Workshop 3E On-line Education (cb and advocacy). Marty Kich, Wright State University Martin Snyder, AAUP National Staff

AAUP-CBC SUMMER INSTITUTE

2013Workshop 3E

On-line Education (cb and advocacy)

Marty Kich, Wright State University Martin Snyder, AAUP National Staff

Presenters

Instruction for the Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls

The Campus Tsunami Universities Reshaping Education on the

Web One Course, 150,000 Students College May Never Be the Same The Year of the MOOC A Shakeup of Higher Education Online Classes Fuel a Campus Debate

Sample Headlines

Governance◦ Who decides whether to offer on-line courses?◦ Who decides what to teach on-line?

Academic Freedom◦ Who controls the curriculum and syllabus design?◦ Who establishes prerequisites, if any?◦ What flexibility and discretion does the individual

faculty member have? Intellectual Property

◦ Who owns the course material?◦ What control does the faculty member have over

future uses of the course material?

Overview of the Issues

Workload◦ How is faculty workload calculated for on-line

courses? For hybrid courses?◦ How should faculty be compensated for

developing and teaching on-line courses? Technical problems

◦ How can student identities be verified?◦ Is on-site testing available/required?◦ What certification system is in place?


Finances◦ Will on-line education cure the “cost disease”?◦ Is unbundling a realistic option?◦ Are wage slaves the answer?

Quality of Education◦ Will MOOCs save the world?◦ Will on-line education “destroy the soul” of

education?◦ Will on-line education for the masses create a

bi-polar educational system that further stratifies American society?


AAUP Statement on Distance Education

The use of new technologies in teaching and scholarship should be for the purpose of advancing the basic functions of colleges and universities to preserve, augment, and transmit knowledge and to foster the abilities of students to learn.

The development of appropriate institutional policies concerning these new technologies as instruments of teaching and scholarship is therefore the responsibility of the academic community.

Principles: General

The governing board, administration, faculty, and students all have a continuing concern in determining the desirability and feasibility of utilizing new media as instruments of education.

Institutional policies on distance education should define the responsibilities for each group in terms of the group’s particular competence.

Principles: Areas of Responsibility

As with all other curricular matters, the faculty should have primary responsibility for determining the policies and practices of the institution in regard to distance education.

The rules governing distance education and its technologies should be approved by vote of the faculty concerned or of a representative faculty body, officially adopted by the appropriate authorities, and published and distributed to all concerned.


The applicable academic unit—usually a department or program—should determine the extent to which the new technologies of distance education will be utilized, and the form and manner of their use.

These determinations should conform with established institutional policies.


Before they are offered, all programs and courses for academic credit that utilize distance education technologies should be considered and approved by the faculties of the department, division, school, college, or university, or by representatives of those bodies that govern curricular matters generally.

The procedures for approval should apply to all such courses and programs, including those recorded in some way and thus not requiring the teacher’s active presence on a regular basis.

The faculty should determine the amount of credit toward a degree that a student may earn in courses utilizing the technologies of distance education.


The faculty of the college or university should establish general rules and procedures for the granting of teaching load credit in the preparation and the delivery of programs and courses utilizing distance education technologies, for required outside of class student contact (office hours), and for the allocation of necessary supporting resources.

Within the general provisions of these governing regulations, specific arrangements should be made within the applicable academic unit (usually the department) for courses offered by its members.


Adequate preparation for a distance education course, whether one that requires the regular, active presence of the instructor, or one that has been recorded, requires considerable time and effort for the creation or adaptation of materials for the new media, and for the planning of assignments, evaluations, and other course materials and their distribution.

The instructor will therefore need to have adequate time to prepare such materials and to become sufficiently familiar with the technologies of instruction prior to delivery of the course.

Such preparation—depending on the teacher’s training or experience, the extent of the use of these technologies in the course, their complexity and the complexity of the materials to be created or adapted—will usually require significant release time from teaching during an academic term prior to the offering of the new course.


To enable them to carry out their instructional responsibilities, teachers assigned to these courses should be given support in the form of academic, clerical, and technical assistance, as well as means of communicating and conferring with students.

Sufficient library resources must also be provided to the students to enable them to benefit from the teaching.

Since instruction by distance education technologies does not allow for the same degree of interaction between students and teacher that is possible in a traditional classroom setting, provision should be made for the students to confer personally with the teacher at designated times.


