Of course, there are issues here. For one thing, this kind of education is mostly one-way. Yes, there are ways of feeding back. A lucky student might be able to grab a sliver of the teacher’s attention, but generally, it’s about the passing of knowledge from one-to-many. Also, students in many cases get together in groups and discuss the work–building on one another’s knowledge. But this isn’t the same as the circle around the sage, the guided conversation that has gone on as long as we have had schools.

Transforming teaching from the kind of conversational learning community that is–at least ideally–found in the university classroom to this sort of massive version is more than just switching media. It means that the teacher has to shift the structure and format of her work. In many cases, this means moving to text, but it also means framing the work more didactically, shaping ideas into units and subunits that can be consumed in little bites.

And this can be amazingly advantageous to many students; students who can’t necessarily get into a classroom each week because of the expense of tuition, because they have full-time jobs and maybe families. Yes, this could potentially be a less rich form of learning than a classroom, but it can reach people who might otherwise never get at that education. It can be provided relatively cheaply, and often for free.

Now some of these are absolute crap. No, check that, I would argue that most are absolute crap. And some have called for their elimination because of that–and a return to more traditional forms of face-to-face learning. The response is natural, and especially when presented with some of these weak examples, it’s clear why they might want to do away with them altogether.

But here’s the key. Many of those who engage in this massified version of learning find their way into the more traditional classroom, or maybe even new forms of learning communities we haven’t even thought of. In other words, although this new form may replace some of the traditional classroom learning, every indication is that there are opportunities for synergy between traditional forms of learning and leveraging new media. There have been calls to move away from massification of learning, and as a person who is interested in networked approaches, I find sympathies with this. But I think a much more reasonable approach is to ask how we can continue to combine these largely “broadcast” models to help enhance what we do in the traditional face-to-face classroom.

So, I say, let’s keep up with this book-writing thing. It might turn out to actually be worthwhile.

I want to be able to argue that online courses are as good as their offline counterparts, but it’s difficult, because we don’t really know that. And this is for a lot of reasons.

The UoP Effect

First, if traditional and elite universities had been the originators of successful online courses and degrees, or if they had promoted those successes better (since I suspect you can find some pretty substantial successes reaching back at least three decades), we wouldn’t have the stigma of the University of Phoenix and its kin. For many, UoP is synonymous with online education, particularly in these parts (i.e., Phoenix).

Is UoP that bad? I don’t know. All I have to judge them on is people I’ve met with UoP degrees (I was not at all impressed), and what I’ve heard from students. What I do know is that they spend a lot of money on advertising and recruiting, and not very much money on faculty, which to me suggests that it is a bad deal.

Many faculty see what UoP and even worse for-profit start-ups are doing and rightly perceive it as a pretty impoverished model for higher education. They rightly worry that if their own university becomes known for online education, it will carry the same stigma a University of Phoenix degree does.

The Adjuncts

At ASU, as with many other research universities, the online courses are far more likely to be taught by contingent faculty rather than core tenure-track faculty, and as a result the students are more likely to end up with the second-string. I’ll apologize for demeaning adjuncts: I know full well that if you stack up the best teachers in any department there is a good chance that adjuncts will be among them, or even predominate. But on average, I suspect that a class taught by an adjunct instructor is simply not as good as one taught by full-time research faculty. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one is that they do not have the level of support from the university that regular faculty do.

I’ve been told by a colleague here that they wanted to teach in the online program but were told that they were “too expensive” to be employed in that capacity. And there is a model that is beginning to separate out course design, “delivery”(ugh!) or “facilitation,” and evaluation. But I suspect the main reason more full-time faculty don’t teach online is more complicated.

Online is for training, not complex topics

This used to be “Would you trust a brain surgeon with an online degree?” which is actually a pretty odd question. Brain surgeons in some ways have more in common with auto mechanics than they do with engineers, but the point was to test whether you would put yourself in mortal danger if you were claiming online education was good. Given how much surgery is now done using computer-controlled tools, I think some of that question is moot now, but there remains this idea that you can learn how to use Excel online, but you certainly cannot learn about social theory without the give-and-take of a seminar.

