Inward Looking Service Learning 6

Summer Camp

Historically many learning technology units, often in conjunction with Center for Teaching Excellence units, would offer faculty development programs in the summer to get faculty comfortable moving down the path to use learning technology in their teaching. Virginia Tech is one of the first places that had a vigorous program of this sort. There they coupled the faculty development activity with the replacement of the faculty member’s computer. You can think of the replacement computer as the bribe for the faculty to get them to participate in the faculty development activity. Alternatively you can think of the faculty development activity as institutional burden imposed on instructors when they received their new computers.

At my campus we did stipends to be spent on student help or on software/hardware in lieu of computer replacement. Ultimately we had to get rid of the program because of budget cuts and because the need for increased support also consumed resources so there was some redeployment of resources toward general support. My understanding is that this has been the trend nationally.

If a campus did embrace a program of inward looking service learning, it would be a natural to offer this type of development to the students during the summer between their freshmen and sophomore years. I would make this a requirement for all students though I wouldn’t give course credit for it, nor would I charge tuition. (So it is worth asking if it is affordable to do.) I would offer it in two different modes: either face to face in a one week block, which means the students would have to be in residence on campus during that time, or online, in a three or four week block, so the students could live at home and hold down a job as long as they had adequate access to a computer and the network.

The goals of this intensive training would be these:

a) Get students some expertise on the mentoring part. How to facilitate a session, how to listen to the other students to help direct their discussion, how to get them to understand their role as an intermediary between the professor and the students taking the class.

b) Get students some background on Web design and the use of other software that would be employed in making learning objects.

c) Get students to understand the help structure on campus, so they know where to go to get support when they need it. (The issue of how students in the mentor/teacher role can access help is an interesting one because the current help resources that we have on campus to support instruction clearly wouldn’t scale as is if all these mentor/teachers were potential consumers of the help resource.)

d) Give the students an appreciation of what the faculty member and their peer mentor/teachers will be expecting from them both in terms of effort and in terms of performance.

e) Learn the basics about copyright, the campus policy toward copyright ownership and creative commons licensing.

f) Get students some basics on making content universally accessible and on understanding how different learning styles will process content differently.

g) Perhaps get acquainted with the instructor they will work for and the other mentor/teachers in team of students assigned to that instructor.

In other words, a good part of this summer camp work would be things that most of us have already done in their summer faculty development activities, with the remaining activities devoted to getting the attendees to understand their roles as facilitators in the small groups.

The big difference, apart from the different audience, is the scale. When we were doing this sort of thing we did a couple of workshops with a total of perhaps a 100 faculty combined. Based on our current enrollments, we’d have to push through about 7000 students through these same workshops. So a big question is whether we could keep quality up and intensity of commitment with these very large numbers.

In other words, with these summer workshops we’d be a situation similar to how the big for profit universities (like Phoenix) work. It is intriguing to ask whether if the approach were successful it might create spillovers in instructors for courses that do bear credit and are offered during the academic year.

I know that right now our campus is moving down that path of offering a one credit hour University 101 course for every freshmen student. Certainly courses such as that would likely benefit from that type of approach. Perhaps other courses in the curriculum would likewise benefit.

It is also conceivable that such non-degree training will have market value for the students in terms of summer employment they might qualify for and even in terms of the initial job they seek after graduation. Further, if upper level students taught in this program or served as teacher/mentors in this program, that too might serve as an important credential. Therefore the university has an important role in certifying that the students have completed the work assigned during the workshop and have attained the requisite mastery of the content.

Inward Looking Service Learning 5

The role of graduate students

So far I have deliberately not considered graduate students much if at all in the discussion of inward based serviced learning. I hope to make my reasons for doing so apparent in this post and to discus how I’d like to see graduate students utilized in undergraduate instruction at public research universities.

My direct experience with graduate students is first as an undergrad at MIT and then Cornell, second as a grad student myself at Northwestern where I did my doctorate and then at Illinois where I’ve interacted with initiatives that involved graduate students in a teaching/support role in the Economics department and more broadly across campus as my ed tech unit has supported instruction.

At MIT the intro chemistry course I took, which was somewhere between general chemistry and organic, was taught in lecture/recitation mode. I had a great TA who taught us a lot and if my recollection serves (this was fall 1972) really liked the teaching part. The Physics class relied on faculty to do the TA function and the Calculus class was taught in self-paced mode where I believe they used undergrads as graders of the walk in exams we had to pass to get credit for the course. The other classes I had were small and taught by faculty.

My first semester at Cornell I took a course called Women and Politics taught by Werner Dannhauser. He was an extremely popular professor and the course was offered in the large lecture room in Uris Hall. I don’t believe we had recitation sections but he had several graduate assistants who I believe occasionally lectured, but it is quite possible I’m confusing this with some other large class. The following year I took German taught by a graduate student (I shirked in this class starting around the middle of the term because it was an 8 o’clocker in the morning. I had to take German in summer school to get through their requirement which required a certain score on the achievement test equivalent. But that was my fault not the fault of the grad student.) I also took a topology course which was smallish but had a grad student grader and somehow I got to know him and we talked both about the math and other things. I also took a macroeconomics principles course, again taught in the large auditorium in Uris. The prof was great, he ultimately encouraged me to go to grad school, but I had my first experience with a TA who I thought was not competent. I only learned much later that the Cornell Econ department was having some problems in those days.

At Northwestern, I was on fellowship all four years I attended. Nonetheless, I served as a TA each quarter of my second year. No first year students in the Econ department at Northwestern were allowed to TA and at least at that time the teaching was part of the degree requirement. (Some of this may have been to work around IRS regulations, but I want to get back to the idea of Teaching as part of the education.) I also acted as a grader later on – that was purely on a cash basis and not considered part of the degree. I had no interaction with the students whatsoever in that capacity.

At Illinois, it is a commonplace for first year graduate students in the department to TA, the key is their English speaking ability, not their knowledge of economics. Fellowships, which have been funded by gifts, are typically reserved for students who are further along and have proven their worthiness. Likewise, faculty with grant money who can fund research assistantships, typically hire upper class students and they likely will take on those students as their thesis supervisor. Many graduate students TA for several years and so I think it is reasonable to describe the TA relationship as an employment relationship primarily, rather than as part of their graduate student education.

Thinking of it as an employment relationship there are several factors that tend to alienate the grad students. First, the wages are low. Second, the faculty member they work for as a TA quite likely is not going to be on their dissertation committee nor have they necessarily taken a course from that faculty member. So the TA function is outside their own graduate education and there is little or no attempt to tie the two together. Also, the graduate students don’t have many options about being a TA. They can’t really work at other jobs (for example teach at the local community college) because they need the tuition and fee waiver that is bundled with being a TA. And in some departments (Anthropology is a known example) the time till the dissertation is completed may be 6, 7, or 8 years and until it is done the department can exploit these students as TAs.

It is said the public universities simply can’t afford to use graduate students as TAs in the way private universities do. In other words, the publics knowingly exploit their graduate students to some degree, and offer a somewhat lower caliber of instruction as a consequence, because the cost model of the publics doesn’t allow anything else.

However, if inward based service learning by undergraduates is a viable alternative, perhaps it is then possible to utilize graduates students more in the way the private universities do. This likely means fewer graduate students overall (and some might find that objectionable) but the graduate students we do have would find their involvement with teaching more sensible and more to their liking.

Here are a few more specific points.

(1) It will be difficult if not impossible to find undergraduate peer mentor/teachers for senior level courses. (Those qualified will have graduated already.) It makes sense to use graduate students here, particularly if the faculty member in the senior course also might know the graduate student from other contexts, a course they’ve been in together, a seminar series they both attend, or if the faculty member will be on the student’s dissertation committee.

(2) To the extent that the ability to deliver a coherent lecture is valued in the particular discipline, graduate students should get practice at lecturing. The recitation section is not the place for lecture. Indeed, the point of the recitation is for students to be able to interact with their instructor. So graduate students should be allowed to lecture to the class as a whole.

(3) To the extent that we want to evoke change in the way teaching occurs, from presentation mode to “guide on the side” mode, graduate students need to learn the new modalities. Assigning them as a TA in a large class is not the way to go about achieving this end. Better to have them in a smaller class where they can interact with the students more readily. Most of our smaller class tend to be taught at the upper level.

