mBsLOG

Welcome to my weblog. It is an unconventional blog in that I am not planning to post daily or weekly, but only as topics of interest emerge. I enjoyed playing a little with my initials and the word blog and am amused by the fact that it is as much something I am slogging through as something I am blogging about. This listing only shows the five most recent posts.

I will try to discipline myself to keep a more or less regular set of reflections coming, but I can't promise. I have disabled commenting and discussion as it ended up being more maintainence and cleanup than I cared to deal with. That doesn't mean your comments and thoughts aren't welcome. Should you wish to comment on what I have said, I will be happy to add your comments verbatim so long as they are not spam. Simply send an email to me at Pitt -- see my home page. I will insert it in the appropriate post with attribution if you wish. Please reference the title and date of the post on which you are commenting. Also, if you want to suggest a topic that might be covered or discussed, let me know and I will try to include it.

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Thu, 21 Aug 2008

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.

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