Category Archives: Online Teaching

A Defense of Asynchronous Teaching

Posted on October 28, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Recently, I’ve been talking a good deal with one of my favorite interlocutors on teaching matters, Bret Weber.  He and I approach online teaching in different ways.  While I hesitate to speak for him, it seems to me that his online teaching emphasizes more cohort building, realtime interaction, and incremental assignments with set due dates.  This approach has suited his students, his teaching goals, and his program (Social Work) well.

My approach to online teaching is almost the complete opposite.  When I first developed my idea for online teaching I wanted it be as experientially different from the classroom as possible.  I was probably overly strident in my efforts to establish this difference and romanced by change for the sake of change. Whatever the cause, I developed a radically asynchronous model for teaching my History 101: Western Civilization class.

The class has 2 deadlines, and one of those deadlines is optional.  All work must be done by a date toward the end of the class so that I have some some time left to grade the inevitable onslaught of papers and assignments.  All the course material is available from the start of the class.  The only optional deadline is an optional midterm paper that, if the student decides to write it, is due at the mid point of the semester.  If a student opts out of this midterm paper, he or she must write a final exam paper that brings together all the content of the class.

The lessons in the class are organized into 15 folders numbered for each week.  So students are guided to engage a body of material and assignments each week.  Each weekly folder includes readings, a quiz, a discussion board post, and, in many cases, one or two potential paper topics.  Along with the cumulative paper, students must write two other 3-5 page papers analyzing historical documents from the class. All the work from the all the weeks is due at the end of the semester.  In general, I grade two or three weeks at a time as assignments come in.  Assignments that come much later than two or three weeks behind the weekly folder inevitably get less attention, but the students know that I grade on schedule and give greater attention to work submitted in a regular and consistent way.  I use a Twitter feed and announcements to remind the students to keep up with the course and to let them know where I am in terms of grading material.

This system has certain risks.  For example, I regularly write off the last two weeks of the semester to grade the papers from all the students who leave the work in the class to the last minute. These assignments tend to be, generally, of a lower quality, but the average grades for all assignments are not significantly lower than in my classroom classes where I tend to have more regimented deadlines.  It appears to be the case that this system probably leads some students to do more poorly on their papers which they leave to the last minute. On the other hand, it also appears that some some students do better than they would in a traditional synchronous course, and the students with better outcomes tend of offset the students who perform less consistently.

Aside from the assessed results of the class, his system does offers some additional benefits as well:

1. Flexibility for Students.  Teachers have always bemoaned the absence of face-to-face contact with students in an online environment.  My online classes have attracted students from around the world and across the country.  Face-to-face time would be impossible with these students even leveraging all the technology available to maximize realtime communication in an online environment.  Moreover, many of my online students have lives that make regular schedules difficult.  Online teaching gives a student who works on oil pipelines and needs to be far from civilization for weeks on end, a way to begin a university education. To me this is a good thing, and an asynchronous course, particularly at the introductory level cultivates diversity in our classes and expands the democratizing aspects so close to the heart of higher-education.

2. Flexible Engagement. One of the most challenging parts of creating a class schedule is attempting to address how different students will engage course material over the course of the semester.  For every assignment that some students master easily, other students, particularly in an introductory level course, will find challenging.  An asynchronous course allows students to engage material at their own pace and, moreover, allows different paces to exist in the class at the same time. It is interesting to see the natural divisions among students as small cohorts of students form and engage course materials at similar paces over the course of the semester. In a course of 70, about 10 students stay precisely on the weekly schedule, another 10 or so may fall the occasional week behind, and a third cohort of 10-15 students are never more than 2 weeks behind over the course of the semester.

2. Flexible Assessment. One of the best things from a faculty standpoint of asynchronous teaching is that it restricts the bulk grading experience to one occasion at the end of the semester.  During the semester there is a constant trickle of two or three assignments a day.  I tend to assess assignments on a weekly basis and contribute to the online discussion board slightly more often. I find that grading the slow trickle of assignments over the course of the semester gives me far more time to make substantial comments on student work.  Moreover, it gives an advantage to students who can make reasonably consistent progress through the course.  I’ve found that even students with the most complex schedules rarely fall more than a couple weeks behind if they attend to the course in a serious way.  The half of the class that maintains a good schedule of engagement over the course of the semester tends to get the kind of substantial comments that allow their work to improve over the course of the semester.  Students who turn in all their work at the end of the semester do not get the same benefits as students who approach the course in a regular way.  They not only tend to get less sustained comments on their work, but also have less time to develop skills and improve on the skills introduced over the course of class.

