Teaching Thursdays

Entries categorized as ‘Future Teaching’

The Cost of Cheap Education: Another View

September 24, 2009 · 2 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

It was really exciting to see the interaction between John Tagg and Anne Kelsch who are two of the most thoughtful commentators on higher education to grace this humble blog.  Their discussion revolved around a recent Washington Monthly article entitled “College for $99 a Month” which reviewed the education model offered by companies such as Straighterline.  My post today is less of a critique of their posts and more a complement to it.  I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the same article.

First, one aspect of the original article that was not noted by either Tagg or Kelsch was that introductory level classes have evolved over a particular trajectory in part to satisfy the changing needs of university faculty.  Introductory level classes play a key role in the university ecosystem, according to the Washington Monthly article, by providing income that supports upper level courses, research (particularly in the humanities where external funding opportunities are relatively scarce), and even the physical facilities and services which have become synonymous with university life.  So, the nature of these lower division courses and, in particular, their size has become an important feature in university fiscal ecology; changing one part of the ecosystem will necessitate changes across the ecosystem.  This is not say that this is a bad thing,  but we are all probably aware that the balance between teaching and research is one of the key issues at stake.  Introductory level courses are frequently taught by non-research faculty (often adjuncts).  Redesigning introductory level courses, making them smaller, or changing their relationship to the rest of the curriculum are expensive and potentially time consuming tasks that take time away from research, writing, and other faculty tasks.  The university ecosystem is a delicate thing!  The advantage that companies like Straighterline have is that they employ individuals who are charged only with teaching.  They can offer courses so cheaply because they don’t have to manage the complex ecosystem of the modern university.

Next, if changes in the way that we teaching lower level classes will be this expensive and disruptive process within the university ecosystem, we have to consider quite seriously who will bear the costs.  The democratization of higher education represents one of the great myths of the American success story.  At the same time, higher education likes to cling to its elite roots.  Many of the expectations surrounding university life redound with ideals from the earliest days of the modern university.  As Tagg points out when he asks “what is college for?”, there is not a single answer that describes the role of college in the development of all students.  Our calls for a university that develops students in accordance with the age old principles of humanism will not necessarily ring true with our entire student body.  In many ways, companies like Straighterline which offer bargain basement higher education packages cater to students who have radically different expectations of their college education.  Universities have long ago absorbed crucial aspects of vocational education which practices across the world have demonstrated can achieve some degree of success without placing emphasis on critical thinking or intellectual development and focusing on the mastery of a set of practices or body of content.  While we can argue that there are better and worse ways to communicate and teach content, the basic goals of these degrees and experiences are substantially different from the goals of fields like history, English, or math.  My point here is that universities have pulled together a wide range of disciplines under a single roof.  At some point in the past, this may have led to economies of scale where facilities and certain core resources could be shared among these divergent disciplines; today, we might argue that this forced marriage of vocational, practical, theoretical, and philosophical education works counter to the basic democratization of higher learning.  Maybe Straigherline can do as well, if not better, than tradition bound university practices which, and here’s the catch, are expensive, rooted at least partially in lingering elitism, and perhaps maintained as much for their place within the university ecosystem as any genuine concern about producing a sustainable, well-educated society.

Part of my evidence for this (and it’s a bit circular) is the growing Luddism of many university faculty.  (This critique does not apply, obviously, to Anne’s and John’s posts; they both demand that we reformulate the very nature of college education which would, in part, undermine the position of companies like Straighterline.)  When I use the term Luddism, I don’t mean it to describe an irrational response to technological change, but rather in terms of E.P. Thompson’s reading of Luddite radicalism in 18th century England.  He argued (bear in mind I’m an Ancient Historian) that the Luddites were less concerned with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of the cloth production, per se, and more concerned with the incredibly deleterious effects of these changes on the social fabric of their communities.  The violent and superficially futile protests were socially calculated acts meant to highlight the plight of communities which were suffering grievously as a result of industrialization.  Today, I often wonder whether our protests against changes within academia represent a kind of Luddite response to an increasingly dynamic educational environment.  The coming of the $99 university degree may not be inevitable, but university much face the changes brought about by technology, the increasingly challenging global economy, and a dynamic workforce which struggles to relate to the elitist rhetoric that has come to dominate the discourse of higher education.  What I am suggesting is that the response to challenges from places like Straighterline tend to be geared more toward shoring up the existing university ecosystem rather than understanding how such challenges (which are basically symptomatic of larger changes in how education and information is understood in the global economy) will inevitably produce a radical restructuring of university life.

