Singing Along To The Same Old Song

There once was a dragon named Puff
We sang about him and other stuff
But then there was rock
And occasionally Beethoven and Bach
Yet of folk songs are there ever enough?
#MusicFromChildhood

Nostalgia or Neuralgia

When we used to drink Fresca
And do puzzles by Maleska
Enthralled by what was on paper
But now that's become all vapor.
#BecomingCrossAboutWords

Tea for Two with Letter Boxed

For whatever reason, on July 19, 2023 I was able to successfully complete the Letter Boxed puzzle in the NY Times with only two words, the first time I had done that.  I don't have a screen shot of my solution but I know the first word I used was cybernetics, since I wrote a little post about it to my Facebook Friends. I had been doing this puzzle for a few months, either after completing the Spelling Bee or when I was stuck on the last few words there.  I had been satisfied with simply getting a solution until then, though if I could get one with three words that seemed like an accomplishment.

But now I have the bug to find two-word solutions and as of late I've been reasonably successful at it.  Moreover, this has actually become more interesting to me than the Spelling Bee, even though that is much more popular, because it seems that these solutions to Letter Boxed are not prescribed, so there is more freedom to come up with solutions of your own making. 

Now I'd like to know whether the puzzle is designed so there always is a two-word solution or if it is just a happy coincidence that I've been finding them as of late.  Also, has there ever been a one-word solution?  I haven't tried for that yet.  At present it seems impossible or, if not that, then certainly out of my grasp.

I had been updating this blog post with screenshots of the recent solutions, but it seemed that blogger didn't like my doing this - the screen shots would "evaporate" and what remained was only a text-based summary of the solution.  So, I've made a Google Docs version of the screenshot solutions.  I hope to keep that up to date and will try to do so as long as this activity holds my interest.

Syllable

Silly and Ability were proud of what they did
For Silly and Ability had produced a kid.
From this the best of the parents tried to converge
But the independent child thought instead to diverge.
#HistrionicsAboutSomePhonics

Reverting Back To Childhood

My longstanding ability to pay attention
Seems to have opted for taking an abstention
Then having already decided on the previous thing
After moving to the next the prior one doesn't ring.
#ForgetMeNot

A Tiny Bit Of Labor Economics

I used to disagree with Paul Krugman fairly frequently in this blog, back when he was writing about health economics.  More recently I stopped doing so, even if I didn't buy into everything that he argued.  Since much of it was taking an economics perspective on our national politics, I didn't see a good reason to air my occasional misgivings.  But I will do so about this column from yesterday, No, ‘Socialism’ Isn’t Making Americans Lazy.  My thought here is that the questions I offer up might be instructive to consider in their own right, to push the argument further along. 

Krugman uses employment data to make his case, which would be convincing if having a job (and keeping it) meant the person was not lazy.  A potential alternative would be that some jobs enable the people who fill them to shirk to some extent, yet that behavior becomes the norm so such people won't be fired as long as they conform to this norm.   The first question, then, is this: do such jobs exist, and do they constitute a significant fraction of all the jobs in the labor market?  I do want to note that one can go to the other extreme and observe that there are certain jobs where the people who fill them put in 60 hour weeks or more and with no increased compensation because such people are salaried and then put in the time based on what the job requires.  So we might be willing to agree that employment or not is a binary variable, but effort while working is closer to a continuous variable and laziness may refer to the effort level rather than that the person has a job.

The second question is this: what sort of jobs enable shirking as an equilibrium outcome?  Now I will shift gears and give two examples from my personal experience.  How much this generalizes is anyone's guess.  A parallel question to what is being asked here is in the teaching and learning arena.  Can students shirk somewhat and yet expect to get reasonable grades in the courses they take.  My prior post suggests just that.  And the teachers shirk too, by enabling this sort of student behavior.  George Kuh referred to this sort of behavior as the Disengagement Compact.  (See page 6, first column, of his article about the National Survey of Student Engagement.)  Then, I get a huge number of solicitations from vendors who think I'm still working for the University of Illinois as an academic technologist, even though I retired back in 2010.  I've complained about this to friends who still work in this area at various universities around the country.  Their response is that these sales people are lazy - they don't do their homework.  It's easier for them to simply blast an email to whomever is on their list without updating that list to ensure it is current and without making the message highly personalized so it appears to the recipient that the person is really trying to communicate.

