then this could hardly be an example of personalized mentoring.  Remember that a Mooc is "massive."  This means thousands of students.  How many mentors were hired?  How good are these mentors?  How are they tested?  credentialed?  Perhaps the answer can be found at Georgia Tech.  Thrun writes "Udacity’s new model is the foundation for our work with Georgia Tech, where we are offering an entire master’s degree at 15 per cent of the tuition cost of on-campus education."  My understanding is that the class that went well in the summer consisted mainly of students who already had BAs.  Moocs do seem to work well with highly motivated students who already have a college education.  But Thrun still sees Moocs as a model for bringing down tuition costs of students without BAs.  It looks to me that this is a scheme to replace faculty with undereducated and underpaid part time workers.  What kind of an education is this?  Would you want your own children taking these classes, for example getting his or her papers graded by an underpaid person without any credentials?

Clay Shirky's latest defense of MOOCs quality doesn't matter very much, surely much less than cost

Clay Shirky, a leading MOOC advocate, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:


"Running a college was cheap enough that the surplus between dollars taken from our students and value produced for them was enormous. It was so enormous, in fact, that we never had to resolve the tension between the view we faculty have of ourselves (molders of youth, transmitters of sacred tradition, wise elders) and the view most of our young charges and their parents have of us (instructors in the skills needed in the modern world, including especially preparation for gainful employment)."

This is a false dichotomy if I ever saw one.  What faculty see themselves in such a rosy light as is portrayed in option?  I suppose that on our very best days some of us might feel something like this.  There is something sacred (in a secular way, if that is possible) about higher education.  But even in those moments we are well aware that we are mainly seen as instructors in certain skills related to employment...and we mainly see ourselves that way, realistically speaking.  So, both are true, although the first less so than the second.  It is promotion of these kinds of dichotomies that lead people like Shirky to suggest that only an idiot would promote anything like the first option, and all realistic people accept the second as the whole truth.  Hence we should accept MOOCS.  Of course even if that were true the issue would remain whether MOOCs will really give students these skills.

"The net benefit from a bachelor’s degree has shrunk every year of this century, with nothing today suggesting a reversal of that trend."  That's a wild one.  Where is Shirky's evidence?

"As has been widely discussed, most MOOCs reiterate the ancient form of the lecture, and do not signal much of a leap in pedagogy. (As McLuhan noted, the contents of the new medium are the old media, at least at first.)"   Where is the new medium here?  Television was a new medium.  Perhaps we could argue that the web is a new medium.  But MOOCs are not new media.  What does Shirky imagine the wild new thing that would replace video clips of lectures would be? 

"As ordinary as their educational sensibility may be, MOOCs represent a change in expectations among our clientele that cannot easily be contained in traditional structures. For as long as students and their parents have nervously scanned tuition bills, they’ve asked themselves “Isn’t there another way to do this?” And for that long, the answer has been “no.” Now, for the first time, the answer is “maybe.”
You would think that this “maybe,” from a few nontraditional learners, would be a small threat to existing purveyors of higher education.

There are a couple fallacies here.  First, although "maybe"s are always nice...it is always nice to think about new possibilities, we also need to be cautious.  Shirky has already admitted that MOOCs are not going to win out at the level of quality.  So what exactly would the parents be getting.  One of the illusions of the MOOC business is that supporters compare the cost of a year at Harvard with the low cost of a MOOC.  This is the wrong comparison.  Most Harvard students are never going to take a MOOC.  Harvard is marketing MOOCs to colleges where tuition is significantly less. 

Second fallacy:  MOOCs in their current form do have to do with learners in the tradition of auto-didact.  That's a good thing about MOOCs, as it is about the very similar Learning Company lecture series.  But the importance of MOOCs is that they are platforms, including testing mechanisms,  intended to replace teaching in the universities and colleges (mainly community colleges).  MOOCs may be fine for people who live on isolated farms, as correspondence courses have always been.  But that's not the issue.  So, the phrase, "a few nontraditional learners" is deceptive, at least.

"keep expenses below revenues."

This is a nice truism.  But Shirky does not mention all sorts of other ways that this can be achieved other than gutting the very idea of college professors outside of elite institutions.  How about lowering non-academic expenses (especially administrative costs), which seem to go up every year?  How about bringing back some of the lost state funding? 

