Do MOOCs still matter?

The Massive Online Open-Enrollment Course... not many years ago it was being touted as the pedagogical revolution that would break higher education wide open, knocking down the traditional classroom walls.  A leader in the MOOC movement is "edX".  Its CEO, Anant Agarwal, was interviewed recently by a Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter.  Five years and 11 million students after its founding, the non-profit hopes to be sustainable by 2020.

In my experience --- and I "taught" a couple of MOOCs a few years ago (although mine amounted only to Minor Online Open-Enrollment Courses --- Mini-MOOCs) --- two kinds of students are attracted.  The first are the dilettantes, i.e., folks with a casual interest in your topic, who sign up and participate to widely varied degrees from 'hardly at all' to 'across the finish line.'  Instructors may or may not award a certificate, which may or may not have any value to the student.

The other market is students who can translate the MOOC experience into credit hours toward a degree at a legit college or university.  This is where the future lies, if there is a future for MOOCs.

As potential for-credit offerings, MOOCs might be viewed as a sub-set of online learning more broadly.  I have quite a bit more experience with that, having taught online courses for a couple of years now for a Philadelphia law school.  I confess that even after two years, I still struggle with the pedagogical and technological challenges of online learning.  Last fall I taught Human Resource Management and received the best student reviews of my long teaching career.  Asked "what does the professor need to improve?" answers included:

"You can't improve upon perfection."

"The class was great, no improvements needed."

"Nothing, loved him."

No, I'm not making those up.  Then, this spring, I taught ADR for the second time.  I tried using video to improve the interactive nature of the experience, which after all included units on negotiation and mediation.  Whether due to the technology or the students' lack of sophistication, the video components performed very poorly.  And I had one student --- who didn't seem to think he needed to provide more than two or three sentences for any discussion or exam question ("Hey, this is graduate school") --- tell me I was the worst online prof ever.  I put most of that right back on him.  But, like any good and responsible teacher, I'm left wondering how I might have brought him around.  I've had duds like this --- who are in the class only to get a grade and ultimately a credential --- in my face-to-face classrooms, where I could deal with them one-on-one and gage their body language and expressions. Lacking that opportunity online, it's much more difficult, if not impossible, to engage this kind of intellectually bankrupt student.

In last week's post, I made the point that a liberal education is important not only because it teaches students how to think, write, analyze and adjust to life's fast-paced changes.  I contended that it also teaches them how to live meaningful lives... even if they find themselves professionally redundant some day, despite those skill sets.  In my view, only an extended on-campus (preferably residential, aka, traditional) college experience can do that.

Let me close, then, by saying, I see two types of college students in our future.  The first will be those who use MOOCs, AP credits, and life experiences to help them cobble together a credential and a career.  They hopefully will achieve gainful employment.  They will not in my opinion achieve an "education."

To become an "educated"  human being still requires the much-maligned traditional college experience.  Providing that without putting a mortgage on the student's diploma is a major challenge for us "traditional" college teachers and administrators.

College preparation should start in first grade... and every American should have a minimum guaranteed income.

This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking we need to make the future work, say two pretty powerful thinkers.

The first piece of advice comes from Dr. Nancy Zimpher, as she prepares to down from her post as SUNY's 12th Chancellor.  Our work cannot begin at "grade 13," she says.

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard commencement speech suggested a "universal basic income" for every American.

"Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract," Zuckerberg said during his speech. "We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas."

One might argue that, if somehow these two recommendations were instituted in tandem, American might experience a 21st century Renaissance.

Of course, such a Utopia is beyond the imaginations of most of our political and corporate leadership and most of our populace.  The late Joe Bageant in his 2006 Deer Hunting with Jesus --- a book I have been recommending as summer reading to everyone who will listen --- put it this way:

 “The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda.”


If Joe was right --- and I believe that by and large he was --- this is no foundation on which to build a Renaissance.  This sounds more like the ingredients for an Inquisition.
What might be some other out-of-the-box ideas that would work, if only we had the will to try them?