(4) If graduate students don’t teach the first year they still will have needs for tuition waiver and stipend. This may be less the case for foreign grad students who have home country or home company sponsorship. But it still is something to be considered. I know that many public universities are doing big fund raising efforts to offset declines in public subsidy. In my view of the world funding the first year graduate education out of subsidy or gift fund would be a high priority. But since any set of funds have an alternative use one might reframe this point to say we need to shrink the subsidy that goes to faculty (either pay them less or have fewer of them) so we can have a viable experience for first year graduate students.

(5) In general the size of the graduate programs should be determined first and foremost by the discipline’s need for new members over a certain time span. Undergraduate teaching needs should not be the primary driver of the size of the graduate program.

(6) Most faculty prefer to teach graduate students and the subject matter of graduate student courses, because they can better tie their research to their teaching and because they can occasionally find a student at the dissertation stage that they want to supervise. For this reason, faculty may be instrumental in their other views and consequently want a large graduate student TA pool for their department. Thus a discussion between the Provost and the faculty on the TA issue may very well find them pitted against each other.

In everything I talk about above where I say graduate student one could readily substitute in doctoral student. I am definitely not talking about masters students, for example in the MBA program, who pay big bucks for a professional degree of some sort. Because professional program students are paying tuition, they need not be considered here.

Inward Looking Service Learning 4

For those regular readers of my blog who expect a daily post, let me offer my apologies, as I've not met that standard the last couple of weeks. First I was on family vacation though I did bring my laptop. Then I took an unplanned trip because my mom was in the hospital. (She'd back in her condo now.) The lesson is that anytime anyplace does not mean every time every place and the barriers to communication, which clearly exist, are most definitely not technological. I'm back in CU now and how to resume the regular pattern of posting.

- - - - - -

Peer Mentor/Teachers and Writing and Editing

Immature writers, and mostly I mean first year students but the thought probably applies to many throughout their undergraduate career, frequently have a problem generating prose when asked to do so in a formal setting (producing a draft for a term paper). They play games like adding filler text, adjusting margins and font, and unfortunately knowingly plagiarizing all are part of the paper they write. I'll return to why they do this in a bit, but note here that in an informal setting, instant messaging and email, these same students are writing all the time. So the issue is almost certainly with the formality of the task, not the writing per se.
Many more mature writers, and I believe this is the case for many I have met since entering the learning technology field, have something of the reverse problem. They take what I would call a CYA (cover your derriere, an acronym I learned from hearing John Poindexter testify during the Iran-Contra hearings) strategy in their writing. That is, the writing proves they've done the requisite research. It conveys thoroughness of purpose, in some cases in an overwhelming way. Frequently, however, what it misses is a sense of the reader. The bulk of the writing is daunting - rendering it inaccessible to many who want lighter fare. The writing needs a heavy dose of editing with a good pruning knife. But what should be cut? The readership is diverse, right? Better to leave everything in because somebody will want that particular information.

My sense of the freshmen writing problem is that that is stems from lack of prior work - the students haven't done the requisite research in advance of the writing task and they haven't done the pre-writing necessary to talk about how to assemble that research into a coherent discussion, identifying the themes and the arguments that will provide the direction for writing the paper. In many cases the term paper is "outside" the other course work that they are doing so the procrastination follows naturally.

One of the ideas of the inward based service learning is to keep students engaged and accountable via the group meetings. When it comes time for a project that requires research, the group's internal mechanisms should have already been firmly established and the project work should be a continuation of what they have already been doing. If the group has already been doing some writing to facilitate its own work, for example, via keeping minutes of the meetings, and if the work itself has had some writing aspect all along, the larger project should be less daunting. The group through its structure should ensure that the research gets done in advance of the writing and then it should be able to talk through the issues that are necessary for a pre-writing activity. My sense is that this will go a long way to alleviating the first problem with student writing.

If by the junior year the issue of generating prose has largely been addressed and most students are competent at that, then the second problem must be addressed. This, I think, is harder as editing requires a strong sense of taste and a sympathy for the reader that may be hard to develop. But the motivation to develop this would seem clear as in the private sector the ability to write a good memo, clear and cogent, one that captures the attention of top management, obviously is a skill that can be tied in a straightforward way to career advancement.

Of course, this may not be the biggest need in the students' writing as perceived by the instructor of that junior level course, who mostly will be concerned about teaching that subject. So I don't believe that the second issue can be addressed unless this becomes a strategic goal of the curriculum as a whole. My sense is that serendipity alone will not get us there.

Indeed, one of the larger benefits in moving to the inward based service learning approach is that faculty will have to reconsider what are the major learning goals for the undergraduates and undoubtedly some of that will focus on student writing. My own bias here is that the primary goal should be to learn to write for intelligent non-experts (engineers writing for business types, English majors writing for scientists, etc.). Apart from the two issues I've identified above, the major problem is that education makes the students insiders into their field of study while a substantial part of what is needed is to make them generalists, especially in how they communicate.

So what we hope to achieve is some recognition of these goals at the curricular level and then a structuring of the peer mentor/teacher activities to help turn those goals into outcomes.

Inward Looking Service Learning 3

The First Year Experience

Having sketched out how inward looking service learning might work, I feel like a man with a new hammer and I’m looking for some nails. So I want to begin to consider how peer mentor/teachers might be fruitfully employed outside the normal course experience into other facets of student life.

One reason for asking this question is to note the following. With the retention rate at my University (our graduation rate is around 80%) we have a ratio of about 5.5 eligible students per available peer mentor/teacher. But in the model I described previously, in large classes there would be 10 eligible students per mentor. And it is not clear whether the institution will want to use peer mentor/teachers in small classes, where substantial direct student/faculty contact is possible. So we haven’t yet allocated all the peer mentor/teachers and if the model is to work then we need to fully allocate them to useful functions.

In the model I’ve set up, after the first year students spend a substantial amount of time in the peer mentor/teacher role. (Recall that these students are taking one less course per semester and are also putting in the hours they previously would have worked at a part time job.) During the first year students don’t perform as peer mentor/teachers. So it might be tempting to allocate this additional time to letting these students take other courses. And perhaps there is some of that. (At MIT when I started in 1972 they had a bunch of courses that were out of the norm and for half the credit of a regular course. I took a course on “Calculus Theory” with a great professor that really helped me make a jump in my mathematical imagination. One of my roommates who was in many of my classes, including the calculus theory course, took another one of these unusual courses on Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” )

I want to suggest a different use of that time, one that focuses on shaping what students do when they are not doing their course work. On my campus this part of student life is normally not the concern of the academic side of the university. We have an entire administrative structure called “Student Affairs.” This unit includes divisions of Housing, Recreation, and the Dean of Students office among many other functions. There is some overlap between Student Affairs and the Academic Affairs. One of the bigger examples is the Living and Learning Communities. But in the main they operate in different spheres.

On a comparative basis, the University of Illinois does a good job getting students acclimated to campus and encouraging students to participate in extracurricular activities. But at a national level there are issues. Binge drinking is an overt symptom. The broader problem is a pervasive nihilism with underlying cause that precedes college and college only amplifies – school is a passport not a reward in itself, fun is hedonistic over indulgence, a blasting of the senses into a temporary oblivion, and as long as grades are good have as much fun as possible. To this college adds a personal sense of freedom, especially the living away from home part.

And there is an additional factor that exists at Illinois and probably at most major state universities, particularly when there is a single large city in the state that dominates its political and cultural life. Many of the students at Illinois are from the suburbs of Chicago and frequently they attend in cohorts that are sufficiently large that the social life they had in high school simply extends and amplifies when they are in college. The good in this is that it mitigates the sense of loneliness and homesickness that many first year students experience. The bad is that it tends to preserve a sense of provincialism and keeps the students in the friendly, safe environment that, unfortunately, does not challenge them sufficiently and does not encourage them to grow in their perspective.

One possible approach is to encourage a sense of discipline via a regimented regime, conjuring up images of Marine Basic Training or the coaching of Bobby Knight. That method might appeal to some of the students. My preferred alternative is to promote a sense of exploration and engagement in the students so that the course work and leisure time share a sense of purpose, perspective, and approach and more deeply so that the students are offered a serious alternative to the hedonism that they surely will encounter, likely in ways that will make it hard to resist. So the core idea is to create the viable alternative, make the students experience it (I trust they will experience some of the hedonism as well), and after the first year let them choose their own path in their leisure activities armed with a sense of the possibilities.