Is a course like a record album? Should we "debundle" - that is the existential question.

Stanford Computer Science undergraduate Raven Jiang has written in his blog an unusually perceptive discussion of some of the issues I raised in my article in the Boston Review.  I disagree with much of what he says but I want to begin my comment with praise.  He has a good grasp of some of the larger cultural implications of MOOCs and even of possible dangers.  For instance, he writes, drawing on parallels in the newspaper industry,

"MOOCs make consumption of knowledge cheaper, but who will pay for the creation of knowledge?"

But overall, Jiang is pro-MOOC and what is commonly called "debundling."

Jiang's thinking is that courses are like record albums.  Customers should be able to buy the one cut rather than be stuck with ten songs they do not really like.  First, I wonder about this whole approach to music:  maybe this is a generational thing, but when I was young and a big music fan, what I really loved was albums, not singles.  I loved to hear the whole thing over and over again.  Sure, I had favorites songs, but the work as a whole seemed the real work of art.  So the move from buying albums to simply buying the singles that attract, singles that might have been at best the lead-ins to the larger artistic experience, seems more than sad to me.

But let's pursue the analogy.  Should higher education be like that?  Should students be able to unbundle your Introduction to Philosophy class, choosing for instance just to read and study the ten pages on their favorite religious philosopher and ignore Nietzsche and the rest?  I would think that one of the great things about going to college is that you are forced to thing about ideas you would normally not think about ....forced to expand your mind.  You may not approve of or even value some of the philosophers you have read but at least you will have encountered them.  Unbundling record albums is sad, but unbundling philosophy classes is particularly worrisome.  Why?  Education is not entertainment.  It might be entertaining sometimes, but customer choice should not be the ruling idea in education.  If it was, most students would choose only that which is easy and unchallenging. 

Jiang writes, "A kid in India today can take a Stanford course on cryptography on Coursera without having to move to Palo Alto and fork out sixty grand a year in tuition. Sure, she doesn’t get to enjoy the green grass and palm trees, but then again, why should she be forced to pay for the whole package if all she wants is the knowledge? It seems that if greater access to education is good (and it is), then we should embrace MOOCs."  A number of questions may be raised here.  First, is this really a course?  One does not receive credit for its completion, only a "certificate of completion."  Is there, perhaps, a reason for this?  Could this "course" be better labeled "entertainment?"  I like seeing video courses produced by the Teaching Company.  If I see all of the videos in a series have I completed a course?   That would be delusional.  Have I learned something.  Yes, just as I might learn something from reading a book checked out from a library. But learning in libraries independent of taking classes is nothing new.  So what is the big deal about MOOCs?   

I do not think it is a bad thing that the kid from India can learn something about Cryptography by taking this "course."   But I also think it is interesting that this is always the kind of example used by MOOC supporters.  It seems quite off the point.  Remember, Coursera is not a company of do-gooders.  If they care about kids in India, this is a sideline.  These people want to make money.    Where they can make money is by getting people to replace teachers in the US with their courses.  What MOOCs are about is outsourcing.

Third, perhaps the argument could be better put in this way: greater access to education is good, MOOCs sometimes provide greater access to education, therefore we should support that aspect of the MOOC phenomenon that provides greater access to education.  Should we support everything else about the MOOC movement?  Not based on this argument.

Jiang continues:  "Californian public schools such as SJSU have bought into MOOCs in a big way largely because the state’s public school system is broke."  Don't be silly.  The public higher education system in California is not broke.  If believing this is a big motive for supporting MOOCs then some more thinking is needed.

Jiang then gives a very nice summary of my piece
 "

• MOOCs’ emphasis on multiple-choice quizzes fail to teach students how to write clearly and persuasively and to read critically.
• MOOCs reduce knowledge to piece-wise consumption and does not train the “ability to integrate and explore information creatively”.² Leddy refers to this as “a symptom of our society’s degraded approach to knowledge itself.”
• MOOCs relegate instructors to the role of mere technicians and degrade teacher-student interactions. Students lose the opportunity to participate in the creation of knowledge because they are now further removed from the professors.