How much work is of this sort, I really don't know.  But consider this.  Another column from yesterday, this one by Peter Coy, is about doing away with the 'Representative Agent Model', which invariably produced results consistent with Chicago School thinking, and instead replacing it with the Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, which needs computers to produce the outcomes but then the results obtained are far more realistic.  Reasoning by analogy, we need a Heterogeneous Jobs model, which would admit that some jobs do enable shirking in equilibrium, while others do not.  

But there is still a different way to think about things, which has to do with preparation for entering the labor market.  Way back when in Development Economics, there was the Harris-Todaro model to explain from rural to urban migration based on income differentials in the two locales.  Again reasoning by analogy, if there are certain jobs that differ substantially in the wages they offer, with much of the differential explained by the human capital requirements of the higher paying jobs, then there is a puzzle.  Why do those who are stuck in the low paying jobs not try to acquire the human capital and thereby raise their income. Does laziness explain that?  A certain fatalism or lack of wherewithal? Or something else? And when it happens across generations, particularly in males who seem to feel emasculated, what can overturn this sort of lock-in?  

The decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service sector were phenomena of the 1990s.  The movement to online work in a big way is a product of the last decade.  The nature of work is not static.  Krugman assumes a job is a job is a job.  That just ain't so.  He should be held to a higher standard in making the sort of argument that he made.

Dire Dread-ucation

From this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed, it appears that American's view of higher education is fairly grim and has been declining recently.  The article points out a substantial difference in perspective on this point between Democrats and Republicans, no surprise there.  Much of this difference reflects a general decline in respect for institutions. For higher education, it seems the guilty parties are Wokeness in general and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in particular. There has been so much press available to the general public on these topics.  Yet there has not been much at all on learning in college, broadly considered.  I will take on some of that below.

I was surprised that the polling didn't report about differences across respondents based on their own highest degree attained, and/or whether they were in college at the time of responding to the poll.  One might expect that the greater the degree attainment, the more the respect for higher education.

But those who have read my blog regularly, focusing only on the posts about my college teaching experience in the past decade and reflections about higher education more broadly during that same time period would find that I too have lowered my expectations about higher education.  Let me give a brief overview of the criticisms.

Student Prior Preparation

• While a handful of students read intensively for their own edification, most students don't read much at all.  When asked to read a news article from the New York Times, many can't make good meaning of it.
  
• Too many students rely on rote as their tried and true way of getting through classes.  They don't make any effort to produce a narrative for themselves that would explain what they are learning.
• Regarding social skills, they spend too much of their lives in their phones so don't know how to have a face-to-face conversation with somebody else that is not mediated by technology.
  

 Student Motivation And How Classes Are Conducted

• Students are highly instrumental in their courses, caring a great deal about grades but only rarely showing intrinsic motivation for the subject matter.
• Even attending class needs an extrinsic motivation, e.g., clickers.
  
• There is now an expectation that instructors will teach to the test.  As much instruction is done by adjuncts, and their job security depends on student satisfaction in their classes, the instructors tend to conform with those expectations.
• While the science of learning says that this happens mainly by students practicing Transfer, which means applying the subject matter in a novel context, neither homework nor testing offers this sort of practice. 
•  Many students tend to be quiet in a discussion oriented classroom.  They don't raise their hands to participate in the discussion. They prefer to let others in the classroom do the talking.
  

High Tuition And Student Debt

• This one has gotten a lot of attention.  It surely serves as a driver in the students taking an instrumental approach.  But in the press it has not been as well connected to overall income inequality in the economy.  College education has been cast as a passport to high incomes.  That's why most of the students are enrolled.
  
• As there has been research which shows lifetime income correlates highly with income during the first 5 years after graduation, internships and job placement have taken on greater importance.  Colleges have become willing partners in student placement.
• Those students who have their parents pay for college are relieved of the pressure from the need to repay student loans.  With little prior financial experience, this pressure can feel much more severe than what someone who is just as leveraged but far more mature might feel.