Part of this is to give the students “role models” in the form of other students who seem to be leading interesting and full lives and part of this is to get the students to overcome some personal inertia that they are more likely to encounter at big schools. There are a slew of good opportunities in terms of social/intellectual activities on campus for students to take advantage of. If a student is by nature outgoing, then joining one or several of these activities is no big deal. But for the shyer student, and many are in this category, there is reticence to take the first step, for fear of walking outside the personal comfort zone and possibly being put in a tough spot. The presence of the peer mentor/teachers doesn’t eliminate these risks, but they can make it more likely that the initial steps are taken so that the upside possibilities can be realized.

The structure of what I have in mind would be something like this. The peer mentor/teachers would have to volunteer for this particular assignment. They themselves would be in groups, say of three or four. They’d be chosen for their diversity – boy/girl, humanist/engineer, sophomore/junior/senior, and some other dimensions. They’d be the leaders of a group of freshmen, perhaps ten of these, who would also be selected so their group is diverse. (I definitely would choose them so they don’t come from the same dorm floor.) I don’t quite know how this would be orchestrated but it would be good for the group as a whole to have at least one meal together per week with ample time afterwards for friendly conversation. The rest of the time the meetings might be in smaller groups arranged on an ad hoc basis.

Indeed, to a certain extent too much structure will kill what we’re trying to produce – that social/leisure time can be used in fruitful ways that expand the sense of self. Perhaps some of them go to a concert or to a public debate on campus, perhaps they attend a meeting of a registered student organization, and perhaps they just hang out and talk – meaning of life stuff, the type of stuff we used to think going to college was about. I’d hope there would be a lot of that.

The peer mentor/teachers have to be prepared for this sort of thing so they got ideas for activities or discussions and have some sense on how to get their freshman charges to open up a little, say what’s on their mind. And as was mentioned above, they have to spend a fair amount of time modeling behavior for the freshmen. So we want to encourage situations where the peer mentor/teachers are together having a spirited argument or a friendly discussion, where the freshmen are around to watch and join in. And we’d also want some time where the peer mentor/teacher is in one on one conversation with one of the freshmen.

There is much of this that I don’t know how to accomplish and I’d want to feel my way to a programmatic approach with different experiments on how this might work. What I’m describing above is what I found in my out of class life at Cornell during my junior and senior years (with me in the role of one of the freshmen and a bunch of graduate students I lived with as the peer mentors). A lot of that was serendipity. I didn’t move into the place we all lived (509 Wyckoff Road) with any of this in mind. My roommate and I just wanted to get an inexpensive apartment with a fireplace. I ended up spending less time with him than I thought and a lot of time with the people I met there. The lack of planning notwithstanding, I still feel that much of what I got from those folks was of greater value than what I got in the courses I took. And my sense is that now many students get none of that and there’s only so much we can ask from their courses, even if those courses are very well taught.

At the risk of being accused of trying to turn all our students into bookworms and closet intellectuals, we really should try some things in this arena.

Inward Looking Service Learning 2

Explicating the Peer Mentoring/Teaching System and More on Counting Beans

It helps me in thinking about the proposed structure of a university that embraces inward looking service learning to envision two types of courses; we’ll label them small and large. In my model small courses are typically taught as seminars and are faculty led. They are places for students to directly interact both with their peers and the instructor in an ensemble fashion. On one level, if we could afford it we’d offer most if not all our courses in this mode with research faculty teaching them. But doing this approach across the board is too expensive. (See my posts from mid June, especially the post on June 14.) So we also offer large classes that are taught in a different modality. The undergraduate peer mentor/teachers are employed primarily in the large classes. The thought is that this bang-bang solution is more effective for learning than having all classes near the average size. However, I will argue below that there are many features of the large class setting that we might want to incorporate in some way in the small environment. So please be prepared for some non-stereotypical thinking.

In the traditional large class setting there might be lectures a couple of times a week and a recitation section once a week. Conscientious students might form study groups outside of class so they can keep up with the reading and assignments and to make sure group members are ready for exams. The main idea is to flip flop the roles. Make the study group the focus by formalizing its structure and scheduling the meeting times just as classes are scheduled. Make the lecture less important and perhaps change what is done during these ensemble sessions.

Some of what I suggest will wreck havoc on how to determine “credit hours” and, frankly, for the learning it is really not that important. But it is important for the revenue allocation to the class and determining whether what I suggest is feasible or not from that vantage. So in the background it might be useful to think of the traditional version of the large course as 3 credit hours (which is what I used as the baseline in my June posts) and to assume the revenue that is generated is derived from that.

Let’s assume these study groups are set by the institution with 5 students per and an undergraduate peer mentor/teacher assigned. Supposed they meet twice a week with the intent that a meeting should last about 90 minutes but is scheduled so that the meeting is assigned a two hour block. The two key points are that no student in the group can claim to have something else going on during that time slot and that the peer mentors can lend something of a voice of experience because they will have taken the course previously, possibly mentored for the course previously as well, and concurrently will be coached by the instructor on how to run these sessions and ensure that the right type of work is being done in them.

Of course the nature of the work that the group does will depend on the subject matter and the instructor style. In my intermediate microeconomics class I had the students do a mixture of machine graded problems in Mallard, written out problems set type of work submitted online and with the graders evaluation also returned online and some more open ended writing. Let’s stick with that for now just to be concrete.

During group meetings the students will discuss recent readings and how best to internalize those into their own way of understanding. They will review work that has been done since the prior meeting as well as other work that may have been returned to them, either with a final evaluation or with commentary that requires further response. The group will spend some time discussing upcoming work and if the labor is to be divided in some way how that should be done. There may also be some time spent on how well the group is functioning and if needed process changes that might make things better.

The group meetings serve both as a direct educational opportunity for the students and as a commitment mechanism. The students must come to the group meetings prepared for the meetings to have value. The students must do the readings and the required work on their own. The meetings are meant to create a positive feedback loop for this individualized work. A significant part of what the mentor/teacher does is to make sure that all the members of the group are receiving this positive feedback. If a particular group member is struggling, that person needs some individual attention and the mentor needs to make arrangements to provide that attention. I don’t want to spend time here talking about out and out slacking off. But, obviously, that would ruin the entire approach and therefore must be weeded out as quickly as possible.

Since the students will do some of their work individually, it is reasonable to assume they will occasionally need help right then and there. Instant messaging with other group members is a possibility. But the class also needs to provide online office hours (and perhaps face to face office hours as well) to keep students engaged and productive while they are doing their work. So another part of the mentor/teacher time commitment is participating in their fair share of staffing those office hours.

Further, the mentor/teachers likely will spend some time as evaluators of the group work that the students submit. It probably makes sense to have some arms length evaluation so that in the evaluator role either the focus is on another group’s work entirely or, if the work can be modularized then each mentor as evaluator focuses on a specific module an becomes expert at that so that evaluation across groups for the same module is delivered in a consistent manner. One of the additional roles that the mentor/teacher fills is to help the students in the group understand and react to the evaluation, to make the students view the criticism they receive as a benefit to give them a new starting point for making modifications on what they’ve done previously.

Some of these courses may rely substantially on online materials that are student created. Thus, the mentor teachers may spend some of their time on content development. It may be that some specialize on this and have little or no direct interaction with the student groups. In any one course specialization of this sort might be desirable. The goal, however, would be that as the students move through the curriculum they get a chance to play both roles as they fill their service learning obligation.

The instructor in effect runs a seminar for the mentor/teachers in her charge. In this way, whether the mentor/teachers are able to as students take other small classes, they do have small class like interaction with the professor. Envision that there is one two hour session per week where issues raised since the previous session are raised, the various mentor teachers compare their experiences of their respective groups, and the professor communicates what next steps are expected. Also envision that there is some seniority among the mentor/teachers so that the more experienced ones may mentor the less experienced ones and the professor may also mentor some of the experienced ones. The professor may make a point of attending a couple of the group sessions each week, both to learn what goes on there and to show the professors interest in that those sessions are well done.

What about lectures? My suggestion is that the professor would run an optional “review session” that either went over the lessons that should have been learned from the work the students completed the previous week or that focused on similar but not identical problems to be worked through so the students can see how to generalize from the work they’ve done and perhaps to get a different view on how to approach the work. If there were other course staff, say some experienced graduate students, they could be doing the more traditional type of lecture that centers on presentation of the material. Otherwise, that type of thing could be moved online and perhaps done in a way that is more accessible to the students (modular clips, linked with support materials, perhaps delivered by the mentor/teachers and in their style of language, to convey that the material is intellectually accessible). Alternatively, lectures may be dispensed with entirely and instead be replaced with online interactive content.