Asynchronous teaching is not a perfect system for all classes.  I might suggest that that it works best in larger, introductory level courses. It does little to accommodate  unmotivated or undisciplined student who can easily leave their work to the end of the semester or to set deadlines. My experiences has been, however, that these students tend to struggle in any learning environment and  the asynchronous system only exacerbates these issues.

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Posted in Asynchronous Teaching, Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Teaching

A Showcase for Online Teaching Technology

Posted on October 7, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This week the Senate Continuing Education Committee hosted its regular Online Teaching Showcase.  Each semester the showcase brings together faculty who teach online and asks them to share some the techniques and technologies that they use to make their online classes more successful.  In some ways, this regular gathering of online teaching faculty is a great way to get a sense for future directions in online teaching.

Many of the most common (and intriguing) applications that faculty used to reach their online and distant students sought to facilitate realtime interaction between faculty and student.  The old stalwarts, Adobe Connect and the various Wimba Applications (which are conveniently bundled into Blackboard), made an appearance.  Their reliable and familiar interfaces allow faculty to stream a lecture to a group of students in real time, record the lecture for an archive, and share screens with students.  Tegrity Lecture Capture joined these two applications as another option for faculty who are interested recording lectures live. Tegrity is a server (or as they say now “cloud”) based application that allows students to view lectures either in real time or recorded without downloading software to their computer.  To watch a recorded lecture, the student downloads a relatively small executable file which they then run on their computer. Based on the demonstration that I saw at the Showcase, Tegrity allows for the faculty member to track students who stream the lectures from the cloud.  Faculty could not only see how long a student viewed a recorded lecture, but also isolate parts of the lecture that a student re-watched in order to identify problem concepts or explanations.

I also saw a demonstration of Tidebreak which is an application that creates a dynamic, shared environment where students and faculty can share screens, swap files, and even take control of a central, shared workstation to demonstrate a procedure or execute a task.  I could imagine that software like Tidebreak could be used alongside Adobe Connect or Wemba to create a far more interactive online classroom, but with this advance comes greater complexity.

Cloud based computing also was on display with products like Citrix.  Citrix allows students to access applications run “in the cloud”.  The applications range from Adobe products like Photoshop to the standard suite of Microsoft offerings (Excel, Word, Access) and even more specialized applications like the statistics application SPSS.  From what I can tell, the goal of this kind of service is allow students access to software without the expense and complications individual licensing. It will eventually allow a faculty member to create an online computer lab where they could work with a group of students using virtualized software (again, from the cloud) without making them each buy the applications or worrying about the hardware that remote students are running.

The applicability of these new applications and services is immediately apparent to the part of me that wants to create a richer, more dynamic online classroom.  Another part of me observes that the complexity of these applications will certainly increase the learning curve for a student engaging in online learning (even while services like Tegrity and Citrix could lower the point of entry from the stand point of hardware and software).  Much of the collaborative technology on display also privileged a live teaching environment.  Most of my online teaching, however, and I imagine this is true for many faculty members, is done asynchronously.  That is to say, we are not interacting with students live; instead students are viewing course material at their own pace and interacting with the instructor or their fellow students at far less regular interval than they would in a classroom environment.  While I am sure the users of each of these technologies would stress that they could also work asynchronously, it still seemed clear to me that the goal was to reproduce the classroom experience in a virtual or online way, rather than to imagine the online classroom as something fundamentally different.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Technology

What I wish I had know BEFORE Teaching my First Online Course

Posted on September 23, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Jody Ralph, College of Nursing, University of North Dakota
Heather Terrell, Department of Psychology, University of North Dakota
Bret Weber, Department of Social Work, University of North Dakota

The following 25 points came out of a recent Office of Instructional Develop, On Teaching Lunch Seminar entitled “What I wish I had Known Before Teaching my First Online Class” (pdf).  The focus of the seminar was online teaching and this fantastic list emerged from the discussion.
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Bret Weber offered this brief introduction to his points (#20-25), but it also serves as a nice introduction to the entire list.
In many ways, good pedagogy is quite similar in both the ‘live’ classroom and more technologically dependent classes.  At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that pedagogy and  ’learning delivery’ will change across the spectrum from graduate to undergraduate, small colloquiums to large lecture halls, professional programs to more academic courses, and even across disciplines, individual teaching styles, and unique class groups.  Nonetheless, the following are ideas that need to be addressed in both online and face-to-face class settings, even if there are technical differences.