To return to my first observation: that companies like Straigherline do not simply offer a new model for teaching university level classes, but threaten to disrupt the institutional fabric of university life by separating teaching from research, undermining long held faculty privileges (office space, access to libraries, relatively generous pay, support for humanities research, et c.), and repositioning higher education to serve students who view the college degree as a kind of vocational or practical training.  These seismic changes are equal parts terrifying (hence the Luddism) and exciting (hence the quality of Anne’s and John’s response), but above all demand wide ranging discussions of the kind that this blog seeks to encourage and support.  So, if you have an opinion, idea, or comment, post it here or drop me or Anne Kelsch a line and we’ll make sure that your post appears on Teaching Thursday.

Categories: Anne Kelsch · Bill Caraher · Future Teaching · John Tagg · Online Teaching

The Cost of Cheap Education

September 17, 2009 · 4 Comments

Anne Kelsch, Director, Office of Instructional Development, University of North Dakota
with a response by John Tagg, the keynote speaker and workshop leader for the upcoming Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium at UND (October 16-17, online registration and schedule is available at the OID webpage).

In a recent article for the Washington Monthly entitled “College for $99 a Month,” Kevin Carey describes StraighterLine, an online company that offers college courses at that flat monthly rate. Telling the story of an out-of-work fifty year old mother of three who gets her courses done quickly and efficiently in order to dive back into the workforce, Carrey argues that “The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.” The article certainly has generated a lot of buzz, as academics express collective anxiety about the future of traditional universities and colleges in a free market dominated by cheaper and faster delivery (for example, see Zephyr Teachout’s response, “A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges,” from last Sunday’s Washington Post and Laurie Fendrich’s rejoinder, “The Dystopia of Distance Learning,” on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog).

The article provoked the historian in me, who has often been fascinated by the impact of technology on culture and its surprising ways of democratizing and shifting even the most longstanding and seemingly unshakable hierarchical structures. But it also got me thinking along other lines. I have been reading a lot of work by John Tagg lately, getting ready for his visit to UND for the October 16-17 Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium. Tagg has been a deep delving critic of higher education for a number of years. One of the fundamental questions he keeps coming back to is, “what is college for”? Some time ago Tagg coauthored with Robert Barr a provocative piece in Change magazine (I have seen it referred to a number of times as Change’s most oft-cited article) entitled “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education.” In that article Tagg and Barr described a nascent and much needed shift in higher education in which universities and colleges, which traditionally have focused on the “provision of instruction”(where enrollment numbers are the primary means of institutional decision making and evaluation), were beginning to focus on the “production of learning.” In other words, he was noting and advocating for a way of thinking about our work in terms of student learning, rather than in terms of credit-hour generating. While Tagg acknowledges that “Nobody thinks that running institutions for the purposes of keeping the classes full is really a good idea,” he goes on to say that most faculty and administrators enforce that approach “because they believe they have to, and often do so with deep resentment and distaste” (The Learning Paradigm College, Jossey-Bass, 2003).

One of the things that I like the most about Tagg’ work is that he doesn’t stop at just describing this sad reality. He goes on to offer approaches to affect both institutional and instructional change, giving examples from universities that have managed to make learning the thing that matters the most on their campus (a good example of this is found in his 2008 Planning for Higher Education article “Changing Minds in Higher Education: Students Change, So Why Can’t Colleges?”  ).

To get back then to the question of whether or not we are inevitably to be replaced by entrepreneurs who have figured out how to “deliver education” faster and cheaper than we do, I would say we need to avoid letting them determine the rules of the game. If we reduce the issue to who can produce the most credit hours for the least cost, than our jobs may be in danger.

