a thaumaturgical compendium

Howard Rheingold recently tweeted something that plugged into a question I have been mulling over for a while:

If I taught a truncated online version of Social Media CoLab for 6 weeks, no accreditation, what would students pay?

In particular, I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to relocate a small grad seminar to the local Panera Bread. I was struck by the fact that by doing so, I improved a lot on the “classroom” experience (as it has in the past when I taught a senior seminar at a local brewpub–though this introduces some other issues). We had more comfortable seating, better and more convenient food and snacks, a better net connection, and parking steps from our classroom. There was a Barnes & Noble next door, as well as some of the other big box shops within easy reach. No, we didn’t have a white board or data projector, but that was survivable–we could use paper or shared documents on our computers. What did we need the university for?

Unneeded

When it comes to online teaching, the question is even more pointed. I am a thorn in the side of my online division because I don’t like to use Blackboard. I’ve yet to find a faculty member who likes Blackboard, but I get a lot of “it’s better than nothing.” I’m actually not sure that’s true. But in any case, there are better tools available (many for freee!) out on the wild, woolly web.

There is the issue of the library, and our expensive subscriptions. Hard to get around this one, except to note that there are an increasing move toward open scholarship that provides good text-like material and opens up research. And, frankly, students rarely use the library anyway, unfortunately. And at least in NYC, our public libraries are pretty decent for academic research.

University administrators will add that they provide all sorts of other things beyond classrooms and libraries: dorms, a registrar, health and counseling, faculty support, specialized labs, administration of grants, and the like. What they won’t tell you is that university administrators are paid far better than faculty are for what they do. I won’t dismiss the amount of work that administrators do, from faculty administrators like department chairs all the way up. But I am pretty sure that we could do without that work.

The key issue, then, is accreditation. If accreditation could be based entirely on what students know when they get out, we would have no problem. Unfortunately, accrediting bodies are interested in process as much as outcome. And the question on many students’ minds is “can I get credit for this?” I can picture a peer-review system that would “certify” particular teachers, courses, and even programs, entirely outside of the orbit of the university, though the question of “what peers?” is always at the forefront. I have a feeling that in a decade or so, this idea will seem commonplace. Another alternative model is the creation of an institute (in some form) that can borrow credibility, and even faculty and for-credit course offerings, from a friendly university. This is pretty common for summer institutes offered at the graduate level. Finally, although there are issues with certification from corporate universities, I can see a Panera U (or, more likely, a Google U) building their brand through an educational arm.

Professor Pay-per-play

I am not about to complain about what I get paid. I choose to do this job, and the perks outweigh the minor inconveniences. My paycheck is better than that of the average worker in the US, but far worse than the pay for many (doctors, lawyers) with less specialized training than I have. So, I don’t want this to sound like whining about my salary–it’s not. If that were the primary issue, I would muster out, amakudari style, into industry, or supplement more heavily with consulting.

Yet, the question remains: when I am creating much of the content for students and engaging in teaching, what part of their tuition dollar do I deserve? As a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, my salary and benefits make up about 45% of what the students are paying for a course. (Some quick Googling backs this up as a reasonable approximation of the percentage of the operating budget coming our way as faculty.) At that rate, I am probably way, way ahead of the average prof, though that’s always hard to gauge. I mean, when I was teaching an undergraduate course of 350 students, even at a public school that percentage was a much lower proportion of the tuition dollar.

So, what if we were to pay the professor directly. I can offer you the class I teach at Quinnipiac at half-price. Heck, you bring cash in an envelope to each class, and if you decide to drop out, you just stop coming/paying. Maybe I give you a discount for paying all up front. This sounds terrible to many. Professors touching money?! But it is all too easy to forget that education is big business, and that business is built on the work of the profs.

But then what of open education

Of course, you don’t have to pay for my online course, anyone can take it. Really, if you pay Quinnipiac, you are mainly paying for official credit from the university, indicating that you have taken the course. Unaccredited universities lack the kind of reputational boost that most people want out of a degree. It is easy to argue that I can only do this because I am employed by a university.

It’s true. I have a family to feed. I can’t just give courses for fun. I would, of course. Even if I were driving a truck, or whatever, I would still probably want an opportunity to teach. But since there are not a lot of openings for “public non-school teachers,” I would have to have a day job, or win the lottery.

I suppose I could use free courses to flog my book. Buy the book for $16, and you can be a part of my course. Unlock the director’s cut of the book, or something. But the truth is I would like to make the book as free as the course. In fact, if anything, I would rather it went the other way: publish the book for free, and collect some income for teaching. But somewhere in this equation, there needs to be a little money coming in.

Begging and Advertising

As much as I hate to admit it, I think the most likely model is not student-pays, but advertiser-pays. Textbook Media is one company providing ad-supported textbooks. Why not sponsored courses. Big banners on the blackboard. A short commercial at the outset. There are some obvious niche advertising opportunities here.

Does that make you a little queasy? Me too. But I suspect that this is because universities still manage to hold a sheen that textbook publishers may have once had, but have lost. Given the kind of market pressures that universities now face, the intrusion of ads may become more tolerable.

Those ads could take several forms. Maybe Panera does pay teachers to lecture and hold discussions. Or do teachers put AdSense on their online materials. Or movie theaters handle the tickets and give profs 75% of the take, making the rest on popcorn. At least for the equivalent of large lecture classes, advertising support makes sense. For seminars in which there is give and take, it makes more sense for people to pay directly for a coordinator. The specialized skills of making discussion work, along with expert-level subject knowledge, remain important marketable skills.