1. State the importance of self-directed learning from the beginning to reduce the expectation of “hand-holding.”
2. The educational background of online students tends to vary more than traditional classes and tends to be harder to assess. Consider posting an optional blog for Introductions to obtain some sense of their backgrounds.
3. For asynchronous courses, can post pre-recorded lectures and mp3 of audio portion.
4. Students may not have the computer programs that you think they do (Powerpoint, Adobe reader, etc.)
5. Students, especially rural, may have really poor internet connection (think about file size, synchronous meetings, etc).
6. Students generally complete proctored exams last-minute so you do not need to keep them open for weeks.
7. Some people will register for a class but are not ready to be a student. They assume that, because the course is online, they can simply cram it into their 60-hour work week.
8. Provide individual and group feedback (group feedback may save time and nobody feels picked on.)
9. Provide resources (online library resources, online tech support, smart thinking, etc.)
10. Ask for anonymous formative feedback either at the midpoint or several times throughout the semester… surveymonkey is one option. SGID can also be done online.
11. Don’t waste their time… many online students are busy adults…. very low tolerance level for anything perceived to be a waste of time.
12. Do NOT assume that an online course will be less work for you as an instructor. In my experience, it is more.
13. Making an online course “equivalent” to in-person instruction does not mean that the course can or should be “the same.” Making a course equivalent means that it meets the same goals and objectives. Think about your course objectives and choose the best tools to accomplish those objectives.
14.  It may not be possible to replicate discussion in an online format in a way that mimics in-person discussion. Perhaps it is not necessary either. If the goal of discussion is internalization of concepts, this can be accomplished with other tools.
15. There are SO MANY resources available through CILT–take advantage of them.
16. On the other hand, keep it simple. Don’t feel like you have to use a lot of fancy tools just because you can. Use the tools that best accomplish your goals.
17. Publisher resources can be a godsend and a curse. There are many resources that can help students learn, but if you run into technical problems, CILT can’t help you.
18. Try to avoid teaching a new course for the first time online. In other words, if you have taught the course before, or have taught online before, this is a good thing. But if you have done neither, it’s really hard to have an overall sense of how the course should be structured.
19. Assume the course will be taught again with many more students, so that you don’t have to design it all over again.
20.  Be accessible!
21.  Include lots of ‘synchronous’ components (even if the class is asynchronous).
22.  Consider lots of smaller ‘deadlines,’ even though you will need to be flexible.
23.  Don’t be afraid to engage complex group projects.
24.  Keep the course up-to-date (links, documents, deadlines)—and help yourself by avoiding redundancies.
25.  Consider your online presence.
26. A final note: many of the programs commonly used in online courses only run on Windows. If you are a Mac user, plan accordingly.

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Posted in Bret Weber, Heather Terrell, Jody Ralph, Online Teaching

Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the ‘Unequal Gaze’

Posted on February 18, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Mick Beltz, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Dakota

It is my intent to explore the relevance of Michel Foucault’s insights, on discipline and the panopticon, within the context of the online educational experience. Bill Caraher, in his recent posting, “The Panopticon and Online Teaching,” explored some of the possible ways to use the work of Michel Foucault as a tool for understanding the online experience. While there will be some overlap between his thoughts and mine, the specifics of our discussions point to different conclusions.

Many people, when presented with Foucault’s discussion of the disciplinary principles of the panopticon, tend to view this discussion in a negative manner. They tend to read this harsh language of prisons, internalization, and discipline with a mild horror. They see the panoptic gaze in a purely negative light and take steps to chastise any structures that reinforce that gaze. I do not intend to defend every example of the ‘unequal gaze’ as being beneficial; however, I do want to highlight some positive consequences of the panoptic nature of online educational environments.

