Massive Open Online Courses Topple Campus Walls
“In a classroom, when you ask a question, one student answers and the others don’t get a chance,” Mr. Thrun said. “Online, with embedded quizzes, everyone has to try to answer the questions. And if they don’t understand, they can go back and listen over and over until they do.” Just as a child who falls while learning to ride a bike is not told “You get a D,” but is encouraged to keep trying, he said, online classes, where students can work at their own pace, can help students keep practicing until they master the content.
“The goal should be to get everybody to A+ level,” he said.
— Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, is a former Stanford professor and Google Fellow who taught a free massive open online course on artificial intelligence that enrolled 160,000 students last fall.
So where did standardized testing come from anyway? That’s not just a rhetorical question. There is a “father” of the multiple-choice test, someone who actually sat down and wrote the first one. His name was Frederick J. Kelly, and he devised it in 1914. It’s pretty shocking that if someone gave it to you today, the first multiple-choice test would seem quite familiar, at least in form. It has changed so little in the last eight or nine decades that you might not even notice the test was an antique until you realized that, in content, it addressed virtually nothing about the world since the invention of the radio.
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Thus was born the timed reading test. The modern world of 1914 needed people who could come up with the exact right answer in the exact right amount of time, in a test that could be graded quickly and accurately by anyone. The Kansas Silent Reading Test was as close to the Model T form of automobile production as an educator could get in this world. It was the perfect test for the machine age, the Fordist ideal of “any color you want so long as it’s black.
After Tyson finished his master’s thesis, his advisers dissolved his dissertation committee—essentially flunking him. “I still don’t talk about it much,” he says, “because it was a failed experiment, and I’ve moved on from that chapter of my life.”
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As for his relationship with UT, Tyson claims he’s moved on. “I don’t hold a grudge, and I don’t blame the department for kicking me out. I might have done the same thing in their position,” he says.But at other moments, it’s clear that he’s still raw about Texas, almost 30 years later. “When I get mail from the Texas Exes, it goes straight in the trash. Why should I believe in an institution that didn’t believe in me?”
That’s the way Tyson sees it: UT didn’t believe in him, while Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton did. “When I look at my life, the tracks of my success take a detour around Texas,” he says. “It’s the only place where I didn’t succeed, and I’m still figuring out what that means.”
So is the University. Astronomy professor Craig Wheeler remembers Tyson: “Research was not his strength. He was never going to solve any major scientific problems. But I knew he was going to do something big, because he had charisma. He’s warm and funny, but he also has serious backbone, ambition, confidence—and that’s taken him far.”
And so it has. But for Texas, he’ll always be the one who got away.
From an article about Neil deGrasse Tyson in the University of Texas alumni magazine.
It’s so easy to see people like Tyson who have had great success in life, and forget they may have had great failure as well.
Attrition from doctoral programs is high, with about 50 percent of doctoral students leaving without completing their program (NYTimes). For many of these students, this may be the first time they experience failure.
Ultimately what determines success is not the absence of failure, but how a person respond to it.
If you’re only using words to communicate as a teacher, why show up?” he says. “Why not just type your notes? Teaching is a full-body performance. The moonwalk was all the rage in 1983, and the students loved it. It made the material work for them.
Dear Stephanie,
Your 3 absences will result in your letter grade dropping. I am a working mother so I understand, but you need to come up with a better plan for when your children get sick. I know you have turned in your assignments and do well on your exams, but I have to enforce the letter grade drop. Also, if you miss one more day I will withdraw you from the class. Do you have a doctors note?
-my psychology professor.
Dear psych proffessor,
Thank god you UNDERSTAND. Since you have 2 toddlers and full time childcare, I knew you would. I do not have a doctors note because I have been so overwhelmed with studying for the midterms that I did not take him. What I do have is emergency room papers. I was so tight on time because of the low tolerance for absences, I waited until he was THAT SICK to finally go. So I will bring you those papers tomorrow. I will also “plan” for my ten year old to stay home alone so I never miss your class again. I have no babysitters or child care, this is the best I can do for you. Or since you are so understanding, I can drag my sick child to school and let him nap on the floor during your class. The pain meds they gave him will knock him out, you won’t even know he’s there.
Thank you so much for all of your understanding. I apologize for my sons inconsiderate respiratory infection and infected lymph nodes.
Xoxo,
Steph
Source: martiniqueeny
The disadvantages of an elite education
An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.
That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.
— William Deresiewicz
Why teaching is hard
One of the hardest things for an expert in any field to remember is how it feels to be a novice in that field. Once you’ve gained enough experience that you start seeing the world in a different way, the world simply doesn’t look the same anymore.
This is a short clip from the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Host Jad Abumrad is interviewing pianist Jeffrey Swann about Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung. Listen as Swann tries to demonstrate Wagner’s use of leitmotif by playing two variations of the spear motif from Die Walküre.
Jad gives a small sigh of frustration before he bravely admits, “See, I can’t hear the difference there.” Swann offers to deconstruct it for him, and we go from bewilderment to an “aha!” moment in less than 30 seconds.
This whole Radiolab podcast (“The Ring and I”) is pretty cool, but Jad’s “aha!” moment really jumped out at me as a teacher because, even though I know a bit about the concept of leitmotif (and I’ve seen the Ring live and listened to it on the radio and CD), I did not quite grasp right away what Swann was trying to demonstrate either. I had the same “aha!” moment right along with Jad.