If the institution prepares courses or programs for use by entities outside the institution, whether for academic credit or not, whether recorded or requiring the regular, active presence of the teacher, the faculty should ensure that the same standards obtain as in courses and programs prepared for use in their own institution.


The precise terms and conditions of every appointment should be stated in writing and be in the possession of the faculty member and the institution before the faculty member is assigned to utilize distance education technologies in the delivery of instructional material in a course for academic credit.

No member of the faculty should be required to participate in distance education courses or programs without adequate preparation and training, and without prior approval of such courses and programs by the appropriate faculty bodies.

Teaching Appointments

A faculty member engaged in distance education is entitled to academic freedom as a teacher, researcher, and citizen in full accordance with the provisions of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, jointly developed by the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Uni versities) and the American Association of University Professors and endorsed by more than 200 educational and professional organizations.

Academic Freedom

Teachers should have the same responsibility for selecting and presenting materials in courses offered through distance education technologies as they have in those offered in traditional classroom settings.

For team taught or interdisciplinary courses and programs, the faculty involved should share this responsibility.

Selection of Materials

The institution is responsible for the technological delivery of the course.

Faculty members who teach through distance education technologies are responsible for making certain that they have sufficient technical skills to present their subject matter and related material effectively, and, when necessary, should have access to and consult with technical support personnel.

The teacher, nevertheless, has the final responsibility for the content and presentation of the course.

Technical Considerations

The institution should establish policies and procedures to protect its educational objectives and the interests of both those who create new material and those who adapt material from traditional courses for use in distance education.

The administration should publish these policies and procedures and distribute them, along with requisite information about copyright law, to all concerned persons.

The policies should include provisions for compensating those who create new course materials or who adapt course materials originally prepared for traditional classroom usage, including any use or reuse of recorded material.

Proprietary Rights and Educational Policies

Provision should also be made for the original teacher creator, the teacher adapter, or an appropriate faculty body to exercise control over the future use and distribution of recorded instructional material and to determine whether the material should be revised or withdrawn from use.


A teacher’s course presentation should not be recorded without the teacher’s prior knowledge and consent.

Recordings of course material are academic documents, and thus, as with other works of scholarship, should have their author or creator cited accordingly.


The idea behind MOOC’s is to bring education to the masses, enabling anyone throughout the entire world with access to the internet, the opportunity to study college or university level courses, gaining a quality educational experience.

All the courses are free and in most cases so are all of the learning materials.

For courses which follow a textbook a free read- only version of the text is made available and any courses which involve using software, this is either already freely available in the public domain or can be accessed through one of the providers portals.

MOOCs

F2F: Traditional face-to-face course Hybrid: Combined face-to-face and on-line

course ILO: Interactive Learning Online MOOC: Massive Open Online Course MOOC2Degree: MOOC leading to credits

and degree OER: Open Educational Resource

Definitions

MOOC’s became popular in early 2012 when Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, both formerly of Stanford University, launched their online learning platform Coursera. “Coursera is an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students rather than hundreds.”

The Providers: Coursera

Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born. “Now we're a growing team of educators and engineers on a mission to change the future of education. By making high-quality classes affordable and accessible for students across the globe: Udacity is democratizing education.”

The Providers: Udacity

EdX is a non-profit created by founding partners Harvard and MIT “bringing the best of higher education to students around the world.” EdX offers MOOCs and interactive online classes in subjects including law, history, science, engineering, business, social sciences, computer science, public health, and artificial intelligence. The courses are “designed to be interesting, fun and rigorous. They are the best courses, from the best professors, and the best schools and span a variety of subjects, from science and technology to the humanities.”

The Providers: edX

Stephen Colbert Interviews Anant Agarwal, President

of edXhttp://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/07/26/colbert-report-explains-moocs

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/07/26/colbert-report-explains-moocs




After six months of high-profile experimentation, San Jose State University plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a company that promises to deliver low-cost, high-quality online education to the masses.

San Jose State Provost Ellen Junn said disappointing student performance will prompt the university to stop offering online classes with Udacity this fall as part of a "short breather.”

The Case of San Jose State: What Did Not Work Inside Higher Ed (July 18, 2013)

The Udacity students fared significantly worse than their in-class peers, according to preliminary findings Junn presented to fellow California State University System provosts last month.

74 percent or more of the students in traditional classes passed, while no more than 51 percent of Udacity students passed any of the three courses.