Student Mental Health

• There is crisis in this area which predates the Pandemic.  In discussing the issue the emphasis has been the paucity of mental health professionals that students can access.  
• In case it isn't obvious, there are elements in each of the the prior three areas that can contribute to declining student mental health, because students are living an artificial life that doesn't nurture their real developmental needs and allow them to express those needs in a matter of fact way.  And they face additional pressure, a lot of it, because of the financial issues.
• The social life on campus, perhaps a refuge of sorts, may exert its own forms of stress that makes things even worse, especially if students connect with an inappropriate (for them) peer group.
  
• The issue was not out in the open the last time I taught (fall 2019).  It may have gotten more attention since, because of the Pandemic, clearly its own source of stress.
  

My experience is that the first two items are discussed in faculty development workshops that focus on how to improve their teaching.  (Can improved pedagogy overcome those obstacles?)  But they aren't discussed more broadly.  Campuses have a tendency to want to put a glossy look on their activities for public consumption.  Presumably that will aid in their fundraising efforts.  

I started college in 1972 and the bulk of these issues were with us then.  Have they gotten more severe over time?  My sense from my teaching in retirement is that there was a marked downward shift in things starting in 2015, and another that started either in 2018 (when I didn't teach) or in 2019.  There likely were many more downward shifts from when I graduated college in 1976, to when I retired, summer of 2010.  But how does one measure this?  Faculty who endure have their perceptions to rely on, of course, and interviewing them broadly might be useful for this.  Making comparisons across different cohorts of students would be harder.  Younger siblings might be able to make comparisons with their older brothers and sisters, but beyond that this appears to be a challenging measurement problem.  

 

Nevertheless, the faculty perception itself might be of interest to the general public.  Or would it be among those who are not themselves academics?  If not, then the public misgivings about higher education, based on all the political rants, serves to mask these academic issues.  

Let me note one other thing and then close.  Economists have models about higher education impacts future employment.  The first, and perhaps more obvious of them is via human capital, both general and then specific to a discipline. The second, is as a signal of intrinsic worth.  In that sense both the university attended and the GPA while a student serve as signals (and there may be more drill down components as well).  The issue is whether in both dimensions the value has depreciated because of the academic issues I've described.  What happens then?  And if it has been happening already, should we be surprised?

I'm disappointed that the academic issues don't seem to find their way more broadly in the public consciousness.  Reading, as its own issue, should be discussed much more, in my view.  I realize that it is unlikely to happen. So I have blog posts like this one to vent, as if it might.

How much does it matter when, within our own life-cycle, we read a story?

I'm reflecting on this opinion piece in the New York Times about Shirley Jackson's story, The Lottery.   It claimed that readers became very disturbed from reading the story.  I read it in school, perhaps elementary school or maybe junior high school. That detail I don't remember.  What I do remember is that there was a surprise ending to the story. What I don't think happened at all was me becoming disturbed and, further, most if not all of my classmates didn't get disturbed by reading the story as well.  So I began to ponder whether reading it as a kid is different from reading it as an adult. 

Some years ago I learned that to make good meaning about what one is reading, the reader needs to supply the context, which the writer might only hint at.  Is The Lottery simply a story, the context supplied within and thus to be read for itself, or is it intended as a metaphor of some kind, so the context needs to be applied to the events in the larger society?  I doubt that I considered it as a metaphor when I read it as a kid and I'm not even sure that I knew what a metaphor was at the time of this reading.  (I do recall that we learned about metaphors and similes at the same time, but where that was in my school trajectory I can't recall.)  If considered simply as a story, is The Lottery disturbing?  Can it still be a good read even if it is not disturbing?

I'm not sure whether what follows are good answers to these questions, but they make some sense to me.  Admittedly, answering a question with a question is not completely satisfying, but it is what I will do here.  Are we so inured to violence in fiction, TV, the movies, and video games that none of it seems disturbing?  Or might it be that some of it remains disturbing but which bit that is would be very hard to predict in advance?  I recall as a kid having nightmares after watching The Giant Behemoth on TV, the scene where the monster steps on a car and crushes it terrorized me for some time thereafter.  I was in elementary school then.  There were, of course, many movies I saw when I was older that were frightening at the time of viewing; Psycho comes to mind, but I don't recall nightmares from most of them or lingering dark thoughts.  Perhaps Repulsion and The Pianist (both directed by Roman Polanski) were disturbing, but it is now so long ago and these were not childhood memories of those movies, so they are not as strong.