And he replies:

"While entirely valid, these points are missing the long-term picture. These are substantial criticisms for why MOOCs in their present form are defective and cannot yet fully replace traditional classrooms. However, the key word here is “yet”."

This is where we really disagree.  Jiang thnks that MOOCs will get better and better, and so all of the points raised above will eventually no longer matter.  I can't picture how this is going to happen, although, to be sure, the future is always full of surprises.  What then is the basis for Jiang's hope? 

He notes that at least one teacher of a MOOC course for Coursera is impressed by how it is constantly improving.  This looks to me more like the typical self-advertising hoopla we are constantly getting from MOOCsters.   He then mentions Google glass, although it is not clear how this product will address the three bullet points.  He also mentions Leap Motion which is a product that will sense one's hands and fingers...and I cannot see how this will deal with the bullet points either. 

(MOOC believers remind me of people who believe that virtual sex will replace real sex in the near future.  Think of all the advantages...no STDs for one.  One might say that virtual sex now is not too impressive...but just way, with Google glass and Leap Motion, virtual sex will be awesome.) 

Jiang then writes, "My feeling is that it is too early to write MOOCs off as lecture videos with multiple-choice questions. But I do agree with the argument that it might be premature at this stage of development for schools like SJSU to put all their eggs into the MOOC basket."  We disagree on the first point:  I think it is the right time to write MOOCs off for exactly this reason.  I just cannot get excited about being able to see what Prof. Sandel sees through Google glasses or touch what he touches through Leap Motion:  this will not make his lectures or his class (in the MOOC form) better than a real class with a real teacher.  I suppose that Jiang will argue that criticisms of MOOCs are premature because we have not tried Sandel in three-D yet!    (These technologies might make virtual sex better...I'll leave evaluation of that to the next generation.)  However, I appreciate the second point and wish that more MOOCsters would think more seriously about this issue.

Finally, Jiang raises an interesting question, whether MOOCs may just be a good thing mainly for Computer Science classes, and not for Philosophy and other Humanities type classes.  Since I teach Philosophy and know nothing about Computer Science teaching, I could not say, and would be interested in what Computer Science teachers would say about this.

Here's the quote:


"Even if we truly believe that online teaching will forever be an inferior alternative to traditional lectures for some purposes, there are clearly elements of a modern college education that are directly replaceable by MOOCs without any loss of content. Engineering students for example perform much of our learning by doing problem sets. Lectures are generally a non-interactive affair, unlike a history class where some form of debate or discussion can conceivably arise. Even with just the limited technology available to us today, one can imagine a MOOC system of online lectures where a small specialized teaching staff is required only to hold office hours and to grade parts of the problem sets that are not machine gradable (at least not with current natural language parsing).
It is easy to see why Computer Science professors tend to be the ones behind MOOC start-ups: many of them already run their own classes like one. At Stanford, it is common for students majoring in CS to watch all their lectures online and turn in their problem sets by e-mail."

The rest of Jiang's article is also worth reading.  Would you consider changing majors, Jiang?

Are MOOCs great because they give us new literacies, which are actually not the same as the old-fashioned "literacy"?

Geoff Cain at his blog criticizes my article on MOOCs in the Boston Review.  Cain complains that I am not an expert on the educational theory surrounding.MOOCs.  This is true.  MOOCs only became a big deal in education within the last couple year and only came to my attention a few months ago.  My area of specialization is not theory of education.  So I am catching up quickly.  There is so little time, however, and one has to speak quickly since the threat to higher education is immediate.  Some MOOC promoters are arguing for reduction of faculty by fifty per cent in the next five to ten years. So we only have that much time before higher education as we know it is over.

Cain notes that I do not distinguish between different types of MOOCs.  Yet I make important distinctions between types of MOOCs in the opening paragraph of my article.  The MOOCs I am concerned about are not the ones that are there primarily for autodidacts and are not for credit.  I am concerned about MOOCs that are being used to replace teachers in higher education.  This is the real point of MOOCs.  This is how MOOCs will save money.   Coursera and the other companies would not exist if there was not money to be made somewhere in all of this.