It’s a position that is hard for me to argue against, in large part because it’s how almost all of us in academia learned about these things. I too have been taught in that environment, and for the most part, my teaching is in that environment. As one colleague noted, teaching in a physical classroom is something they have been taught how to do and they have honed their craft; they do it really well. Why are they forced to compete for students with online courses when they know they would not be as effective a teacher in that environment?

But in many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Few schools require “traditional” faculty to teach online, though they may allow or even encourage it. As a result the best teachers are not necessarily trying to figure out how to make online learning great. We are left with the poor substitute of models coming from industry (modules teaching employees why they should wear a hair net) and the cult of the instructional designer.

Instructional Designers

As long as I’ve already insulted adjuncts, I’ll extend to instructional designers. I know a lot of brilliant ones, but the “best practices” make online education into the spoon-feeding idiot-proof nonsense that many faculty think it is. It is as if the worst of college education has been simmered until you get it down to a fine paste, and this paste can be flavored with “subject expertise.” Many are Blackboard personified.

When you receive a call–as I recently did–for proposals to change your course so that it can be graded automatically, using multiple guess exams and the like, it makes you wonder what the administration thinks good teaching is.

I am a systematizer. I love the idea of learning objectives aligned with assessments and all that jazz. But in sitting through a seminar on Quality Matters recently, we found ourselves critiquing a course that encouraged participation on a discussion board. How did discussion align with the learning objectives? It didn’t. OK, let’s reverse engineer it. How can you come up with a learning objective, other than “can discuss matters cogently in an online forum” that encourages the use of discussion-based learning. Frankly, one of the outcomes of discussion is a personalized form of learning, a learning outcome that really comes out as “Please put your own learning outcome here, decided either before or after the class.” Naturally, such a learning outcome won’t sit well with those who follow the traditional mantra of instructional design.

QM has its heart in the right place: it provides a nice guideline for making online courses more usable, and that’s important. But what is vital is making online spaces worthy of big ideas, and not just training exercises.

The Numbers

I like the idea of the MOOC, and frankly, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of courses. It’s funny when people claim their 100-student in-person class is more engaging than a 1,000-student online course. In most cases, this is balderdash. Perhaps it is a different experience for the 10 people who sit up front and talk, but generally, big classes online are better for more students than big classes off.

Now, if you are a good teacher, chances are you do more than lecture-and-test. You get students into small groups, and they work together on meaningful projects, and the like. Guess what: that’s true of the good online instructors as well.

I think you can create courses that scale without reducing them to delivery-and-test. ASU is known for doing large-scale adaptive learning for our basic math courses, for example, and I think there are models for large-scale conversation that can be applied to scalable models for teaching. It requires decentering the instructor–something many of my colleagues are far from comfortable with–but I am convinced highly scalable models for interaction can be developed further. But scalable courses aren’t the only alternative.

I think the Semester Online project, which allows students from a consortium of universities to take specialized small classes online, is a great way to start to break the “online = big” perception. Moreover, you can make small online course materials and interactions open, leading to a kind of TOOC (Tiny Open Online Course) or a Course as a Fishbowl.

Assessment as Essential

I’ll admit, I’m not really a big part of the institutionalized assessment process. But it strikes me as odd that tenure, and our continued employment as professors, is largely based on an assessment of the quality of our research, not just how many papers we put out–though of course, volume isn’t ignored. On the other hand, in almost every department in the US, budgeting and success is based on FTEs: how can you produce more student hours with less faculty hours. Yes, there is recognition for effective and innovative teaching. But when the rubber hits the road, it’s the FTEs that count.

Critics of online education could be at least quieted a bit if there were strong structures of course and program assessment. Not just something that gets thrown out there when accreditation comes up, but something that allowed for the ongoing open assessment of what students were learning in each class. This would change the value proposition, and make us rethink a lot of our decisions. It would also provide a much better basis for deciding on teachers’ effectiveness (although the teacher is only one part of what leads to learning in a course) than student evals alone.