My guess it that a person will find a story disturbing if it triggers a fear that is preexisting within that person and perhaps makes the person reflect on that fear in a different light. As an adult, reading a story metaphorically might bring that many more possible fears into play.  If that happens the story is no longer merely entertainment.  It becomes a form of ethical instruction.

Ruth Franklin, the author of the Times opinion piece, wants us to consider the benefits of this ethical instruction, even when it comes at the price of being disturbed.  This may be meant partly as a counterargument to all the book censoring seemingly going on.  But it also may be meant for readers like me, whose access is unrestricted by censors but who may nonetheless opt for "comfortable fiction," which for me is now mainly murder mysteries.  They do provide entertainment, but they don't challenge the reader on ethical grounds; at least there is not much of a challenge.

I confess that for my own self preservation I read much less of the newspaper than I used to, including fewer opinion pieces.  So reading Franklin's piece is more exception than rule for me.  Much of it is just too depressing and my curiosity is not engaged by most of the non-opinion pieces.  The intersection of what is good news and what is a good read seems rather slight for me now.  And if I develop sufficient guilt feelings regarding my ignorance, by reading the posts of friends in Facebook on some news item, I can do a bit of self-education then and there, even if that leaves me a bit behind the times.  Keeping up with everyone else does not provide motivation for me.

Yet short stories rarely find their way into my routine.  Instead it's book-length fiction and sometimes book-length non-fiction, some magazine non-fiction, TV series perhaps on Amazon or Netflix, or the occasional full-length movie.  Franklin's piece is an urging to expand the repertoire to include challenging short stories on a regular basis.  

I actually have a prior disposition for doing short story reading, as indicated by this page on short stories called Appetizers that I made early during the Pandemic.  The page is part of a Website to encourage college students to read more.  The issue for me that remains is how to select interesting and challenging stories.  I suspect that my sense of taste is not so common, if not entirely unique to me.  In other words, just because a friend liked it doesn't mean I will like it as well.  I'm willing to engage in some experimental consumption, in which there will be misses as well as hits.  But I'd want a decent batting average.  

Maybe after trying this for a while, I will write another post to consider how I've managed this question about selection of readings.  But I'll only do this if what I come up with seems to be working.  All I can promise now is to give it a serious try.

The Sense Of Taste We All Should Develop

An idea expressed with elegance
The product of true intelligence
A demonstration of presentation done right
Thus giving the learner true insight.
#TheProofIsInTheMarginButTheInkHasBled

Outwitting Oneself

The self-declared genius
Took intravenous
To keep his thinking fluid.

While seemingly clever
In this endeavor
He kept confusing a Dryad for a Druid.
#AllWetBehindTheEars

Finding The Warm Glow

I write to highlight the work of my friend and colleague, Turinawe Samson, who runs a small NGO in Uganda called Universal Love Alliance and who recently had an opinion piece in the Washington Blade that describes the current plight of LGBTIQ people and what ULA is doing to help them. (In the interest of full disclosure, I help ULA as their ghostwriter. I am also the Treasurer of the ULA Foundation that does fundraising on behalf of ULA.)

ULA’s approach is a finger-in-the-dike way to help LGBTIQ people survive now, hoping that other forces will be brought to bear that will do the heavy lifting. Even with that, ULA is desperate for more revenues to sustain the current effort.

This brings me to consider potential donors, who might help ULA. Yet to make this essay of general interest, I want to think through the problem a potential donor solves, regardless of the organization that might be the funding target. With this I have my experience as potential donor in addition to a reasonably good understanding of the economics involved.

Let’s consider whether the potential donor perceives the donation to matter. Some years ago I wrote a blog post called Mattering Bias, where I was trying to reconcile why some very rich potential donors willingly signed up for The Giving Pledge yet were notoriously anti-tax. Mattering requires the scale of the gift to be in line with the scale of operation of the recipient organization. Scaling of this sort does not hold with government spending, particularly at the federal level, where most people’s attitudes toward taxation might then be described by what economists call the free-rider problem.

