Some faculty oldtimers remember when almost all courses were taught without media—even Power Point was not around!—and the grade distribution was supposed to be a normal curve (10% 20% 40% 20% 10%). We were face to face with our students, and we got regular raises. Ain’t so now! We are in the midst of major changes, and the university of 2020 or 2025 will be a very different place.
83% Say: Change!
“Although a majority of Americans believes higher education remains critical to the nation’s competitiveness and the best way for individuals to achieve the American Dream, 83% say that higher education must innovate for the United States to maintain its global leadership, according to a new Northeastern University survey.” The poll “underscores the centrality of higher education to the country’s competitiveness and character, but also illustrates the belief of most Americans—particularly those under 30—that the world’s preeminent higher education system must change.” (http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2012/11/innovation-summit/)
But what should change? Certainly, the cost of higher education is a big concern. The respondents favored a hybrid mix of on-campus and on-line courses and responsibilities. They also favored cooperative education linking the academy with the workplace. The issue of public funding of higher education was included in the survey, and a strong majority regretted the cutbacks and favored more public support.
The Lumina Foundation found similar results in its national survey. For instance, 71% of respondents agreed that “having education beyond high school [was very important] to a person’s financial security in the future.” But 74% indicated that higher education was not affordable for everyone who needs it. So the solution: 87% of the respondents think that students should receive college credit “for knowledge and skills acquired outside the classroom.” (See http://www.luminafoundation.org.) For GIS expertise, maybe. For skilled lawn mowing, maybe not. Where might the line be drawn?
Scorecard
President Obama: “I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act, so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. And tomorrow, my Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” The scorecard is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/college-score-card.
Let’s look at one of our campuses on the scorecard. Towson is said to cost $13,418 a year, to have a graduation rate of 63.7%, has a loan default rate of 3%, and the median borrowing is $201.39 a month. Employment data are not yet available. Of course Maryland System campuses vary on these measures, and the family is left to weight the information according to its needs. The search can also be made taking degree, location, occupational interest, and other factors into account. So there’s no magical “this is for you” answer, but a lot of disparate information is now in one place. There will be quite a few corrections over time, if the FV check on the information is valid. Eventually, the scorecard tool will be a useful addition in choice decisionmaking. Maybe it will replace the deeply flawed rankings that appear in various national and regional periodicals.
MOOC Soaring!
The New York Times (6 January 2013) reports that since the online Coursera was launched about half-a-year ago, it has drawn more than one million users. About 70,000 new students sign up each week for one or more of the 200+ courses offered. (Alas, about 10% of the signees complete them.) And that’s just one of the companies that are offering free courses online. But how can the free courses be sustained; they do cost to offer? “’We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,’ said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. ‘I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.'”
It’s hard to compete with free courses from Stanford, MIT, etc.; but maybe the brick and mortar campuses will be able to compete as soon as payment is required to take an online course. Most of us with offices on a Maryland System campus probably hope so. The full article is worth reading; it’s at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/education/massive-open-online-courses-prove-popular-if-not-lucrative-yet.html?hp&_r=1&&pagewanted=print.
The University of Maryland has joined the Coursera and is offering five courses free this spring. The first offerings include an eclectic mix intended to appeal to a diverse international audience (details at https://www.coursera.org/courses):
♦Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies (James V. Green, Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute)
♦Women and the Civil Rights Movement (Elsa Barkley Brown, College of Arts and Humanities)
♦Exploring Quantum Physics (Charles Clark and Victor Galitski, College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences)
♦Surviving Disruptive Technologies (Hank Lucas, School of Business)
♦Genes and the Human Condition (Tammatha O’Brien and Raymond St. Leger, Department of Entomology)
With the soaring of MOOC, what is left for faculty members to do who are not in the so-called elite universities and perhaps not even great lecturers? Certify! A student who takes one of the courses gains knowledge and skills but no document to show in the pursuit of a job or advancement. Both edX and Udacity will sell passed-course certificates if the students pass an exam at a secure testing center supervised by proctors. Who will be the proctors? Perhaps looking at a mirror will provide a clue!
Faculty members’ contacts with students is a big advantage of campus life; some faculty members enter the profession because of the appeal of working face-to-face with the next generation. As some observers have noted, even contact via email or skype is not easy with the numbers of students involved. Some faculty members have a hard time learning the names of students in a class of twenty! And the situation might get worse if standard courses by well-known professors meet the needs of many universities. Why not have a great political scientist at UMBC record her “American Government and Politics” for all universities where such a course is on the books. Think of the savings for universities!
How do the offering universities make money? And who pays the proctors? These are unknown to us, but maybe it will be like this: For each student, certification for a course will cost $200; the proctor will get $50; the university will get $150. Only $50, the future proctor might wonder. But $50 times X for two hours of work is not bad if the X is, say, ten students. Alas, no benefits.
The latest and perhaps not unexpected development is offering free online courses for credit. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by participating universities. Apparently, the goal of some universities is to attract students for free and then enroll them to complete a degree. Isn’t that call a loss-leader? There’s a web site with more information: http://www.mooc2degree.com.
San Jose State announces courses via Udacity: “Students who successfully complete the College Algebra and Elementary Statistics courses will earn credits transferable to most colleges and universities nationwide. Students wishing to apply that credit to a CSU campus must demonstrate satisfaction of the Entry Level Math (ELM) requirement. These pilot classes—each rich with interactive opportunities—are open to SJSU students, veterans and high school and community college students.” Want SJSU credit? Pay $150, which is a fraction of the cost of a traditional course on its campus.
It’s worth noting that the idea of “blended courses” is being taken ever more seriously. The blend is between traditional and online education. So a traditional professor may still be involved (hurray: still a job!) but less to lecture and more to lead explorations of MOOC or other online/recorded lectures.
But how do we know who is taking the tests for the MOOC or MOOC2 course? Maybe there’s a career for the new Ph.D.s who cannot find a regular academic job: taking tests, writing papers, and more for paying students. But MOOG provider Coursera is trying to establish identity by what it calls keystroke biometrics, that is, the rhythm of the typist! Well, people with Ph.D.s are surely smart enough to have their fingers do the acting.
Who Pays?
Public university funding has shifted dramatically from governments to students. Back in 2001, governments supplied about 36% of the funds compared with 32% from students, but beginning in 2004, the switch took place. Now the figures are government 22% and students 48%. (The editor of this publication, who admittedly is over 29 years of age, paid $32 his first semester at UCLA. Times do seem to have changed, and probably not for the better.) In December, Chancellor Kirwan spoke at a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation event. Here are the introductory paragraphs:
“The fiscal reality is clear: State support for public universities, on a per-student basis, has been declining for more than two decades, was at its lowest level in 25 years even before the Great Recession hit, and cannot be expected to increase any time soon.
“The need for greater levels of educational attainment is equally clear: The U.S. became the world’s dominant super power because it was also the best-educated nation in the world. We now rank 16th in the proportion of our citizens with a college degree, and so are on the verge of losing that critical competitive edge.
“As a result of these realities, the higher education community must rethink our operating model. We need to reevaluate and reengineer our operations—both administrative and academic—with a much higher priority given to effectiveness, productivity, and accountability, while holding fast to our commitment to the quality of our education programs.”*
Can we have our cake and eat it too? Some think online courses will solve the crunch, but others think that that in many fields quality education and related life experiences can only be achieved in face-to-face education. The next decade should be exciting—and maybe painful. Productivity surely means more online courses, lower-paid instructors—if the “contingent” category, more emphasis on hiring good grants getters over good teachers. We know of one academic unit in the midst of deciding whether to hire on a tenure line a good fund raiser but modest teacher or the opposite. What to bet which person is hired?
*The full text is at http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/11/Creative-Ways-To-Bend-The-Higher-Eduation-Cost-Curve.
Governor Brown Pushes UC
The governor wants UC campuses to do more teaching, less research, and use more online courses to save money and increase offerings. The universities must “reconfigure themselves so that they are more effective and they’re able to do excellent work, but do it in a way that will not keep the costs escalating.” Governor Brown things that the “psychic income” is so great for faculty members that more modest salaries should happily be accepted. Well, many faculty members’ jobs are enjoyable, but are they so enjoyable that they will cut down what they pay for housing, food, medicine, etc.? Will the psychic income decline with the rise of MOOC? Of course, the Brown approach may spread nationally.
Bells and Whistles
“University students prefer the ‘old school’ approach of an engaging lecture over the use of the latest technological bells and whistles in the classroom. That was a finding in a recent study of the perceptions of students and professors in Quebec on the use of information and communications technologies, or ICTs, in higher learning. ‘Students are old school – they want lectures. They want to listen to a professor who’s engaging, who’s intellectually stimulating and who delivers the content to them.’” (From http://www.universityaffairs, 20 November 2012, thanks to Jim Baxter) Of course, bells and whistles are better than a professor who’s not engaging, not stimulating, not conveying content. Perhaps, therefore, all professors should be divided into two categories, the engaging (etc.) and the not-engaging, and the latter should be supplied with bells and whistles—or praised for grantsmanship.
Faculty Work at UMBC (and elsewhere!)
The university has created a series of “posters” about faculty work and many other topics. One indicates that the workload of faculty members is increasing, having changed in just under a decade from five courses to just under seven. Another indicates that at least at UMBC students are overall deprived on classroom contact with tenured or tenure-track faculty members: fewer than 40% of student credit hours are taught by the Exalted Ones. But that this percentage has only slightly declined over the past nine years. It is surprising that at the graduate level, fewer than 70% of students’ credit hours are earned with the EOs. Perhaps these figures should not be surprising given the national decline in tenure and tenure-track.
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