The Case of San Jose State: What Did Not Work

“While the pilot gave many students the opportunity they would not have otherwise had to earn college credit and move closer to their academic goals, we will be pausing enrollment in SJSU+ until the spring in order to work with SJSU on improving the student experience,” the company (Udacity) said in a statement.

The Case of San Jose State: What Did Not Work

The courses were put together in a rush. That’s apparently because of the timing of the deal with Udacity. The pilot project was announced a fortnight before classes started.

Like other similar deals, it was also the result of a no-bid contract.

The deal came together at the highest levels: On June 16, 2012, California governor, Jerry Brown,e-mailed and called Udacity to talk about how it could help California's higher education systems. “We need your help,” Brown said, according to Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.

The Case of San Jose State: Why It Did Not Work

But, because of the haste, faculty were building the courses on the fly. Not only was this a “recipe for insanity,” Junn said, but faculty did not have a lot of time to watch how students were doing in the courses because the faculty were busy trying to finish them.

It took about 400 hours to build a course, though the courses are designed to be reused.

The courses included at-risk students, high school students and San Jose State students who had already failed a remedial math course.

“We stacked the deck against ourselves,” Junn said of the Udacity partnership.

The Case of San Jose State: Why It Did Not Work

While San Jose State’s work with Udacity is paused, the university plans to keep working this fall with edX, a nonprofit founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Students in the edX experiment are actually doing better than normal San Jose State students.

Unlike the Udacity partnership, which is designed to replace the classroom experience, San Jose State is using edX material only to supplement the classroom experience.

The Case of San Jose State: What Worked

Enrolled students are expected to review edX material before they come to class.

Faculty, in turn, have more class time to work with students and are able to devote less time to lecturing, the faculty members have said in interviews.

In fact, San Jose State students using edX are outperforming students who do not.

The Case of San Jose State:What Worked

A Conversation with Kenneth C. Green

about MOOCsat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypoxtwgsgEo




“The purpose of this study is to explore the key obstacles that stand in the way of widespread adoption of highly interactive, adaptive, online learning systems [ILOs] at traditional colleges and universities. Such systems rely heavily on machine-guided instruction to substitute, but usually only in part, for traditional faculty. We believe such systems have the potential to improve faculty productivity and lower instructional costs without sacrificing educational quality.” [Emphasis added.]

Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education (Ithaka S+R, May 2012)

“Relatively few institutions view online education primarily as a way to reduce the cost of instruction, especially for traditional students. In fact, many of those interviewed believe that online courses are at least as expensive to teach as traditional courses—and that is no doubt true of online systems that do not, in fact, substitute machine guidance for some substantial part of day-to-day faculty guidance. To the extent that managing costs is a consideration, the reduction in facilities expenses is generally seen as the principal benefit.” [Ithaka, Barriers] (Emphasis added.)

Managing Costs

“Yet, aside from a few institutions’ references to improvements in retention or pass rates, most interviewees did not explicitly mention a desire for better learning outcomes as a main factor behind their decisions to increase their online offerings. While a few institutions cited what they saw as preliminary evidence that their online courses had similar, if not lower, withdrawal rates as their face-to-face courses, the belief that students in online courses may learn the material better than their traditional-format counterparts did not appear to be widely held.” [Ithaka, Barriers] (Emphasis added.)

Improving Learning Outcomes

"Now, some colleges are testing new approaches to shorten the path to a degree, or blending teaching with online learning to help students master material and earn credits in less time. In some states, they’re testing new ways to fund college based not just on how many students enroll, but how many of them graduate, how well did they do," he said. "And in the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it.“—President Obama (July 24, 2013)

Obama’s 'Shake Up' for Higher Ed

Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association (the faculty union for the California State University System), said that she agreed with President Obama that college must be affordable. But she said that she worried about rushing to embrace models that will result in a new, more limited experience for students who are middle-class or low-income.

"We have be very careful that we don't build in our zeal a two-tiered system, where the middle class gets higher ed lite, with lots of online, and the folks at the top continue to get a full and rich higher ed experience," she said. "We have to be really careful we don't get there.”

Two-tiered System

“We don’t teach courses, we teach students.”David Hughes, Rutgers University

Documents

Workshop 3E On-line Education (cb and advocacy). Marty Kich, Wright State University Martin Snyder, AAUP National Staff