Five ways small colleges can respond to MOOCs

The chorus of people proclaiming that MOOCs will destroy traditional higher education is long and getting louder.  MSN Money wonders if they portend "The End of Higher Education as We Know It." The excellent education analyst Kevin Carey suggests that they present both a solution to access and cost challenges of higher education.  And venture capitalists, world-renowned universities, and star faculty members are lending their wealth, fame, and wisdom to the creation of businesses that create, market, and manage MOOCs.

If MOOCs achieve their wildest dreams--huge enrollments of students taking courses for free that grant college credit, then  institutions that charge large tuitions will be hurt.  But MOOCs are far from those dreams.  While a few courses have massive enrollments, a tiny proportion of students complete them.  The quality of the course content is uncertain, and the pedagogical assumptions behind them are flawed, at least if what we think we know about the power of active learning is true. MOOCs offer individual courses, not well thought-through curricula that lead to higher-level learning outcomes. And MOOCs don't have a business model that works for the simple reason that free things don't earn the money required to create them.  In this, MOOCs are not unlike shareware and social networks--both things that consumers can use for free but which seek to earn income.

It is here--at the intersection of MOOCs' prominence and their weakness, that small colleges who wish to engage with MOOCs (as opposed to ignoring them or demeaning their popularity) can act.  So the question is how small colleges can respond to MOOCs in a way that takes advantage of their prominence and the expertise of small colleges.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Provide academic support to students who enroll in MOOCs. Any traditional institution that lost more than 90 percent of the students in a class before it ended would shut down.  And so small colleges have figured out how to ensure that students stay enrolled, not just for a single course but through to graduation.  They do so by providing academic support--discussions, tutoring, advising, and evaluation to track student learning.  MOOC students who are serious about learning would be anxious to have this sort of support.
• Provide feedback, evaluation, and improvements for MOOCs. One of the dangers of using famous faculty to teach MOOCs is that famous faculty get their fame from excellence in research, not (usually) in provoking student learning.  MOOC providers (and other edtech entrepreneurs) have not tended to study student learning or to design their work based on measurable outcomes. In other words, online providers of education haven't given attention to quality control.  Colleges and universities have spent the better part of the past twenty years building courses to achieve certain educational outcomes.  That expertise is sorely needed in the world of MOOCs.
• Use MOOCs to fill gaps in their own curricula. Students at small colleges experience curricular gaps in three ways: the school does not offer a particular course because it lack faculty expertise in that area, courses are offered rarely so students who need to take a course can't get it, or students develop curiosity in an area where there is no course.  MOOCs could fill those gaps more easily and less expensively than hiring an adjunct, assigning overload to a faculty member, or hiring a new faculty line.  So if a student wants a course in, say, East African history, let her take a MOOC. more broadly, MOOCs could be a way to round out the curriculum for intensely focused schools.  If you run a music conservatory, for example, use MOOCs to fill out general education.
• Use MOOCs for remediation. A large proportion of college students need remediation which institutions supply by offering lots of sections of college algebra, for example.  The quality of these courses vary among instructors (often adjuncts), and the cost to the institution (faculty lines, classroom space, etc.) and to students (uncertain quality, the need to repeat, slowing the path to graduation) make remediation a big issue.  But if an institution selected a MOOC in, say, remedial English (or built a curriculum in math through the Khan Academy's YouTube lessons) consistency of content would improve, students could progress at their own speed, and the cost to the institution would go down. 
• Use MOOCs to assure the quality of prior knowledge. Colleges already accept massive amounts of transfer credit.  The quality of some of it is very good.  But other sources--concurrent enrollment, for example--provide prior learning of uncertain quality.  Add to this fact that ever more students will come to traditional colleges with credit from for-profit universities, corporate training, and military service.  Many schools deny students credit for that experience.  but a school which wanted to welcome students who had learned in those settings might ask prospective students to work through a MOOC for free, and use their success in the MOOC as a  rationale for granting credit for prior learning.  MOOCs thus become a real tool for access to higher education, not a tool for avoiding the wisdom built into enrolling full-time in a college.

Does competency-based education shorten time to graduation?

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Mandy Zatynski reports on a hearing of the House Education and Workforce subcommittee about the cost-effectiveness of higher education.  There, she reports that Teresa Lubbers, Indiana's Commissioner of Higher Ed testified that competency-based education, particularly of the sort offered at Western Governor's University, shortens the time to graduation.

