A short note on small group learning and mentoring

Over at UnCollege, they've just posted a new story about education innovations and their scalability. While much of the article is about a new method of learning computer code, a few of the remarks are broadly applicable to any learning, particularly the humanties-type learning I am most focused on:

What has brought projects like the Khan Academy to prominence is that they scale: a single video can be watched by millions of people.  While it’s wonderful to give millions of people access to knowledge, I think we should be careful when scaling education. I don’t think you can replace the learning that comes from an intimate five-person discussion about Shakespeare with watching a video from MIT, the Khan Academy, or anywhere else. I don’t care who makes the video, or how great a teacher the person is, having people to support and challenge your ideas is irreplaceable.

Academically adrift in admin and infrastructure costs...

We've commented here on the cost of administration before. Now there's a new book out that is synthesizing a lot of the information on the various sources of the core problem in higher education - the constant increase in tuition coupled with a steady decline in rigor.

Listen to Bob McChesney's hour-long interview with author Richard Arum (the February 12th, 2012 episode of WILL's "Media Matters") about his new book (co-authored with Josipa Roksa) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses or read about the book at the publisher). If you're more interested in a humorous and somewhat sarcastic take on the issue, see "Where does all the money go?" over at College Misery.

It is the usual catalogue of suspects: administration and student services driving costs up and various poor incentives for good teaching driving quality down. 

Anyone can be a teacher and everything is free?

Education Stormfront sounds very positive about the prospect of directly financed education - the idea that anybody who wants to be a student of something pays any teacher he or she wants any agreed price. According to the article, these are the expected effects:



1. Anyone can be a teacher.
2. The cost of learning will drop nearly to zero.
3. The whole huge bureaucracy will be gutted.
4. Classes will be developed based on what the students want, not what the government wants.

While I would not dismiss this idea entirely, I am pessimistic about these effects or at least about how positive Stormfront is making them sound.

"Free" education proliferates online...

The number of "free" sources of academic knowledge is proliferating rapidly online. One of the more well-organized meta-sites that collect these resources is https://plus.google.com/114424163811716070551/posts/bnLpsUq7rhd. It lists hundreds of university sites and other online sources with an emphasis on audio-visual approaches. Of course these sites aren't completely "free" in the sense that nobody paid for them. They are free of charge for the user, however.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that knowledge itself - both the raw data and the tools for interpeting it - are easily accessable. The question we keep returning to is that of mentoring. Where will be the place for humans as educators as this process continues? Given enough time and discipline, smart people will always be able to educate themselves in this environment. But how much time could they save with help? Is it enough to pay for? Will expertise in, say, the humanities be "worth" anything directly, as a teacher or mentor, when adults are doing the learning? 

A Course Platform for Unfaculty

There are several challenges involved in freelance teaching. Finding students, convincing them to enroll in non-accredited courses and pay for them, and establishing credibility as an educator outside the academy to name a few. Another important one is finding a platform which can support online learning outside of an academic institution. However, this challenge can now be overcome with CourseSites.

CourseSites offers a fully functional Blackboard platform and allows instructors to create up to five courses for free. For those who are familiar with Blackboard as a course management system, the utility of this website for unfaculty should be obvious. For those who are unfamiliar here are some of the benefits.

The Free Education Matthew Effect

In sociology there is a phenomenon called the Matthew Effect which derives from the following passage in the Gospel of Matthew: "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." I believe that the growth of free educational resources online will create an educational version of the Matthew Effect.

Until very recently in order to get a college education you needed to go to college. And, in order to network you needed to go to college. For students who could afford it this meant going to a top of the line university. Of course, the ability to fund these top of the line education already created a gap between students who could pay for a premium education and those who had to settle for what they could afford. But, what will happen in a world where you can attain the knowledge and networking benefits of college for free with the use of online resource such as iTunesU, Open Culture, MIT Opencourses, and LinkedIn?

There is a humanities knowledge market...

