MOOCs are not classrooms--but they're pretty amazing

Many of you have probably seen this talk by Daphne Koller, or one like it. She talks about the origin and goals of Coursera, a system that provides MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from top universities for free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

There are plenty of user complaints about online courses, most of them revolving around peer grading (graders don't always grade responsibly or competently) and the lecture-heavy blahbeddy blah of the courses themselves (the platform and reach may be revolutionary, but the pedagogical method is anything but). And the idea that you can "teach" in this format is a fairly maddening claim to most educators (depositing a one-size-fits-all packet of information into a zillion  people's faces with zero interactivity is not "teaching").

But.

Come on! It's amazing! Knowledge is power. MOOCs may not be "classrooms" but they are libraries of knowledge and they have the power to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people.*  They cannot replace schools, or teachers. But they can open a brand-new door for remarkable but underresourced people who can activate that knowledge into growth and action (in a class of 100,000, if even 1% are driven further, that is a pretty impressive mass).

When women gain access to knowledge, they are healthier, their children are healthier, and their societies' economies are healthier. When young men gain access to knowledge, they broaden their understanding of how they might find their place in the world, of what it means to be strong. When any person gains access to knowledge, (s)he develops a mental and psychological framework that would have been impossible without that experience. How can we deny the power of this resource?

MOOCs also provide an unprecedented opportunity to hone and improve the delivery of knowledge. To paraphrase Koller, when two people get a test question wrong, it's meaningless, but when 2000 people do, conclusions can be drawn. Imagine if we could harness just some of the data the millions of American children produce in school, and use it to improve our school system.

Yes. I am aware that this is exactly the kind of thinking that has led to misguided policies related to data-driven instruction, student assessments, and teacher evaluations. But that is because of the patronizing, almost imperialist stance the policy-makers in our land--the legislators and their loud fringe constituents and their very persuasive corporate backers--have adopted toward teachers and teaching. It's their conclusions that are tone-deaf and unhelpful--not the possibilities. You can't solve everything with data and you can't squeeze data from everything. But there must be SOMEthing meaningful we can draw about learning from the digital and analytical powers available. We just need to ask the right questions, use the right tools, and be humble about the incompleteness of what that data can really tell us in a rich and unpredictable human transaction such as teaching. (For the record, we're 0 for 3 there).

Something like 96% of MOOC enrollees never finish the course. Of course that wouldn't be acceptable in an education system--but that's okay, because a MOOC isn't a classroom. If 4% of registrants gain something significant from a MOOC, that's a lot of souls.  A MOOC's strength is  numbers, reach. The strength of excellent teaching is the opposite: personalization, and depth. MOOCS are not classrooms. But they're pretty amazing.



*(Frankly, given our warmongering natures, the ability for one person to communicate convincingly to masses of those numbers is a little staggeringly terrifying, but let's stick to the positive use of that capability for this post, shall we?)

This week's round-up

All right then! It's been a long time since I blogged...so long that even after my last project finished up and the holidays calmed down and technically I've had the time and inclination to do so, I just...couldn't do ir. This big electronic piece of white paper is a little angry and intimidating when you haven't visited with it in a while.

So, I'm not going to try write anything profoundly insightful today. I'm going to write about what, in brief, I've been thinking about.

I've been thinking about the Friends of the Chicago River Student Congress I volunteered at last Saturday. Our poor river...it just doesn't get the glory that our lake does. I'm so glad Friends exists and Chicago governance in general seems a bit more focused on giving our hard-working, surprisingly calm and pretty river its due. Now to just make it as clean as it is pretty. I was especially impressed with the Cook County Forest Preserve District's brand-spankin' new Urban Ambassadors initiative, which was made possible by a special grant the CCFPD received. Cook County Forest Preserve District in general has been really hiring some fantastic people and making some exciting, productive efforts to get folks of all ages and backgrounds out into nature. I'm looking forward to the next Calumet Stewardship Initiative's Green Drinks, at which CCFPD head Arnold Randall will be speaking.

I've been thinking about Instructional Design. There's an awful lot of learning--of all kinds, not just K12 learning--being facilitated by software, and benefiting from the power and perspective that digital and online tools can offer. Real-time models, maps of all sorts, research sources, interactive scenarios...it's pretty amazing. The possibilities are pretty exciting.

Now, if only teachers could be given the space, time, trust, and resources to learn those tools, and incorporate them fully into their practice--you know, like folks who work in corporations get to do without question or delay or weird overbearing evaluations or random people and entities inserting themselves into every step.

On a related note, here's a great post about how everyone thinks they know what teachers do, because everyone went to school--and how that is hurting our education policy and outcomes mightily.

And with that--I think I'll sign off. Two posts a week, folks, two posts a week. Talk soon!

Pecha Kucha Chicago, March 2013

Some thoughts about Pecha Kucha (not pronounced as you'd think...it's p'chAH k'CHAH), a quarterly creative idea-sharing night here in Chicago and in cities around the world. I'm writing about it here because it is a forum for sharing information in a story-like form in a social setting--something to think about for when I finally manage to pull together H.E.A.R. Chicago, my edu-ideas forum.

Pecha Kucha takes place at Martyr's, one of my favorite bars and entertainment venues. The dynamic transparency of the digital age has so fuzzied the walls between our work and personal lives, for better or for worse, that it seems entirely natural learn about local strangers' professional passions in a bar. (I would add here that separating personal and our professional lives is actually pretty new, isn't it? We weren't able to do that until we had enormous urban centers and a cultural stance shaped by the priorities and patterns of industrialization.)

The hosts for the evening were Chicago Pecha Kucha organizers Peter Exley (pictured left) and Thorsten Bösch. I'll let the Pecha Kucha website's FAQs explain further:

PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images...

and

The presentation format was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture. The first PechaKucha Night was held in Tokyo in their gallery/lounge/bar/club/creative kitchen, SuperDeluxe, in February, 2003. Klein Dytham architecture still organize and support the global PechaKucha Night network and organize PechaKucha Night Tokyo

While it was originally a way for architects and designers to concisely convey what they are thinking about, anyone can present now, on subjects personal or professional:

PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps -- just about anything, really -- in the PechaKucha 20x20 format.

I tweeted during the presentation using the hashtag #pechakucha, though these tweets are long buried by now, I'm sure. Here's a link to the lineup from the evening, and here's a three-point summary:

• Topics varied widely, from a pair of performance artists' snaps documenting installations to a neuroscience professor's history of frontal lobotomies. 

• Presenters' purpose also varied widely; a few geeks geeking out about their objet d'geekery, a few non-profit organizers hoping to raise their profile, and a few of those intensely charismatic folks who are dearly entertaining to listen for six minutes and forty seconds but whom you're glad you can go away from afterward.

• The presentations were all quite interesting and well-paced (or at least, enough so to listen to for six minutes and forty seconds--I think that's part of the beauty of the format), though some were better than others, naturally.

Would I go again? Sure. Am I thinking about pitching a presentation? Absolutely. :-)

*And I mean "geeks" in the best sense: folks really really into and knowledgeable about a subject; wonks.

MAP-Making and Unmaking

Well this is interesting. Seattle teachers and parents are boycotting the administration of a standardized test given to students.

The MAP test takes three and a half weeks to administer to all the students in his school who are required to take it, Michie said. It's given three times a year, and the school has only one computer lab, which means that for ten weeks a year, the lab is available only for MAP testing.

This follow-up article quotes an op-ed penned by the president and CEO of the company that makes the MAP.

Matt Chapman, NWEA's president and CEO, responded to the Seattle boycott with an op-ed in the Seattle Times. Teachers were "rightfully concerned" about high-stakes testing, he wrote. "In a decadelong quest for accountability, we have lost sight of the real purpose of assessments in the schools, and the mission of public schools themselves—student learning."

But MAP was no ordinary standardized test, he said; in fact, it was "the anti-standardized test."
"Developed by researchers, educators and psychometricians, MAP yields immediate insight for teachers while they still have an opportunity to teach and influence a child's learning," Chapman wrote. Legions of teachers were using MAP results to tailor their teaching to individual students, thereby improving learning for "countless kids," he said.

What this tells me is that the test's intent is valuable, but its application is not realistic. The MAP assesses students' growth over time, starting with a diagnostic and including a midpoint (hence the three times per year)--that is good. Much, much more sensible than an end-all-be-all once-time end-of-the-year  big ol' honkin test. The MAP uses the flexibility afforded by digital technology to adapt instantly to each child as he or she works through the test--that is good.  Much, much more sensible than a one-size-fits-all, static, mute, unresponsive thing. The MAP includes extensive training to help educators use the results to customize instruction for their students--that is good. Much, much more sensible than that one-time end-of-the-year test, which the teachers for that grade level don't even see, and which is fairly useless for guiding instruction (as well it should be, as it is a summative assessment, not an instructional guide).

But the MAP seems to have been developed without the benefit of piloting in schools or modeling in realistic schoolish circumstances. Testing children ten weeks a year (and that's only one test--the students must take additional standardized tests as well) is absolutely silly. That's about 30% of their instructional time! Tying up the school's entire digital capacity for that amount of time is almost as silly. And the mountain of data produced may just be too steep to reasonably climb. Actually that last thing always seemed to me to be the inevitable quandary of any meaningful standardized data collection, ever since state standards gained momentum at the turn of this century--when we finally got around to producing a useful test that provide substantial data at a level of detail that actually helps target instruction, given the large number of students, well of course the data pile was going to be impenetrably gargantuan!

And as always, as ALWAYS, can I say it loud enough, as ALWAYS, the implementation is where even good policies go to die. Because, while we come up with thing upon thing upon thing upon THING to add on to the teetering piled mess of school initiatives, we do not change educators' working conditions. Even the most engaged educators trained most diligently on the most sublime of instruments can't make headway if their working conditions are outrageously lacking in the time they need to guide, nurture, mediate, evaluate, remediate, communicate, encourage--and teach.

The comments in the first article turn almost immediately to Testing Is Bad No Testing Is Good Shut Up No You Shut Up. That's inadequate.Wouldn't it be amazing if the teachers and parents were listened to respectfully and without fuss, the MAP-makers went back to the drawing board with some valuable feedback and perhaps a new development model allowing for a more iterative process, and the result (be it MAP or something else) were a more practical and less obtrusive, and therefore more useful, assessment tool?

2013 Predictions?

It will be interesting to review this list of predictions for 2013, put together by past NEA president John Wilson, and see where they've gone. It reads more like a wishlist than a set of predictions to me, but I am congenitally incapable of donning rose-colored glasses, so maybe I'm just not seeing it right.

EdWeek's Rick Hess makes 2013 predictions, too, infused with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole (which strikes me as an excellent way to hedge against coming out too terribly wrong 365 days from now--clever!). His overlap some with Wilson's but strike me as more realistic, less utopian, and more nuts-and-bolts.

Hack Education's Audrey Watters opted out of making ed tech predictions this year, citing her incorrect predictions last year--and sounding as super articulate and insightful about her own self-doubt as she does about any other subject she covers. Do you read her blog? It's smart.

2013 ed predictions: What are some of yours?

Online Education: Room to Grow

Discussions about technology in the classroom--especially blended learning models--yield consternation about the prospect of technology replacing teaching. Technology couldn’t possibly replace teaching. It is a tool and a medium; it’s like saying desk chairs replace teaching. Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education--and his commenting readers--wrote convincingly on this topic earlier this year.

More recently, Michael Horn of the Innosight Institute makes a concise case for this in this response to a recent NYT blog. However, I have to issue a caveat about this link: Horn also cites another posting about the op-ed by Steven Spear, which defends the role of online instruction. While I agree with Spear’s conclusion that online instruction can be valuable (and is here to stay regardless), his arguments are troubling.  Spear essentially says that, while online education is inferior to live instruction, “those with less opportunity” should be happy to settle for the online option as a good enough combination of value and reach. That position shortchanges the present and future of online education and obviously short-changes “those with less opportunity.” And it is folly to accept his argument that because a lot of people do something, it is automatically a societal benefit. And frankly when there are this many errors of syntax, mechanics, and usage in a posting, it’s difficult to buy that posting as the words of an expert.

"Online education" is a gigantic and as yet immature notion with a variety of formats, as laid out by  Horn and Heather Staker here. It is becoming more differentiated, and more sophisticated. It can be neither summarily dismissed nor roundly celebrated. We're just getting started here; some things will fall by the wayside and some will work, and we will slowly become experts at which ideas work best with which students for which purposes.