For one, let's admit that, even if manufacturing can be revived in the US, most jobs will be done not by workers, but by robots.  This seems inevitable.  But is it also inevitable that the robots must be owned by the few, rather than the many?  If I can have an avatar on the Internet, why can't I have a surrogate robot-worker at the plant?  


Here's another: while we train students for the rapidly evolving world of work, let's ensure that they also receive a solid liberal education.  And I don't just mean critical thinking, writing ability and information literacy.  Yes, all these are desired by employers and are the source of the flexibility that will allow for the retraining that millennials and their progeny will have to undertake several times in their lives.  But, for those Americans for whom no meaningful work will exist, along with the basic income must come the basic sensibility to find meaning in other pursuits.  The best way to equip people for this possibility is exposure to the liberal arts.


The sixties media guru Marshall McLuhan once observed that we look at life through a rear view mirror, as we travel down our highways and byways. More precisely:“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”


Can this mold be broken?  Can we not only push the envelope, but tear it Here is a little essay on  some of the possible causes of the Renaissance.  Do Do you see any parallels to our own time and place? (I think perhaps I do.)

Do parents and high school students have a right to know...

...how much a university's graduates earn?

Fair is fair.  If the for-profit sector must demonstrate that its graduates are achieving gainful employment, why not the public and non-profit sectors of higher education as well.  And our "customers" deserve to know what their investment is worth.

At least those are arguments being made by advocates  of the move afoot to repeal the federal ban on reporting such data. A "College Transparency Act" would make this data available, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Opponents cite student privacy laws, such a FERPA.

Should the bill become law, the National Center for Education Statistics would be charged with creating a resource parallel to the College Score Card.

As is so often the case, California is ahead of the nation on this.  The Salary Surfer is an interactive site that enables students to see what degree and certificate holders from the Golden State's community colleges are earning two and five years out.

For instance, being a lawyer, I queried about law and got the following information:

Curriculum Award Type     Median Annual Salary     2 Years Before          2 Years After      5 Years After Paralegal Degree $33,006 $45,117 $46,756 Paralegal Certificate $36,533 $47,781 $52,879

A couple of things jump out at me. 

1.  A paralegal degree resulted in a meaningful income jump two years after graduation as compared to the recipients' pre-graduation income

2.  But three years later, their salaries had increased very little.

3.  Meanwhile, those receiving only a certificate did much better.

What might I, as a parent of a high school student, infer from this?  One hypothesis might be that those getting a paralegal certificate came into the program already possessing a four-year college degree.  

Would parents and students be sophisticated enough to draw such inferences from the data?  Maybe or maybe not.

But such data would sure seem to trump no data... don't you think?

Justices, too, are multi-dimensional.

Proof of this came from the Supreme Court of the United States yesterday, as Justice Clarence Thomas broke ranks with his conservative brothers to join four liberals in finding that North Carolina's redistricting violated the Constitution.

The opinion written by liberal Justice Kagan found that two districts that bunched African Americans together, diluting their political clout in neighboring districts, was racially motivated and therefore unconstitutional.  Justice Thomas, arguably the Court's most conservative member, made the vote against North Carolina a 5-4 decision.  Why?

Well, I think one might reasonably conclude that his race trumped his political philosophy.

If so, then his siding with the four liberals on the SCOTUS bench is a good example of the complexity of human beings and our political doings.  We are witnessing another example in reaction to the Trump Administration's proposed budget.  Proving yet again that he will say almost anything that's convenient in the moment, Mr. Trump's budget disavows his campaign promise not to cut Medicaid.  And even some very conservative Congressmen are troubled by that proposal, coming as they do from states which in the past eight years have vastly expanded medicaid coverage.

Like Justice Thomas, these conservatives have multiple interests and concerns.  Consequently, as Mr. Trump and his White House are learning, just because your party has majorities in both houses doesn't guarantee that everything you send up the to the Hill will be embraced.

Justice Kennedy is more complex than Justice Thomas.  He has often swung back and forth between the conservatives and the liberals on the Court.  Back in 1993 the Court approved gerrymandering, if done purely for political purposes, as opposed to being racially motivated.  Justice Kennedy has indicated a willingness to revisit that issue, if an effective legal yardstick could be articulated to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable political manipulation of boundaries.  Word has it that such a test case is working its way toward SCOTUS now.