What if the potential donor is not a member of the uber rich, will the donation then be consigned to not matter? No, but then the scale of the recipient organization must be smaller, to again come in line with the size of the donation. I can assert that a $5,000 donation made on behalf of ULA would matter, a lot. Those who are financially comfortable can afford to make such donations. This would greatly expand the pool of potential donors beyond the uber rich. Are such people willing to make donations of this magnitude? And, if so, how do they identify candidate recipient organizations?

Even if the donation does not matter, in the sense discussed in the previous paragraphs, some people will make the donation because it is the right thing to do. Microeconomic modeling being what it is, theoretically the donor is assumed to receive some psychic benefit from making the donation. This is the warm glow, as mentioned in the essay title. The idea stems from the late 1980s and the work of the economist, James Andreoni. If motivated purely by the warm glow and able to make a donation that is very modest in size, then much of the population can participate in charitable giving.

At the time of Andreoni’s work, email was in its infancy and most people had never heard of the Internet. Solicitations for funding were mainly by direct mail, which in addition to the postage carried the cost of preparing the mail message to be delivered. Thirty plus years later the cost of such messaging is considerably less. How has that impacted things?

Nowadays we all suffer from information overload, filtering out much of the messaging we receive without learning its contents. And in some cases, we do learn the contents but aren’t persuaded by them. Collectively this makes for a kind of market failure, as each solicitation sent weakens the possible impact of other solicitations. The net result is to condition us into becoming free riders, this even when we’d want to experience the warm glow, if only we didn’t feel so vulnerable and exposed by contributing in response to a decent solicitation. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

My answer is to ignore solicitations entirely and instead search for the organization to receive the donation. One issue is that not all organizations are on the up and up. How does one avoid being taken in? Large organizations generally face greater scrutiny and that may offer some reassurance. Alternatively, there are micro grant organizations. Two I know of are Spirit In Action and Amistad International. One might donate directly to them. Alternatively, seeing the organizations they support that have received multiple rounds of funding should offer assurance that the organizations are trustworthy. Yet another alternative is to focus on local organizations, where the word-of-mouth information flows are more reliable.

None of these are perfect solutions. But if the warm glow would fill some of the emptiness so many of us now feel, can we afford not to give it a try?

Revisiting The Umpire Theory Of Technology

I came up with this metaphor in late January of 2007, in a post called Learning Technology and "The Vision Thing". This was soon after the annual ELI conference and in my prior post I had been quite critical of the conference and the supposed vision it was attempting to convey to attendees.  So, I provided an alternative in this post.  The metaphor itself is explained early on as follows:

Let me begin with a little personal philosophy; I subscribe to the Umpire Theory of Technology. According to that, in a baseball game the umpire is absolutely critical to make the calls in an unbiased way. But if you watch a game the only time the umpire gets noticed is when he makes a bad call. If the umpire does his job very well, he becomes invisible. Learning technology well employed should be invisible too.

It then follows that the visioning itself can't be about the technology. The technology only plays, at best, a supporting role.  The visioning then must either be about aspirations for teaching and learning, in this post I articulated my aspirations about Humanism Across The Curriculum, a next generation view of Writing Across The Curriculum, or it must reflect current issues/problems with teaching and learning and then offer up problem solving solutions.  (On the issues/problems I will offer one possible look in the discussion that follows.)  Learning technologists might benefit themselves by an embrace of the Umpire Theory, at least temporarily, to give them a perspective where they can be self-critical about their beliefs and their practices with the technology.  My belief is that such an exercise would be quite useful to learning technologists prior to a complete embrace of AI.  

But in this piece I will have a historical look only, where I know something about what happened, and not discuss the present at all, since I've been out of it for some time.  Yet I think the history tells us something about the present as there are persistent patterns with new technology adoption.  Considering those patterns is where I hope there is benefit in this post.  First, there is a tendency for learning technologists to become highly enthusiastic about the next big technology innovation.  That enthusiasm served as one of the drivers for learning technologists to enter the field.  And a certain fraction of instructors will likewise be so enthused, call them innovators or early adopters.  This feeling that technology itself will drive major change is fueled by what the innovators and early adopters do with their teaching as a consequence of the technology. 

