I felt that I had to respond to this negative comment on online learning:
Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.
Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.
Goodness knows, I’ve thrashed Coursera enough but this have to keep reminding myself that it is still experimental. Professors have had almost a hundred years to teach yet the number of times I have encountered a memorable professor or a memorable lecture - is, well - one or two out of maybe eight years of college and grad school. After all, aren’t most professors like … anyone, anyone?
But in 6 months of Coursera, I have already had one extremely memorable course - a course I had no previous knowledge in and yet found to be extremely challenging and the end of the course left me with a short void. In particular, this farewell email excerpt from Prof. Ronen Plesser’s Astronomy course is the most heartfelt and rewarding experience I have ever had as a student [emphasis below mine]:
You are also deserving of my deepest thanks for sticking with me through what has been a challenging course. I set some high expectations for all of us when designing the class, in terms of the level at which I wanted to present material and ask you to - as someone put it on the forums - "think around" with the concepts. To the extent that this has succeeded it is largely a result of the effort you put into it, individually as well as collectively.
This was my first experience with online education, and I have to admit I was quite surprised by the effectiveness of the discussion forums. A great deal of teaching and learning happened on these, the great majority of it involving students and not staff. All of you who contributed to this by asking great questions, sharing your insights, adding extra bits of information, or participating in the common struggle to master tough material have played a huge part in making this class a pleasure to teach and, I hope, a positive experience for students. For this, too, I thank you.
As you probably gathered, the lecture videos were produced more-or-less "live" during the class. This flies in the face of accepted wisdom on best practices in the medium, which suggests that all class materials be prepared well before launch. This had a cost to all of us - the occasional (or more than occasional) errata, the mis-statements or errors on slides or in autograder settings, even the omission of entire segments either because I forgot them or because I ran out of time. But in hindsight I think it was a wise decision. As the course developed, I found myself, somewhat to my surprise, developing an attachment to the class and the students despite never having met any of you. I think this is largely due to a real class spirit that developed through the discussion forums. This meant that while technically I was lecturing to a laptop, in my mind I could envision actual people, my class, listening. To me, this makes a huge difference. In suffering the imperfections, you allowed me to learn how to use the medium more effectively while giving me the sense of a human connection that is, I think, so vital to teaching. I had not expected this to happen in an online class, but it made it possible for me to teach with the kind of focus that only such a connection can sustain. If you compare the first weeks of the class to the last ones, I think you will see this happening.
I also have to address the following item that the author (a UVA professor) pointed out:
A few weeks ago our president, Teresa A. Sullivan, was summarily dismissed and then summarily reinstated by the university’s board of visitors. One reason for her dismissal was the perception that she was not moving forward fast enough on Internet learning. Stanford was doing it, Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. too. But Virginia, it seemed, was lagging. Just this week, in fact, it was announced that Virginia, along with a number of other universities, signed on with a company called Coursera to develop and offer online classes.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the author feels threatened and is dissing online education because he cannot get a handle on how to best use the technology. Agreed that online is not always the best medium and humanities is probably one (of numerous) areas where there is a great deal of work to be done. I would point him to Coursera’s History course taught none other by UVA’s Philip Zelikow. This is another course that I am enjoying having not taken History at all. The multiple choice format of the quizzes leaves me wanting more. But what’s interesting here is that Prof. Zelikow seems to be using the Coursera platform to supplement his UVA course. And that is a course I would like be in. (Also UVA's Louis Bloomfield's Coursera course on How Things Work is plenty fun so far!)
And that should be what every professor should aim to do - make online and face-to-face teaching enjoyable for both - the student and the teacher. For the most part I would say that most of my "live" learning experiences have been enjoyable for neither.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
The benefits of an office job
- Snow days like today. Federal government is closed because of Snowquester.
- If I injure myself - sprained ankle or dislocated shoulder I can still do some work. No need to use sick days and even get paid unlike other service or construction jobs.
- Tele-work
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Can you be addicted to online learning?
There has been addiction to food, sex, TV, video games, and the list goes on. Is online learning an addiction? Since signing up for Coursera I’ve been going so busy with courses that I’ve barely had time do anything else - blog for instance.
Or is this another form of technology addiction rather than learning per se?
Or is this another form of technology addiction rather than learning per se?
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
How technology is undermining the MOOC experience
Frustrating weirdness on Coursera due to fragmentation of browser and OS-es:
- HTML5 videos do not work on Chromium running on Ubuntu 12.10
- HTML5 videos do not work on Google Chrome running on Android on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (older version of Android, perhaps) but works on Google Chrome on Nexus 7
- HTML5 videos work on Google Chrome and Chromium on Windows 7
- Adobe flash movies running on Firefox via YouTube does not have controls for playback speed. I tend to watch the lectures on higher speeds.
- No rewind buttons! Moving the slider around sometimes causes the video to reload which takes a lot longer than the few seconds that I wanted to rewind back to.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
How Jeff Lacker really understands unemployment
“It’s very unfair to think of me as not caring about the unemployed,” he said. “It just seems to me that there are real impediments, that just throwing money at the economy is unlikely to solve the problems that are keeping a 55-year-old furniture worker from finding a good competitive job.”
…
His favorite escape is driving a Porsche Boxster racecar; a model sits on a shelf at his office.
File this under ideological economists who are in the top 5% who work with their guts rather than history, models or data. For the record I fall under the same category as well since I too believe this:
As he sees it, the Fed’s current effort to reduce unemployment by purchasing mortgage-backed securities crossed both lines. He sees little evidence that it will help to create jobs. And he says that buying mortgage bonds is a form of fiscal policy, because it lowers interest rates for a particular kind of borrower.
But as noted:
That sense of caution is deeply frustrating to proponents of the Fed’s recent efforts. The economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer wrote in a paper published last month that such pessimism about the power of monetary policy is “the most dangerous idea in Federal Reserve history.”
“The view that hubris can cause central bankers to do great harm clearly has an important element of truth,” wrote the Romers, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley. “But the hundred years of Federal Reserve history show that humility can also cause large harms.”
From the NYT.
…
His favorite escape is driving a Porsche Boxster racecar; a model sits on a shelf at his office.
File this under ideological economists who are in the top 5% who work with their guts rather than history, models or data. For the record I fall under the same category as well since I too believe this:
As he sees it, the Fed’s current effort to reduce unemployment by purchasing mortgage-backed securities crossed both lines. He sees little evidence that it will help to create jobs. And he says that buying mortgage bonds is a form of fiscal policy, because it lowers interest rates for a particular kind of borrower.
But as noted:
That sense of caution is deeply frustrating to proponents of the Fed’s recent efforts. The economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer wrote in a paper published last month that such pessimism about the power of monetary policy is “the most dangerous idea in Federal Reserve history.”
“The view that hubris can cause central bankers to do great harm clearly has an important element of truth,” wrote the Romers, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley. “But the hundred years of Federal Reserve history show that humility can also cause large harms.”
From the NYT.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Coursera dreams and details
I listened raptly to Daphne Koller’s TED talk and was simultaneously inspired and appalled by the difference between its idealistic dreams and reality. One compelling aspect of MOOC was instant feedback -- to facilitate learning -- and how it relates to the way homeworks/quizzes are implemented.
However, the implementation has so far been extremely inconsistently across different courses and in some cases have deviated from the ideals envisioned. Feedback runs the gamut from too little to literally giving you the answers. This fine if the quizzes don’t count towards a grade or certificate but is totally bogus if doing so enables me to earn a perfect grade easily.
For instance, in Scott Page’s Model Thinking class the quizzes count towards the grade and gives the student multiple attempts (five) to try to get it right. This is somewhat good, I guess, but the feedback is literally the answer! I expect feedback to be something in the order of clues e.g. “the relevant concept here is …. check lecture …. etc.” Or if the answer is given then the following attempt would present a different question - but it doesn’t. In theory I could get a perfect score if I just filled everything in with the feedback. In Lada Adamic’s Social Network course, we get 100 attempts which is quite interesting given that it is somewhat balanced by very cryptic feedbacks with no indication of whether you’ve answered the question correctly. In what the Economist is reporting as the most popular Coursera course with over 180,000 students, we get 1000 attempts on exercises which do not count towards a grade and exams that do count. This course meets with the ideals - we get two attempts (I think that it might be just the right number - something like 2 or 3) with instant feedback on what we did wrong and then on the second attempt we get a different set of questions.
The problem with Coursera and its franchise approach is that very little is being done to streamline the experience - I guess in many ways this is like going to a real college. We may all get to go to Harvard online but the the course could also suck just like at the real world version of Harvard. I am hoping that this myriad approaches are some kind of randomized experiment to see which one works better but I am doubtful that this is so.
Again, Khan Academy has the right idea and adaptive testing is the way to go but one thing professors seem to hate doing is to create test banks. This is one reason why text books from companies like Pearson are so expensive but at the same time appealing to professors. The questions have already been prepared.
However, the implementation has so far been extremely inconsistently across different courses and in some cases have deviated from the ideals envisioned. Feedback runs the gamut from too little to literally giving you the answers. This fine if the quizzes don’t count towards a grade or certificate but is totally bogus if doing so enables me to earn a perfect grade easily.
For instance, in Scott Page’s Model Thinking class the quizzes count towards the grade and gives the student multiple attempts (five) to try to get it right. This is somewhat good, I guess, but the feedback is literally the answer! I expect feedback to be something in the order of clues e.g. “the relevant concept here is …. check lecture …. etc.” Or if the answer is given then the following attempt would present a different question - but it doesn’t. In theory I could get a perfect score if I just filled everything in with the feedback. In Lada Adamic’s Social Network course, we get 100 attempts which is quite interesting given that it is somewhat balanced by very cryptic feedbacks with no indication of whether you’ve answered the question correctly. In what the Economist is reporting as the most popular Coursera course with over 180,000 students, we get 1000 attempts on exercises which do not count towards a grade and exams that do count. This course meets with the ideals - we get two attempts (I think that it might be just the right number - something like 2 or 3) with instant feedback on what we did wrong and then on the second attempt we get a different set of questions.
The problem with Coursera and its franchise approach is that very little is being done to streamline the experience - I guess in many ways this is like going to a real college. We may all get to go to Harvard online but the the course could also suck just like at the real world version of Harvard. I am hoping that this myriad approaches are some kind of randomized experiment to see which one works better but I am doubtful that this is so.
Again, Khan Academy has the right idea and adaptive testing is the way to go but one thing professors seem to hate doing is to create test banks. This is one reason why text books from companies like Pearson are so expensive but at the same time appealing to professors. The questions have already been prepared.
Creating a slideshow in Ubuntu Unity desktop
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)