The Reality of MOOCs

Have now completed three MOOCs.  One actually required some pretty detailed work; two required simply taking some multiple choice quizzes.  As a public lecture medium, or as a marketing device, I think that a MOOC has a lot of potential, but it takes a lot of effort and resources to make great video to tap into that potential.  For colleges, etc. that are already facing difficult budget choices, I wonder whether those resources are going to be available for simply promotional purposes.

The problem, of course, is that teaching and learning involve more than simply a teacher talking and a student listening, which is much of the mechanism of the MOOC.  That reminds me of my freshman chemistry class with the four hundred students in the lecture hall listening to the professor talking and then taking multiple choice tests to prove that we either learned, or didn't learn, the material.  That model, which is the model of the MOOC, has been around in higher education a long time now.  If that is how, you are going to teach, and for some subjects/purposes/etc, that might be appropriate, then the MOOC will work.

Faculty v. Staff in the online world

We've run distance education for decades now, and we've been online for at least a decade, and I've been involved in online ed for a lot of years now.  First, in the last five years we have dramatically expanded our distance enrollment options.  There are many factors that explain that focus from the administration to increase online enrollment:  limited classroom supply; perceived in-expense, need to find more enrollment, etc. 

So we've added a lot of courses and a lot of instructors (many of whom are, quite frankly, not suited to teaching online).  That has lead to a huge growth of staff to make it all work.  Let's just say that maybe we've gone from 12 support staff to 80, and everything has become bureaucratized with staff.  That, of course, means a lot more staff expense, which, means, in turn, that we need a lot more enrollment to support the staff and still grow, and to get more enrollment, we need to offer more courses, but to offer more courses, we need to have more staff.  It is very Kafkaesque--and if you walked through the sea of cubicles where most of our staff are now lodged, you would feel as if you were walking through one of Kafka's settings.

Anyway, the title of the post is fac. v. staff.  What has happened with the great increase in staff, is that almost everything about the online teaching process is now controlled by staff decision-making, and there is almost nothing in the last year or so that has been done with faculty input.  And because staff likes to have uniformity, my impression is that courses slowly begin to resemble one another.  Now someone is going to object to that, but I'm talking impressions here.  Don't all BB courses really resemble one another?

Where Goes Digital History

Just notice that I haven't posted here since last December.  I have been keeping busy.  For example, I did navigate the course creation process at Northern Virginia CC to get approval to add a new course to the history offerings at the college, Introduction to Digital History.  My next chore will be to get that approved as an online offering.  I have also been updating my work as a Chancellor's professor.  Wish I could be doing more, but I have been side-tracked by the realities of the need to coordinate our history schedule both on campus and online and also the need to find and hire new adjuncts.

On the DH front, I am struck by how much talk there is of data, and this is a tough call for a historian to make the realization that the discipline might be going in a data direction instead of just a read and interpret documents.  Over a hundred years ago, Marx tried to put history on a scientific footing with his study of economics.  I wonder if the new crop of digital historians might succeed where he failed.

What Are MOOCs

Check out this very well-said statement by James Richard Brett, which appeared in the latest issue of the University of Virginia Magazine.

 There are good economic and pedagogically sound reasons to make videos of large-scale lectures for regular academic credit and to re-run those lectures locally for a faculty-defined number of years, honing them and evolving them to fit the local environment and the students. Faculty must look at the curriculum to see where these opportunities exist and resolve to find the right balance within the resources available.
Mere distribution of processed information is not higher education, however. The essence of higher education is to foster in students the ability to analyze ideas and data, to relate these to other materials, to develop arguments, to reach conclusions and to present the results of these processes with clarity and style, while encouraging a respect for data and unpleasant facts, tolerance, commitment, creativity and perpetual curiosity. The process is dynamic, cumulative and involves extensive interaction among students, part of which is conducted by people who have already had and reflected upon the experience—faculty.

MOOCS, the new hot fad in higher education

Everyone seems to be talking about the Mooc; articles are appearing in major newspapers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, in journals like the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in all kinds of web-based media.  Everyone seems to have fallen in love with the MOOC, and most of those people really know very little abut what education really involves.  Yes, I am going to sit in front of my smartphone and watch some expert talk to me for an hour and voila, I have learned by being part of a MOOC!

Reflections on Social Presence in the Online Classroom.

This is based on the articles by Steven R. Aragon, “Creating Social Presence in Online Environments,” and Brandi Scollins-Mantha, “Cultivating Social Presence in the Online Learning Classroom:  A Literature Review with Recommendations for Practice.”  This was part of a professional development activity at the college.

To begin with two points to consider
(1) there is no right or wrong when it comes to establishing social presence in your online classroom (just as there is no absolute right or wrong to the same in the face-to-face classroom)
(2) your selection of what techniques re social presence to use/not use will depend on your discipline, your specific course goals and objectives and your own personality
(3) You can always change things!

A working definition of social presence:
the establishment of a connection/relationship with a student so that learning takes place (agreed, that’s a bit on the high and mighty side).  Here is another way of possible saying it; a instructor must create an atmosphere of engaged learning, meaning that he is engaged with the student and the student with the material and the instructor. (I think that engagement factor is absent from a lot of online courses.)

Now that social presence can be achieved/attempted in a whole lot of different ways.  I happen to focus on transferring the classroom’s one-on-one conversation to the online environment. I choose not to focus on some other aspects of the social presence definition.

Some factors:
(1) Start with good design of course material in a variety of formats (text, images, audio, video) to capture different learning styles.  That material should be your own content as much as possible (not publisher-provided Powerpoint slides).  That immediately establishes a presence in your course.
(1a) Again, everything begins with the design of your course.  “guide on the side, not the sage on the stage” (in the online classroom, an instructor really needs to be both.  You need to demonstrate to students that you are a master of the course content, and that you can guide them through the course.)
(2) Quick turnaround with communication to students (Returning their emails once a week quickly proves to students that you are not engaged and really don’t care about their learning).
(2a) Send them reminders often with hints on how to approach difficult assignments.
(3) Make tech support a priority (This is often a problem at NVCC, although we are getting better about it; tech problems can really diminish student enthusiasm)
(4) While being nice and interested in student hobbies, etc, is great, you cannot let that alter the way that you grade and assess student learning.
(5) Be aware of how much personal information you provide to students, and be aware of how much you expect students to share with other students.  That is just the world we live in.

Does anybody really know anything about educational reform?

We've got basically open enrollment at the community college level.  Students have to take English, reading and math placement tests, but results on those tests only really apply to English, reading and math courses.  So what about the students who enroll in a Western Civ survey courses that has appropriate college-level reading and writing skill levels, while the students possess a sixth-grade reading level and some sub-college writing ability?  What does that mean re the demand for "student success?"