This wouldn’t fix everything. It may very well be that people learn better in small, in-person classrooms, but that it costs too much to do that for every student or for every course. The more likely outcome, it seems to me, is that some people learn some things better online than they do offline. If that’s the case, it would take the air out of the idea that large institutions are pursuing online education just because it is better for their bottom line.

In any case, the idea that we are making serious, long-term investments and decisions in the absence of these kinds of data strikes me as careless. Assessment doesn’t come for free, and there will be people who resist the process, but it seems like a far better metric of success than does butts in seats.

But maybe not in the way University of Virginia Rector Helen Dragas and others seem to think. For those not playing at home, the UVa recently went through a very public and destructive firing and rehiring of their president. The reason, it turned out, is that their Board of Visitors seemed to think the university should be engaging in creative destruction more quickly. Or something similar to that. They wanted more motion, faster. And MOOCs seem to be the current darling of what elite institutions can do to… well to forestall the inevitable.

To be clear, I agree with the economic doom-casters. I think we are in for a cataclysmic and rapid change in what universities do in the US. I think it will feel a bit like an echo of the newspaper collapse, and in particular, we will see a large number of universities and colleges not make it through the process. Part of that is that there will be challengers outside of traditional universities, and part of it will be that traditional universities will find ways of reaching new students. A big part will be rapid changes in how universities–particularly private universities–are funded.

But I think Siva has MOOCs wrong, in part by assuming that there is a thing called a MOOC and that it is a stable sort of a thing. In particular:

He notes:

Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference.

So, there is a question of terminology. Are Khan courses MOOCs? Let’s assume they hold together into courses and curricula, even then, are they MOOCs? Are MIT’s Open Courses MOOCs? I think calling these MOOCs makes about as much sense as calling a BOOK a MOOC. These are the open resources that make up an important part of a scalable online open course (a SOOC! I can wordify too!).

The main issue here is, I think, his insistence on this idea of “education.” I don’t think I believe in education any more. I’m not sure I believe teaching is much more than setting the stage for the important bit: learning. But he is suggesting that there is more here. That education consists of more than just learning.

But I also think it is way too early to guess at what “MOOCs” do well, when they are a moving target. The idea that calculus or chemistry instruction scales well but history or philosophy does not I think has a lot more to do with institutional structures and university politics than it does with the nature of learning these things.

I think one of the major problems universities–both the elite institutions Siva is talking about and the “less elite” universities and colleges–is that they are the wrong tool for the problem they face. They face students coming to college not well prepared by high schools. The first two years is remedial work, often outsourced to adjunct labor. And since the university wants to put its resources into the “meat” of education, the cool stuff students don’t get to until senior year, they are screwing up what is happening up to that point.

The result is Bio 101 and English 101. Courses that best reflect the worst in college education. They are either 30-student courses taught by first year grad students and/or adjuncts, or 1,200-student courses that involve showing up to class, memorizing key terms, and regurgitating them into the appropriate bubble on a Scantron form. It’s not the 20-person senior seminar on Kierkegaard’s less known knitting patterns that are the target of MOOCs, it is the Bio 101s.

Now, part of the problem is that many large state schools (and small private colleges) only have Bio 101s. I regularly had students at the senior level at SUNY Buffalo who had never written a term paper. At Quinnipiac (which boasts very few giant lectures courses), I heard something similar. As bad as Bio 101 is, it’s a cash cow for the university. If you are able to can that cash cow, all the better.

But here’s the trick, if you are able to can it, and make it available to all for free, it’s not a cash cow, it’s an open service to society. It is not the best solution to the problem (reminder: the problem is failing public secondary and primary education in the US), but it is a stop-gap that doesn’t soak the student.

At present, scaled courses follow the trajectory of scaled courses in giant lecture halls over the last two decades: lecture and multiple choice. The real innovation in MOOCs is the potential for creating networked learning communities within these massive courses. I think it’s possible we can do that. I also think it’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of time. Which means money.

So, if administrators are excited about MOOCs, I say: good. If they don’t understand the monetization of open education resources, I say: join the crowd.