Princeton Professor teaches Coursera course; you must be kidding me!

I don’t recall ever agreeing with anything Thomas Friedman has ever written in the New York Times, but this Sunday’s article was especially ridiculous.

He was again extolling the glories of the coming education revolution led by MOOCs.

This is part of what he wrote:

“Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote: “A few months ago,  40,000 students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free course in introductory sociology. ... My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. ... Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.””

Friedman mentions this because he thinks it is a wonderful thing, I suppose. Let’s consider what this professor actually said:

My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line.

Well, isn’t that just education at its finest? Princeton should be proud. Not only are they still lecturing, a relic of the Middle Ages when students didn’t have books and monks read them to them, but the professor is reading it line by line. The analysis of a text is a scholarly activity done by intellectuals, and when done with students, it is part of an effort to create more intellectuals. Does Professor think that the world needs 40,000 more sociology intellectuals? When this stuff happens at Princeton, it is still isn’t really good educational practice, but Princeton does try to produce intellectuals for the most part.

When done with 40,000 students from 113 countries, this is is simply fraud. There is no need for them to read a text in this way. Far from being a revolutionary new practice that will eliminate universities as Friedman says, this kind of activity is perpetuating the very thing that is wrong with universities --- their distance from the real world.

within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. ...

It is nice that there were thousands of comments. How many did you respond to Professor Duneier?

I assume the answer is “none.” As a professor, not responding to a student, is, in my mind, the worst thing one can do. Education is about the dialogue between professor and student. This is why classrooms, especially large classrooms, are a terrible idea. They limit discussion. When I taught at Yale and Northwestern I never assigned readings. just topics for discussion. And then we discussed. If you had 30 or 40 students you could get into some good arguments, especially if I had assigned a provocative question to think about. (“What does it mean to learn” was one I often used.)

Your job professor is not to notice how many nice discussions students have with each other. But it is his last line that got me:

Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.

So, the Coursera experience was good for you eh? Nice to hear.

But the issue is that universities have always been good for the faculty. Places like Princeton are run by the faculty for the faculty. No one teaches much. No one cares about anything but PhD students and research.  Undergraduates sit in lecture halls in order to pass the time between football games and parties. No one cares because they all windup with impressive Princeton degrees.

Friedman is right that online will change universities, but not the kind of online that Coursera is providing.

Just yesterday, there were thousands of visits to a lecture of mine that is on line because it was assigned as part of a Coursera course. I find that very funny since my lecture was about why lectures don’t work (oh the irony!) and why learning requires doing and why universities should stop teaching scholarly subjects and start teaching students skills they can use in real life.

Yes change is coming. Too bad Mr Friedman doesn’t have clue why. Here it s. We can build mentored learn by doing courses online that challenge current teaching practice. They won’t be offered by Princeton because Princeton likes what it has now. But change is coming, just not the change Coursera or Friedman had in mind.

Teacher's Despair: We cannot afford to be focussed on training intellectuals

As part of a presentation to teachers in Mexico City that I am to make at the end of the month, Telefonica of Spain has set up a forum for teachers to ask me questions here:

http://encuentro.educared.org/forum/topics/solo-se-aprende-haciendo?groupUrl=solo-se-aprende-haciendo&x=1&groupId=6416998%3AGroup%3A560029&id=6416998%3ATopic%3A560071&page=1#comments

It is in Spanish and my Spanish is minimal at best, so they have been sending me translations of the questions and comments that have been posted. What I am struck by, as always, is the difficult situation in which teachers find themselves these days. It really doesn’t matter what country a teacher is in, they are faced with two truths:

1.    They are not quite sure what they are doing in school is really the right thing to do

2.    They know they have very little power to change things

Here is one question I got for example. (Excuse the awkward translation, I received them all in that form.)

·       We learn something new every day, depending on our attitude towards learning, and even if we are not going to put it into practice, we need to take it in as part of our general knowledge. For example, why is philosophy important for someone who is going to study engineering? There is some material that is simply useful in life. Is this assessment correct?