But I think we need to refuse to let the conversation start there. Instead we need to proactively answer Tagg’s question, “what is college for?” If college is only about the transfer of content or knowledge from one generation to the next, then we may have a problem. Technology clearly handles the mastery of content through repetition and multiple testing well. There is a reason that lower division courses, which most often serve as content laden introductions to the discipline are the ones most commonly put online. A lot more effort is necessary to replicate the learning that goes on in an upper division course, where the focus often shifts from memorization to higher order thinking and skills. And while it can be done effectively, the faculty that I speak with who design and teach those courses will tell you it is very labor intensive (and therefore not cheap) work, requiring tremendous effort to generate and maintain the quality of student learning that they believe necessary to meet their standards as a good class. They will also tell you that the learning outcomes they put in place for such courses can be achieved, but they are different learning outcomes than the ones they set in place for an on-campus course.

I would argue that college is not just about that kind of content transfer that is most readily available online. But the truth is that we often let this kind of learning dominate on our campuses, too. Students who attend classes with hundreds of others, who read (or don’t read) the textbook, take multiple choice exams and joke about forgetting the material shortly after the “information dump” has occurred, and have little interaction with their instructor (who most often is a poorly paid adjunct who has little support in terms of resources or professional development) have already felt that reality. Those that go to college and experience smaller classes, where they know their professors, perhaps participating in research projects with them, who have interactive classes where technology is woven into the curriculum in a way that increases the range of teaching strategies, who get their hands on materials in the lab and library —those students have experienced the costly environment that is more likely to result in profound and lasting intellectual growth.

If we allow easily measured outcomes (usually captured in standardized tests) to determine if we are teaching students, then we may have reason to fear. But if we teach students to our aspirations for them as educators (making certain to check that the courses and assessments we design match those aspirations) than I would argue that we cannot be so cheaply or readily replaced.

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A Response by John Tagg, Professor of English and Core Faculty Member, Palomar College

My first response after reading Carey’s essay and the various replies to it was “how in world do they do it for $99?” Carey really doesn’t explain that in the article. Then I considered some of the responses. A few things are not in doubt. Online education has grown like Topsy and will almost certainly continue to do so. Access to higher education is already available to students in many forms that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and this proliferation of various forms of educational “delivery” will also continue. And, a point to which leaders and faculty in higher education have been largely oblivious for decades if not millennia: people are different. The best framework for learning for Tom is not necessarily best for Dick, Harry, Sally, or Minerva. To a point, the proliferation of options is likely to succeed simply because it opens up new possibilities that have been previously closed. There are probably a number of niches in the higher education market but have yet to be plumbed. But what does all this say about the prospects for the “traditional” University?

I think that Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein, in their 2006 book The American Faculty, make the case that the role and nature of faculty work has changed dramatically and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The question is not whether the university will change. The question is whether it will change by development or replacement — by increasing the capacity or competence of existing universities or by their being replaced by other institutions that adapt to the salient public demands and social needs more quickly and effectively.

Most of today’s universities do an awful job of educating students in the lower division. They are paying the price for that, and will continue to do so until they get better at it. What most large universities offer lower division students is a collection of distinct and disconnected classes, taught to no particular pattern and in no coherent pedagogical framework, that usually have no inherent sequence or definable consequence. General education, by and large, is a basket of black boxes the meaning and function of which is largely opaque to students. That is, of course, not always the case, but it is likely to be the case at most large public institutions. Many of these classes are taught to very large groups of students with little interaction. I think it was Randy Bass from Georgetown who expressed surprise several years ago at the dismay widely expressed at the growing phenomenon of distance education. Distance education, he noted, has been with us at least since the 1960s, but we’ve called it the “lecture hall.” Indeed, in the traditional large lecture class, if the student is 20 feet away from the professor, she might as well be 20 miles, or 2000 miles away. If what universities offer students in the early years of their college education is a pretty much patternless group of uncoordinated classes, I have no doubt that many other institutions could do a better and more efficient job of it. Indeed, they have.