I am a fan of competency-based education. Westminster offers three degree programs, a Bachelor's of Business Administration, an MBA, and a soon-to-be Masters in Strategic Communication, that are all competency-based.  Student learning in these programs is phenomenal.  Students feel like they have learned deeply, and that what they learned is more relevant to their lives than what they would have learned in the traditional classroom. And where we have been able to measure learning outcomes side-by-side with traditional programs, students in our competency-based program learn at least as much as students in our traditional programs. But these programs do not, by their nature, lead students to graduate more quickly.  


The same is true for Western Governor's University.  Their IPEDS data is quite clear on this point. Only 18% of students who entered in 2005-2006 had graduated in six years, and only 25% had transferred elsewhere.  No matter how you look at it, at WGU, competency-based education  does not lead to quicker graduation, regardless of what Teresa Lubbers says.


This isn't surprising, given the students who enroll at WGU.  All courses are taught on-line, and most students are non-traditional.  Many stop and start, or take more time to complete classes because of work, family, etc.  This is WGU's market, and based on the students I know who attend there, the approach to learning matches their lives.


The take home is simple.  WGU fills a niche.  Their academic programs are well-designed; their organizational structure innovative.  But if you want to improve time-to-graduation, you've got to look elsewhere.

Thanksgiving week odds and ends

I've been away for the past week, visiting California and my oldest daughter who is 2/3 of the way through her first semester. A few thoughts piled up. Here they are, in no certain order (and without any promise of value):

1. Disneyland and the first-semester of college can have the same impact on teenagers. We spent two days at Disneyland along with about 20 members of my wife's family. Disneyland is an amplifier. It heightens things for good or ill. Food costs more, crowds are more crowdy, fun is funner, anxiety is more troubling. Everyone knows this. But being there with my college-age daughter, and talking with her about her feelings about college, reminded me that college, especially in the first year, does exactly the same thing. Disagreements escalate, uncertainty becomes paralysis, confidence becomes certainty. What should colleges do with the amplification?

2. Faculty need to make more mistakes. Neil Postman suggested in The End of Education that faculty could improve student learning by making mistakes on purpose when teaching. Students would learn by truth-testing their faculty. Just before break I gave my students an assignment but with the rubric for another assignment included. Interesting responses from my students--a couple tried mightily to fit their assignment into the wrong rubric. A couple pointed out my error. But most went along with the assignment as if nothing was wrong...

3. Student evaluations of faculty may become obsolete. As faculty focus more on student learning, student evaluations of faculty may make less sense. This is especially the case when faculty use student-centered pedagogies--problem-based learning, collaborative learning, etc. The student evaluation hardly touches at all on the work faculty do in these settings.

4. Gratitude is much more important for learning than we credit it for. Or perhaps more correctly, ingratitude impedes learning. Ingratitude locates obstacles outside of the learner--I can't learn because of the teacher, or the course, or the subject, or the school--and because those external obstacles can't be controlled, learning dies.

Thanks to all of you.
gary

What goes in the backpack?

So what gets put in a school-in-a-backpack backpack? The answer turns, I guess, on what you think about the connection between curriculum and real life. I can imagine three options: a laptop, a journal, and a toolbox.

You take a laptop if your driving focus is to give students access to information from outside their experience. From there, curriculum goes one of two ways--to internet-based research, or to curriculum delivered via computer, and customized to respond to a student's particular knowledge and confidence. (On this approach, SatoriEdu is doing some interesting work.)

You take a journal if you think that your student's experience is rich enough that the main thing that a teacher can do is help students uncover their learning through reflection and analysis. This approach has a long tradition behind it. (When John Dewey visited Brigham Young academy in 1901 he suggested that "homework" was the work that students normally did at home--cleaning, cooking, farming, etc. Students went to school to learn from their homework, not vice versa as it is today.)

You take a toolbox if you want students to assemble or create solutions to real-world problems. Over the past couple of days I've been learning about synthetic biology--a branch of biology in which scientists try to create new living things (bacteria, viruses, etc.) to solve health or social needs. One interesting outgrowth of synthetic biology is iGem, a project in which groups of undergraduates work through a summer with faculty oversight to create new organisms out of a registry of component parts. The registry is essentially a toolbox.

What else goes in the backpack?