Cain writes, "I hate to tell Leddy this, but literacies are changing. I do a lot of writing, but my work depends more on my ability to collaborate with others and the creation of intelligent networks than my ability to write a ten page paper."

This kind of comment reminds me of when people would say in the 1960s that watching TV gave one a new kind of literacy.  Sure, one could say this in a way.  But even though someone could learn a lot by watching TV, literacy was still literacy, i.e. a matter of being able to read and write.  Watching TV doesn't help you much with either. 

Cain tells us that he does a lot of writing, and I do not doubt that Cain himself is literate.  I suspect that his literacy came from actually taking classes from live teachers in a university.  Still, even if he is an autodidact himself and learned how to write from reading the writings of others, those others probably learned how to read and write in a formal educational context.  Even autodidacts depend on the educational institutions they avoid.

What I want to ask, however, is whether Cain's literacy changed because he uses a computer to write and post?  I doubt it.  More puzzling is his comment about his "ability to collaborate with others."  There is a long tradition of co-writing articles, books and so forth.  There is no change in literacy between writing an article by oneself and writing it with someone else.  The philosophy department at SJSU co-wrote out letter criticizing Sandel.  Our literacy did not change because of this.

Cain also wants to contrast collaborative work with the ability to write a ten page paper.  I wonder why the length of the paper is so important to him.  My students are required to write pieces of various lengths, from under one page to as long as ten pages.  Graduate students are expected to write even longer pieces.  Writing at greater length requires greater organizational skill and deeper understanding of a subject matter.  (Part of the attack on the ten page paper may belong to some belief that in the age of tweets, the more complex literacy needed to write about something in depth is no longer needed.)  In any case, whatever literacy is required to write a good ten page paper or a good one page paper is the same as whatever literacy is required to write something collaborative.

I suspect all of this talk about "changing literacies" is just a excuse for rejecting the very notion of literacy.   Perhaps Cain doesn't think that it is important any more to learn how to read and write critically and creatively.  That would be too bad, since if the view was widely held we could well be said to be entering into a new dark ages.

So is "creation of intelligent networks" supposed to replace reading and writing?  Well, whatever "creation of intelligent networks" is, it is not a matter of literacy any more than creation of a good pot is.  Creating good pots is a wonderful skill....but it would be a great mistake to claim that any skill is a "literacy."   (I wonder whether I am part of Cain's "intelligent network" or does an intelligent network only consist of people who agree with each other?)

The Great Flipped Class Myth

Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury news has written "MOOCs: Could professors' resistance derail online-learning?"  referring to the on-line letter published by my department at San Jose State.  The question is over-generalized since we did not attack on-line learning in general, only MOOCs.  But isn't it exciting that we might even be considered some sort of force:  one that could derail MOOCs?  Well, let's be realistic.  Voices of criticism or even skepticism are quite small, and the momentum seems to be largely in the direction of MOOC expansion.  The best we can do is raise questions and perhaps influence the process to some small degree.  I am glad that Cassidy is least recognizes that the points we raised in the letter are "valid concerns."

What I want to talk about here is the myth of the flipped course. Here is why Cassidy thinks that MOOCs are in general a good thing.  He has talked to the people at Coursera: 

"When I talked to Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng earlier this year, what excited him most about this new way of teaching and learning was the potential it held for those who left college before finishing their degrees.

"Hopefully, it will bring a lot of working adults back into the education system," he said. "There are working adults who don't have a college degree." Massive online courses could ultimately let them pick up their remaining credits without having to regularly make it to a class at a specific place and time And he talked about knowledge-hungry students in developing countries who lack access -- financial and geographical -- to higher education."

O.K.  This could be a good thing.  But is this where the money is in MOOCs?   Cassidy wisely adds

 "None of which means Ng, an associate professor himself, isn't also excited about Coursera providing on-campus, online learning." 

So, lets get back to the point at issue.




"But rather than serve as a way to make professors less relevant, Ng described a system in which professors were more involved in teaching. Remember the flipped classroom idea? Daphne Koller, Ng's co-founder and a Stanford computer science professor, told me this week that that is exactly how she taught her most recent course.

"When they come into class, they have an open-ended discussion," she says. "Let's imagine you've got this problem. How do you go about solving it? It's much more interesting. Compare that to siting in an auditorium with 150 people listening to the same lecture."

