If you weren’t at THATCamp Prime or weren’t watching us live on UStream, you can now either listen to Digital Campus Episode 88 or even (shudder) watch the recording of the live broadcast. Unlike most episodes of the podcast, in this one we largely took questions from the audience, so it was even more free wheeling than usual. Is that good? Is that bad? You decide.
Digital Campus Live
June 21st, 2012The Online Course Tsunami
June 20th, 2012Higher education has been all aflutter the past year or so about the transformative potential of online and/or distance education mediated through digital media. While the buzz on this topic has waxed and waned since the late 1990s (Web 0.1 for those old enough to remember), now there is some big money behind some of the more interesting attempts to harness that potential.
Nine million dollars in start up grants from the Gates Foundation really puts some oomph behind several of these efforts, most notably the MITx initiative. There is much to be admired in these projects, but it’s less clear to me what this all means for the humanities in general and history in particular. Yes, the MOOCs of the world are drawing in tens of thousands of virtual students for courses such as how to build your own search engine, and the Kahn Academy claims more than 160,000,000 lessons delivered thus far. But the vast majority of the content out there from these types of platforms is in the STEM disciplines.
If you are a professor at almost any college or university in the United States, you know that there are plenty of people on your campus, just as there are on mine, who believe that online/distance education is the future business model for higher education. It’s certainly an attractive one at a place like George Mason, because we are completely out of classroom space, with no relief in sight in the next decade, so if we could convince our students to just stay the heck away from campus, our space problems would be solved.
At this moment, in June 2012, I have no opinion one way or the other about whether online/distance education is really the future of our industry, or like Cold Fusion, it is and always will be the future solution to all our problems.
What I do know at this moment is that no one I’ve been able to find is engaged in serious assessment of the learning that is happening through these courses, especially as compared to other deliver models, whether they are traditional classroom models, or hybrid online/classroom delivery. Given that universities are already pumping untold millions of dollars in the rush to develop these sorts of courses and degrees, and new start ups are popping up almost weekly, it seems to me that we ought to try to figure out just what, if anything, is changing in our students’ learning.
After all, learning is the goal of teaching the last time I checked.
The good news is that, at least in the history business, we know something — a lot actually — about how to assess what and how our students are learning about the past. Those assessment models are not dependent on a particular delivery system and so they can quite easily be applied to the new courses/degrees that are surely to result from the Online Course Tsunami coming ashore on the historians’ coast.
My hope is that one of these big money foundations out there (Bill, Melinda, are you listening?) will set aside at least a little bit of their millions for some serious, scientific assessment of learning gains through these new course delivery systems. Then we’ll have a much better sense for how much time, effort, and emotional investment we ought to make in these models.
THATCamp (Day 2d)
June 16th, 2012The final session of the day was on disruptive pedagogy. And although my name was in the program as the discussion starter, it’s not me! Heather Munro Prescott was the person to propose this session and so I’m just here because, obviously, it’s a subject I have a lot of interest in.
Heather began with a discussion of her public history graduate course and the challenges she faces teaching that course. Given those challenges, she asked why she was spending all this time organizing the course if students know something already when they walk in? She also discussed setting up a grad course as an “un-course” rather than the conventional course.
One person there raised the question of whether or not the idea of disruption is idiosyncratic to a particular institution’s student population? In other words, if you have a population that is creative or not, or rules followers or not. Another worried about student evaluations and how a loss of structure might effect that. It’s a good reminder to me that not everyone has the same tolerance for what we might call “teaching risk” that I, or Mark Sample, have. It’s also a good reminder that students need to know, clearly, what the expectations are in a course, regardless of how disruptive or deformative our pedagogy are.
Much of what people were circling around was coming up with assignments that challenge students’ expectations of what was going to happen in a class.
I raised the question of the tension between the tried and true and the disruptive. This question, I think, needs to be at the heart of any conversation about how much “breaking” is appropriate in our approach to teaching. Not everything should be broken just for the sake of breaking. But, as I have argued many times, I think a lot of the conventional approach to history teaching ought to be thrown out and started over from scratch (for a reasoned dissent, read the comments on this post).
There is definitely interest in this idea of disruption. Whether it will go somewhere as a project or not remains to be seen.
THATCamp (Day 2c)
June 16th, 2012In the first afternoon session I sat in on “Technology and International Scholarly Partnerships Across the Digital Divide” [facilitator: Peter Alegi]. I am interested in this topic, both because I am one of the founding editors of Global Perspectives on Digital History and because I am a trustee of the Romanian-American Foundation, which is spending a lot of money to promote the transformation of education and research in Romania (but in a more connected, more global context).
Topics discussed: “digital imperialism” by the global north at the global south; dealing with chaotic situations at the other end (Tunisia); how underrepresented groups are connecting to digital resources; how to fund these sorts of collaboration, especially since so much of the money is locally designated — our citizens only; should projects include a for pay version/service to help sustain it; how to make sure funds, if available to local partners, are actually spent on what they were assigned to; using projects such as these to help build local capacity to apply for funds; how local partners get “credit” for doing digital work in their local contexts (complicated enough in the US as it is).