On the question of online courses — and I confess that I have taught them for about 10 years myself — the most interesting and credible bit of evidence I’ve seen recently is the report released by the Department of Education that does a meta-analysis of experimental studies that actually use a control group in examining the relative benefits and disadvantages of online and face-to-face courses. It’s worth taking a look at: http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf. What they find is that online courses tend to do a bit better than face-to-face courses in achieving definable learning outcomes. More interesting is the reason. In those studies that measure time on task, students tend to spend more time on online courses than they do on face-to-face courses. It’s also interesting that they spend even more time, and tend to do even better, in blended courses, which combine face-to-face and online elements. It seems reasonable to say that a class that elicits more student effort is, all other things being equal, a better class. I doubt (though I stand open to correction on this) that it is the technology, per se, that elicits greater student effort. I suspect it is the overall design of the course. Indeed, to the extent that online courses sometimes demonstrate superior pedagogy, I suspect it is because online courses are more likely to have been designed. Face-to-face courses, as likely as not, have been inherited, copied, or extemporized or have simply evolved from a syllabus, a textbook, or a cognate course. (I’ve done it myself, Lord knows, so I know how it’s done.)

You point out, Anne, that we tend to have higher expectations for our upper division courses. That’s us. The striking thing is that there’s very little evidence that our students share this view. Look at the NSSE report from last year, which I think is consistent should the results from most other years. Seniors report spending no more time on academic work than freshmen. It does appear to be the case that we condition students early in their time at the college to a set of expectations about how much effort college should involve, and they maintain those expectations, and the behaviors that result from them, with amazing consistency until they graduate — or not. Even more depressing, if we compare the reports of high school seniors accepted to college with the reports of college freshmen — as the NSSE folks have done with the BCSSE– we find that students expect to study more before they get college than they actually do study when they arrive. So by the standard of student effort, which is the gold standard when it comes to learning, there is a vast room for improvement in the experience of students at traditional, face-to-face universities. Our future, I suspect, depends on what — if anything — we do about that.

Categories: Anne Kelsch · Future Teaching · John Tagg · Models in Teaching · Technology

Teaching Thursday: College for $99 a Month

September 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In their recent college guide, Washington Monthly included a provocative article entitled “College for $99 a Month”.  This article featured the work of Burck Smith and his tech start up StraighterLine.  This company provides introductory level classes to students and allows them to enroll in as many as they want for a flat fee.  While on the one hand, this model for higher education would seems to suggest a kind of radical deomocratization for knowledge and teaching (at least at the introductory level) as online classes become available and affordable to people who do not fit the model for traditional residential college education.  On the other hand, as the article points out, the for-profit model developed by Smith which leverages economies of scale and the rapidly developing potential for online knowledge delivery, holds forth real dangers for traditional universities which rely on “high volume” introductory courses to subsidize both more focused (and typically inefficient) upper level courses as well as faculty research, the maintenance of the physical plant, and other expected features central to life on a residential university campus.

With both a tremendous upside and potentially game-changing risks, we invite our UND faculty readers to chime in on the potential and problems of a Smith’s model and similar challenges to traditional methods of information distribution and, for lack of a better word, teaching.  Be sure to check back this Thursday for a response from , Anne Kelsch of the Office of Instructional Development will respond.  We’d also like to hear your take on this intriguing view of the future.  So if you want to offer a post, send it along!  Or start the conversation in the comments on Anne’s post!

Categories: Anne Kelsch · Future Teaching · Online Teaching

Teaching Thursday: Building Communities

September 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

As I reflected on the series of posts grouped loosely around the idea of the “new” future of teaching, I was struck by their common focus on defining, building, or structuring community at the University.  Bret Weber and my post on the 24/7 professor, Cindy Prescott’s response on boundaries and manner, and Dean Benoit’s post on mentorship all reflect the desire to evaluate and forge productive social relationships at the modern university. Several of the responses share a similar focus: particularly Anne Kelsch’s response to Dean Benoit’s post, but also a response offered by Mark El-Dweek show that the call for an increased focus on mentorship is neither limited to the faculty-graduate student relationship nor without challenges.  Other graduate student responses to Prescott’s post on boundaries and manners (which itself originated as a response to our post on the 24/7 professor) likewise showed that both social and professional boundaries required constant negotiation and a keen eye for context.  When I proposed the topic for the first series of posts this year, I had half expected a gaggle of posts on new teaching lingo or technological innovations (and, of course, such posts are still welcome).  It is interesting to see that most of the concerns that contributing faculty and administration have are with very basic issues of social and community organization on campus.