Swann had to turn off his “expert” ears, and present the spear motif in a way that “novice” ears could “hear” it. That’s why teaching is hard, but why those “aha!” moments with learners can be so awesome!
Source: radiolab.org
Ensuring student success – Students are not to blame
Many students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, that each one of them has a talent, each of one them has a capacity to develop – intellectually and emotionally – then it follows that each one should be given a fair chance to succeed.
— Arshad Ahmad, president, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Canada
New Horizons for Learning EdTech Database
The venerable New Horizons for Learning journal, now hosted at Johns Hopkins University, has announced the addition of a database of educational technology tools reviewed by educators.
Why student success is such a radical idea
MIT recently announced its plans to offer its free online course materials with the opportunity to earn certificates of completion through its new MITx platform.
Sebastian Thrun recently announced he is leaving Stanford to offer free online courses through a platform called Udacity.com, which also will offer certificates of completion.
Both MITx and Udacity are experiments in offering online learning to large numbers of students for free, along with some kind of “official” recognition of achievement. One way they differ is in their orientation toward student success and completion.
MIT emphasized the rigor of its courses by pointing out that not all students will be successful:
“Reif emphasizes that the [MITx] courses will be built with MIT-grade difficulty. Not everyone will be able to pass them. But, he says, ‘we believe strongly that anyone in the world who can dedicate themselves and learn this material should be given a credential.’”
Chronicle: MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
Thrun reflected on his own realization that weeding out students does not promote learning:
“In all my life of teaching, my 20 years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I had always been a tough teacher. I had always given students really hard questions, I had always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of ‘weeding.’ This was an open university. There was no reason to reduce class size. There was no certificate to be earned. And here I was teaching a ‘weeder’ class. Then I started to realize that we set up students not for success but for failure. We really empowered the professors by looking smart, and we don’t really help the students to become smart.”
MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn.
It’s no surprise that Thrun is leaving Stanford to pursue his vision on his own terms. Institutions and the academics within them are heavily invested in their own prestige and exclusivity. Even as they experiment with new learning formats, they measure the quality of their program by guaranteeing failure for some and success for others. Thrun takes the view that the success of his program is vested in the success of his students. This radical idea simply isn’t compatible with the mission of an institution like Stanford.
Of course it is the prestige of Thrun’s status as a now-former Stanford professor that enables him to be taken seriously, as is his role as a Google Fellow and the connections that brings (Google founder Sergey Brin is featured in a Udacity.com video). He’s not just some guy recording math lessons on YouTube, though Sal Khan and the Khan Academy have been part of his inspiration. The difference, though, is in how Thrun is using that prestige to create a platform that promotes successful learners.
The future will bring many more experiments and many more radical ideas designed to bring online learning and higher education to vast numbers of students. If you’re going to teach the world, maybe you should start out by expecting success. It will be quite a different world when education is no longer a zero-sum game.
Sebastian Thrun resigned as a tenured professor at Stanford to pursue his own vision of online learning at udacity.com. He made his decision after 160,000 students from around the world signed up for the artificial intelligence class he offered online for free this fall.
Watch today’s announcement as he shares some really remarkable insights about the power of online teaching and learning. Really inspiring!
(Hint: skip the inane introduction and jump to Thrun’s talk at 2:20.)
I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It’s a political problem.
Source: Wired
UK universities earn millions collecting overdue library fines
Universities have raised almost £50m (US $77 million) from fining students for overdue library books in the past six years.… With fines as little as 10p for each day a book is overdue, it shows that students are returning thousands of books late each year.
— The Guardian
So what will they do when “books” are no longer “returnable”?
I have recently argued that the one useful response to today’s teacher shortage is to expand sites of recruitment to places as yet untouched by teacher recruitment drives: state prisons, homeless shelters, gay bars, and blighted urban neighborhoods. At first I made this suggestion ironically, but as I had time to reflect on the challenges we face in recruiting teachers committed to social change rather than in reproducing the status quo, I have come to consider this strategy more seriously. If we are trying to shift our system of public education away from its role as a reproducer of social inequities, then we need teachers who are willing to challenge the status quo. Better yet, we need teachers with experience in challenging the status quo. Those who survive on the margins of society acquire an intense experience of being the outsider. These outlaws and social misfits may be more likely to advocate for the radical transformation of ideologies and for the dramatic restructuring of systems of education than are the traditional pool of people whom we cycle through teacher preparation programs.
What would our schools look like if their faculties were comprised of ex-cons, queers, and street people? How might the life chances of all children be different were there more welfare mothers working as elementary educators? If we filled our classrooms with people with heightened experiences of resisting and countering abuse, victimization, marginalization, and approbation, would we succeed at moving school closer to our social justice aims than if we continued to hire all the Miss Jean Brodys and Jaime Escalantes of the world?
- Students are drawn to hot technologies, but they rely on more traditional devices
- Students report technology delivers major academic benefits
- Students report uneven perceptions of institutions’ and instructors’ use of technology
- Facebook generation students juggle personal and academic interactions
- Students prefer, and say they learn more in, classes with online components
— ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 Report