My point this morning is simple:  Concern for civil rights and civil liberties is not a liberal monopoly.  Nor is concern for the social safety net.  Protecting rights and benefits in a time of conservative dominance of the federal government may be a matter of taking the time to learn what practical considerations may surmount pristine conservative principles for individual decision makers and addressing those concerns.   This, I think, may be a better approach than insisting upon maintaining a strident "us v. them" posture in our politics.  

What student unrest can do...

This fall University of Missouri at Columbia will be admitting a freshman class that will be 35 % smaller than the class it admitted in September 2015.  Overall enrollment will be down from about 35,000 to some 30,000.

If you have been following the trials and tribulations of Missouri's flagship public university during the same two years, then you know that racial tensions resulted in the resignation of a president and a boycott of the football team.

Reportedly, the new president and his administration are surprised by the depth of the fallout from these high-profile incidents.

Piling on to the school's problems, legislators angry about university ties to planned parenthood cut funding for grad assistants, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Other factors include changing demographics, a fact of life to which many of us must adjust.

There is also a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't aspect to the school's enrollment problem.  Rural students may choose to apply elsewhere because they are concerned about the campus unrest and how it was managed.  African-American high schoolers and their parents continue to have concerns about the racial atmosphere.

I'm fond of weather analogies --- thus "the Fifth Wave".  So, to borrow a cliche, the school fondly known to locals as Mizzou is being buffeted by a Perfect Storm of demographic, racial and political winds.  Administrators had best batten down the hatches.

The Purdue-Kaplan Deal--- what can it mean?

Weekends during the first half of my summer will be devoted in large part to completing the manuscript for what I hope will be my 21st book: Riding the Fifth Wave - A Survival Guide to the New Normal in Higher Education.  This Blog's name is drawn directly from that working title.  And, if you are a regular reader, you know that I have been following campus closings, for-profit failures, and the other prevalent indicia of a major disruption in the higher-education empire that has dominated American post-secondary education since 1945.  Indisputably, there is a "great disturbance in the Force."

My new book not only will track the problems.  It also tries to suggest some solutions.  One that I had not foreseen is the merging of a public institution (Purdue) with a for-profit player (Kaplan).  As an opinion piece in the Chronicle notes today, Kaplan was called out in a U.S. Senate report not so very long ago as one of the many for-profit companies that churned unqualified students (and federally funded student loans) into bottom-line profits, while failing to fulfill their mission of preparing those students for gainful employment.

So why would Purdue team up with Kaplan?  Well, both parties bring something significant to the union that the other lacks.  For Purdue it's an instant national presence via Kaplan's 15 on-the-ground campuses, plus a powerful online infrastructure.  For Kaplan it's respectability... i.e., great content, high reputation, and the parent company's academic standards.

Will this business model catch on... or is it a one-off?  I don't know, but I will be watching both this marriage and also for copycats.  It's an intriguing idea that could bring a series of win-wins to the beleaguered American higher education environment.  Financially stressed non-profits may want to give the Purdue-Kaplan model a try.

Meanwhile... I will have to revise a couple of the chapters in my book manuscript before I send it off to Peter Lang in late July.

The Sunshine State Is Slashing Funding for Remedial Education--- Big Mistake!

According to this morning's Chronicle of Higher Education,  after the state system made remediation optional, student participation allegedly plummeted.  Legislators therefore cut funding.  Leaders of the state's 28 open-access colleges are protesting that the legislature has goofed.  They say that the nature of remedial programs has morphed, but that --- if anything --- student use of such services has grown... and grown more costly.

It's hard for me to believe anything else.  Twenty years ago, when I left the private practice of law to return to the academy, my three-year transition job was teaching legal research and writing at Widener University's law school in Wilmington, Delaware.  Back in the day, Widener Law School pulled up the rear among law schools in the Greater Philadelphia area.  It had the largest student body among the region's law programs and was a bit of a bottom feeder from among the applicant pool.  Consequently, remediation was a "must."