I can’t help but feel this teacher’s pain when reading this. I am saying, as usual, that we only learn by doing and this teacher is trying to figure out how what he or she is doing is still ok. “If we don’t put it into practice, isn’t is still ok to teach?” Now of course, for me the answer is “no” since I believe that we only learn by doing, but consider the teacher. The teacher stands up in front of class trying to teach general knowledge that will never be used. The teacher’s hope is that philosophy would be of use somehow to someone and that the “general knowledge” that is the staple of the school system will someone turn out to be useful even though this teachers isn't really so sure it will.

Consider this next question:

·       Learning depends more on the person doing the teaching, on the strategy and methodology applied, than on the student. This is because a good methodology can make the student take interest in what he/she is doing and be enthusiastic. Is that right?

Here we have another teacher saying that a good teacher can make students excited about anything so isn’t that a worthwhile thing to be doing? Well of course it is. Turning students on to things they didn’t know about and getting them to care about it is very enjoyable for a student and could possibly have a large affect on the rest of the student’s life. What’s the problem then?

The problem is well expressed by this next question:

·      It is possible to learn almost anything. All we need is motivation. We must try to somehow involve, motivate and encourage students to participate in their lessons... Is it possible to learn through practice, even when what is learned is of no use to the student?

This teacher is willing to accept the fact that what is taught in school may be completely useless to the student’s future life. I for one, find that idea very difficult to accept. I realize that teachers teach what they are ordered to teach, but what must it be like to teach material that you know is completely useless to the student?

I ask this question as If I didn’t know what it is like, but of course I know it all too well. Exactly the reason that I became an education radical is that I was teaching a course in Semantics at Stanford and realized within a few days that no student in the class cared about, or would ever make use of, what I was teaching. They were simply required to take Semantics. I knew right then I needed to re-think.

I will now consider the last (of the one’s I have chosen to write about) three questions together:

·       Would it be wiser to focus more on the theoretical basis than on practice? Students show more interest in classes in which the outcome is an object constructed upon a scientific foundation.

·       It is extremely important to find the reason behind what we teach and, often, this raison d'etre is the source of knowledge or of its use in other sciences or fields of knowledge.

·       Is it possible to remember what they have heard in a reading if it is truly significant to them? If what is read motivates the reader, does this mean there is a greater chance of learning it? Or do we only learn by doing?

I get an overwhelming sadness from these questions taken as a whole. These teachers are focussed on teaching science, and basic knowledge, and great books. This is what they do and it is what they have always done. They ask if there isn’t some use to it all and of course there is. This is how we create intellectuals. Intellectuals worry about science, and general knowledge, and philosophy, and great literature, Intellectuals can discuss these things and enjoy doing so. They may use them or they may not but it is part of the well-rounded education of an intellectual.

My question is about the percentage of intellectuals out there in world. I find it hard to believe that our school systems in every country are geared towards the creation of intellectuals. I am sure 90% of all students have no interest in becoming intellectuals. They would like to learn to earn a living, and how to take care of their families, and how to be good citizens, and how to have good relationships with people. They would like to know how to function in the world. While we can kid ourselves that making them read Don Quixote, or read about the glories of the Spanish Armada, will somehow contribute to their greater development, this just has to be wrong and irrelevant to their lives.

Our education system was designed to create intellectuals. In the U.S., it was designed by the President of Harvard (in 1892). He wasn’t interested in the average person. He was interested in the elite who would attend Harvard.

All this must stop. We need to focus on getting the general population to be able to think clearly. This does not mean teaching algebra and chemistry and pretending that such things teach clear thinking. It means having students practice making decisions and understanding the consequences of those decisions. It means having them come to a conclusion about something they care about by learning how to examine evidence. It means having them learn to create a plan that will help them get what they want and then executing that plan. The average person does not need to read Descartes no matter how much we rationalize to ourselves that Descartes said some things that might be of use to the average person.