One of the most powerful concepts within the discussion of the panopticon is that of the ‘unequal gaze.’ For Focault, the ‘unequal gaze’ is a structural relationship where two individuals have different power relationships in their ability to monitor and survey the other person. In the discussion of the panopticon, the prison guard has the ability to completely monitor the actions and behaviors of the prisoner. The prisoner, on the other hand, never has the ability to monitor the prison guard, unless the guard allows the prisoner to have access to this information. This uneven power relationship usually means that the prisoner never knows if they are being monitored; instead, since there is the constant possibility of being observed, the prisoner must always operate under the assumption that they are being monitored.

The result of this ‘unequal gaze,’ for Foucault, is a level of discipline that shapes the individual to better fit within modern society and workforces. Any time that an institution has the ability to constantly monitor and record the individuals within those institutions, and the individuals internalize the disciplinary principles, they end up with a ‘docile body.’ That is a body that is disciplined in such a way as to fit smoothly into a society.

It is almost uncanny how the current online education model mirrors the idealized disciplinary institution of the panopticon. The power relationship between student and instructor is magnified in online educational environments. Any given student in an online course, only has access to material presented by the instructor. A student sees what the instructor wants them to see, and nothing more. For many students, this may even mean that they do not know who else (if anyone) is also taking the course. If an instructor decides to not include any group work, a student may never know if there are other students in the course. This isolation has a powerful impact on the internalization of the disciplinary principles. In traditional face-to-face classroom environments, students have the opportunity to talk with other classmates outside of the classroom. Even if this does not happen, a student will likely receive subtle verbal and non-verbal cues indicating the understanding of concepts and ideas by other students during class time. This eliminates isolation. If a student does not understand a concept, they might be able to see that other students are in the same boat. Most online teaching environments are not structured to eliminate this sense of isolation. Instead, since any given student does not know for sure if anyone else is in the course, they each are left with the potential of feeling that they are the only ones that are confused or lost. This feeling of isolation is at the heart of the internalization that comes from the ‘unequal gaze.’

The level of internalization of disciplinary principles needs to be much higher for online educational environments than it does for traditional educational environments. One of the major selling points of online educational environments is that they can allow students to be freed from the standard confines of the course structure. This means that they are freed from attending lectures at preset times or from needing to be someplace specific to learn. The difficulty is that these structures that students are being freed from are not arbitrary; they serve valuable educational purposes. They ensure that students are receiving the necessary information on the subject matter. They ensure that students are spending a specific amount of time digesting that information. They ensure that students do not fall behind in the course. If we free students from the repressive disciplinary structures of the traditional classroom environment, how can we avoid the negatives those structures are designed to prevent? This is the question Foucault was concerned with: how can we eliminate the repressive disciplinary structures and still maintain the results we desire? This is the importance of internalization. The panoptic nature of online educational environments provides this. Instructors are presented with a vast array of information that tells them how often a student views material, how long they view it, whether they have skipped over sections, etc. Since this information is unequally distributed in the instructor’s favor, the instructor has a much stronger level of power (not including all of the other power relationship that come in all educational environments). This ‘unequal gaze’ coupled with the potential isolation allows online education to free the student from the repressive structures if they are able to successful internalize the disciplinary principles.

Foucault argues that the goal of the panopticon is to create the ‘docile body’ within the prison population. By this, he is arguing that we need to shape the body to be better prepared to be a productive member of the workforce. Those people who cannot control their bodily impulses would be disruptive to those who can control themselves. This focus on the body seems anachronistic to our modern understanding of the needs of the workforce. Modern pluralistic societies have been arguing for decades that the body is not relevant to success. Instead, it is the capabilities of the mind that are relevant. The panopticon that accompanies online education seems to embrace this belief in a way that does not occur in traditional classroom environments. Since both the student and the instructor are disembodied representation of ideas, the focus on the body is eliminated. The race, gender, social class, age, or able-bodiness of both the student and instructor are obscured. This reinforces the expectations within the modern workforce. We are disciplining students to see that the presentation of ideas is the only relevant standard, because students cannot use any physical features as an excuse for their performance in a course.

I believe that there is a second beneficial consequence to the panoptic nature of online educational environments. I have argued, so far, that the ‘unequal gaze’ creates isolation for students. This is not necessarily a negative thing. Since the student’s primary contact is with the instructor, this can be used to foster a feeling of a personal educational experience. Instead of being able to blend in with the crowd, online students have no ability to see the crowd they might blend in with. Whether it is real or not, students internalize the personalized interaction with the instructor. For the student, he or she is likely to feel a personal connection with the instructor, since that is the primary voice they hear in the class. But from the instructor’s perspective, each student is just one out of many students. This gives the perception of personalized attention, without being as capital intensive as private instruction.