I felt this way in the late 1990s, when the online components of instruction seemed to give courses a new vitality and in my campus role I got to talk with these early instructors who were doing wonderful things with their teaching, even if by current standards the technology itself was quite primitive. The drive and and creativity of these instructors infected me.  For a while I became a true believer.  Then, my little Center for Educational Technology, which had just come into being, had as its implicit mission to get as many courses as possible onto one of the learning management systems we then supported.  I embraced that mission, at least for a while. 

A variety of political economy issues got in the way of fulfilling that mission in a satisfying manner.  We were underfunded from the get go and remained that way.  There were other campus systems in support of instruction that had developed prior to the forming of my center, and those would have to be abandoned eventually.  The transition to the learning management systems was painful.  While we did offer small grants for adoption, followed by attendance at a multi-day workshop that would give instructors ideas about how to implement, we couldn't afford to make such workshops a pre-condition for adoption and many other instructors simply adopted the LMS, perhaps after getting some training on its functionality from one of my staff, though perhaps not.  After a couple of years of this, we stopped giving out the small grants and providing the multi-day workshops, with the funding redirected into my Center's budget.  Fast forward now several years to where scaling considerations forced us to embrace an "Enterprise Learning Management System" and convert courses from the previous systems or have the courses start anew, it was determined that upwards of 90% of the class sites used the LMS in such a lightweight way that conversion was unnecessary.  Those facts were in the background when I wrote the visioning post. 

Let me fast forward again another 5+ years and consider a different technology entirely, so as to begin to ask whether the prior experience generalizes.  The following is from an email I sent to the Educause CIO listserv, which at the time was discussing the pros and cons of lecture capture technology.

It is interesting to read all these testimonials about lecture capture and how popular it is.  However, given the recent NY Times piece about the value (or lack) of laptop initiatives, http://goo.gl/mzVge, it behooves us to remain skeptical about the value of lecture capture on learning, in spite of the admitted popularity.  The argument against must be something like this – lecture capture encourages student effort to focus on the ability to reproduce the lecture.  But we know from the How People Learn volume of a dozen years ago, http://goo.gl/ZZ8vQ, that learning happens primarily via “transfer.” At issue then is the impact of lecture capture on student efforts aimed at transfer.  If students find transfer difficult but mastering the lecture within grasp, their preference for the technology is understandable. And instructors who want students to like their classes have reason to feed that preference.  So it seems possible that the technology can be popular but the impact on learning might be nil.  It would be good to gather data on this parse to try to relate lecture capture to transfer activities.

I want to note that my hypothesis at the end of this paragraph is not novel at all.  It follows from what George Kuh called the Disengagement Compact, in this piece, What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE.  The operative paragraph is here:

And this brings us to the un-
seemly bargain, what I call the
"disengagement compact": "I'll
leave you alone if you leave me
alone." That is, I won't make you
work too hard (read a lot, write a
lot) so that I won't have to grade as
many papers or explain why you
are not performing well. The existence
of this bargain is suggested by the fact
that at a relatively low level of effort,
many students get decent grades - B's
and sometimes better. There seems to
be a breakdown of shared responsibility
for learning - on the part of faculty
members who allow students to get by
with far less than maximal effort, and
on the part of students who are not tak-
ing full advantage of the resources in-
stitutions provide.

Real learning is labor intensive.  Technology can't change that, though perhaps it can save some time the student spends in activities that support the learning.  I would argue that real teaching is labor intensive too.  When I first started as an assistant professor in economics, back in 1980, almost all the faculty were tenured or on the tenure track.  Then the reason to shortchange the time devoted to instruction, particularly at the undergraduate level, was that the added effort beyond some minimal level didn't count for promotion, tenure, or salary review.  Nowadays, most of the undergraduate instruction on campus is done by adjunct (specialized) faculty.  They have a different reason for participating in the Disengagement Compact.  Lacking tenure, their job security hinges on students being satisfied, as indicated by the course evaluations administered near the end of the semester.  If students are entirely instrumental in their approach, motivated by grades alone, not at all by learning, then by giving them good grades for comparatively little effort the instructor gets decent evaluations and to teach the course yet again.  