Now we are getting down to the brass tacks, the real substance.  Koller thinks it is an amazingly new idea to have open-ended discussions in the classroom.  One wonders what Koller's classes were like before MOOCs came along....sounds like they were pretty deadly.  Moreover, her image of what is being replaced by MOOCs is the auditorium class with "150 people listening to the same lecture."  I have in fact taught classes with as many as 100 students, but I much prefer my regular classes of from 14-40 students.  I agree that the 150 student lecture class is not the best for pedagogy.  But lets talk about the 40 student class that I typically teach at the lower division level. Since these are General Education courses and since the president of my university wants to replace such courses ultimately with MOOCs, the real target of MOOCs, as I see it, is not replacement of 150 student classes but both 100 and 40 student classes.  And yet in the 40 student classes there already is a lot of open-ended discussion.  Coursera's idea is to expand class size way beyond 150 students!  It is amazing that Koller can speak with disgust of 150 student classes when the classes she now promotes have thousands or even hundreds of thousands!  This is beyond ironic.

Cassidy then continues: "The student/professor discussion is interactive and more personal. All of which makes the professor more important, not less. "The real value of attending a great university isn't just the content," Ng told me. It's the interaction with the person delivering that content."

This is exactly right, and this is why MOOCs are so bad!  MOOCs are massive.  Massive is not personal.  The flipped class is a red herring.  The real issue is that with MOOCs things are less personal.  Remember 1984 where things were promoted by giving them labels that were the opposite of what they really mean.  "Massive is intimate" sounds a lot like "War is peace."

Cassidy ends by saying:  "I understand that Ng is the founder of a for-profit business who has a self-interest in spreading the gospel of massive online learning. And I realize that it's too early in the online course revolution to know whether the shift will play out more the way people like Ng and Koller see it, or more the way the San Jose State philosophy professors see it."

Yes, time will tell whether people will buy into the smoke and mirrors of the "flipped class" myth. 

Are MOOCs Good For Students?

I published an article on MOOCs at the Boston Review:


http://bostonreview.net/us/are-moocs-good-students

Some Recent Links on MOOCs

The Mercury News published an article about my department's criticism of MOOCs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_23320598/san-jose-state-professors-fire-back-at-online

I like the quote from a philosophy minor:

Traditional classes are just fine with Ryan Brewer, a philosophy minor at San Jose State who said the interaction with his professor and classmates is what college is about.

Online lectures feel "like a hand-me-down education," he said. "'Here, watch this video.'"

The online Mercury article nicely includes copies of our letter and Sandel's reply. 

The SF Chronicle also has an article, quoting my colleague Janet Stemwedel

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Harvard-for-Free-Meets-Resistance-as-Professors-4519370.php

See also, the Council of UC Faculty Association open letter to Daphne Koller of Coursera, a MOOC provider

http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php

See how Udacity, another MOOC provider, plans to replace teachers with non-graduate student TAs at Georgia Tech:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/28/documents-shed-light-details-georgia-tech-udacity-deal

UC Faculty are organizing opposition to SB520 which seeks to give college credit to MOOCs

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/uc-faculty-opposition ; and http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/uc-faculty-weighs-in-on-californias-mooc-credit-bill/


A nice blog post on the meaning of teaching which is critical of MOOCs

http://academeblog.org/2013/05/22/the-mooc-and-the-meaning-of-teaching/

Here's a feminist critique of MOOCs

http://www.historiann.com/2013/05/15/guest-post-on-the-lords-of-mooc-creation-whos-really-for-change-and-who-in-fact-is-standing-athwart-history-yelling-stop/

Also see Joshua Kim, who, although he supports MOOCs, raises relevant skeptical concerns.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/playing-role-mooc-skeptic-7-concerns

The philosophy department at SJSU is also mentioned in this one

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/28/harvard-professors-demand-greater-role-oversight-edx

Lecturers may also be concerned about their courses being outsourced
 

http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Lectures-Raise/139471/

This article discusses the electrical engineering class at SJSU, 

also see http://chronicle.com/article/In-Deals-With-10-Public/139533/  on Coursera's bid for a role in credit courses.