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Posted in Michael Beltz, Online Teaching, Technology

The Panopticon and Online Teaching

Posted on January 21, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota
Crossposted to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

In a blog post a few months back dedicated to the topic of online teaching, I mentioned an observation by Mick Beltz, a regular contributor to Teaching Thursday. He suggested that teaching online captured some of the essential characteristics of M. Foucault’s panopticon as outlined in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this metaphor, Foucault used Jeremy Bentham’s vision of the panopticon to describe modern society. The panopticon is an architectural form, most famously used for prisons, where an observer stationed at a central point can see into a series of cells. The people in these cells can always see the observation post (although they do not know whether they are being observed), but cannot see into any of the other cells. In this way they are together, yet isolated from one another In practical application, this means that a warden can observe the behavior of all the inmates almost simultaneously while the inmate cannot observe each other’s behavior.

For Foucault, the pressure of constant observations implied specifically in the panoticon, but functioning elsewhere formed the ideal environment for maintaining the kind of discipline introduced in the prison, the factory, and even the modern school. For Foucault, this kind of internalized discipline produced by the fear of being constantly observed, ensured that society maintained a degree of conformity sufficient to keep the engines of capitalism moving. The panopticon and its culture of observation were part of Foucault’s analysis of discipline in modern times and part of a greater goal of the modern state to produce “docile” bodies .

The parallel between the panopticon as a physical building and the experience of teaching (and presumably taking) an online course are quite striking. First the observer, in this case the faculty member, can observe student behavior through a comprehensive array of statistics as well as submitted work. The individual student, on the other hand, has almost no view of the faculty member, except for when their work is evaluated. At the same time, they have only limited abilities to observe the work of other students and rarely would know when another student is being particular successful in the class or struggling. In a classroom setting, of course, students can interact freely with one another both before and after class and encode their behavior in ways that make it difficult for a faculty member to observe, much less understand. Even during class, verbal and non-verbal cues from the blatant — like laughter at a particularly innane comment by a fellow student — or subtle, like glances at one another or eye-rolling or even the frustrated figiting that occurs when a class runs over, provide clear modes of communication between students. Moreover, students can use these techniques to force a dialog with even a reluctant faculty member. The classroom dynamic presents a formidable and almost irresistible check on unfettered faculty authority.

The removal of this opportunity for spontaneous, collective action certainly removes a key aspect of the faculty-student dialog from the classroom setting. Moreover, the realization that one is being constantly observed initiates and conditions the student for a world where companies like Google see everything from your mundane search patterns to your house to your financial, personal, and religious identities. The conditioning of students to be observed in an online environment prepares them for a world where companies and governments constantly gather information and construct identities for individuals which are so subtle, varied, and complex that they exceed the individual’s ability to understand or realize them.

The impact of this environment on teaching as a profession is significant. While the “teacherly” gaze has always been one of any number of treasured weapon in the teacher’s arsenal (able, when deployed successfully, to bring to order even the most disruptive student), it now has the potential to become the single most powerful tool for conditioning behavior. We can observe when a student comes online, how long they stay for, what they look at, as well as the what they produce. With only a little exaggeration, we can say that the student study habits, reading behavior, and analytical practices are de-mystified and can be placed in direct correlation to student performance on evaluated work. In effect, the barrier that has long separated the mystical process of learning from the work of evaluation has come down.

The advantage, then, of online education is that it conditions students to become the docile bodies in our information age and to accept our individuality as a commodity in the information economy. The documented life is the commodified life.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Technology

The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective

Posted on October 8, 2009 by | 2 Comments

Michael Beltz, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Daktoa

While reading the insightful exchanges about the changes in alternative modes of college education, “The Cost of Cheap Education,” I was struck by how the discussion was framed from an institutional perspective. I do not disagree with any of the specific details presented by these articles; I found them to be well reasoned and generally correct in their assessments of programs like Straighterline. However, I feel that part of this discussion might be better understood from an alternative perspective.

From a students’ perspective, should lower-level courses be used to subsidize the other components of a department/university?