In fact, during my time at Widener (1993-96), the law faculty called for a reduction in the size of the student body to be accomplished by chopping off the bottom strata.  I well recall a faculty meeting at which the president of the university drove down from the main campus in Chester (PA).  His message:  we'll spend more money on remediation, but we won't shrink the enrollment.  And why would they?  The law school was Widener's cash cow.

Fast forward 20 years and, if anything, I see an even greater need for remedial assistance for students at all but the best colleges and universities.  And, as the Florida folks apparently are claiming, the nature of the remedial services has evolved.  Research has revealed that remedial courses often are perceived by students as stigmatizing.  This is especially true with regard to our students of color.  A 2016 CUNY study is particularly compelling in its conclusion that mainstreaming students directly into introductory courses, complemented by intensive tutoring, is a far superior way of ensuring weak students' success, as measured by pass and graduation rates.

Bottom line: remediation has evolved from traditional remedial (usually no-credit) courses to more sophisticated approaches, such as the use of embedded tutors.  But remediation is as vital to the success of a large swath of our student bodies as it ever was, if not more so.

Ethics: a Critical Component of Higher Education's Role in the Age of Trump

As the Chronicle of Higher Education points out this morning, Penn State University has had an ongoing ethical crisis.  It began with the Jerry Sandusky scandal, which disgraced beloved football coach Joe Paterno and probably contributed substantially to his demise shortly after retiring.  The scandal culminated with the criminal conviction of another former PSU icon, President Graham Spanier.  Now, just as the Keystone State's mega-versity apparently was putting all that behind it, a freshman fraternity pledge died in an irresponsible and reckless hazing incident that has resulted in 18 frat brothers being criminally charged. Phew!

According to the Chronicle, PSU's leadership is meeting the challenge head on, seeking to create a culture of not only obeying the law but also just plain "doing the right thing" because it's right.  If that's the case, I applaud them.

As I have repeatedly asserted in this blog, higher education must step up and take a leadership role in the defense of civil rights and civil liberties in the Age of Trump.  The President's precipitous firing of FBI Director Comey yesterday is merely the latest proof that our rights and our liberties are under threat from this Administration.

The media won't do the job.  While the New York Times and Washington Post are still reliable, most broadcast media have sold out to Infotainment; just watch the Today Show on any given morning to see what I mean.  And the unions won't do the job.  With Justice Gorsuch reconstituting a conservative majority, SCOTUS is poised to gut public-employee unions by eliminating the "fair share" dues requirement at the earliest opportunity.  Private-sector unions are already whittled down to less than 10% of the workforce.

If higher education is to fill the vacuum, then the highest possible ethical standards are a must.

My May Webinars are available for registration here:

https://jamescastagnera.wordpress.com/ned-mcadoo-2/

Are accreditation organizations more trouble than they are worth?

Two of the top journalism schools in the country apparently think so.  According to  Inside Higher Ed, both Northwestern University and UC Berkeley have dropped the Accrediting Council on Education in Communications and Journalism.  The dean of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism called the organization a "1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change."

The demands placed upon schools to achieve and sustain their accreditations can consume significant amounts of human resources in my experience.  And, as membership expands, the problem identified by Gilbert and Sullivan in their operetta "The Gondoliers" --- when everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody --- devalues the credential.  A cost-benefit analysis may cause more schools to question whether all the time and money couldn't be better directed.

Additionally, accrediting organization restrictions --- such as on the number of faculty who must be full-time and/or tenured and their teaching loads --- sometimes skews the job market... to the benefit of the job candidates at the expense of the institutions.

I speak from personal observation and, admittedly, my comments are merely anecdotal.  But there is literature out there that supports my view.  Here's but one example.

If not accreditation, then what?  The answer to me seems obvious: valid assessment that is made publicly available.  Assessment, if done well, is a far more useful investment of our financial and human resources.  And it is a far-more reliable indicator of how well we are serving our constituencies.  One indicator of the truth of this statement is the emphasis that accrediting agencies are now placing on assessment.  If even they recognize the efficacy of assessment, this begs the question: why do we need them, except to push us into doing what we ought to be doing enthusiastically on our own?