Here is the presentation I’ll be giving in the morning. Yes, I’m still playing with the “screencast-as-slides” approach: ooh, distracting motion!

Update: And here is a short outline of tips I handed around:
phases.

You may have noticed I have abandoned the idea of going all audio here. I’ve also decided not to echo every post from my grad courses here, but instead to do more periodic posts. And the periodicity will be rather long, since this semester’s classes are set up on a two-week cycle, in order to prepare for the shift from 16-week semesters down to 7-week courses. I know: yikes.

Today, allow me to introduce you to the Introduction to Interactive Communication Course, designed to be the first course people take when they come into the program. As former students know, I’ve taught some initial version of the “first graduate course” for about seven years now, in three different graduate programs. I like it because it is always, in some way, a survey, and it gives me the chance to try to set a trajectory for students’ graduate programs. I don’t know how successful I am at that, though, since many students end up thinking of it as that strange anomalous course we took at the beginning of the program. In fact, now that we are shifting the program, I think we need to be thinking about the curriculum again to make sure we are covering all our bases and not being more redundant than absolutely necessary, but that’s fodder for another post.

Like most of my grad courses, this one is blog-centric. The main course blog for the course may be found here, along with the start of a blogroll as students get their blogs set up. The assignment for the initial two-week “module,” may be found here, and includes a longish introductory talk and a shorter “nuts & bolts” overview of the syllabus. As the syllabus notes, the course provides a bit of a sampling of what the program is about, though the focus is less on design (found in more of the courses) and more on some form of overall social understanding of what interactive communication is and what it does.

As always, I’m trying something new with the classes this semester. (At some point, I’ll write about my experiments with Facebook as courseware last semester.) At the suggestion of an instructional designer, I’m trying self-assessments for each unit, to hopefully be able to get a better read on what students are getting out of the course–or not getting out of it–at each stage. I’ll let you know how that goes. Be sure to check out the participants’ blogs, once we get rolling, and I will likely point you to posts I think are interesting along the way.

Many (scores, actually) moons ago, I happily volunteered to write an article for the “Blogs for Learning” Nicole Ellison was putting together. I actually wrote this almost a year ago, while in Aruba, and then inconveniently forgot about it entirely. Blame it on the Balashi. Just ran into her again in Vancouver, and sent it along, and now it appears at the site.

Of course, these days, a “large class” is one that grows to 30 students, thanks to my switch to teaching a smaller private university. But I hope some of the hints that appear in the short article can be of help, especially if you are new to using blogs in lecture classes. Here’s the beginning:

In this short article, I hope to provide some examples of failures and successes in managing blogging in large classes, and some indication of where this might go in the future. Like many people, I started blogging in small senior-level seminars. This was in 1999, and at the time there were not really blogging systems available, and like many other people, I had to write my own. What I saw as a very simple way to replace email lists and bulletin board (forum) systems turned out to be an extraordinarily effective way to encourage conversation among students, and I have used blogs in most of my classes in the years since. Today, blogging in a small class is a fairly easy way to get started for both students and teachers.

And here’s the rest.

Kevin Lim is one of 20 bloggers up for a $10,000 annual blogging scholarship. Many of the other blogs are also quite good, but Kevin–who is a former student of mine–has the best one, and deserves to win. If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I’m a regular reader of Kevin’s blog, and often find interesting stuff there that I wouldn’t otherwise find.

Unfortunately, it looks like they are deciding who to award it to based on the inherently flawed internet poll. Not only is the willingness to vote a bad indicator of real popularity (if popularity, rather than quality, is their major criterion), let alone quality, but there is far too much opportunity for fraud. Not that I am impugning any of the finalists, only indicating that it’s a bad way to judge things. Right now, for example, the number of votes cast for each blog has no relationship to the Technorati ranking or PageRank, which suggests something is fishy. Moreover, it’s clear that more popular topics are going to win out over more academic topics in broad popularity.

But, who am I to complain, since I encourage my students to court an audience. Good luck to Kevin, and to the other entrants. And bravo to Collegescholarships.org for offering money to student bloggers. Yes, it’s a commercial for them, but this is marketing I can get behind.

I admit it: I thought DOPA was too dopey to be very worried about. After all, Net Neutrality seemed to me to be more important in the long run, and more embattled. I never imagined that DOPA would make it very far, and so I wasn\’t worried about it. As Will Richardson notes the anti-social networking bill has passed in the House of Representatives. The vote was 410-15. My response is aligned with the American Library Association\’s: what are these guys smoking?< ?a>

So, time to call your senator. Really. Schools already are too much like prisons. At least, social networking provides a bit of escape, and a chance for students to be proactive. At most, it encourages self-driven learning, collaboration, and creativity. Let\’s not let our congresscritters add more blinders to students eyes.

In particular, I\’m going to be calling Hillary Clinton\’s office to make clear that if she expects to get any of the under-40 (yeah, yeah, I had another birthday–and I won\’t be part of this group too much longer–but 40 is the new 30) vote in future elections, going after social networking is the wrong way to do it. And I promise, when it comes to 2008, I will remember her vote on this issue, and I will be very noisy about it.

I’m a bit behind the curve on this one. I’ve done the standard 15 minute presentation, but it took me a lot longer to put together than I had expected. The topic: the learning blogosphere. I’ve glanced as some of the other offerings for VR@RL, and this is a bit on the lightweight side, but I hope there is something there of interest.

You can also download a copy of the presentation in WMV (18 Mb) or MOV (35 Mb) formats.

Update: By popular request, the video (split into two halves) is now up on YouTube: