A Post by Michael B. Spring
Online Education (August 21, 2008)
Online education is a topic surfacing more and more frequently in
graduate professional schools at universities like the University of
Pittsburgh. I find myself increasingly ambivalent about the topic and
about the push to "make it so." My ambivalence comes from some history.
First, while I have been programming since 1969, and have been on the
technical faculty in Information Science for more than two decades, my
academic preparation was in education, specifically in the area of
structured curriculum design. Second, for about 15 years I served as
an administrator and director of the distance education program at the
University of Pittsburgh. The unit was responsible for delivering more
than 150 courses per year to more than 2000 students across forty
departments and three schools. Third, some of my early research was on
assessing the relative quality of face to face and distance education.
I served as an evaluator for the Commission on Higher Education of the
Middle States Association with particular attention to non-traditional
institutions. Fourth, I have experimented with a number of
systems and techniques for delivering the content of my courses using
various forms of technology that are not time or space bound --
a number of online lectures are mounted on my website in various
forms of completion. This is all to say that at heart I am conversant
with the various formats and technologies for distance and
online education. Further, I would like to believe that I
understand both the theory and practice of making it work. Yet I am
resistant to some of the administrative mandates to "make it so".
The source of my resistance comes at two levels.
The first relates to focus and commitment. The second relates
the demands and rewards of technology. I discuss both of these
points below in more detail.
Focus and Commitment
While we build new dorms and classrooms at a cost
of hundreds of millions of dollars without any let up, our investment
in cyberspace is minimal at best. Yes the money spent on cyberinfrastructure
is increasing,
but seldom do we talk in terms of a five year or ten year plan in the
same way we talk about physical infrastructure. Granted, it is hard
to do plan far in advance given the rate of technological change,
but it is possible to
think about the future in terms of alternatives. I foolishly suggested to our
Chancellor almost a quarter century ago that we should make an investment
in technology equivalent to the investment we were making in buildings.
If we begin to offer all of our education in selected areas -- graduate
professional programs to select a target, we need a dramatically different
physical infrastructure complimented by a significantly larger technical
infrastructure. We also should consider that not all online education is
equal. Our model should be Amazon, or Google. What I mean to say here is
that Amazon is not just another bookstore, it is THE bookstore. Google
is not just another search engine a.k.a. library, it is THE information
source. At the risk of offending my professional colleagues, most of us
are not good enough to be an educational Google or Amazon.
There are faculty who are
good enough, and they should be the focal point of the prototypical
online courses. Again, I am reminded of some history. When I was director of
External Studies, the composite rank of the faculty was the highest teaching
undergraduates anywhere on campus. It was because we targeted full professors
as those best able to express their lectures in writing. It should be
no different with online education.
I would suggest that a strategy for mounting a successful online
education effort should be more than offer courses online. There
are at least four first targets for
online education.
-
World Class Courses offered on the internet should be designed to
capture the entire market. The goal should be to be the singular brand for
that service. The money should be invested with the aim of capturing the
world. The content, the presentation, the services, the experience should
all be first rate and designed to replace all equivalent courses offered by
any other institution. This is what I mean by the Google/Amazon model.
The fear that some have that institutions will lose students
to online education is a valid one if the online classes are
first rate. (I am not worried yet based on what I have seen.) Wouldn't it be
exciting if the offerings of institutions were cut a hundred fold while the
students in each of those offerings were increased a hundredfold. Each
institution would offer its world class signature courses and students would
have the benefit of a combined education across institutions that was
unparalleled by the offering in any other form from a single institution. Imagine
what the dynamics would be if you could have a class taught by the best faculty
and
serviced by the best PhD students with small group discussions among the
1000's of enrolled students going on 24 hours a day! I get so excited about
what such a course might be like that I can hardly contain myself, but this
is not the vision I hear being articulated and surely I don't hear plans to
allocate enough money and resources to do it. More than 20 years ago, I
worked on a project supported by the Annenberg Foundation to offer a national
telecourse that was aired on PBS. It was called Planet Earth, and it was
endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. It was the first telecourse
where the course materials were developed by an AAU institution. Our
research goal, which we accomplished, was to be able to produce a custom
textbook, which was integral, for each institution offering the course.
We were able to produce camera ready copy of each ~600 page text book in
about 2 hours. It required an hour of main frame computer time and about an hour of
printing time. Today, this is not trivial, but it could be much more easily
accomplished on a standard PC. The cost for the authoring, automation, and
execution of the 300 individual textbooks was about $200,000 -- or $600 per
master copy. (The cost of producing the video was another $1.5 million.)
Today, for my first world class online course, I would set the goal
of having a personalized set of materials for each student enrolled, and I
would work toward an adaptive system that was continually adjusting to the
particular needs and learning difficulties of the enrolled students. This
is my vision of a world class course offering online. I would guess you
could do it for well under a million dollars, and by my calculation if you
attracted 1000 students at $1000/enrollment for the best class on X in the
world, you would be at a break even. I seldom hear administrators talking
about this kind of vision.
- Nuggets would be those course offerings that can be mined from the
knowledge already well formed in faculty. Nuggets, I have long held,
abound in institutions of higher education. They are easy to imagine,
and I believe almost as easy to find. At a theoretical level, imagine
that everyone who has taught and done research for 10 or more years finds
themselves at a cocktail party where for some reason they are motivated to
explain what they know best to one of the guest's that shows a genuine
interest. They wax eloquently for about a half hour and make clear
something the guest could never have understood by reading for days.
The faculty member has thought about it long and hard, tried to explain
it to children, undergrads, and PhD students. They know it cold and
they know how to explain why it is so exciting. I believe that there
is, on average, one nugget per senior faculty member at a large research
university. Granted, some faculty will be barren, but there will be
others who have four or five. I would guess that at the University of
Pittsburgh, there are about 3000 nuggets that could be mined, and at
30 minutes a piece that is 1500 hours of stimulating and provocative
content. I would further be willing to bet that it would be relatively
cheap to mine, and that at least 150 hours could be combined to form some
new degree for people from 50-70 who want to know a little about all the
aspects of our world from first rate minds that can explain it to an
educated person.
Even if you couldn'’t make a new degree program
think of the value of such a collection for public and alumni relations.
When I suggest nugget production and mining to my colleagues,
their eyes glaze over. They don’'t know how they would sell a new
degree program, or how to do alumni relations, or why it is important
to let the public know the exciting parts of what we are doing.
(BTW, at my website, in my online lectures, I mined what I hope are
a couple of my own nuggets. My best effort is 26 minutes and 34 seconds
on the last twenty years of my research -- –
"“The Document Processing Revolution”.")
Nuggets as the low hanging fruit of online education.
- Building Blocks are those course components that are worth building
for reuse. (The argument might be somewhat reminiscent of the move to
consolidate statistics courses years ago.) This would be the topic
covered in more than one course that
others would use because they can't do it better, and maybe because it is
not what they do best. Some nominees might be "how to properly cite
references in a paper", "the assessment of statistical measures used
in a research paper", "how to make notes on a book", “measures of central
tendency and deviation." My personal take on one such topic is far less
general, but it is of growing interest to my colleagues. I have been
working on SGML and XML for more than two decades. As XML grows in
popularity and its uses increase, I am asked more and more frequently
to deliver a lecture or share my lecture notes. I suspect that from
XML, to RFID, to TEI, to NMR, to ... there are topics that we would
love to have others present for us as building blocks. I am not sure
what the economic model for this is, but I don't think it is hard to
develop one.
- Content Focused Instruction is my name for that instruction that is
good in any form because it is the content that is critical.
I argued back in the late
70's while developing state wide continuing education courses for
physicians delivered late at night or early in the morning by the
Pennsylvania Public Television Network that we should be working
toward a "television of abundance". (By the way, the TV series was
called Physician Update, and it was a joint product of Pitt, Penn State,
and Temple and it carried continuing education credit for physicians.)
My argument then, and to some extent today, was that as we move from a
few broadcast channels to hundreds of cablecast and now internet channels,
content
quality will trump production quality and we would see program selection
guided more by the content than the production value. This is a lot of
what is being done today, but I must admit that when I was talking about
low fidelity in the 1970, I couldn’t have imagined just how embarrassing
some of what is being produced today would be. If content is to trump
production quality, there better be high quality content, not just some
mindless drivel.
Use of Technology
I have said more than I intended in this post, but not quite as
much as I feel needs to be said. You may have an inkling from what
I said about world class courses that a really good online education
course is not simply some video and notes online with a periodic
discussion. There is a lot of technology that can be brought to bear,
and while some of it is new, some of it is actually quite old.
Last night, teaching e-business, I reminded the students that e-business
is not simply about the use of technology. It is more about improving the
bottom line via technology. This means one of several things, but the two
most frequent goals are increased sales and improved productivity. If you
spend $1,000,000 to offer new online education programs and simply shift
your population from the classroom to their home, you have lost -- increased
cost without increased revenue. Similarly, if you install course management
software that decreases faculty productivity, you are not
engaged in good e-business. So, it should be the case that effective online
education is better, easier, faster, more efficient for both faculty and
students. It should open new markets, or DRAMATICALLY improve customer
satisfaction -- leading to increased donations from alumni, etc. Seldom do
I see these assessment criteria applied. Our course management system must
be great because it is costing us X million dollars a year. As best I can tell,
few people are asking if it is making the faculty and students happier, more
productive, or more efficient.
With no effort
to be exhaustive, and because I am getting sleepy -- as you may be -- here
are just a couple of the dozens of ways we could make online education
better than -- not just as good as -- traditional education.
- Consider for example a multiple choice test. In class, you
give the exam, score it, give it back, and discuss it in class. If
you are doing it online, the test can be different for each student,
students can be given immediate feedback, branching can allow a check
to see if the question may have been confusing or whether the student
might really understand the concept. Immediately after the test is
administered, review material can be suggested based on the analysis
of the answers. Wouldn't that be something?
- Consider questions addressed to the instructor. Imagine they
are computer mediated. Imagine question context, question, and
answer are stored in a database. Further imagine that the next time
a linguistically similar question is asked in the same context, the
system asks the student if the previous answer helps. Think about
just three of the implications. As an instructor, my effort is
leveraged, the more I work with the system, the more I am freed from
having to answer the same question personally. From the students point
of view, it may be the case that after the course has been offered a
couple times, my question will be answered not a day after I ask it but
in a second! Finally, meta analysis of the data after a period of time
might suggest revisions to the material!
- Develop social awareness. About ten years ago,
I participated in an online conference in
which the participants were represented as a set of small squares on
the left side of the screen -- there were about 200 of them. As the
conference began the open squares turned white as people logged in.
During the presentation, they stayed white, or turned blue, or turned
red. Blue meant I am with you but bored, move faster; red meant I am
lost and I need more info. I think yellow meant something as well.
People could type questions at any point in time and they were filtered
by staff and passed onto the instructor in real time. We all had
feedback at many levels about the presentation.
- For now, my final observation is about authoring.
When I discovered I
could take a standard PowerPoint slide set and voice narrate it,
and turn it into html, I immediately did that. When I discovered it only
worked in Internet Explorer, I stopped. Doing reasonable quality online
course should not be an order of magnitude harder than doing regular teaching.
A little harder is fine, and as easy as is better yet. The payoff of doing
an online course should be at least as good as the payoff from doing a regular
lecture
and potentially better (e.g. the development of a question/answer system that
saves me time.) We do not yet have the specialized authoring tools that make
it as easy to do online education. They are coming, but Universities need to
make significant investments.
Online education is in our future, but we have not yet taken the
time to plan an articulate set of goals, or made the investment to build
the kind of infrastructure that makes this next generation of quality
educational experiences a reality. It is not sufficient to
say "make it so" unless the money, incentive, infrastructure, and
most importantly vision are in place.