Suppose this large class had 200 students and had one mentor/teacher per 10 students. (Thus, the mentor/teachers would facilitate two of the study groups.) I’m going to rely on the same revenue numbers as in my June 14 post, but note one critical change as a consequence of the new approach. Students take fewer classes in this internal service learning world, so the revenue contributed per class can be higher. In the June 14 post that revenue number was $400. Here it makes sense to bump it up it up to $500.

Here is the consequence of that assumption.

Revenue generated = (200 + 20) x $500 = $110,000

Direct Compensation for mentor/teachers (4 quarter time mentor/teachers together costs $12,800) = 5*$12,800 = $64,000.

Thus revenue net of compensation for the teacher mentors is $56,000. If there are no graduate Teaching Assistants, then half the faculty members salary can be paid (we assumed that was $100,000) and it seems reasonable to assume that this obligation represents half the faculty member’s teaching burden. Plus a small surplus of $6,000 is generated. That is about half the stipend of a graduate assistant, which is one possible use of the funds. If more graduate assistants were viewed as needed, the class would have to larger.

This arithmetic is meant to show that yes, one can do this inward looking service learning model with research faculty, but they would of necessity have to embrace the approach and be willing to teach in this mode.

Inward Looking Service Learning

When I attended the Frye Leadership Institute two summers ago, we went through a rather extensive, team based exercise to come up with our own fictitious university and then within that structure try to solve the various issues that universities face nowadays – satisfying research faculty who may see the mission quite differently from the administration view, recruiting students and ensuring programs that provide value to them, generating sufficient revenue, etc. As I recall, each of these mock universities was designed to address some specific concern, e.g., continuing education for senior citizens. (My group focused on giving students a north-south perspective as in North America and South America.) It really is a good exercise to go through to make one aware of all the cross currents that must be addressed in running a university. If you can find a cohort all of whom are interested, I’d recommend you try it yourself.

My next several posts will be about designing such a university which like mine has a research orientation that it wants to preserve yet it also has numerous undergraduate students that it would like to serve well and do so at a reasonable cost. Furthermore, the design of the institution must make a frontal assault on the student engagement issue.

My pie in the sky idea is to make inward looking service learning the centerpiece of this hypothetical university and then to explore how it might come to be as well as to try to bring out as many issues as I can reasonably articulate about where progress really is and where we might be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

So starting with this post we move from the concrete to the speculative. All of this is hypothetical and needs to be considered as such. (Better to criticize the post that there is a way to do things better or that what I’m suggesting can’t work for such and such a reason than to simply argue what I’m proposing is not realistic.) The focus of the discussion, something that needs to be kept in mind throughout, is to consider how students can be employed in a set of dual roles – learner and teacher, apprentice and content creator, novice and mentor. The duality is critical to the conception. Thus I want to break the mindset where the student is the customer and the instructor is producer. The student wears many hats. And perhaps the instructor and the institution must do likewise.

Let met begin by noting why I think this has a prayer of working. At my own campus we attract a comparatively high caliber student that is evidenced not jut by the SAT/ACT scores reported in US News and World Report and elsewhere but also by the relatively high graduation rate (tied for third in the Big 10). These kids are talented and most have been reasonably well prepared for college. So I think they are ready for the type of role change I will discuss and to a large extent I believe that institutions such as mine have erred by not conferring sufficient responsibility on these students. Also, as residential students, they are more or less captive and one can reasonably expect to divert their time from one activity to another that is seemingly more beneficial. I can’t see this idea working on a commuter campus or a residential campus with less able kids.

In this particular post, I will content myself with counting beans, to show why this might work on a different dimension, from a business point of view.

Let’s begin with the following observation. Many students work. When we did the evaluation work for the SCALE Efficiency projects, seven or eight years ago, the finding at the time was that in Freshmen level courses mean hours worked per student was low but in upper level courses that number was 8 or 9 hours per week, roughly the equivalent to the time we expect students to put in for a 3 credit hour course. If anything, the evidence and the practicality of the situation (higher tuition with financial aid not keeping pace) suggests that students work more now.

Let’s envision that this work time is redirected toward the university. (In some cases the university may already be the employer, but in other cases not.) Let us assume that the work these students had been doing can be done by other unskilled or semiskilled labor in the workforce at a comparable wage so that the impact on this other work can be ignored in a first pass. Instead, we can concentrate on the new use of this work – supporting the learning of other undergraduate students on campus.

Let’s also envision that after the first year experience students start up in this service learning enterprise and apart from redirecting their work time, we also redirect their course time, so that say 20% to 25% of that time is now engaged in a university sanctioned service learning activity.

In other words we envision about 18 – 24 hours a week being spent on the service learning and that the reward and recognition that students get for this work will be partly in terms of cash compensation and partly in terms of credit. Let’s do some arithmetic on each of these.

Suppose the “hourly wage” for these students is $10/hour and suppose that 10 hours per week is the time that is compensated by cash. Then it takes 4 such students to get a full time equivalent compensated on wages, with the cost equal to $400/week and over two sixteen week terms that costs 32 weeks x $400/week = $12,800. That number surely is lower than what we pay two half time graduate students in stipend for an academic year (and the university has to pay the grad students fringe benefits on top of that) and ditto for adjunct instructors let alone tenure track faculty. (Note that the students get the fringe benefits as part of the services covered by their tuition, so it is not a cost here.) In other words, undergraduate labor is inexpensive and part of the argument is that it makes sense to use that inexpensive labor in more circumstance that we have done heretofore. I’m not arguing that we do away with graduate teaching assistants or adjunct faculty, but I think on the former that in many cases they are being used as slave labor primarily and that we have too many if justified only by the need to train them for a future career in the discipline. And it seems to me that the latter are anathema to preserving the research character of the place or, flipping the argument, that tenure is not a necessary institution to promote research and that all faculty can be adjuncts. I can see the argument, especially in a place where all research activity is sponsored externally, but it is orthogonal to what I want to discuss, so I’m keeping tenure in.

The other arithmetic point, and I hope it is obvious, is that if students do one course worth of inward based service learning in each semester after the freshmen year, then this must be one less course these students are taking per semester. (After all, the time must come from somewhere.) Thus, the service learning reduces the demand for instruction in sophomore to senior level courses on the order of 20%. Of course, these students require supervision and mentoring while they do their service learning. The supervision is an added burden on faculty and support staff. So a key to the whole thing is how much of an added burden that is.

And the argument I want to put forward is that it is less of a burden than some skeptics might think, because the activity will be directed to supporting the teaching that instructors continue to do. That is, it is not just mentoring; it is also a productive activity that makes the instructors teaching burden lighter. Here again is the duality.

If this underlying arithmetic is wrong, say the supervision really is time consuming for faculty, then the thing doesn’t work. But if it is right, we are now seeing the ingredients for a scalable solution to keep down the costs of instruction and yet provide a decent education.

Using Undergraduates in Instruction – What We Know Now

I started my own experiments teaching online in 1995. Before that I taught for 15 years in what we now call the “traditional approach.” In a few of the undergraduate classes I got to know the students and they got to know me in a way that I would describe as “intellectual affection.” This was in the undergraduate math econ class that I taught regularly for about 5 or 6 years. It was a small class, we did esoteric but intellectually interesting stuff (for most of it we used David Gale’s book on Linear Economic Models) and these kids were thinking about Econ graduate school; a few actually went.

In most of the rest of the undergraduate courses, the bulk of which was teaching intermediate microeconomics, I hardly got to know the students at all. The class size (around 60 students and I was typically assigned a grader for the problem sets) really didn’t promote discussion. Many of the students were extremely mercenary about the course (it was a requirement for the business major but not one they endorsed) and they reacted to it negatively. In the early 1980’s some of them would come to office hours, perhaps because I was only a few years older than them and I was nice guy (still am) and didn’t go out of my way to put distance between myself and them. (In contrast, I had a colleague who came to Illinois the year before I did and who wore Brooks Brothers suits when teaching in part to establish his authority.) But I didn’t learn much about the students thinking this way other than that they were stuck on some parts of the homework or the midterms.

Ten years later after some hiatus, I got back to teaching intermediate microeconomics. I probably taught a better course then, since I was more seasoned as an economist and as an instructor. But the distance with the students had widened. I recall giving out candy cigars to my class soon after my first kid was born. But I don’t think that helped in getting the kids to come to office hours. The vast majority of the students were near anonymous to me. I graded the exams, a combination of problem solving, essays, and multiple choice) but I dreaded that. It was not a way for me to get to know the student’s thinking.

Somewhere around that time, I served as an undergraduate advisor for a semester or two. I recall a lot of forms to go over and that was mostly bureaucratic stuff, checking to see whether the students had completed such and such requirement. There was a bit on which course the students should take to fill a requirement or a cognate, who was the good professor, who was the professor to avoid. I don’t recall any of it that was very meaningful and in no case do I recall having repeat visits from the same student. I must not have been very good at it, because I wasn’t asked to do it the following year.

Also around that time I had a sequence of graduate students where I was the dissertation advisor. In some cases these students had taken an advanced course or two from me. In another case, a Portuguese student had been referred to me by a colleague. We ended up writing a paper together on cost overruns that was the heart of his dissertation and that received some attention at the time it appeared. Indeed, I tried to treat my advising role as one of co-authorship. But I know at the time I felt I was doing too much of the work. The students couldn’t contribute as equals – they didn’t know the literature well enough and were not good enough as math modelers. But part of that was the point – the co-authoring was a way for them to learn what was required of them to write journal quality articles.

Though I’ve had inquiries from undergraduates to serve as a research assistant for me in some capacity, to the extent that I was engaged in theoretical work that centered around understanding a mathematical model, there really was nothing for them to do. I’ve never worked with an undergraduate on my economics research.

I can’t say how typical this experience is. I do now know of some exceptional faculty in anthropology who have engaged ordinary undergraduates in their research project – The Ethnography of the University of Illinois. And I know some science faculty members who keep an undergraduate or two as part of their research lab team. There are some opportunities for undergraduates to have meaningful interaction with faculty members. But I also know I heard from several different students how their professors seem arrogant and aloof. And I know the Boyer Commission report characterized undergraduates as second class citizens on campus; undergraduates operate outside the main set of intellectual activities that are underway.

I want to contrast that view with what I’ve learned since I began to teach with technology and then as someone who has talked with many other instructors about their teaching experiences with technology. Almost from the get go, I used undergraduates as online TAs. The students in the class had online access to live help and they made substantial use of that. (Ironically, they also demanded that the TAs have face to face office hours, but even when those were supplied they were not heavily utilized.) And ultimately I used the TAs in a more controversial role, as graders of the student homework.

In our Calculus and Mathematica offering at Illinois, undergraduate tutors were used in a similar manner. Likewise they were used as TAs in Chemistry. And, as I reported a week or so ago, I got the idea from Burks Oakley, who taught in Electrical and Computer Engineering. All the instructors I know who tried this on my campus thought it was an excellent idea. And in the Calculus and Mathematica case I was able to talk with some of the undergraduate tutors themselves. Their experience seemed similar to the experience my Econ TAs had. They felt hey were really helping the students – doing something valuable. And I know from the evaluations we did that the students taking these courses also felt this was a good idea. They were connected to someone who’d help, someone who was reliable, who was there for them.

A little later I got involved with the Program in Course Redesign led by Carol Twigg. Through some of their meetings I got to know about the similar implementations at other campuses. The Virgina Tech Math Emporium, which received a lot of publicity at the time, used undergraduates as helpers along with the faculty who walked the floor. A particular professor from Colorado who taught a large Astronomy class gushed with the praise of the undergraduates he had recruited for assisting him in instruction. My impression is that anyone who has taught in a large class setting and has used undergraduates aided by online technology to help with the teaching thinks it’s a good idea.

Many who have not tried it, however, think it is a frightening concept, the blind leading the blind. They fear the undergraduates don’t know enough. But those who have done so will make the following counter arguments: They get to use students who have taken the course already so know how it should be done. They get to choose those students who have done well in the course and our good undergraduate may be as able or more able than our graduate students. And the undergraduate TAs want to do it. The grad students often view the teaching as burden they need to bear to get their assistantship. They are often not otherwise engaged in the teaching.

Let me turn back to my own teaching with undergraduate TAs. One of the key things I would observe is that I got closer to them. In many cases they did some online work for me, designing exercises in Mallard or some other programming for me. I coached them in that and critiqued their work. As a group, we would review how the students in the class were doing and discuss a bit how the TAs were providing feedback for the students. I got to know these kids as TAs in a way I would not get to know them as students. I could tell when they were doing well and when they were struggling by my own monitoring and my own feedback from the students in the class. I think they also felt the arrangement was something special, something that would be good to replicate.

Because I taught quite a few students, I was able to negotiate with the Econ department administrator at the time a deal where the department was willing to pick up the tab for these undergrads. Actually, the deal was great for the department. I taught 180 students instead of the normal 60 students and they paid somewhere between $3,000 and $3,500 in wages for the students. There is no way they’d get that type of gain by using adjuncts to teach 3 sections of 60 students per.

But, in general, departments are not prepared to support undergraduate assistants in this way. There is no business model for it. The loose cash is hard to come by. The expectation is that it will be graduate students who support the faculty in instruction and the business structure supports that model. Some instructors have been known to give their undergraduate students course credit via an independent study option. For most of the better students who would be chosen as undergraduate TAs, the cash is more appreciated than the course credit. But for a student near graduation, the course credit can matter a lot. Yet I’ve also heard from some in the administration that this is not a good route to go, unless one can demonstrate the learning that these undergraduate TAs have achieved.

My experience is that the learning is as much in knowing how to communicate and how to mentor as it is in mastery of the economics. That is valuable. But that is not the subject I teach and certify. We in the Econ department do not offer a course on communication and mentoring. So the giving of credit for this type of student work is tricky.

I would characterize the situation this way. There is promise in using undergraduates to help support instruction, but the institution is not poised to move in that direction. At present it is more of a curiosity than a strategy.

On Darwin and Schumpeter and Higher Education

With President Bush calling for the teaching of “Divine Intervention” presumably under the belief that all the splendor in which we live couldn’t possibly have been caused by a series of accidents, it seems worth noting that in the social world that is Higher Education things at present appear less than splendid and the forces of change that Darwin focused on are often cruel and debilitating. Natural disasters are painful. Species become extinct. The dying out of the once dominant forms is predictable. What replaces them is not.

We in Public Higher Ed are facing twin crises. The first is the crisis in cost. In this Higher Ed has followed Health Care. Within Higher Ed, this is being portrayed as State government walking away from it historic role of funding Higher Ed and there is a certain truth to that. The acceleration in the full tuition that non-needy families are required to pay is partly real cost increase and partly compensation for the decline in state funding. But it is not the total problem.

Another significant factor, commented on substantially at the time but hardly remarked upon nowadays, was the elimination of mandatory retirement while tenure otherwise remained intact. In a world where nominal salaries are unheard of and even zero percentage increases are rare as long as there are some raises given and where inflation has been comparatively benign for the last 15 or 20 years, there have been real increases in the salaries of tenured faculty inclusive of fringe benefits and retirement pay. This effect has been accentuated by the intense quality competition between universities, something fueled by the under supply of elite institutions that I’ve commented on in an earlier post.

Still another factor, one that I have not seen remarked on at all but one that seems quite obvious under even modest reflection is federal funding of research. In the health care arena the effect may be most obvious as the product of the research indirectly produces expensive equipment, procedures, or drugs that undoubtedly enhance quality of life but equally surely raise costs. But also with health care research, as with other sponsored research, the funding is given in a leveraged manner where the institution that is the home of the principal investigator receiving the grant is expected to provide a variety of in kin complementary inputs to support the research. In this way the research competes for general campus funds and thereby raises the cost of operation. This is not to the say anything at all about the benefit that the research creates. There may be great return in terms of new product or services created, a jobs multiplier, and general economic well being. But the beneficiaries are typically other than the families paying tuition to the university. For them, the impact is to increase cost.

There are, of course, yet other cost issues – the hyperinflation in journal pricing, the increased demands to keep our data secure, and the competition for some of our faculty from outside academe, to name just a few. But the one I want con consider here is the Schumpeterian one. We are excellent on the “creative” part of the Schumpeterian ideal. We can readily create new courses and new curricula, new research centers and foci for technology transfer. But we are fairly horrible on the “destruction” part. We don’t kill off areas of our operation easily if at all. Everything has some constituency. And being subsidized is not and indicator that the activity is not prized. So the university is constantly in a state of increase in scope. This is a big cost contributor. And it is what those outside academe probably would focus on in bringing a “business methodology” to higher education. But that isn’t easy. Especially at large public universities which have a commitment to be comprehensive, what does one destroy? We really do need to figure this out or we’ll implode under the weight of all we offer. The Schumpeterian view offers the potential that we’ll control our own destiny. It can be less harsh than the Darwinian approach. But it does require creative destruction.

