Ed,
Cool --- and I think we are generally in agreement in this area as well - again, with the exception of how radical a solution is required. It is my belief that graduate students at Tier One research institutions like UNM are getting a pretty solid education, a professional network, and reasonable career preparation at a fairly reasonable (at least at the public schools) cost-benefit ratio. Students at 2-yr and voc/tech institutions are getting immediate job prep, at the expense of a substantive education, but also at a pretty reasonable cost-benefit ratio.- The lack of substantive education, however, means 2-yr graduates cannot adapt and grow, as your construction industry example shows. In addition, two-year schools offer very little in terms of creating an educated and responsible citizenry. 2-yrs and an immediate job, is Not the answer! K-12 and the majority of schools between Tier One and community college are severely broken. In both cases. neither society nor the student is getting a benefit even remotely commensurate with cost. That said, the educational need of the majority of students and the social obligation to meet that need has to be addressed. It would be nice if this could be done via "reform" and "incremental improvement," but, In my opinion, this is not possible - it will take a substantial, radical and revolutionary change. davew On Sun, Mar 31, 2013, at 03:30 PM, Edward Angel wrote: Dave, Actually, I had only one very slight disagreement with you which I kind of forgot about by the end of my email. I have no problem with what you are proposing and should have pointed out how I agreed that one of the requirements of all the possible ways we can improve the system is the commitment by the student to 30-40 hours a week, something that many students can't or are unwilling to do. The slight disagreement was with respect to "with the exception of elite research universities and 2 year professional / vocational institutions." I'm a great beneficiary of and believer in public high schools, colleges and universities and want to see them improved. I'm disturbed by a tendency all the way up to Obama to emphasize 2 year vocational training. It's an easy way to avoid dealing with the serious problems of public education. It's especially pronounced in NM where our public K-12 system is terrible so we wind up with so many young people with a GED and vocational training who can never achieve their dreams or realize their potential. As inefficient as UNM can be by having low admission standards and teaching classes that can be done at a lower cost in 2 year schools, it does provide an opportunity for many that is in danger of disappearing. Lately, we've noticed it in young people who are now jobless due to the collapse of the construction industry. With a GED and a young family, they are really stuck. Ed __________ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) [1]an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) [2]http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 31, 2013, at 3:06 PM, Prof David West wrote: Ed, I am curious where you disagree / what you disagree with. I see one thing in the post below that is inconsistent with my opinions as stated. I did not address motivations, faculty, or economics - but would agree with everything you said below in those regards. The only point of potential disagreement - you are far more charitable with regard existing university education (your final paragraph). While I do not advocate "dumping on" existing higher ed - I do believe that it has become an entirely untenable model - both in terms of economics and in terms of education. MOOCs are NOT the answer! As far as I can see they perpetuate a model that, in my view, is not working - at least not working in terms of educating people who can think, who are engaged with knowledge, ... (discussion for another time and place). Totally online universities - e.g. Digipen - are not the answer! My answer to your question in a subsequent post: - Digipen could probably (opinion again - no hard numbers here) be a better option for 1-5% of the people they enroll - primarily because it can give a mature dedicated student with professional experience a more focused and integrated program of study of immediate professional use. (Note this says nothing about the education they will receive.) - UNM would be best for the roughly 20-30 percent of students able to take on-campus courses and interact with peers and faculty on a regular basis. (except in math, where I like the Digipen options over the traditional 8-credits of calculus). - I would suspect that Digipen's ten year average drop-out/non-completion rate will be double or triple UNM's. - both offer very little, especially given the cost, to a majority of their students beyond a piece of paper that will get them past the HR department of a hiring corporation. In my opinion, on-line has the potential to replace and improve upon the standard 40 hours of lecture, single textbook, lame classroom discussion, homework assignments and exams part of existing higher ed. But simply moving the standard model to on-line (I would guess more than ninety-percent of current on-line efforts, including Digipen) will not realize that potential. My belief / quest / futile tilting at windmills is focused on a really radical reinvention of education in toto along with the ways such an education is offered/obtained. (Again, another discussion for a different place and time.) A question - perhaps a way to get some real data into the discussion - do you, Ed, or anyone else on the list have any data about graduation rates for on-line schools, like Full Sail University or Walden? I think the Feds have started requiring for-profits to start posting this data, but could not find it in a cursory search. davew On Sun, Mar 31, 2013, at 09:48 AM, Edward Angel wrote: Dave, I don't think interesting describes my response to this post. More like disgusted. I would have said outraged but I'm getting too used to seeing nonsense on the web to respond as I used to. Although I agree with most of the points you and Bruce made, I disagree in a couple of important places but more than that I object to the characterization of what is going on in the post and how willing people are to accept some of its statements, most of which are a total misreading of what is going on with universities and MOOCs. If I were to make a single statement about how to understand what is going on, I'd harken back to Deep Throat and advise people to take his advice: "Follow the money." It amazes me how many people are willing to see the faculty as the bad guys on the credit issue and not even look deep enough into the issue to see that is not the case for most of them. i've spent over 40 years in academia, a lot of battling administrators and often other faculty about these issues. But with regard to MOOCs, it's hard not to be a little sympathetic to the situation college presidents find themselves in, especially at public institutions. Budgets in states, including California and Washington, have been cut dramatically. Although there is some idealism in universities' support of MOOCs, they are not charitable institutions and other than a few elite universities which can afford to support experiments with MOOCs that provide high level classes for a global audience, the