Higher education
You can replace university with MOOCs, because Sesame Street
An analysis of the effectiveness of Sesame Street can potentially also inform current discussions regarding the ability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to deliver educational improvements. In essence, Sesame Street was the first MOOC. Although MOOCs differ in what they entail, Sesame Street satisfies the basic feature of electronic transmission of online educational material. Both Sesame Street and MOOCs provide educational interventions at a fraction of the cost of more traditional classroom settings. Most (but not all) MOOCs exist at the level of higher education, which clearly differs from a preschool intervention. Our knowledge of the ability of MOOCs to improve outcomes for its participants is so limited, though, that any proper evaluation of the impact of electronic transmission of educational content is beneficial.
Where do you even start? What definition of "online" includes broadcast television? Even setting that major quibble aside, if "electronic transmission of educational material" equals MOOC, what isn't a MOOC? I've learned that Coca Cola is the pause that refreshes, and that Coke adds life; where's my diploma? And what does my excessive consumption of fizzy sugar water say about the educational outcomes of MOOCs? Is it really the case that because "our knowledge of the ability of MOOCs to improve outcomes for its participants is so limited" that almost anything involving electricity and information counts as evidence?
Let us set aside, for a moment, my antiquated expectations of higher education. Purely as somebody who can't count to twelve without experiencing visions of funky psychedelic pinball machines, this egregious case of false equivalence is particularly galling. Sesame Street is Sesame Street. It's brilliant. But it is not online kindergarden. It is certainly not blanket evidence that teachers can be replaced by software, at any level of education, to the benefit of all concerned.
I would do something about this outrage, but I can't. I have a purple hand.
UPDATE: In breaking Sesame Street news, Why Sesame Street’s Move to HBO Is Both Great and Extremely Depressing:
Sesame Street was founded to help low-income kids keep up with their more affluent peers. That is literally why it exists. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And now it is becoming the property of a premium cable network, so that a program launched to help poor kids keep up with rich kids is now being paywalled so that rich kids can watch it before poor kids can.
UPDATED UPDATE: Clearly, I should devote my life to telling people how great Sesame Street is, before I miss the zeitgeist. Sayeth Cory Doctorow:
When Sesame Street first launched, it was all about kids: the whole thing was designed to be as compelling as possible for children, especially the vulnerable kids of the job-juggling urban poor who were finding themselves being babysat by the TV. But Jim Henson and the Children’s Television Workshop scrapped that whole design and started over, remaking the show as something that had jokes that parents would enjoy, songs that could please the adult ear as well as the kid’s.
The key insight was that whatever pedagogical value Sesame Street held, it would be multiplied if it opened a conversation between kids and their carers. The kid might enjoy singing the ABCs along with Big Bird, but what if Dad or Mum could be persuaded to sing along with her, after the show was over, reinforcing the lessons and shaping them around the kids’ own life and circumstances.
This is the gold standard of kids’ media.
Mind you, I can't stand Elmo. Annoying, over-merched purple newbie. You weren't there when we lost Mister Hooper!
UPDATED UPDATE UPDATE: Now Mark Thoma is piling on! I didn't want to do this, but I'm forced to bring out the Slippery Slope ("By Milton Bradley. Incremental fun for ages 8 and up! Contains choking hazard at pointy end."). If Sesame Street is a MOOC, Dr. Seuss is a MOOC about repetition, assonance, and rhyme. Enid Blyton is a MOOC on the evils of smuggling and the importance of keeping hydrated with lashings of ginger beer. Need I go on…?
Thursday, 18 June 2015 - 1:23pm
You have to laugh: "internal classes have been cancelled […] As there are no internal classes there will be no recorded lectures for you to view so ignore sections of the Study Guide that refer to these things." Classes or lectures formerly in Room 101 are now down the memory hole. There never were any classes or lectures, and we've always been at war with Eastasia. We hope you have enjoyed the flexible delivery of your increased human capital.
Thursday, 28 May 2015 - 6:40pm
A thought on student retention in "thin markets of less academically prepared students": If you live in regional Australia—well, Coffs Harbour at least—you can expect at least one serious extra-curricular catastrophe per year that will seriously undermine your ability to cope with a full-time undergraduate workload. Your options then are to either drop out of all your units and rack up additional fees when you come to redo them (which I did last year), or plead for unreasonable deadline extensions (which I'm doing right now). So why can't you pick up your studies later at the point where you left off? By which I mean the university loses the ability to double dip on fees, but potentially gains students who might otherwise drop out altogether.
Any assignments you've completed in one session would not have to be re-done the following session, which gives the students additional study/life wiggle room early in the session when they're likely to still be recovering from whatever misfortune stuffed them around. Some universities might have to worry about class sizes inflating, but certainly not at SCU's end of the market, where it's a challenge to get more than a few people to the end of each unit. Another objection might be that assignments could change from session to session, but I think it's reasonable to just proportionally adjust marks for completed work if, say, assignment one is worth 20% in one session and 25% in the next. It's not like you can game the system, given that at SCU nobody can be certain what's happening in advance, or even if a unit is running at all, until about a week before the start of a session. If anything, you can be pretty confident that each curriculum revision dumbs down the content, so earlier work should count for more anyway.
Friday, 22 May 2015 - 8:54pm
The next time somebody asks you to believe that the best way to allocate educational resources is through the well-informed consumer choices of (mostly) 18 year old kids, or that the best way to assess the performance of academic staff is through the considered judgement of those same kids, I ask that you make an earnest effort to remember what you were like when you were 18 years old.
When I was 18, I borrowed from the library a book on metaphysics, expecting it to be a popular science book. Which is how I came to be sitting on a train thinking "Windowless monads? Carl Sagan never said anything about windowless monads! Who is this Leibniz crank?"
Bootleg education
Once or twice now (I'm being evasive to protect my sources), when venting frustration at neoliberal higher education, I've been told by a member of the academic precariat (paraphrasing heavily):
"I completely understand where you're coming from, and I sympathise, but I don't personally work like that. I go through the motions of administrative accountability, but what I do is principally guided by my own academic integrity, and is as near as possible to what I would do under ideal circumstances."
This is all very laudable, but unfortunately the university administration could choose not to hire that person next term, stick another disposable academic work unit into the same slot, with the same textbook, study guide, and PowerPoint slides, but fewer scruples, and the university (defined as the sum of its administrative staff) would not skip a beat.
It's occurred to me on several occasions to likewise say to those assessing my work, such as it is:
"I've read the predetermined learning outcomes and marking criteria, but I'm choosing to ignore them and try to find something about the given topic to write about which might be interesting and original instead. Give me the mark you have to give me, and I won't be offended. If you can give additional feedback based on the pretence that we're at a real university that would be appreciated, but I understand that you probably do not have the luxury of the time required to do so."
I think that such a compact could work, although it would render explicit the fact that we inhabit a higher education system where academic education is prohibited. I suggest that we not only recognise, but also embrace this prohibition. We academic bootleggers need a secret password; as a traditionalist, I think it should be "swordfish".
Selling Students Short
This evening I attended what I think must be my first book launch since leaving Sydney over a decade ago. I feel almost civilised. Here's a comment I left on The Conversation's review of Richard Hil's new book:
Students don't only have "no choice but to study online because of work or family commitments", or indeed anything to do with their own circumstances. Often we have no choice but to study online because we have no choice but to study online.
Last year, as an undergraduate at Southern Cross University, I first encountered the phrase "converged delivery". This is where nominally "internal" units of study are delivered entirely without face-to-face tuition. You can "attend" lectures on-campus if you like, but you'll just be looking at a slightly larger screen than you have at home, hanging from the wall of a classroom. Students thus have the "flexibility" of choosing distance education at home, or (in the case of Coffs Harbour) distance education in a campus conveniently located in the middle of a swamp, adjoining an airport and one of Australia's most impressive sewage ocean outlet pipes.
Initially I thought that this was a reaction to the Grattan Institute's - sorry, I mean the government's - proposed higher education reforms. But no, the move to converged delivery is an SCU program that was set in motion in 2007. University administrators are not reluctantly responding to a neoliberal agenda imposed on them by government; they are among the agenda-setters, leading the way to cheap, dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator faux-education.
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