Let’s turn to the other crises, the crises in commitment. Here I’m focusing on the teaching mission only. On the student side, I’ve written several posts about the source of student alienation and the need to make their experience more one of self-actualization. On the faculty side, certainly the tenure and research pressures are stronger than. And from the administration perspective, the cost issues with the creative destruction force a tepid kind of support.

All of this is creating a negative spiral and at present the world looks quite Darwinian. How do we get out of this loop? In economic principles we talk about comparative advantage as a motivation for trade. To me, that seems like a good starting point. We need to niche and become less comprehensive, because of the cost issues. But we need to simultaneously satisfy our constituency.

Here is a hypothetical to illustrate. Suppose Illinois has a good Math department but only an ok Economics department while at Indiana it is flip flopped. Then a deal is struck between the two universities so that each gets to downsize its weak department, student who reside in state but want to study in the area that their state university is weak in get to go to the neighboring state at in state tuition rates.

Of course that is too simple. Maybe they only want to study a field as a correlate to their main area of interest and the state university is strong in the principal field. What then? If courses were taught online and for the distance students they are treated as if they are taking a local course, then this might be a satisfactory alternative from their point of view. It is a commonplace now to observe that students find it too hard to assemble credits taken at multiple universities. However, if that assembly were part of a university’s own strategy to niche its offerings according to its strengths, then the university and student interests are brought more into line. (And then we are left with the more mundane issue of convincing the skeptics that the online offering offered by that other university is as good or better than the face to face offering provided locally.)

Before we get too pleased with ourselves for coming up with the solution, let’s note that the faculty are also a constituency and even if, for example, the Indiana Economics department were willing to hire some of the better Economics faculty at Illinois, the Economics faculty at Illinois may be none too keen about downsizing their department. (I want to repeat here that this is a hypothetical. I’m using my own department as an example lest I be accused of advocating the down sizing of some other department.) So this will be painful to affect and unless the administration is strong willed and visionary, not very likely to happen.

The alternative is to search for yet more revenue or to reduce costs via innovation in practice or to squeeze all are activities as we have been doing and hope that we can hold on. The first seems unlikely now. The third is what I mean by the Darwinian approach. Eventually as we continue to squeeze things will break in an unplanned way and it’s hard to predict what will happen. The second is where I see the most possibility and where I will focus the next several posts.

Random Rants

I was on the road for much of the day with my family. We're in San Antonio now. Very hot here and I'm still getting acclimated. So this will be an atypical post about my quick surfing for today.

Scott Leslie has a nice post about XML authoring tools. This seems to me to be quite important, perhaps less so for the content they produce than for making students aware of XML. HTML editors are ok, sure, (Blogger supplies one to write posts like this) but to do anything a bit more interesting an XML editor is needed.

Will Richardson had a post pointing to this site at BoingBoing. There is a new school for the "Creative Industries" which will use Creative Commons licensing of all the courseware and a Wiki will be the backbone tool for the school. Interesting!! The longer description at the site got me to think about Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants a serious discussion about "learning to learn" and "critical thinking." While the post by Will Richardson emphasizes the technology, we should not lose track of expert-novice interactions and how those are enabled, online or face to face. The success of the school will hinge on that, not on the technology.

In the future, I need to write something longer about the interconnection between "freedom" in the sense of choosing what to work on rather than being assigned to the task by a superior, on the one hand, and work as play, on the other. They are not identical, but they are similar. My spin will be on how grim budgets should be managed in light of what we know about how people learn, including our staff. I would then want to tie this to "teaching students a discipline" and expressing freedom within a discipline.

Will Richardson has another post about Edu Blog Hosting. Will lists some sites that host and claims these give safe and effective ways for using blogs. I didn't understand what safe means in this context and I'd like that explained. Some readers may recall an earlier post of mine where I said I wouldn't teach with a Blog open to the Internet because students deserve privacy, especially for their formative ideas. Is safe intended in that context? That would be interesting.

On the Preference for Leisure

Last week Paul Krugman had an interesting column comparing France and the United States in terms of the “labor-leisure tradeoff.” The countries are comparable measured by productivity. Incomes are higher in the U.S., but that is because Americans work more. The French take more vacation time. Krugman explains some of this represents voluntary choice by the French and he argues that some of that choice is institutionalized via health care available to all and generally good schooling. So the French need not put in the extra effort at work to assure these services will be provided.

This got me to thinking about whether college students here in the U.S. make a “rational choice” (meaning they will feel no regret about their choice years later) regarding their own labor-leisure tradeoff. Last week, the Chronicle ran an article (dated July 29 in the online edition, the link requires a subscription) about an anthropology professor going underground to play the role of a student at her institution, characterized as a non-elite university. One of her principal findings is that students do anything and everything out of “a sense of fun.” Potentially, the fun could be quite elevating. My boss and I frequently speak of having our staff engaged in play as they explore new technologies and new approaches. Play definitely can be educational. The depressing thing, however, about this article in particular and about much of the discussion on student engagement in general is the apparent equating of fun with hedonism. Thus, I fear that many students are implicitly making the following choice:

“I know that I’m going to work hard once I enter the real world. College
is my last hurrah and I’m going to make the most of it by partying as much as I
can during my college years.”

Given my training, it helps me to think of this from an economics perspective. The basic economic model of labor supply has a person’s time devoted to either work or leisure. Work means (in the model) that one does what the employer wants while leisure means doing what the individual wants. There is no direct disutility from work (except in jobs that create health risks or some other type of externality) but one doesn’t have the ability to control how that time is used, so there is an opportunity cost of time from working.

In applying that basic model, I teach my students that we can only measure market work. We can’t measure non-market work (child care is the biggie, but there is also house keeping, gardening, home repair, etc.) where an individual supplies the labor themselves and there is no financial transaction. So non-market work gets counted as leisure for measurement purposes. This makes it intuitive for the students to understand that starting at a low wage level, people tend to work more as the wage rises (because they go to the market for some of the labor they had been supplying themselves) but once the wage gets high enough people tend to work less as their wage rises (because they want to take more leisure).

Using that as a basis, one can push the students further and ask whether in fact some people get direct satisfaction from the time they spend at work (they like the job independent of the money they receive from doing it) or, conversely, whether leisure time can prove productive. I did this indirectly in a Discovery course (small course intended for freshmen to be taught by tenure track faculty) that I taught a few years ago. I asked the students the following question: Who works harder, the weak student or the strong student? The response I got surprised me. Perhaps 15 of the twenty students said it was the weaker student who works harder, presumably to compensate for the weakness. As I recall, only one student talked about weaker students possibly becoming discouraged and giving up and only a few made the point that the stronger students like doing the work so they may do more of it.

As I said, I found the response surprising because it seemed to indicate an extreme instrumentalism in the students – students take the course to get a good grade in it and that’s all – nothing about the joy of learning, the benefit in getting perspectives that were new to them, or the intrigue of the underlying subject matter. This instrumentalism may be what others have termed “student pragmatism.” But whereas some, including myself, have argued to accommodate the pragmatism to some degree, I think we need to combat this instrumentalism by making students more aware of possible alternatives.

It may very well be that we can increase the chance of success by focusing on student perceptions of leisure rather than by trying to convince the students that course work is a path to personal satisfaction.

For me personally (and I suspect this is true of many academics) that split between leisure and work is quite fuzzy almost to the point of being meaningless. In which category does reading the newspaper belong? What about writing this blog? (On most weekends I compose posts. That’s got to be leisure, right?) I don't want to impose my own view on my students, but I would like them to at least consider it.

This past weekend my wife and I took the kids to visit my brother and his family. The time was for hanging out and play. While we did go to a lake for swimming and Frisbee toss, we spent a remarkable amount of time playing games that had some educative value. This included the card came Casino, the board games Blokus and Pente, neither of which I was familiar with before, and the kids also played some Chess. Each of these games has an element of competition to them. If you are to be competitive you have to understand how to play the game and then to become somewhat clever with your play. The competition is a spur to learning and the learning makes it more likely you’ll win the game. I was pretty terrible at Blokus, though I did improve. After I got murdered in a game or two of Pente, I seemed to catch on.

