On line education is certainly booming these days. Today
MIT and Harvard announced a plan to provide free on line courses. I find this ironic given that I’ve
advocated “virtual learning” for over twenty years – with little response.
Universities I formerly worked at routinely showed scant interest in offering
online degrees or serious online programs. Now, however, with the sudden
appearance of for-profit ventures and the interest of venture capitalists,
universities are being signed up to offer on line degrees, and have begun
independently building and offering on line degrees.
Yet when you ask nearly anyone in academics about these
degree programs, the overwhelming opinion is that they’re awful. Even the
people promoting them seem to agree on that; in my last column I quoted the
provost of the University of Michigan talking about his deal with Coursera:
Our Coursera offerings will in no way replace the rich
experiences our students obtain in classrooms, laboratories and studios here in
Ann Arbor.
Well, right. Because they are aren’t very good. Reaching
100,000 students on line may seem like a good idea, but we fail to ask the
real question: what kind of
educational experience is provided on line?
I am writing about this today in particular because my company, Socratic Arts, has just begun constructing four
on line masters degree programs in Computer Science. We have a great deal of
experience in doing this, of course, having built a number of masters programs
for Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley campus ten years ago (that they still
offer, but not on line.) We also recently launched an MBA program with La Salle
University in Barcelona that’s soon to be available in a number of Eastern
European countries as well.
Now, with the backing of investors, we have decided to
start building additional on line degree programs. But – and this is a big
“but” – these programs will do far more than replace the existing
classroom offerings of major universities. At heart, they’re meant to seriously
disrupt the very concept of how education is provided.
Getting universities to agree to work with us hasn’t been easy.
Why do they prefer to work with 2Tor or Coursera or Udacity? This is very easy
to answer. Those companies want to do what the existing universities already
do. Universities do not want to change how they do things. They can’t eliminate
lectures, for example, without eliminating the basic economic structure upon
which a university is based. They cannot emphasize teaching over research when
their financial stability depends on major research funding. They want to
essentially copy their existing classroom courses, because they have no other
choice.
Socratic Arts, on the other hand, wants to do it right.
What does that mean? That means convincing faculty to re-think education in a
serious way. To explain what I mean and to illustrate these differences, I’ve chosen
eight arguments that faculty have against our methodology. Or, rather, that we
have against theirs.
Theory
before practice
In most university programs, they teach theory first and
practice second. You wouldn’t teach the theory of walking to a two-year old,
nor would you teach the theory of economics to someone who was opening a
lemonade stand. No one sits still for theoretical discussions when they are
ready to try to do something. No one except college students of course, who
have no choice. Universities are wedded to theory first because they often
don’t know how to actually teach practice, and because it is much easier to
talk about something then to do it. But the real reason is that professors like
talking and they like research and theory. It is what they do in their own
lives. So that is what they teach.
Socratic Arts does it the other way around of course, that
is, if we ever teach theory at all, which is often quite unnecessary.
Coverage
Masters degree programs offer coverage. What does that
mean? That means that the faculty have a wide range of research interests and when
they sit down to design a masters program, everyone wants what they specialize
in to be covered. For this reason, most masters degree programs are incoherent
and unorganized. They are simply a list of courses to choose from that
represent what the faculty has to teach. There is no end game. No one is
thinking about what kind of person they are producing at the end of the
program. No one asks what the student will be able to do when he or she is
finished.
That, by the way, is the first question Socratic Arts asks
when it starts to work with a university. The question is usually met with
blank stares.
Replicating
the classroom
Universities have classrooms and they think they should
always have them because some deity must have wanted it that way. The idea that
a classroom is a basically bad idea because it forces one teacher to talk and
students to listen, is not discussed. Getting rid of the classroom in the era
of easily findable information is sometimes thought about, but cannot actually be
done without making professors do an entirely different job than they are used
to doing. And professors are, in general, very conservative when it comes to
changing the way they do things. More teaching responsibility is on no professor’s
list of things to wish for.
Socratic Arts makes professors into mentors or coaches who
help students as they need help with tasks they are interested in performing.
Our idea of a teacher is much more like a normal idea of a parent -- there when
you need him or her to help you figure it out for yourself.
Teachers
as information deliverers
Get rid of lectures. No one remembers what they heard in a lecture
a week later. They are there for ancient reasons. Most on line courses simply
deliver the lecture on line and think they have done something miraculous. Nothing
could be sillier. What can be conveyed by a lecture in an hour could take weeks
of practice to actually learn.
There are no lectures in Socratic Arts on line programs.
Discussion
of experiences, not replication of experiences
We learn by doing. Plato said that. Dewey said that.
Einstein said that. Almost every educational philosopher has said that.
Education means providing experiences, real or simulated, that a student can
make mistakes in; try again; think about what went wrong, and try again. While
this does happen in PhD programs as a matter of course, it almost never happens
in masters or undergraduate programs, or even in a typical college course.
All Socratic Arts masters programs are experiential. They create
experiences that lead to experiences that lead to more complex experiences.
They are, for this reason, very engaging and fun. Professors know how to do
this, but the very structure of a masters program tends to prevent it.
Simultaneous
courses
The structure that prevents it is the idea that a student
must take four or five courses simultaneously. This structure exists so that
professors can only teach three hours a week and then can go back to research.
It also exists because it always has existed. Why high school students have fifty
minute periods for every subject is incomprehensible.
When we built our masters programs at Carnegie Mellon, we
made the registrar crazy because all courses were sequential and thus no
student was taking more than one course at a time, they started and stopped at
odd times in the term, and grades were unavailable when the registrar wanted them.
We managed by lying to the registrar. Disruption isn’t easy.
A properly constructed masters program would have students
concentrating on doing something, and only when they complete what they’re doing
will they start on something else that builds on the prior task. This is what I
have called a Story Centered Curriculum since the entire masters program is delivered
in the form of a story in which the student has many roles to play.
Use of
outside experts
Why is the professor the only teacher in a course? There
are many experts in the world. On line experiences allow for many experts to be
recorded and have the right expert pop up at the right time to share his or her
wisdom about exactly the mistake you are making or the issue about which you
are curious. Really, in the age of the internet shouldn’t there be hundreds of
experts available to students who are working on something? Pre-recording expert
stories and delivery just in time is the sine
qua non of on line education. At least it is a sine qua non of Socratic Arts’ idea of education. As far as I know,
no other on line courses do this.
Deliverables
not tests
In every masters programs we build, students have to
produce real deliverables every week or so. They are judged on what they built,
wrote, or presented, and the mentors then help them make it better. No tests. Any
on line course that ends in a multiple choice test is simply a mockery that
makes a sham of education. There are thousands of on line courses that end in
multiple choice tests. They are useful for pretending we have convinced a bad
driver to now be more careful. They don’t do that of course but authorities
like to think they do. You learn nothing from studying for multiple choice
tests except how to study for multiple choice tests. Real life requires real work.
Students should be judged by the work they produce. Socratic Arts masters
degree programs are built like that.
I am writing this diatribe for a simple reason. We now have a large amount for money available to start building masters degrees. I am
seeking universities who want to work with us, but these universities need to
abandon their old models in the new on line space. I would be happy to hear
from people who think their university could do that. MIT and Harvard will
continue to pretend they are doing something important but free courses are not
free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place.
Students don’t typically attend college because of all the great courses.
Universities may like to think that but while a Harvard degree may well be
worth a lot, Harvard courses are just a form of entertainment.