My impression is that a concern for community is a longstanding one both at American universities in general and at the University of North Dakota specifically.  A quick perusal of L. Geiger’s University of the Northern Plains or any subsequent works on the University’s history shows that throughout its history the University of North Dakota has represented a kaleidoscopic amalgam of different groups ranging from early student organization like the Adelphi Literary Society to factions of faculty like the influential band of “Young Turks” who exerted such a key influence on University affairs throughout the 1960s.  In many ways, the history of the University was the history of these groups. The sense of community achieved by these informal or formal groups represented a way that students and faculty warded off the feeling of alienation and dislocation when they moved from tight-knit and sometimes distant communities to the challenging climate and often transient, artificial culture that characterized university life in North Dakota.  (The inability of the University to retain faculty throughout its history was legendary to the point that some senior faculty around mid-century would quip that certain young scholars were “only camping” during their short stays on campus.)  So, the challenges of alienation, dislocation, and fractured communities are not new in American academia (nor unique to our campus), but perhaps their effects are particular heightened at this time and at our university which represents the best elements of democratized higher-education while at the same time embraces its increasingly globalized character and confronts dynamic changes in many academic professions.

Efforts by the Office of Instructional Development to foster community among faculty members through the Alice Clark New Faculty program in recent years complemented the work by Greek and other fraternal organizations on campus to make the trip to the University in Grand Forks less socially disruptive.  There is still work to do, it would seem, to structure the kind of complex communities that can function across an increasingly diverse body of students and faculty members in a time when new social challenges, opportunities, and tools make traditional communal bonds increasingly tenuous and, in some cases, obsolete. The need to establish the kind of common expectations that undergird social order and facilitate productive communication remains a central concern for good teaching, while at the same time these concerns extend well-beyond the the four walls (or Blackboard webpage) of the classroom.  These posts have shown that teaching at the University involves as much responding to the changing expectations of the professional, student, and administrative communities that form the foundation for the University as influencing these communities by changing student, faculty, and administrative expectations.

Categories: Bill Caraher · Future Teaching · Student Expectations

The New Future of Teaching: Social Networks and the 24/7 Professor

August 27, 2009 · 3 Comments

Bret Weber, Department of Social Work, University of North Dakota
Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This post originated in a phone call between Bret Weber and myself.  Bret called wondering what I thought about adding some kind of statement about email expectations to my syllabus.  The goal of the statement was, as Bret explains below, to control in some way the 24/7 expectations of access that some students have developed.  I responded to Bret’s query (in an unhelpful way), by speculating on the roots of this expectation in the proliferation of social networking applications which provide almost constant access to a dense network of information and individuals.  Bret’s response forced me to bring my utopian ramblings back to practical reality.  He gave me the last word, but comment away!

Bret Weber: I’m committed to being responsive to student needs.  This has increasingly meant answering e-mail questions within minutes or at least a few short hours, often at all times of the day and on weekends.  In part I’ve done this as a simple management tool–it’s easier to deal with student issues right away rather than letting them pile up, and before they become bigger and more troubling to both me and the student.

However, I feel that I’m creating unrealistic expectations and possibly unproductive dynamics.  I remember as a student hesitating to ‘bother’ a professor even during posted office hours.  While that is an end of the responsiveness continuum that belongs to the past, I do think that the ‘24/7 professor’ is problematic.  For that reason, I am considering posting that “while I will frequently respond sooner,” students should only expect formal responses to e-mail and phone messages by three cut-off points each week—a form of virtual office hour. 

This would afford me the freedom of responding right away, while sending the signal that I am not a 24/7 virtual professor but an actual person.  Students would have the opportunity to ask questions or raise issues whenever it is convenient for them, while I would be providing a clear idea of when they could expect a response. 

