Workshop 3E
On-line Education (cb and advocacy)
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Marty Kich, Wright State University
Martin Snyder, AAUP National Staff
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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
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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?
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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?
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Technical problems
◦ How can student identities be verified?
◦ Is on-site testing available/required?
◦ What certification system is in place?
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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 bipolar educational system that further stratifies
American society?
AAUP Statement on
Distance Education
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 outsideofclass 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Universities) and the American Association of
University Professors and endorsed by more than
200 educational and professional organizations.
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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 teamtaught or interdisciplinary courses
and programs, the faculty involved should
share this responsibility.
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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.
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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.
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Provision should also be made for the original
teachercreator, the teacheradapter, 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.
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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.
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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 readonly 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.
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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
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
Stephen Colbert Interviews
Anant Agarwal, President of
edX
http://www.insidehighered.
com/quicktakes/2013/07/
26/colbert-reportexplains-moocs
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After six months of high-profile
experimentation, San Jose State University
plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a
company that promises to deliver lowcost, 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.”
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
A Conversation with
Kenneth C. Green
about MOOCs
at
http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=ypoxt
wgsgEo
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“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 machineguided 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.]
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“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.)
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“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 faceto-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.)
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"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)
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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 lowincome.
"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.”
“We don’t teach courses,
we teach students.”
David Hughes, Rutgers University