Kuh's essay is from 20 years ago.  Apart from the move to adjunct instructors, what has changed in that time and are things better or worse than they were then?  My guess is that if you surveyed instructors who have been teaching undergraduates for the past 20 years or longer, many if not most would say that things are worse now.  I would point to three factors to explain this.  One is the decline in reading, particularly as a recreational vehicle and to stay informed about the world (in other words, non-course reading).  Another is the mediation of communication via the smartphone, so face-to-face interpersonal skills don't have a chance to develop well.  The third, something we've been talking about only comparatively recently (but this talk began well before Covid) is that so many students suffer from emotional health problems.  In turn, this can be explained by the artificial nature of the game that is school which students play coupled with the high tuition they or their families must bear.  

I want to make a few more points before giving some very broad stoke thoughts on what a fix might look like.   One is about having an open conversation regarding these issues.  Sometime after I became aware of Kuh's essay, I learned that the U of I participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement, but it didn't release the results publicly.  We were strong in some areas, not so strong in others.  Having the areas of weakness be considered in public media might have damaged the university's reputation.  Why risk that?  

The university did make some internal changes to address the findings.  One of those was to develop a formal program of undergraduates engaged in research.  But only a fraction students were involved in that, with the more elite students much more likely to be involved.  This is another issue with a focus on student engagement, one I've found over the years in my own teaching.  The better students liked my course a lot, though they were only 10-15% of the class.  For much of the rest, it was a struggle.  It is reaching the rest that is the real challenge.

There is a lot of inertia in how most instruction occurs.  If a particular instructor tries to innovate in teaching, his students might find it a refreshing alternative to what they are getting in their other classes.  But it can go the other way, with the students so accustomed by how their other courses are conducted that they are put off by the instructor's attempt at innovation.  I've taught one course a year in retirement, ending in fall 2019.  My experience is that it was the first way from 2012-2014, but became the second way during 2015-2017 and was even worse in 2019.  (I didn't teach in 2018.)  My current view is that for innovation to be successful it must happen across the board, not just in one course at a time.

On the other hand, the Center for Teaching, which most campuses have, tends to make their offerings opt-in for instructors.  Unless there are mandates for innovation from individual colleges or departments, the opt-in approach is what's available to them because they don't have the leverage to do otherwise.  But then those who do opt in are the usual suspects and only a small fraction of instructors while those who don't end up teaching courses that become very static. 

Now to the suggestions.  When I was still teaching, the discussion about student mental health focused on the lack of mental health professionals on campus, so the difficulty that students had in getting appointments with such professionals.  There was essentially no discussion about whether the overall academic environment was creating many of these mental health problems.  Now, with Covid in the rear-view mirror (we hope), it seems time to ask that question in a systematic way.  This will require a serious evaluation effort of students, their friends and families, their instructors, and possibly the people they worked with during internships.  In other words, lead with an evaluation, one where student mental health is the driver, but where the Disengagement Compact might linger in the background as an explanatory factor. 

Campuses are unlikely to do this on their own, for reasons I've mentioned above.  So outside foundations need to step up here to encourage this, with implied funding for remedies after the evaluation has produced its findings.  Implicit in how I've written this post is that the issues I've identified will be found as significant factors in explaining the findings.  The next few suggestions are based on that assumption. 

There needs to be a major effort to move instruction from credentialing to learning. I've written about this a lot, for example in this post called Excise The Textbook.  One should anticipate substantial resistance in making such a move, from both instructors and students.  So there needs to be a plan to overcome that resistance.  As I'm an economist, I'd look to incentives for doing this.  Grant funding might very well be deployed to provide such incentives.  Assuming that the initial resistance is overcome, at least for some subset of students and instructors, one question is whether this move to learning has legs that will endure beyond the grant funding.  Another question arises if the initial group provides promising results.  Will other groups then form that follow a similar path, even if there is no grant funding to support that?

