From a notebook I kept in 1991, I find Capella’s Sevel Liberal Arts inscribed on the first page:
As someone pointed out recently, the dream of making much of the world’s knowledge available to almost anyone willing to find a way to access it is pretty close to happening. While scholarly and scientific publishing continue to lag behind, TED Talks and the Khan Academy and iTunes University — and not counting all the individual creators of content (and by content I mean texts and ‘casts of all shapes and sizes — make an amazing amount of information available.
Microsoft Mathematics provides a graphing calculator that plots in 2D and 3D, step-by-step equation solving, and useful tools to help students with math and science studies.
And it’s free. Link (in the heading) is to the download.
This is just a gentle reminder to everyone interested in open access materials, and in some fashion in open access education, that there is now an easy way to search the expanding offerings: Open Courseware Search. As the site itself notes, the following offerings are searched:
My own university is, I think, moving to a more open model for its course content offerings. I see this as a real opportunity to make available content I have developed to a wider audience. I think the real value of a campus environment is not exclusivity of content but the potential for interaction.
The University of Louisiana has long encouraged faculty to consider distance learning as part of their overall portfolio of course offerings, but there really hasn’t been much of a push, nor much of a plan — so far as I could tell — to really make it happen. With the hiring of a director for distance learning efforts, I am guessing it might be moving forward on that collection of burners that represent any large organization.
That’s good news. As I noted yesterday, universities, especially hybrid universities like UL-Lafayette, are going to have to re-establish for themselves and for the public what it is they do and how they go about doing it.
So here’s a seemingly trivial dimension that I think will play a much more significant role than many of us imagine: production values. Too many on-line offerings from universities are videos of professors lecturing in a classroom. I am currently enjoying a course on developing apps for the iPhone — gearing up for thinking about the iPad don’t you know. The course is on iTunes University and it’s from Stanford with faculty and guests from Apple. All they did was stick some cameras in a classroom, give the folks up front wireless microphones — which they sometimes have to pass back and forth — and turned them loose.
It’s a great start, but with only a little more effort, we might have something really stunning:
It wouldn’t take much to pull this off: you paint a wall of a classroom white, or black — or even green for cool keyed effects, and then you could work with a professor and a camera. Anything worth a close up, the producer could note as worth coming back to and have the faculty member repeat what they said for a cut to the close-up. With a little practice over a few iterations, I imagine it would become a pretty straightforward affair of when to zoom out to leave room for visuals to appear beside the presenter and when to zoom in.
In a number of posts I have argued that the nature of higher education is changing and those universities that recognize that fact and tackle how they want to undergo the transformation are the ones that are going to be happier about their future.
One of the things that has worried me is while the super-efficient and super-rich distribution system that the internet offers makes it easy for all nodes to be both producers and consumers, it also makes it easier for nodes that previously only had access to local resources to turn to global ones. Such a reality is clearly one of the driving forces behind a number of universities making a variety of their educational materials available on-line. MIT led the way with its Open Courseware, but Harvard and Stanford have followed. Harvard mandated that all faculty publications must be openly accessible on the university’s own infrastructure, and Stanford has engaged in a number of fascinating enterprises, including the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) initiative — and let’s not forget iTunes University courses like the one I’m enrolled in on iPhone app development.
These universities and others like them seem to be giving it all away. If education is only about information transfer, then they’ve got nothing left, right? But education isn’t only that. Sure, undergraduate and graduate students do pack a lot into their heads during their matriculation at university, but a good portion of that packing, if universities are doing their job right, is through experiences in thoughtfully structured learning environments.
So, part of what these universities are doing is good old-fashioned advertising and/or marketing, building their brand through both their generosity — and they are being generous, make no mistake about that — as well as clearly articulating for potential students that if you want to be in the presence of knowledge creators and not only get the knowledge but also learn how to create it, then you’ll need to pay tuition and, as a friend of mine once said, “be there to get it.”
Within such a system, there is room between producers and consumers for facilitators, or, as Jeff Jarvis terms it, consultants. Here’s Jarvis on on what’s happening:
In education, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that we can maintain our scarcity-based economy: only so chairs to soak in the wisdom of that teacher. It’s a wildly inefficient system — especially in our industrial-age knowledge factories that try to turn out people who memorize the same answer instead of invent new ones.
Earlier, I’ve speculated about the idea of an educational ecosystem with star professors whose lectures are widely available (as is the case with MIT and Stanford) and who gain value (books, speaking gigs) through being broadly distributed. Then we have local tutors who give us the specialized instruction and consultation we need.
Thus we have performers and consultants. There is still value in unique performance. We will continue to buy tickets to concerts by stars (but we won’t pay for the Muzak covers of their songs on elevators). We will buy books. We will pay to sit in a movie theater with popcorn. The new competition in the case of media and performance isn’t that someone will make a good-enough version of what we do but that there is more call for the public’s attention.
I’m not sure that Jarvis has it entirely right, especially since within his model of the eco-system education is equivalent to media and performance, but I do think that he has the star notion right — even though it runs exactly counter to the ideals of the internet.
Jarvis isn’t entirely right because he doesn’t entirely get that the consultant, or facilitator, possesses value over and above his/her audience. In fact, Jarvis is entirely looking the multiple audiences that educators regularly face. It would be great if educators only had to worry about having an audience of committed students seeking to maximize their time to learn. That would be amazing. But that isn’t all educators face. Instead, there is at least one other market to which they report: those stakeholders that require education to certify that its output, students, possess some minimum set of knowledge(s) and skill(s).
As anyone in education knows, the certification business has become a race to the bottom in terms of funding: how little do we need to invest in order to get the minimum return? This is much of what lies behind standardized testing and, indeed, the current efforts to “streamline” higher education in Louisiana.
Certification is not where a hybrid university wants to get caught. Once you are simply a certificate issuer, your class enrollments go up, your faculty’s teaching loads go up, and pretty sure you are not sure if you are simply a diploma mill with some real estate. Let me be clear, teaching universities can be amazing places, and some of my happiest colleagues are at teaching colleges and universities. But those are typically private institutions who have made it clear to their audience of students and, in particular, their parents, that facilitation requires either faculty also capable of and engaged in content creation or that it requires, as it does, the seeming luxuries of time and face-to-face interaction, which only comes with smaller class sizes and reasonable teaching loads.
As the major research universities increasingly give away their content, there is going to be enormous pressure on the hybrids — those like my own dear little U — to give up content creation and simply become facilities, quite literally. One need look no further than the recent statements by the Committee to Streamline Higher Education that there can be no more than one major research university in Louisiana. (The statement is left somewhat ambiguous but comments from the committee members reinforce the idea that research is research and everyone else should bow out.)
This is so much foolishness, and it turns the wisdom upon which the internet was built upside down and returns us to the industrial model of the nineteenth century where all raw materials flow into a central factory from which all finished goods flow. The information, and knowledge creation, economy is a distributed one. Not all nodes can or will be equal, but each must be allowed to contribute to the larger network. To rule out a priori their potential production is to cut off the margins, exactly the place where we now know innovation occurs.
A recent story in the New York Times reveals what all long-time observers of the humanities know already: in the era of careerism, the humanities are a “hard sell.” (The quotation marks are there to emphasize that the irony of using that phrase is quite purposeful.) Kate Zernike’s story profiles a number of universities, one of which is my very own. (The shuttering of the philosophy department is mentioned early in the piece, but there is no further commentary nor mention of UL Lafayette.)
Long time readers of this site know that I rarely comment on political matters. In part, I don’t write about politics because doing so can too often lead to unintended imbroglios that really aren’t how I want to spend my time. And, too, it’s amazing how sensitive people can get about political matters. I pulled a previous version of these on-line notes because one person was offended by one post and wanted to make more of it than there was to make. Again, it’s just not how I want to spend my time.
Nevertheless, no one in the state of Louisiana has been able to ignore the huge budget deficit, the product of the perfect storm of the larger national economic crisis, the drop in oil prices, and the end of the Katrina federal funds. Because of the peculiarity of the Louisiana budget, a peculiarity that seems to suit many legislators, most parts of the budget are protected except for two: public hospitals and higher education. (In a rare moment of something, the arts are actually protected in Louisiana.) As things built to a head in the fall, the state cut 5% out of the higher education budget, which meant that a number of programs that were about to get underway, suddenly disappeared. In the spring, our illustrious governor sent a budget to the legislature that included another 14.5% in cuts to higher education. My assumption was that he was trying to force a re-thinking of the way budget works, to unprotect some areas and make it so higher education and hospitals aren’t always taking the fall for the state’s larger woes.
Worse, another 20% in cuts was proposed for the following year.
During the negotiations, it became increasingly clear that the conventional wisdom among the state-level policy wonks was that higher education itself must be “re-structured” and/or “consolidated.” The governor was remarkably silent on all matters, and really it was the work of a handful of state senators who saved higher education in the state from the worst of it. The end result was that universities and community colleges will absorb a 7% cut, in addition to the 5% cut made mid-year, for a total of 12% for the year.
What finally drew me to write this note was an editorial by Raymond Blanco in today’s Daily Advertizer in which he pointed out that Jim Tucker, speaker of the state House of Representatives, is the largest antagonist to higher education, making a number of menacing comments over the course of the budget negotiations. This is especially troubling since Tucker is, by all accounts, the real power behind the scenes, at least on the Republican side of things. (How much more power he has I leave for others to discover and/or speculate about.)
It’s already the case that faculty working in Louisiana pay a price in terms of their long-term financial stability, given the remarkable difference in benefits between Louisiana and other universities with which I am familiar. I fear for the future of higher education in a climate where one of the most powerful men in the state clearly seeks to diminish what little place higher ed has. I am making absolutely no predictions nor evaluations. Politics is what it is. Louisiana is what it is. Each of us tries, I hope, in our own way to make things better.