When I was younger, games of this sort played an important role in my life. I played a lot of Chess. There was a board game made by 3M called Twixt that I became quite proficient in. And later on when I was a young Assistant Professor, I started to play Bridge rather seriously for a while. Quite recently, my older kid has been spending a fair amount of time with Rubik’s cube and it became his avocation. Now that he’s solved it, he’ll have to move onto something else. When I used to visit my parents at their Condo before my dad passed away, we’d play anagrams, a game played with Scrabble like letters but no board.

It is hard to make a direct connection between spending a lot of time playing games of this sort and showing problem solving ability in the realm of work. But it seems clear to me that there are some general lessons that transfer. One learns some mental model on how to frame play of the game so one can find “good moves” and winning strategies. (And in this way I believe these games differ from the video games that I’ve also played and both my kids spend quite a bit of time playing now. By providing their own graphical world the video games supply the model for the player. One can succeed in them without the same requirement for ingenuity.) One persists in the endeavor to achieve some outcome – solving the puzzle, feeling confident that the opponent can be beaten – or to develop a sense of proficiency. In that way leaning and play are interconnected.

My university does offer students a wide range of opportunities outside the normal course environment. There are a hundreds of registered student groups and many of these provide fulfilling experiences for their members that encourage personal growth. But I do note they have a somewhat formal structure; after all they are registered with the university. It is hard to envision the university providing structure to a more informal approach. But imagine this.

Suppose that instead of games we talked about student reading habits for non-course stuff. Might instructors, especially those who are teaching students outside the major, influence what students read after the course has concluded? Maybe they point the students to some periodicals in their field that are accessible by lay persons. Maybe they suggest some authors whose books are worth reading (and again are accessible by lay persons). Perhaps they recommend some blogs to follow. Isn’t this a good and appropriate way for the instructor to make the ideas of the course live in the minds of the students beyond the course offering? And isn’t this a way to get students to think about their leisure time as rewarding but not hedonistic?

I, for one, would like to see more of this sort of thing.

More on Hysteresis/What the Future May Bring

I'm headed out of town this morning for a long weekend with the family. The next post will be on Monday.

- - - - -

Yesterday's post on the Academic Calendar was an example of institutional inertia and how historical effects can have durable impact. The technical term is hysteresis, which apparently was first used in the context of physical systems but which also can be applied to social systems. There are many other aspects of the university where one can whether the historical basis for the current structure is still approximately optimal given the current situation. If the answer is no, then new alternative structures may be viable and if given the opportunity might trump the current ones.

Here is another area in which to consider hysteresis in higher ed. The course is now the preeminent unit of learning. Clearly learning continues for research faculty after they have attained their degrees. Does that happen in courses? What about for professionals who work outside of higher education? If the focus is on the learning (and not the certification thereof) is the course the right way to organize the learning.

My experience is that research faculty learn in two ways that I think are appropriate to treat as separate. There is a very deep and narrow learning from participating in their own research projects. This is a specific type of learning by doing, where the word investigator is often substituted for the word researcher. The methodology of the discipline is applied in a manner where the investigator learns a la Sherlock Holmes. The other way is by being a member of a seminar or workshop. This is a somewhat broader form of learning where the researcher stays abreast of current developments in the field by reading papers and seeing presentations by others who are doing research and occasionally presenting their own work.

This may be somewhat unfair as a characterization but I would describe the work of professionals outside of academe also as research, in the sense that much of the work is investigation, but of a much more applied type aimed at getting more specific answers. There may then be structures analogous to the seminar to review the work and share it with peers. The commonality then is learning by doing and sharing of results.

While the Boyer Commission recommended bringing faculty like research into the undergraduate curriculum, bringing the practitioner type of investigation into undergraduate education might be more relevant for the vast majority of them. More to the point for this discussion, the course is in conflict with the investigation. The course ends at a time known in advance. The end time for the investigation is not predictable. It takes as long as necessary to pursue all the leads to solve the puzzle. If one wanted to emphasize investigation in undergraduate education, one would have to do this outside of courses (or, perhaps, have a series of courses that serve as an umbrella to house the investigations).

The current emphasis on inquiry-based learning will either be reduced to trivialities by restricting attention only to those subjects where investigation can be completed in a very short period of time or it will confront this inherent contradiction between the course and the investigation. Harder questions take time to resolve and after considerable thought and work may remain unresolved.

The current divide in undergraduate education is between "general education" on the one hand and "the major" on the other. The focus is on broad (what everyone should know) education early and specific disciplinary education late. This division is increasingly becoming non-functional because we are changing our view about our job as educators from teaching them "stuff" to teaching them "how to learn."

So my "prediction" and I base this on the type of reasoning above rather than on any trends I see emerging is that undergraduate education will cleave and become more like graduate education - - - courses for a while, then investigative research. The Ph.d. dissertation in my experience is more of a solitary quest. The undergraduate alternative likely will be done in project teams. The course part of this will be taught by non-research faculty. The investigative part might be taught by research faculty or perhaps by clinical faculty who have done more of the applied type of research that is appropriate for undergrads. The remainder of the research faculty will be engaged in graduate programs only and the size and the composition of the faculty overall will eventually adjust to this new structure.

The part of the current structure that would cease in this new world is to have research faculty teach stuff. This also points to the primary force that would block this vision from becoming reality. If the research and graduate education is being subsidized by the undergraduate teaching (my belief is that this is happening in departments which are not obtaining a lot of external funding) then the researchers clearly have an incentive to preserve the old way.

On Calendars

Before getting to today’s post, let me comment on yesterday’s post on recording voice and transcribing it in MS Word at the same time. I got a few emails that didn’t realize I was showing the verbatim output from Word without further revision from me. And so people were less than impressed, while I think this is quite amazing. I will play with the approach on a regular basis for the next month or so and then report back about whether I’ve found a way to get a satisfactory final output. I do want to make the point here that on our campus transcription for multimedia seems essential if we are to say the content is accessible. That is a driver for this for this experiment.

- - - - -

One of my favorite papers to teach is Paul David’s AER paper on QWERTY. Steven Jay Gould has reproduced that paper in his book Bully for Brontosaurus and as it turns out there is quite a bit of similarity with the dynamics of increasing returns studied in economics and the dynamics of evolutionary biology – at the outset there are many viable paths and it is impossible to predict which path will win. Then chance events make one path more viable and the head start creates a cumulative effect that results in lock in so the path becomes a de facto standard. The wonderful thing about the QWERTY example is that the keyboard was initially designed to make people type slower but the lock-in is so strong that attempts at using “more efficient” key layouts have not worked.

This is good background to consider the situation of Academic Calendars on our various campuses. Many others have noted the asymmetry with respected to summer sessions have a legacy back to the nineteenth century (or earlier) where students needed to go back to the family farm for planting and harvest. That need has disappeared. But the asymmetry continues. At my campus our fall and spring semester are each fifteen weeks of classes and then one week for final exams. We offer two different summer sessions, one for four weeks (very intensive instruction) and one for eight weeks (moderately intensive instruction). Of course some campuses are on the quarter system instead of the semester system. And even here we have some courses that are only half semester.

While I have seen discussion of the inefficiencies of summer scheduling, I have not seen discussion about Academic Calendar and the issues of primary concern in this blog – student engagement, institutional commitment, and the cost of instruction. Instead of taking five courses in parallel per semester, envision that those courses are taken sequentially in intensive mode in 3 week blocks. Ask how that would effect student engagement. (I think it would promote it.) Ask what that would do for scheduling classes into classrooms. (I think it would be much easier to schedule because there would be fewer offerings in any one block and they’d be offered in larger chunks of time.) Ask whether the faculty would prefer to teach in a couple of these blocks in intensive mode and then have the rest of the time when they are not teaching at all. (My guess is that they would overwhelmingly prefer the block approach.)

Does changing to the sequential approach make sense? I think so. Are we likely to see it? Well, places like University of Phoenix do the sequential model (although I believe 3 weeks is too intensive, even for them). But what about non-profit higher ed? Will it ever make such a reform? Perhaps it will. I wonder who will take the lead on this.

Speech

Ray Schroeder Blog Posting on SpeechExpert
RealPlayer – Free Version
Audio Version of this Post (5.27 MB)

Don’t continue reading this post until you downloaded the audio version. In order to listen to the audio version you need real player. I provided a link for the free version in case you don’t happen to have real player on your computer. It should play fine once you’ve got a player installed.