I know teachers can’t change the system by themselves. But they need to band together and try to make some changes or another generation will be lost.

How does online learn by doing actually work? See the video we made 10 years ago at CMU

This is a movie we shot 10 years ago to describe what a learn by doing projects only mentored, team based curriculum looked like. There are interviews with the mentors, the students, and the faculty (Lynn Carter video referred to in my post yesterday starts at about 3.22).

We learned how to do it and worked well until CMU administrators decided they didn't want to have thousands of online students and didn't want have brand new empty buildings.

XTOL has re-thought and re-built these online learn by doing curriculum taking advantage of ten years of change in computer science. (See my post here from yesterday.)

We are now ready to offer real learn by doing education to everyone, taught be the people who invented it the first place (unless you count Plato or Dewey, which, of course I do.. but they didn't have) computers.

The Best and Brightest Teaching Computer Science Online

In the 1990’s I was running the Institute for the Learning Sciences, trying to re-envision education in the age of computers. My former PhD student (at Stanford) and colleague at Northwestern, Chris Riesbeck, was not only designing the technical side of what we were building at ILS, he was also putting our ideas into practice on a daily basis. He stopped showing up to teach his programming classes. Instead he posted assignments on line and responded to questions and problems that students were having with the assignments. He evaluated the work they did and, as they improved, gave them more difficult assignments. He saw no reason for lectures or classes.

Of course, the authorities at Northwestern objected. His students simply stopped coming to class. It was easier to communicate by email. Many people have learned to program from Chris and most will tell you that he is the best programming teacher they ever had. They were learning to do something and that is not done by listening, but by constant practice with help from a mentor.

Some years later, I was asked to design the educational offerings for master’s degree programs at Carnegie Mellon’s new Silicon Valley campus. Ray Bareiss who had been the associate director of ILS moved to California, and the team at Socratic Arts and I designed some radical new ways of teaching on line. Of course, what we did was built upon what Chris had done and what we had done in a previous venture with Columbia University. We added a story line to the projects students did so it would look and feel like they were on a real job. They were not taking courses nor were they attending classes. We were working with the faculty at CMU in Pittsburgh, many of whom objected to this new style of teaching by mentoring projects rather than by lecturing. One who did not object was a former PhD student of mine (at Yale) Jaime Carbonell, who together with Michael Shamos had enough weight to convince his colleagues in the eCommerce program to go along.

One who initially objected was the Software Engineering professor assigned to CMU-SV, Lynn Carter. But after a few months of teaching our way he said (and I have this on video) that he couldn’t see teaching any other way now that he had understood what good teaching in computer science was all about.

We built a great many computer science master’s degree programs for CMU. All learning by doing, all on line, no lectures, no tests, just mentors available as needed and students working in teams to get things done.

This was before online suddenly became fashionable in the university world, before putting lectures online became the must do trend, an idea that is absurd it is hard to contemplate. Who remembers lectures they heard in college? CMU actually was decidedly uninterested in the fact that our learn by doing offerings available online or even a way to improve face to face teaching, and with the exception of eCommerce did not bring our new teaching model back to the main campus.

My friends and I are still trying to get good practical computer science education to the world in a way that would allow many people to become effective programmers, software engineers, mobile app developers, ecommerce specialists, big data analytics experts and so on.

So, we started XTOL.

http://xtolmasters.com/

You’ll notice, if you look at that site, that the old gang is back together again. We are committed to getting on line education right and to changing the concept of school from a passive experience to an active one, solving challenging problems in realistic settings.

The first two schools (there will be others) to offer what we have built are:

http://softwareinstitute.touro.edu/

and

http://www.uols.org/en

The latter is offering an MBA we built for them and will be offering some of what we are doing in computer science as well.

In particular we will be launching much of the computer science masters degree programs as short courses, in addition to the full degree programs.

http://shortcourses.xtolmasters.com/

The short courses can be taken by anyone who can complete them. They teach real world skills that a high school or college student would not learn in their school and would give them useful knowledge for employment. (As an example, how to optimize a website for search engine ranking is a short course we will soon offer.)

As a computer science professor for over 35 years, I was always astonished at the extent to which computer science is taught as a series of subspecialties that in the end do not produce skilled professions who can be readily employed the real world.

Why is this the case? In my recent book “Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools” I quoted a very well known computer science professor who did not want his name mentioned:

Every faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at my University thinks that their small insignificant area is important enough that all undergraduates must take a course in it. When you add all those courses up there is simply no time for a student to do anything other than take crazy courses in sub-disciplines represented by the faculty in the department. Everybody’s course is a sacred cow. If you tried to put something new in, something would have to come out, and no faculty member wants his course to be eliminated.

At a big state university, which one would think has an obligation to supply training to the students of that state in a major field in which students can readily find employment, the faculty could care less about that and they only want to do graduate teaching. We teach courses that are modeled after courses in the professor training schools like Harvard and MIT. But how many professors do we need?

There are roughly 60 faculty members in Computer Science. They cover all the traditional areas of Computer Science. Ironically, Software Engineering, which is what 90% of the undergraduates do when they graduate, is not covered.  It is not considered an intellectual or academic discipline. It is considered too practical. There is only one software engineering course and it is taught by an adjunct because no one really cares about it.

There are hundreds of computer science majors here.   The faculty doesn’t feel it needs to change because there are students clamoring for what is now offered. 98% of them want to be programmers. Almost none of them want PhDs.

I cannot go to a faculty meeting any more. I get into a fight at every faculty meeting. I argue about teaching and education and they think they know because they are professors. I cannot subject myself anymore to their abuse.

We are trying to remedy all that. Not just in computer science, but that is where we have started because we are experts in that field. We are ready to work with experts in other fields to start making on line education something worthwhile, useful, practical, and enjoyable. And, we want to start a revolution in teaching and learning. Students deserve better.

Check with Socratic Arts and Engines for Education (our not for profit for high schools) for updates:

http://www.socraticarts.com/masters-degree-programs.cfm

http://www.socraticarts.com/services.cfm?service=Short-Courses

http://www.engines4ed.org/

Ban guns? Maybe we should also ban school!

  

In the wake of the recent school shooting, I can add my voice to the millions who think that easy ownership of hand guns and assault weapons is absurd, but there is another point to be made. Can’t we at least start to debate whether having schools is such a good idea? 

Below are some of the questions typed into google in the last week that landed the searcher on one of my outrage columns. They paint a picture in the aggregate of students who are very unhappy in school.  Were these searches made by just some odd kids? Or is it possible that most children find school difficult, threatening, and uncomfortable?

children should learn more useful subjects at school

public school teach you to conform

why should i go to school

math curriculum completely useless stupid

i hate high school what can i do

why school is bad for children

why i hate year eleven secondary school

students don't need certain subjects

hate high school will college be better

useless classes in high school

hating history class

If the school forced students to learn they are not interested in the course

why does a high schooler start thinking they are not that smart

hating a subject

high school is pointless

textbooks suck

commonly hated high school rules

how to get high school students to like you

Maybe you were one of the ones who loved school. I wasn’t. My kids weren’t. And I am pretty sure that any kid who is made to feel different, lonely, stupid, or miserable in school will come out angry. They may not all decide to shoot other kids or teachers, of course. But, some will. 

We need to re-think the very idea of school and we need to do it soon. They are other ways to teach kids the skills they need in life besides shutting them up with 30 or 100 other kids all day, many of whom also hate being there. 

Education on Demand

I thought by now there would be no movie theaters. I have nice TVs and sound systems at home, subscriptions to various movie services and if I want it, video on demand that I can pay for. I never have to leave the house or put up with annoying people sitting next to me.

Still people (even I) go to the movies. They do it to get out of the house, to see an even bigger screen with better sounds and to keep current with the latest offerings that are being talked about in their circle of friends.

You get the feeling that movie theaters still won’t be around much longer anyway. But people who run the movie business are fighting this in every way they can.

61% of adults said that they rarely or never go out to the movies.  Of those who do go to the movies,  55%  said that they go see films less often now than they did before. 73% prefer watching movies at home. Many in the industry are scared to death of DVDS being released at the same time as the movie itself.  “The theater industry is facing something of a crisis. Theater owners don’t quite get that going to the movies is a social experience, and that they need to make that social experience a lot more enjoyable.”

Well, of course, I am not worried about the movie industry. I am just an observer who takes note that when something is available on demand at home or in your favorite place for social experience with others, its appeal in the standard bricks and mortar public format will go away.

Of course I am talking about education. Why would anyone go to school or put up with the annoyance of school regulations, certifications, classroom situations, and being told what you must learn when, if they didn’t have to? Schools were designed for poor people. The rich had private tutors who came to them, or failing that an elite upper class venue where they were treated respectfully. (Do Oxford students still have personal butlers?)

Today school is a miserable mass experience for everyone. Yes, it fun to go to Yale, but there are plenty of lost, bored, and angry kids at Yale too. (They all seemed to find their way to me when I was there.)

If we had education on demand, wouldn’t this be as threatening as movies on demand to the existing system?

So, in that spirit, I am announcing “Education on Demand.” We will offer, and by "we" I mean my team of respected computer science professors (XTOL, http://xtolmasters.com/) on line short courses that can be taken on demand (more or less, they will have start dates so students can work in small teams with mentors.)

Below is a list of short courses we will offer starting in January 2013. These courses run about two week full time and four weeks part time. More are coming. They are open to anyone who wants to take them. They are meant to teach people to do things that might need to do. We will issue a certificate to hang on your wall if you like signed by the relevant faculty. Students succeed by actually doing things. No lectures. No tests. Just producing. Open to anyone, anyone at all. Just do the work.

  

Introduction to Website Development

Web Application Development    

Mobile Web Application Development  

Native Mobile Application Development for Web Programmers

Sensor-based Mobile Applications Introduction to ecommerce

Search Engine Optimization

eCommerce Data Analytics 

Big Data Software and System Requirements

Managing Software Professionals 

Setting Software Projects Up for Success 

Team-Based Agile Software Development 

We are building more of these every day. There will be short courses in other areas than computer science soon (starting with learning sciences.) We are in discussions with industry on building other short courses that industry feels it needs. Feel free to contact us about courses we should build.

In summary:

Learning by doing

Deliverables that prove you can do something you couldn’t do before

Working in teams

Enhancing your employable skills

On line, no need to go anywhere

Education when you want it

The beginning of the end of brick and mortar education

The beginning of the end of rules about what you must do before you do what you want to do

If you can do the work, then sign up

Learning Hasn’t Changed; social learning and facebook don't really add much

A few years ago I was asked for my annual prediction my e-learning magazine and I predicted the death of m-learning. I was attacked by everyone. Funny we don’t hear so much about m-learning any more.

Learning is a field that is very trendy.  There is always the latest greatest that everyone must do. Today this is “social learning” and “on the job learning.”

There is one problem with this. None of this stuff is ever new in any way. Learning hasn't changed in a million years. Did I say a million? Too conservative. How do chimp babies learn? Socially? Of course. They copy what their mothers do and what their playmates do. (Amazingly they do this without Facebook.) 

Do they learn on the job? Apart from the fact that chimps don’t actually have jobs, that is the only way they learn. In the process of doing something they either fail and try again or someone helps them out.

Mentoring. Another learning innovation, Except there has always been mentoring, Parents,  big brothers, helpful neighbors, all there to help you when you are in trouble. None of this is new.

But suddenly big companies have discovered it. Good for them. Better than classrooms and books (which are very new, if you think about it, cavemen didn’t have either.)

I play softball regularly. When I first started playing in this league I noticed a guy who was the best hitter I ever saw. I asked him questions. He gave me tips. I asked for criticism. He gave it to me. The other day I was hitting really well. I was congratulated by my team. I told them I owed it all to him. They didn’t know what I meant. I said I had appointed him my personal coach ten years ago.