I agree with the argument presented by Bill Caraher, Anne Kelsch, and John Tagg that these less expensive models of higher education pose a potentially dangerous shift in the economics of the university. From an institutional perspective, programs like Straighterline, by offering degrees on a flat rate monthly cost, have the potential for changing the ‘ecosystem’ of the university. The current structure of large lower-level, often general education oriented, courses are used to offset other vital functions of individual departments. These courses are the most economically viable, and lucrative, courses within most departments. The money generated from student tuition in these courses allows departments to offer smaller upper-level courses. These upper-level courses are designed primarily for departmental majors and tend to be small in size and for students with advanced levels of knowledge in those fields. The large introductory courses also provide departments with the economic resources to allow faculty to conduct advanced research. For individual departments, and the university as a whole, this system makes sense because it provides a base of resources for them to conduct critical functions.

The question is: does this arrangement make sense from a student perspective? As the system is arranged currently, students are being required to subsidize the upper-level courses and faculty research when they enroll in an introductory general education course. They are being required to have their tuition dollars support activities that they will not see the direct benefits from. As indicated by Caraher, these large introductory courses are often taught by adjunct instructors, post-doctorate fellows, and in many universities, graduate students. Since these instructors are the ones who generally receive the lowest compensation for their work, it reduces the university’s costs. There are two trade-offs that come with this current structure. First, since these classes generally have the largest enrollment, they tend to be taught in the least pedogically optimal manner. While there are many gifted instructors for these types of courses, the mere size pushes instructors to teach in a lecture format and assess student work in a minimal number of ways. For example, most instructors are reluctant to move beyond multiple choice and short answer examinations. These tendencies do not provide the best learning opportunities for students. Secondly, since these instructors are not tenure-line faculty, the quality of teaching can suffer. Again, this is not an indictment of all instructors in these courses. Resources for instructional improvements tend to be targeted for tenure-line faculty members and not those individuals who general carry the burden of teaching these introductory courses. If we consider the University of North Dakota, we can see how these resources are unevenly distributed. UND encourages new faculty to take part in the Alice Clark program. This program provides resources and training for new faculty to improve the ways that they incorporate innovative teaching into the classroom. While this is a great program, it excludes those individuals that are the core instructors in many of the introductory course across the country. Graduate students, adjunct instructors, part-time instructors, and post-doctorate instructors do not have access to these types of programs. They also tend to be excluded from departmental funding for teaching conferences.

Again, this system may make sense from an institutional perspective, but does it make sense from the student’s perspective? Consider a student who enrolls in an introductory level course in biology. If the student is not a biology major, why do they register for the course? Typically it is because it is one of a small number of courses that fulfill a science general education requirement. The tuition paid by that student for the introductory course goes to subsidize other functions of the department. This money enables upper-level courses taught for majors, where the tuition accrued by the smaller class sizes does not cover the costs of the salary of the faculty teaching the course. This may benefit the biology majors, but it does not benefit the student in the introductory course. It also enables the faculty members within the biology department to conduct research. We might argue that this does benefit the lower level students, but the benefit to the student is no greater than to any other citizen (whether they attend a university or not). A fairer system would be to not put the burden of financing faculty research on students at all. Since all citizens receive similar benefits from faculty research, the financial burden should be on the citizens of the state or nation as a whole.

This seems to be an insight that Straightline is capitalizing on. They are able to keep the costs to students low because they have eliminated many of the external costs associated with the university. The student tuition in introductory courses does not go to cover the costs of less financially viable upper-level courses, nor does it go to subsidize faculty research projects. In many ways, there is a greater transparency in where the tuition money goes. The tuition dollars go to the instructor’s pay per course, overhead costs, and Straighterline’s profits. When a prospective student selects to attend a program like this, they are making a sacrifice, though. They are sacrificing quality of instruction, in many cases, and the reputation associated with the degree granting institution. The value of these should be weighed against the costs of the individual credits. However, students should be given the autonomy to make these determinations themselves, based on their own goals.

See also:

The Cost of a Cheap Education
The Cost of a Cheap Education: Another View

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Posted in Anne Kelsch, Bill Caraher, John Tagg, Michael Beltz, Online Teaching

The Cost of Cheap Education: Another View

Posted on September 24, 2009 by | 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.

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Posted in Anne Kelsch, Bill Caraher, Future Teaching, John Tagg, Online Teaching

Teaching Thursday: College for $99 a Month

Posted on September 15, 2009 by | 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!

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Posted in Anne Kelsch, Future Teaching, Online Teaching