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Bill Caraher: When Bret brought this issue to my intention, my immediate response was that his “unrealistic expectations” and “unproductive dynamics” are the product of the social media “mini-revolution” that has begun to condition how we use the internet to interact with not only our students, but also our colleagues, family members, and peers.  Applications like Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed aggregators, and instant messaging allow us to appear accessible almost any time we are online (and for some of us, that means any time we are at our computers).   After all, the Twitter feed grows, Facebook statuses change, and the email machine pops along happily whether we’re paying attention or not.  But sending a message or changing one’s status or Tweeting implies that we believe that someone else is out there (and perhaps a particular person or audience) is paying attention.  Broadcasting a Tweet or sending an email, in fact, not only depends upon, but also reinforces, the expectation that we share a social space where some kind of interaction is required. 

This has crucial implications for how we understand the role of faculty and teachers in higher education.  On the one hand, social networking environments can appear to be a kind of utopian environment and offer an antidote to so many of higher educations well-rehearsed woes.   After all, it’s a dream that students can work together virtually 24 hours a day, spanning distances, and interacting online whenever they find two or three of them in the same cyber-neighborhood.  One of the best seminar experience that I ever had was an online seminar (back in “the day”) with participants from the US, Europe, and Australia.  Every hour of the day some seminar participant was awake and sending off some kind of contribution to a threaded-discussion board that now appears primitive in comparison to the contemporary social networking environment.  In our romanticized “days of yore”, the college system where faculty and students live together enabled a kind of round the clock intellectual atmosphere that broke down traditional barriers of “classroom time”, “office hours”, or “personal time”.   Access to a faculty member (and faculty access to students) continuously via email or other social networking application is simply a variation on these themes.  My online class, for example, is explicitly set up to run asynchronously. I did this because I reckoned that time on the internet was sufficiently fluid that I did not need to set up specific times for assignments and lessons.

Despite my utopian conjuring, I do admit that students and faculty must establish some kinds of barriers to ensure the continued validity of the evaluation and assessment process.   And, of course, all social networks (whether online or flesh and blood) have rules of access.  But I do wonder if limiting access even via email sends a pretty strong message to the students.  If nothing else, it punctures the illusion that the particular class is the most important thing on a particular faculty member’s docket (a useful illusion if only because it can be used reciprocally; e.g. if I have to come to class, then you have to come to class, et c.).  Along the same lines, it shatters the utopian space offered by various social media applications (and foreshadowed by email) that there were places where a kind of continuous access was possible and even desirable. 
Maybe I’m over reacting.  All Bret is saying is that he is going to limit in a formal way his responses to students.  Maybe it’s the formality of the limitation that seems like a kind of cop out to me.  I still hope that the internet and the 24/7 professor remains a useful illusion, and that the nature of access through the internet and, perhaps more importantly, in the realm of social networking sites is allowed to function along more natural lines.

So what do you think, Bret?
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Bret: First, like so many golden age myths, I’m not aware that professors and students ever had a ‘round the clock’ requirement of accessibility.  Even a prince’s tutor must have been allowed some time to sleep and a day of rest!  Additionally, I don’t believe that non-stop accessibility is necessary to expressing the importance that I feel about my classes, students, or even learning in general.

It’s not my intention to limit my responsiveness to students.  Rather, I wanted to let them know that while I might respond quite quickly, they could be assured of a few times each week when they could count on receiving an answer.  Rather than limiting my professional responsiveness to students, I am simply trying to check this excessive and unrealistic idea of being a 24/7 professor. 

Students may text message one another through the hours when they should be sleeping, but they also binge drink and engage other harmful behaviors.  Part of my role is to present a mature example and to relate to them in a professional manner.  I want to be responsive, address multiple learning styles, and be empathetic, but that does not require feeding illusions about availability. 
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Bill: Bret’s response is a fair one, and, of course, I recognized that my call for 24/7 accessibility is, indeed, utopian.  But on the other hand, I stand by my assessment of student culture.  Social media website, in particular, both provide a platform for a much more intimate and continuous level of access than was possible even 5 years ago and, perhaps more importantly for Bret’s observation, these kinds of sites which promote kinds of immersive behavior create an expectation that individuals are accessible at almost any time and almost anywhere.  Bret characterized this kind of expectation as socially corrosive (like binge drinking or all-nighters), but I’d submit that unlike binge drinking or other socially destructive acts the level of “connectivity” possible as social networking sites holds forth tremendous potential for collaborative habits.  In other words, we may want to think twice before trying to break students of the habit of expecting prompt responses from peers and colleagues. 