What confuses me is why this has to be institutionalized in big companies. It is not that complicated. Tell everyone they need to spend an hour a week mentoring and an hour a week being mentored. Let them say officially whom they have chosen. Create a culture where mentoring is the norm. It is the norm in sports. My mentor has never has asked for anything back. I am sure people mentored him over the years.

On the job learning is more complicated. Why? Because the right tools might not be available to do it. What are the right tools:

1. someone to ask who can give just in time help
2. a short course that one can take just in time and that one is allowed to take when it is needed
3. a group that is available for discussion

I will explain each.

Just in time help has always been available to most of us. It is called mom or dad. Even today I get “help” calls from my grown children. They know I will stop my day and help them. I always have. 

How do we institutionalize this in the modern world? By recording all the help type stories that an expert has and making them available to anyone just in time. It sounds complicated and it is. We have built such a system. It is called EXTRA (experts telling relevant advice.) Every organization needs one. Experts move on and their expertise goes with them. Capture it and learn how to deliver it just in time in short bits that last less than 2 minutes.

Stories from experts matter. Not in the form of long lectures but in the form of a conversation that happens when there is an interest in hearing the story.

To put this another way, mentoring is not driven by the mentor. As a professor of PhD students for 35 years I served the role of mentor to a lot of people. They showed up in my office once a week because I told them they had to. After that I told them nothing. Instead I listened. Maybe I asked a few questions to get them to talk if they were shy. But learning happens when someone wants to learn not when someone wants to teach.

I did the same when I taught classes. I set up questions and listened. I encouraged students to argue with each other. I chimed in at the end when they were ready to listen.

Apprenticeship is the other side of mentoring. An apprentice takes on jobs assigned to him. A good mentor lets the apprentice drive every now and then. Surgeons let interns make the first cut after they have watched the process many times.  

In the end there is always a story. In the modern era we can deliver stories when a someone needs one. (When they ask or search or we simply know what they are doing and what would help them do it.) But, the old method still works. Talking.

The problem with big companies is that they set up training sessions that last for a week instead of mentoring sessions that last for an hour. Once a week everyone should meet with their mentor for an hour and talk. Just talk. Maybe a beer would help.

And what do they talk about? A good mentor knows that the mentee drives the conversation. Maybe the mentor saw the mentee make a mistake and could comment on it, but younger people know when they are struggling and are always ready to learn if they respect the person who is helping them.

Formal training really has never been a good idea. The army does it for new recruits but they do it because they are trying to create soldiers who don’t think and just follow orders. At the higher level of army training, at the Army War College for example, officers sit around and talk.

There do not have to be mentors in such situations. People who work together should have the opportunity to exchange “war stories.” This should just happen late at night in bars. It is the most important training there is. But there has to be time made for it. And no it doesn’t require Twitter or Facebook. Social learning has always been how we learn. It is in fashion again and that is nice but it is nothing new. The elders have always gathered around the campfire to discuss the day’s events.

Do we need to teach people how to mentor and how to discuss? Yes and no. Excessive talking, lecturing and such, has never been a good idea and is never tolerated in societies that are truly cooperative. The key is learning to listen. 

Listening, oddly enough, does need to be taught, Most people don’t really know how to do it. They learn the hard way that listening works as they get older. Should we teach it? Yes. How?

We need to put people in situations where listening is demanded of them and where they are likely to fail to do it. (Training is one such place where people tune out. That is why that is why there are tests, but tests usually don’t test anything important.)

Having to perform is the best test.

Summarizing: Short courses delivered just in time are better than training sessions. Gathering a company’s expertise and delivering it via tools like EXTRA matters a great deal. 

But most of all, learning to listen and advise well is what separates winning teams from from losing ones. To listen and advise an organization must formally make time for it, otherwise it won’t happen. Do it on twitter if you like.