Then there needs to be drill down on what a move from credentialing to learning looks like.  My view is that high-stakes assessment, via exams and term papers, needs to be diminished if not totally eliminated.  Regular low-stakes assignments must be done with much more attention to the student getting good feedback on those and that transfer of some sort is required to complete the assignments.  The hope is that after the initial resistance students come to appreciate this alternative approach, want even more feedback, and begin to understand why the alternative has been put in place.  Beyond that, one might hope that students learn to create their own low-stakes assessment as they begin along the path to self-teaching, one of the meta goals from moving to the alternative approach

There is the matter of who will write these new low-stake assessments and who will provide the feedback.  On the latter, during the first year of writing blog posts I had a series on Inward Looking Service Learning, seven posts in all, based on my experience with peer-mentors who had previously taken my course as the ones providing the feedback, mainly via online office hours held in the evening.  I thought it the biggest innovation in my teaching at the time, with the technology as an enabler, an early example of that.  The INSL posts tried to generalize from that experience.  But I want to note that in the course I was teaching, there hadn't been graduate student TAs.  The undergraduate peer-mentors weren't substitutes for those.  They could be afforded because my lecture went from about 60 students to about 180 students.  So the approach de-emphasized the lecture and made the online office hours held by peer-mentors a feature.  

Now there is a big deal with graduate student TAs unionizing because of feelings that they are being exploited.  In courses where there are graduate student TAs, it would have to be worked out in advance that the use of undergraduate peer-mentors would be an addition to the overall labor in instruction.  I'm afraid that under the current circumstances, where everyone seems to be feeling a budget pinch, that's unlikely to happen.  But again, grant funders might come to the rescue, at least at first, so that pilot projects can demonstrate the feasibility (or not) of this suggestion. 

As to the writing of the assessments, I've done that in my own teaching, so tend to minimize the effort entailed as well as the sense of competence in the subject matter that such authorship requires.  But there is also the matter that it might seem to be a lot of work, so individual instructors will balk at it for that reason.  This might be addressed by creating a team of instructors who teach the same course but at different institutions, to divide up the assessments to be written, with an agreement that the products will be part of an OER and that they will use the assessments written by other members of the team in their own teaching.  This means they will also serve as peer-reviewers of these assessments as those are still in draft form. The authorship and the peer-review function will go hand-in-hand. 

Sometime later, the students who do the work to complete these assessments can themselves be considered as reviewers, so their feedback on the assessments can be used in revising them.  Further, students can be given extra-credit projects to write additional assessments and/or to revise the extra-credit project that was completed in a previous offering of the course, under the proviso that these extra-credit projects would also find their way into an OER.  This would provide a mechanism for the assessments to stay current and students might then come to see themselves as authors, another step in the direction of self-teaching.

Let me wrap up.  There may be a lot of wishful thinking in this visioning exercise.  I have no doubt about it.  I hope that readers aren't put off by it.  The point is that it's been done without making technology the driver of the change.  That makes as much sense to me now as it did when I originally came up with the Umpire Theory of Technology.  And for learning technologists who typically assume technology should be the driver, it might be useful to think through for themselves an alternative view.

Overgrowth

Cease and desist
He said to the cyst
But it kept on growing
With no signs of slowing.
#WhenYourGenesExpressThemselvesTooFreely

The Heavyweight Wrestling Approach to Politics

Humpty Trumpty sat on a wall
Waiting there for another cattle call
All the moguls and all his henchmen
Anticipating Trumpty will go at it again.
#TheRepublicanPrimariesAreSecondary

Enticement

If you inveigle Hegel with a bagel
Will it cause a pox because they're out of lox?
#WithinLineRhymesAndOtherCrimes

The Egress From Regress

On creativity
And relativity
If everyone else is moving back
Standing still takes up their slack.
#TheFutureWasYesterday

When Adoration Was Part Of Education

Once upon a time
Before reason or rhyme
Students would bring their teacher an apple
In return for ideas with which they'd grapple.
#IWasOneOfThoseStudents

::

A redundant colon
That has become swollen
And it also insisted
On being twisted.

As we age
Bodily idiosyncrasies engage
And then we find
It's not just about losing our mind.
#DysfunctionAndDatFunction

Blowing Smoke

Intelligence
Or flatulence
When either come to pass
It's simply more classical gas.
#WithApologiesToMasonWilliams

Rumble Still Is In

As a teen I would mumble
Now I'm prone to grumble
When there's a buzz I bumble
Then fall from my perch in a tumble.
#ASightForSoreEars