Yesterday I trashed Microsoft at the end of the post. Today I wanna actually congratulate them for their voice to text software which is available inside Microsoft word. I was inspired to play with this software after reading racial orders Blog posting which I saw on the Sloan see web site about a week ago. It’s interesting how 1ft. rigors and other I didn’t play a little bit with the speechexpert- software that he talked about but I decided that trying while Microsoft had to offer was probably going to be more useful and long run.

The novel thing that I’m doing here with a voice to tax software is that I’ve simultaneously recording a real media stream using the free version of real producer and also transcribing that voice stream two text using the word speech software. To the extent that we can get something of decent quality from the transcriptions point of view one now has something that will be accessible for all and actually I think something that a lot of other but should be trying.

On and off I played with voice recording for at least five or six years and putting streaming voice with either web pages or PowerPoint or something of that, and. The two issues I’ve had in the past with this our first how long would take to produce the contents and second whether in fact what I was doing was really excess of all for all. This stuff is getting much closer to actually doing the trick. As an aside it also might be useful as a way to actually produce first drafts of fundamentally printed material.

I don’t envision everybody doing this and media only but I think it is sufficiently easy that some people should try it and their experience might actually allow others to try it as well.

Let me explain what you’re hearing a part from my voice. Every time word here is a pause from the tape takes what is grayed out of my screen and converts it to printed text. At the same time it gets a little beeped to note that it has accomplished that task. So this is perhaps not as listenable as if I was just doing the voice recorder. You need to be the judge to find out whether it not you can envision listing to stuff like this on a regular basis.

You will also note that I am talking with a date with the punctuation commands. And, actually I didn’t do it correctly so it did the punctuation rather than say the words I need to get along better at that. My point is that if I’m going to be this as a first draft to any further Abell helped me a lot to have the punctuation already there. Consequently I am speaking with pauses rather than continuously. That means it may not be as listenable as it would otherwise the ultimate goal is for me to speak continuously and put the text to actually be created continuously.

We’re still somewhat far from their ultimate goal but where a lot closer than we were a few years ago.

What you see as far as text on this page is exactly as it was converted by word. I have not made any edits at all I have simply copied the word document into the Blog editor. With that copying one can then publish directly to the web. It may not be perfect but I thought you should see what the exact output of the word speech program was.

Yesterday I spent about ten or fifteen minutes training word two of my voice. Today I spent about another fifteen minutes with more training. Presumably the accuracy increases as the amount of training goes up. They also say that you need to be in a quiet place to do the recording. My office is on the street so there are street noise and this a mother noise as well. I think it’s not bad. I’m going to try to use this a little bit more and see if I can get proficient at

All “Features” Great and Small

The last two days I’ve been moving offices. Our unit, which has offices scattered around campus, gained more space in the building where my office is, because most of the Computer Science department has moved into the new Seibel Center. For better esprit de corps we’re moving divisions that had been housed in remote locations into my building. And to best utilize the total space that we have, we’ve reassigned offices to many in the building. That means a lot of people are moving. I’m one of those.

All this makes sense for the greater good of the order and I understand that. But I didn’t want to move. It’s a pain. Two days in a row I’m all sweaty from carrying boxes (and this is with the help of movers) and I don’t know where my stuff is. I screwed up an important budget document because of the move and I’m mad at myself for that. I still fell disoriented so I wouldn’t be surprised if I make more blunders in the next couple of days. Why couldn’t I stay in my old office?

And why, you might ask, am I bringing this up? It’s uncouth to talk about such things --- chin up and all that rot. The answer in this case is to use it as a way to frame the issues. Most all of us have, upon occasion, endured a move. Some of you probably managed it better than I have, but it is an inconvenience for all of us, one we can recognize as such. I want you to keep that thought in mind but now consider another setting, where your campus has upgraded its version of the course management system it supports, or even worse, switched to another platform.

Many of us who support educational technology don’t go through agony when systems are upgraded. In fact, we may be positively disposed to playing with the new version of the software – it’s fun learning the stuff and checking out the new or improved features. But it is really different for our faculty. Their reaction, in the main, will be like mine has been in making the physical move of offices. They won’t like it. They’re apt to be resentful. They’ll want to know whether they can stay in the old version, first off, and then use that to make us feel guilty when they ask what will break in their course site when they have to upgrade.

This may seem melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m overstating the situation. Once a piece of software seems to work and the user has adjusted to it, most users don’t want the software to change. Why should they? The benefits from the change are amorphous to them. The costs are quite obvious. And most faculty are incredibly time squeezed that contributes to their frustration during the upgrade period.

So why is it that in educational technology we support providers push so hard with the vendors or our own developers on coming out with additional features of the software and improving on existing ones? Are we doing it for the benefit of our instructors? Or are we doing it to please ourselves and indulge our too idealistic beliefs about using the technology as a vehicle to improve instruction?

Certainly more frequent change in the software that is supported raises the total cost of ownership. There is more work needed for providing documentation, more training and more follow up consultation for instructors. There are more chances that the configuration of the production system gets screwed up or becomes inappropriate or that some particular unsolvable bug is uncovered.

Here are a set of arguments for why I continue to ask for new features on the instructor side of the product.

Our User Base (To Every Thing Churn, Churn, Churn.)

I don’t think it is commonly recognized that there is a lot of churn in the use of course management systems, at least there is a lot of churn on our campus. We have many instructors who are graduate students and adjunct faculty and those people turn over quite quickly. Also, tenure track faculty instructor rotate between graduate courses where they likely won’t use the CMS and undergraduate courses where they will.

This means we have a substantial population who are new to our system each semester or who have been away from the system for a while and are coming back for a fresh start. While most of these people don’t want to spend a lot of time learning something new, they do want to be assured that the product they are using is current and up to date.

Staying Current with Other Software (Blame it on the other guys.)

Even if we don’t upgrade our CMS, the browsers, plug-ins, and other software our users rely on will upgrade by processes that we don’t control very well. Our stuff has to work with what they have. We can’t guarantee that it will if we get too far behind in what we are supporting. Thus we need to keep up.

Moving Down the Technology Learning Curve (Teaching the Old Dogs New Tricks.)

As instructors get comfortable with using the CMS some of them begin to see possibilities for improving their course and they want to try new things. (We really do need to know how many are in this category and what type of things might encourage this. The ECAR study by Glenda Morgan from a couple of years back suggests that this population is not as large as we might like.) At the point where they are ready to try something, we should be in a position to provide a set of possible offerings. We want new features so we can do just that.

Improving Instruction (I’m the guy your mother warned you about.)

This is why most of us got into the business. We are there to make the learning better. Any improvement in the software that has a chance of doing this we should champion. Here what we really want to do is promote the teaching idea. We don’t expect the software to do it all by itself. We expect the software to serves as a catalyst for the teaching idea and as an instrument to implement the teaching idea.

Let me explain the parenthetic remark in the header, which might otherwise seem obscure. This one is the purest of motives. And clearly it drives us. But perhaps we place ourselves in the role of teacher too much rather than focus on the typical instructor. Keep in mind that the track record on innovation with learning technology by tenured track faculty is spotty at best. So we push for innovation that may be anti-utilitarian. We raise expectations and costs this way and may produce a lot of disappointment. In terms of less uptake than anticipated. Is this the way a twenty first century manager should show leadership?

Competition with Peers (Satisfying our Insecurity Complexes by Keeping up with the Joneses.)

This is a less pure motive but it may be more primal in explaining our behavior. Over there at Peer U, they’re supporting a different CMS than we have here. It has some really cool features that their tech folks say their faculty absolutely love. We better get those, and soon, or we’ll look like slouches and our faculty will complain that we’re falling behind.

- - - - -

Taken together, this is not a bad list of reasons. It is not entirely uplifting to be sure, but most of the reasons are defensible. The thing is, if you reflect on them for a while you likely will conclude that while some innovation in the software is a good thing, the pace of change that we advocate for is probably too rapid. We know Microsoft turns over its product offerings quite regularly, perhaps on a biennial basis. And we know why they do it to. (Non-economists who want to impress their friends can refer to the Coase conjecture about how a durable goods monopolist will end up pricing at marginal cost.)

But we aren’t Microsoft and we should know better. That the vendors push innovation on us, might be understandable. But that is not my experience. We, the informed users of these products, are incredibly demanding in what we want to see in them. This is something for us to ponder.