There is a profit-oriented market for humanities knowledge: Great Courses (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/) offers a wide range of lectures at prices that allow them to turn a profit. The lectures offered are clearly stimulating and at least middle-brow. What they clearly lack, however, is activity on the part of the learner. The learner can watch the lecture and do so as many times as he or she wants. The particularly ambitious learner can even take notes. But that is all. There is no test, no term paper, no presentation, no research of any kind - not even a discussion. In the end, it is strongly self-driven, but not at all interactive nor even active. It remains as passive as radio or television. That is comfortable - and we should not be too surprised to learn that people will pay for that. 

It is more interesting than the issue of rigor, however. According to Heather MacDonald at City Journal (http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_3_the-great-courses.html)...

The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want. And that, it turns out, is a curriculum in the monuments of human thought, taught without the politically correct superiority and self-indulgent theory common in today’s colleges.

Will people pay for pain? Do people want their minds changed?

I once heard a media professor from Texas say in a radio interview that he considered it part of his job as an educator to make students feel miserable. I submit that he would be ill-advized to do anything of the sort without tenure and certainly not in a situation like we are proposing here at Unfaculty.

In a recent article I asked whether students would pay to work if there were no credential being offered. That is part of the broader question I would like to ask here: Will students pay for pain?

Will people pay to work?

The Zero Tuition College lists "assignments" posted by those who have signed up to be teachers or mentors.  The assignments posted vary in how academic they are and how rigorous they are. Generally, they would appear to be well below the usual level of work in a traditional liberal arts college course. The learning is done in smaller "chunks" than in college. That site is only a month or two old, however. We'll see what crops up there over the coming weeks.

There is a short page on assignment guidelines, however, which gives the impression that things will generally not closely mirror the traditional college model. For one thing...

Zero Tuition College operates on an assignment honor system: no one checks whether you've actually done an assignment or not. (There's no point in faking your accomplishments at ZTC because we don't offer degrees.) We do, however, recommend that students document their assignment work with "deliverables" (see explanation on right) that they share with the ZTC community (and later, add to their portfolios).

60,000 people enroll in a free online course...

This story about a free online class is directly relevant to UnFaculty:

http://educationstormfront.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/why-do-60000-people-want-to-take-a-class-on-artificial-intelligence/ and scroll down to "People Love to Learn Things" or go straight to the main article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html?_r=4&partner=rss&emc=rss

Education Stormfront speculates about the potential market if the course were not free, but would instead cost, say, $100. It might still get hundreds of enrollments and they would make thousands of dollars and, in the end, if this became popular, they could earn more than in a traditional university setting. On the one hand, if it is the case that enrollments do not drop to zero when the price goes above zero, that makes the idea of free-lancing academic knowledge suddenly seem viable. But that is only for a handful of people with "sexy" topics and an established reputation. On the other hand, their pioneering could establish a trend and create a market for others. The more people there are who have taken, enjoyed and told about such a course there are, the easier it becomes to sell a like product for the rest of us.

Empathy training and humanities training...

The whole idea of UnFaculty, if it comes to fruition, will imply the need to market the humanities, that is, convince people that the humanities part of a liberal art education is worth engaging and paying for. In her book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (The Public Square), Martha Nussbaum argues for the humanities as being key to building a democratic citizenship. One of the core aspects of that is empathy. Humanities training fosters empathy. 

The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Why Should We Care? by Paul Anderson and Sara Konrath, discusses the connection between academics and empathy:

The troubling conclusion of a recent study by a team of social psychologists (including one of us, Sara Konrath) is that American college students have been scoring lower and lower on a standardized empathy test over the past three decades. In fact, a research paper published in May in Personality and Social Psychology Review shows that since 1980 scores have dropped 34 percent on "perspective taking" (the ability to imagine others' points of view) and 48 percent on "empathic concern" (the tendency to feel and respond to others' emotions). The standardized empathy questionnaire included questions like, "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me," or "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective."