While lots of us have tried “flipping” classrooms, some folks are more hesitant about MOOCs, but they are really the “flip” sides of the coin. (Sorry…)  Now we are learning that the combination can be a powerful one.

One of the chief criticisms of MOOCs is their tiny completion rate.   That assumes, however, that MOOCs–as stand alone courses–are meant to replace traditional courses, but they are not.  The audience for stand alone MOOCs are life-long learners who are very self-motivated or those who have no other access to higher education, and who are also who very self-motivated. The philanthropy that is fueling MOOCs is largely hoping to expand higher education–not drive smaller and regional universities out of business. (And the institutional support from MIT, Harvard and Stanford is about branding.  For them, and not for most of us, this is an opportunity to expand and enhance their worldwide reputations.)

For universities, the advantage of MOOCs is that they provide content.  At the moment, that content can be good, but the learning situation is often poor. Like most early filmmakers, most MOOCs consist of boring video version of live lecturers. As with early film versions of stage plays, filming a live event does not usually enhance it.  But filmmakers soon learned that films could do things that even live theater could not do, and a new genre was born.  So watch for the pedagogy of MOOCs to improve rapidly: video content does not have to be a professor at a chalkboard and soon it won’t be. Unlike a live lecture, videos and podcasts can teach to the many and not to the middle.  Most of us are limited to one language, one example, one analogy, and one mode of delivery at a time, but a playlist of 25 different types of explanations in different languages using different approaches to a single concept will be able to support the learning of different types of students simultaneously.

MOOCs will become better and more useful as the pedagogy improves, but unless you are really giving the most inspirational lectures, you might find that a flipped class that uses video lectures, perhaps from an edX MOOC at Harvard, allows you class time to do other things and provides for more engagement and more student learning.

San Jose State University has tried this experiment with three sections of an EdX course Circuits & Electronics.  Two of the classes met for conventional classes, but the third class used the online videos and then used class time for something else.   “The pass rates in the two conventional sections were 55 percent and 59 percent. In the “flipped” section with the edX videos, 91 percent of students passed.”   (Wired Campus Blog Chronicle of Higher Ed: California State U. System Will Expand MOOC Experiment, April 10, 2013, 3:34 pm By Steve Kolowich)

OK, so the key here is the “something else.” The heart of Teaching Naked, is that course design is going to matter more and more.  Just having students watch videos is not going to improve pass rates.  Having the time to engage students during those valuable and expensive hours in the classroom where the face to face experience means more than just watching a talking head is what is improving pass rates.   Some faculty assume that being “the guide on the side” is somehow a less compelling job than  being “the sage on the stage.” actually, it is the MUCH harder job. Delivering content is fairly easy.  Most of us could do better, but at research universities, most of us figured out we needed just to be good enough at it to get tenure.  Designing great courses and creating immediately interesting class activities is much more challenging, but it is also where the value of face to face education is.  It is also the only way to justify the enormously increased cost.

Flipping, if it is done well, won’t reduce instructional costs.  But if pass rates soar like they did in the test case, then it WILL reduce institutional costs, which could mean for better and more stable universities.  The hard part for faculty, and the reason we will need centers to help us, is because doing this well will be hard work.

San Jose State is creating a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning, where professors from the other Cal State universities will come to learn how to integrate edX materials into their classes.  Surprised?

Universities are like doctors that only accept well patients or gyms that require fitness for admission. If you need to lose weight, you should pick a gym that helps people lose weight: the real measure of institutional success should be the difference between input and output.

We expect university graduates to be successful, but that is hardly a measure of how much students have learned or how much the university has improved them. High school grades and the SAT may predict success in college, but mostly they demonstrate the previous achievements of applicants. Universities start with the students who have already demonstrated they are good at school, and then take credit when they continue to be successful academically. We are so certain of this, that our ranking systems (like the US News and World Report) rely almost entirely on measuring the competition for entrance.

As Americans, this idealized meritocracy sounds convincing. We believe that success is a result of hard work and is usually deserved. We assume that overweight people are somehow weak or lacking in ordinary will power. But our colleges are overwhelmingly populated with students from upper class suburbia and successful high schools: many private high schools graduate and send 100% of their students to college. If you can afford private school or to move to better school district, you can dramatically increase your child’s chances of entering an elite university. (79% of students born into the top income quartile in the U.S. obtain bachelor’s degrees, while only 11% of students from bottom-quartile families do.) A more academic high school, private tutors and multiple attempts at the SAT, all improve the individual students chance of college admission, but none of them measure potential.

We know from genetics that talent and potential are equally distributed among, races, genders and economic classes, so our system is wasting high amounts of talent. A college degree typically adds about $20,000 a year to an individual’s earning potential, and that benefit might be even larger for disadvantaged students. Unless you assume that Hispanic or Black students are less intelligent or lazy, their underrepresentation in higher education means we are not getting as much talent or potential as we could into our universities. Imagine the gain to the country if we selected students for college based upon those would benefit the most. In other words, it is fine to reward students who have done well in high school, but we also need a university that is willing to take on the challenge of measuring itself not by a single admission or graduation standard, but by the gains made while at the institution.

The success of your graduates, by itself, is not a measure of the efficacy of your institution or how much students have learned from you. Fit people tend to go the gym, so picking a gym full of bulging muscles is useless. You want a gym or a doctor with a track record of improving the health of its patrons. It is the difference between in and out that matters.

This is not a plea for open admission. Some schools should be open admission, but we also need an admission process somewhere that selects for potential. Again, free libraries are good, but they tend to attract people who can already read. Making all gyms free would initially just attract poorer, but still fit people. It would not affect our obesity problem. We also need special programs and a different approach to those who have been failed by public schools.

Ranking all colleges by graduation rates without factoring in the different missions and populations, therefore, is completely misleading. Not everyone can or wants to play in the highest stakes game, some doctors want to be podiatrists, not oncologists. But we need some doctors who will treat sick patients and we need at least a few well-supported universities who want to catapult underachieving students.

It might make business sense for a single insurance company to deny patients with pre-existing conditions, but it is catastrophic for society if they all do. It is fine for some universities to cater to the academically healthy, but we also need higher education hospitals to unleash the creativity, talent and intelligence hidden by underperforming inner-city school systems. The lack of mission and diversity in higher education is a drag on the innovation, growth and health of our society and even a drain on our economy.

The University of Potential would admit students not on how much they knew, but on how much they could learn. It would measure itself by how far students’ progress during the time in the institution. It would not have, nor expect, the same success that Stanford enjoys. It would have lower graduation rates and lower average SAT scores, but it would offer a second change to those willing to take it. It would transform society and improve our economy. It would also be intensely democratic and could help remake America, the land of opportunity, invention and potential once more.