vast majority of universities are struggling to support their own students. From the administration's perspective MOOCs appear as a possible cost cutting measure, one that may be necessary even if quality declines a bit. Most of the faculty who are against MOOCs are fighting to preserve quality. Maybe that's a losing cause but not something they should for which they should be reviled. These issues have been discussed in detail in the Chronicle but the post that you sent ignores the underlying issues. Let me examine one course in detail that to me shows why granting credit is not justified. The Udacity computer graphics course is being taught by a very good friend of mine, one I have tremendous respect for. I am enjoying the course and am impressed by the quality of the tools that Udacity has made available to him to enhance the presentation. Nevertheless I doubt that even 1% of the students who finish the course would be able to pass the standard senior/graduate course in Computer Graphics that is taught by most CS departments (most of which use my textbook). If you want to take the view that what we do in academia is irrelevant than I'd estimate that even fewer would pass the certification exam in OpenGL that is being developed by the Khronos Group, the industry group that sets many of the standards including OpenGL, WebGL, and OpenCL. I don't think there are necessarily any bad guys here (other than those who intentionally distort the data). Nevertheless, it is totally unclear as to (a) whether there is a business model that makes sense for MOOCs and (b) what happens to students who complete a less than standard course via a MOOC. Is there a benefit to students who complete a beginning programming or graphics course other than to have sparked their interest? If they want to continue, most will be led right back to the system that is having financial problems and looked to MOOCs to get around them. >From what I've seen, the same is true for essentially all the low level MOOCs. The situation is different for advanced technical courses such as the Stanford Machine Learning course but in the end I suspect that they will also have a minimum impact due to both money issues and to the problems facing non-traditional students other than the ones on this list. I have been involved with advanced technical courses for non-traditional students since 1967 when as a grad student I taught some graduate computer design courses for USC at Lockheed and other locations around Southern California. The students were desperate for advanced education since the aerospace industry was known to lay off engineers with 10-15 years of experience at the slightest downturn and then hire new graduates as soon as business improved. In spite of their motivation and good preparation, very few of these students could complete a standard course in a semester due to the demands of a full time job and a variety of other life issues. I've confirmed this over the years by teaching the same course on campus and off campus both live and via remote technologies multiple times. The on campus students were always able to get the course done while on the average the off campus students could handle about 1/2 to 2/3 of the course. In1972, as a junior faculty I taught one of the first remote delivery courses at USC to a similar audience using one way video and two way voice. It was a huge technical advance and provided high level courses all over the LA area. Later USC, Stanford and others, such as the National Technical University, went national with their programs. At UNM I used a variety of methods to reach remote students, including teaching live classes at Las Alamos, using the video system and recently the on-line system. For 30 years at UNM, almost all of my advanced classes were taught to remote students. Under all these systems, very little changed in terms of their effectiveness. None of the methods had a business model that was able to survive changing technologies, competition, and the true delivery costs. But more than these factors, are the difficulties of teaching in teaching non-traditional students. For every Owen who is willing to put in all the effort needed to get the most out of a class, there may be 10-100 others who are less prepared, don't have the time and are dealing with their jobs. In all the years, I've been teaching such students, I've had some great successes but I've also had to put in far more effort per student for remote students than I did for on-campus students. I note that many courses at UNM are now taught concurrently both on campus and on line. Many local students choose the on-line versions and are willing to pay an additional $100 delivery fee (which does come close to extra costs for the remote course). But most of these students actually are on campus so can access their cohorts, their instructors and the live lectures if desired. Thus they are actually paying for the extras of being able to not come to campus with its parking issues and to be able to review material on-line which to most is worth the extra $100 fee. Their performance is very different from that of truly remote students who cannot access the campus. My final comment is about the bandwagon everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon to dump on US colleges and universities. At this point in my life, I've taught in over 20 countries in five continents, including over 100 professional development courses. The reason I and others have been in such demand comes back to the successes of US schools in educating us. So while every other advancing economy is trying emulate the US success, here we are slashing budgets (what every happened to the free college education?), crapping on ourselves and looking for magic solutions in MOOCs. We have plenty of problems to solve, many that the colleges and universities have helped exacerbate and even greater problems with K-12 education but let's acknowledge where our colleges and universities have gotten us and not be so quick to toss out what we have achieved. Ed __________ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) [3]an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) [4]http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 27, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Prof David West wrote: those discussing MOOCs recently, might find this interesting [5]http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-c ourses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/ davew ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe [6]http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe [7]http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe [8]http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe [9]http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com References 1. mailto:an...@cs.unm.edu 2. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 3. mailto:an...@cs.unm.edu 4. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 5. http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/ 6. http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com 7. http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com 8. http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com 9. http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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