Monthly Archives: February 2013

MOOCs meet your match: the MBC

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Educational psychologist, Marilla Svinicki has analyzed the potential learning in MOOCs in the National Teaching and Learning Forum (December 23, 2012 and reproduced in Tomorrow’s Professor Msg. #1229).  She concludes (correctly in my view) that online learning is good at providing information but not (yet) quite as good at giving guided feedback. Compared side by side, this a cogent and reasonable comparison, but what Svinicki, and other MOOC critics miss, however, is that there are MASSIVE asymmetries here.

MOOCs are massively cheaper. Assume for a moment, you are buying a car and comparing the $25,000 Honda with the $250,000 Rolls Royce (“entry level model”). Even without a college degree, you can probably figure out there is a massive difference in price, so you reasonably ask “how different in the product?” or “what could possible be worth 10 times the price?” If the answer is, well there is a little more feedback that results in a little more learning, that is a very weak sales pitch. (Probably better to stick with “The Rolls Royce (or the elite college degree) will give you much more status and you will be better able to attract a mate.”)

But our classroom-based courses are not just 10x the price. MOOCS are FREE! So all of us teach at colleges are that massively more expensive. (Yes, for all the math geeks, we are ALL actually infinitely more expensive.) I am not sure we can be infinitely better, but we need at least to be MASSIVELY better. A little more feedback for massively more price, and we will still end up like Tower records and your local newspaper (who discovered that browsing was fun, but not MASSIVELY more fun and worth a small premium price.)

The only match for the MOOC is the MBC: the MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOM.

It is true that there is more feedback in college classrooms, but for many students, especially at large research universities (like the University of Texas where Prof Svinicki teaches), it is not massive amounts of feedback. Of course, there is (usually) more learning in a 12-person discussion or an active-learning based classroom vs trying to learn with 100,000 massively different people in a MOOC. But, the real question (for students, parents, governments, and hopefully universities) is whether it is worth the MASSIVE extra cost to sit in a lecture classroom with 300 fairly similar (mostly white American and upper class) students, and take 2 midterms and a final, with little other feedback.

Indeed, a problem with MOOCs is that the learning community is vastly different. That can be an advantage, but perhaps not yet when there are quite so many in the virtual classroom. Classroom teachers have an advantage here, but they often do not exploit this. (When you have changed universities did you spend the summer analyzing the differences in your students and reworking every syllabus before the fall?) If we want to take advantage of this asymmetry, teachers need to spend a lot more time on what Dee Fink calls “situational factors”  and which, of course, is the first step in his approach to designing significant learning experiences.

Another asymmetry is the audience. Universities are doing MOOCs because they are a public good. For students who can’t afford or reach an elite American university, they are a massive opportunity. So again, the comparison should not be just an absolute question of where is there more learning. MOOCs won’t replace all college classrooms, but they were not designed for that. For a student without the access or means to afford an expensive American higher education, the MOOC is a massive new opportunity for learning.

MOOCs will get better quickly. There are important reasons for some universities to do this. Soon there may routinely be as much or more learning in MOOCs. The response, however, should not be for everyone to start offering MOOCs. Roll Royce’s expertise is not necessarily in building a $25,000 car. But MOOCs are indeed the new (and cheaper) competition and that can and should be good for us, but we need to work just as hard to get better quickly and make sure that can justify our massively higher cost with MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOMS. MOOCs, meet the MBC.

The First Thing We Do: Kill All The Grades!

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Most successful organizations are careful to align key practices with the mission.
How do grades support our mission? If the goal of college is to open minds, facilitate change, explore new ideas and help students discover how to change their minds, then which bit of that is fostered by grades?

The arguments in support of grades are familiar, but perhaps their time has passed.

–Grades enforce standards. They might, but standards of what? If a grade signified how many times you had changed your mind during the semester, they might be more useful. The flip side of standards is that grades are a form of punishment: you FAIL. But grades are not a necessary evil: being a teacher does not mean you also have to be the enforcer.

–Grades help graduate schools or employers determine which students are most capable, know the most or worked hardest in college. Ick. If I wanted to be in the sorting business, I could work at the M&M factory. Sorting has indeed been an important part of school—we allow Ivy Leagues schools to sort the potential candidates for President of the United States, for example. (No other schools comes close to the 12 US Presidents who went to either Yale or Harvard. Only George W. Bush went to both!)  Now that we’ve had a Black President, I’m waiting for the community college President.

–Grades reward the best work. Maybe, but they also punish innovation, experimentation, creativity, and mostly failure, which is where we all learn the most. In Teaching Naked  I often suggest that grades need to be aligned with the learning goals, assignments, games and even discussion activities, but what if we just used the learning outcomes directly and measured what you had learned?

Even if grades are not bad, are they good? Do they HELP students learn and change?

But the best reason to eliminate grades comes from the amazing assessment guru Martin Sweidel,  (really our Assoc Dean for Administration at the Meadows School at SMU ). If we eliminated grades, then building a culture of meaningful assessment would be easy.
–Our confusion about assessment would vanish: assessment is about what students are learning. We confuse that with grades, which is often only a way to sort students according to which work we like the best.
–We would have to articulate the real standards, and these could align with our mission.
–We could drastically reassess work-load. One of the main complains about assessment is that we don’t have the time, because we are too busy grading. Imagine what could happen if we had that time to focus on learning and assessment of that learning?!?

Without grades, we would be free to align our time, activities, and classrooms around our mission: creating situations that demonstrate and give students permission to change their minds.

Without grades, we would need to rethink everything else we do. In one step, we would be free to think about what we want to accomplish.

Apparently we have Yale to thank for “grades” (descriptive and first recorded in 1785). There were lots of systems through the 19th century, including a 100 point scale used at Harvard in 1877, and a letter system shortly thereafter, but the descriptive (excellent, good, fair etc.), the letter (A-E) and the numerical (95-100 = A) were combined and adopted at Mount Holyoke in 1897. But like the SAT, these systems of sorting were designed to replace other systems of sorting, that focused on class, race or religion. Eliot, C. W. (1923). Harvard Memories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. I appreciate that the SAT was a part of admissions reform with the goal of making college admissions more of a meritocracy, but maybe the days of sorting can be left behind?

Eliminating grades does not mean we eliminate standards or assessment. It might, in fact, increase both of those things, because we could align our teaching with our goals and not arbitrary need for grades at the end of each class.

We need reform in higher education. At the very least we need to see some bio-diversity—lots of different institutions trying different things. We can’t all survive with the same model anymore. At least SOME of us need to try eliminating grades. Who is with me? To the barricades!

“When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument.”
Finkelstein, I. E. (1913). The marking system in theory and practice. Educational Psychology Monographs 10.