Bret’s original query was interesting to me largely because it reveals a kind of student behavior that has clear roots in an increasingly networked culture and can be productive if channeled properly.  For example, I wonder if the expectation for a quick response could power, in effect, a FAQ wiki or the kind of user forums that are common place in communities (of a sort) who use open-source software.  In fact, a simple alternative to your syllabus caveat could be to insist that students submit any question that would not violate FERPA or involve a problem of a sensitive nature, to an electronic “answer” forum.  In this forum, fellow students could answer a student’s question or you could chime in, at your convenience. 

I may seem naïve, but I find that Twitter works this way for me all the time.  Two quick examples: one from my blog (I received an answer to my query within an hour of posting it), and one just yesterday.  I quipped that I could not understand how a book could have an Amazon sales rank before it was actually published.  Within 30 minutes I had 3 answers from folks explaining that pre-orders count in Amazon’s sales ranking.  What’s more, my social networks in Twitter and through my blog are basically the same size as a large class at UND, and represent a far more dispersed body of knowledge  I’d guess that a classroom social network is much more likely to produce an answer than my dispersed group of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.   If you have doubts about student’s willingness to play along, offer a few points for helpful responses, and let their web habits do the rest.

What do you think?

Categories: Bill Caraher · Bret Weber · Faculty Access · Future Teaching · Technology

Teaching Thursday: New Academic Year, New Future for Teaching

August 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Bill Caraher, Assistant Professor, Department of History

As we stand on the brink of a new academic year frantically working on syllabi, tweaking readings lists, and refining or rewriting lectures, I am positive that most of us are thinking at least a tiny bit about the challenges and opportunities of teaching in 2009-2010. 

I’ve invited a group of colleagues to write about the future of teaching over the next few weeks, when that future and its practical implications are freshest in their mind.

Here are a few of my musings:

  • As I work through the development of a new online version of the History 101: Western Civilization class, I wonder how my university’s growing support of online teaching will effect the way that we teach in the classroom. 
  • I check my twitter feed at least 5 times a day.  Last fall, I attempted to use it (in an awkward naive way) in my graduate historiography course.  Even as we are told that students don’t tweet and that blogs have reached a kind of grizzled maturity, it is clear that social media applications are changing they way that we communicate on the internet.  It’s clear that the once static world of html driven webpages has given way to spaces of interaction.  The content generators are no longer clearly delineated from the content consumers.  What are the implications for teaching?
  • Over the past year the seeming invincibility of the American economic system has evaporated rather abruptly.  Once blue-chip companies like GM and the New York Times which provided touchstones from transgenerational identities, are in serious trouble (or have even passed the point of serious trouble).  I feel like I’ve missed out on a Caraher family tradition because I cannot buy a brand-new Oldsmobile).   How will this economic “adjustment” change the way that we approach our own place in the economic food chain?  How do massive political, social, and economic changes influence our attitude toward what is important?
  • Recent political events have manifest a shocking breakdown in civility and, once again, called into question the status of sincere and sustained discussion in the public sphere.  As so much of university education is rooted in a kind of sincerity and a willingness to engage debates in a focused and concentrated way, how do the prevalence of outbursts such as those witnessed on an almost daily basis on television influence how we understand the relationship between the processes that we champion in high education and those central to a properly functioning democracy?
  • How will recent calls across higher-education for a kind of voluntary, technological luddism shade and condition our use of technology in the classroom?
  • How will changes in assessment, university administration, and general education priorities change the content and methods of our classes?
  • If I could have a new classroom, what would it look like?

I am sure that many of us thought about things like this (or other things entirely) based on our experiences over the past year, our engagement with the political, pedagogical, and technological discourse, and, of course, the practical time constraints that we all face when we stare down the reality of the semester. So, I call out to any UND faculty who are thinking ahead toward the new semester to share their views on the future opportunities, changes, and challenges waiting just around the corner in the new academic year.

Categories: Bill Caraher · Future Teaching