Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX)

Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. This distinction is important, given Harvard’s founding role in creating the edX organization and $30m pledge of support.

The letter is short, so I’ll quote it in full (the signatures are much longer than the letter itself).

As the university marks the first anniversary of edX and HarvardX, some faculty are tremendously excited about the potential of HarvardX; others are deeply concerned about the program’s costs and consequences. We appreciate the meetings, town halls, and other arenas in which faculty have been able to discuss HarvardX. But we believe that many critical questions about the relationship of the FAS to HarvardX, and to edX, have not yet been addressed. These questions (which fall outside the remit of the two existing HarvardX faculty committees, most of whose members are not from FAS) range from faculty oversight of HarvardX to the impact online courses will have on the higher education system as a whole.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is directly responsible for the teaching of Harvard undergraduates and Ph.D. students. It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission. Given the rapid pace of development of HarvardX, we believe it is essential to have a formal, sustained, and structured faculty discussion on these issues as soon as possible. We write to request that you appoint a committee of FAS ladder faculty to draft a set of ethical and educational principles that will govern FAS involvement in HarvardX, to be brought before the FAS for a vote in the coming academic year.

Note that they request FAS ladder faculty, which means tenure and tenure track faculty and specifically not adjuncts and lecturers. It is possible, however, that the requested committee of ladder faculty could choose to involve adjuncts in the process.

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Right to Access Report Links and Upcoming Event

As we announced the other day, Phil and I have written a report sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation responding to California SB 520, a.k.a. the “MOOC bill,” and making some recommendations for the governor and legislature to consider as they attempt to tackle the bottleneck course problem in the current budget discussions. You can see more about the report on 20 Million Minds website here. Ry Rivard of Insider Higher Education has a good write-up of the paper here.

Phil and I will doing a CrowdHall event Tuesday through Friday of next week. CrowdHall basically lets anyone ask questions (asynchronously) and then have participants vote up the best questions for responses by the “speakers.” I have no idea how well it will work, but I’m interested in trying it. We will be serializing the paper here on e-Literate during those days, posting a new section and some commentary each day to try to stimulate discussion. The event starts at 9 AM PST and ends at 2 PM PST each day (although how much those times mean during an asynchronous event is not clear to me).

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MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware

Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the interview, and this is an area that needs more attention – local educational technology support for faculty innovation, with an emphasis on faculty sharing best practices. The summer institute is May 28th – 31st.

I was interviewed by Richard Gordon and Paul Hyde, and some of the key topics we explored:

  • Not everyone is a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education – what the heck is a MOOC?
  • How do MOOCs affect faculty teaching in a bricks-and-mortar university?
  • What are the completion rates of MOOCs and what are the student types?
  • Are there applications beyond higher education?
  • Why is there such significant pushback against MOOCs lately?
  • What disciplines beyond science and engineering are using MOOCs?

Here is link to the U Delaware radio interview - audio only. It’s about a half hour in length, but with some cool NPR-sounding music to kick it off.

I have also added some graphics and created a video of the interview.

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California and the Right to Educational Access

We are pleased to announce the publication of our white paper on California’s bottleneck course issue. Many thanks to the paper’s sponsor, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, for giving us the support and freedom to write exactly what we believe. If there is anything that you find wrong or objectionable in the paper, then blame us.

The central idea in the paper is that California should adopt the principle that students have a right to educational access. There is a fundamental difference between saying that we should do whatever we can to give students access and saying that we have an obligation to enable students to exercise their right to access. And that change of frame is critical to solving the problem of bottleneck courses.

The current incarnation of SB 520, which we have written about here repeatedly, has been accused by its detractors as being a potential vehicle for gutting and privatizing California’s public higher education. We believe that concern is legitimate. However, in the context of a larger bill supporting the students’ right to access, it could be not only positive but essential as path of last resort. As part of supporting every citizen’s right to due process when accused of a crime, the government is required to provide access to a public defender. But few people who have financial means are likely to choose a public defender over a private attorney because private attorneys, by and large, have access to resources (including time for individual attention) that public defenders do not. Likewise, we believe that access to third-party online courses disconnected from a student’s home institution is a poor solution to the student’s access problem. The only worse solution is not to have one at all, which is the current situation. If Californians believe that students should have a right to access, then they must provide a means of last resort for students to exercise that right.

But the best solution would be to eliminate bottleneck courses altogether, which is why much of our proposal centers on providing mechanisms and funding to empower faculty members, campuses, and systems to solve these problems within the California public education system, where students have the benefit of the campus support network and expertise of local faculty. Even the main funding for the third-party course provisions, which we characterize as the “safety valve” of the plan, would go toward developing infrastructure that would be equally useful to support students taking courses from other campuses within the California systems. If the faculty and administrators will lead an effort to solve the bottleneck course problem organically, with appropriate support from the state, then the actual use of the safety valve option by students could become a rarity.

CalStudentFlow Graphic copy

We acknowledge that technology is not the only possible solution to the bottleneck course problem; nor do we assume that the underlying budget challenges should be accepted at face value. We have written about technology as one avenue to solve the problem because educational technology is what we know about and what we were asked to write about. None of what we suggest precludes discussions about allocation of funding in college budgets, levels of state funding support, allocation of faculty time to lower-division courses, or other relevant questions.

We believe strongly that students should have a right to educational access and that technology can be one useful tool in enabling them to exercise that right. We also believe that the educators in California’s public college and university system are still critical enablers of that right and have a central role to play in making that ideal a reality. And we think there is real value in bringing together educators across the state to focus on sensible application of technology to solve a real educational problem. The culture and collaboration, knowledge and infrastructure that could be created to solve the access problem could also be applied to problems such as improving completion rates, improving course quality, and lowering tuition costs.

You can read the white paper here.

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Getting students useful feedback from machine learning

Last month, I wrote this narrow defense of automated essay grading, hoping to clear the air on a new and controversial technology. In that post’s prolific comments section, Laura Gibbs made a comment echoing what I’ve heard from every teacher I speak to.

I am waiting for someone to show me a real example of this “useful supplement” provided by the computer that is responding to natural human language use – I understand what you want it to be, but I would contend that natural human language use is so complex (complex for a computer to apprehend) that trying to give writing mechanics feedback on spontaneously generated student writing will lead only to confusion for the students.

When we talk about machine learning being used to automatically grade writing, most people don’t know what that looks like. Because they don’t know the technology, they make it up. As far as I can tell, this is based on a combination of decades-old technology like Microsoft Word’s green grammar squiggles, clever new applications like Apple’s Siri personal assistant, and downright fiction, like Tony Stark’s snarky talking suits. What you get from this cross is a weird and incompetent artificial intelligence pointing out commas and giving students high grades for hiding the word “defenestration” in an essay.

My cofounder at LightSIDE Labs, David Adamson, taught in a high school for six years. If we were endeavoring to build something that was this unhelpful for teachers, he would have walked out a long time ago. In fact, though, David is a researcher in his own right. David’s Ph.D. research isn’t as focused on machine learning and algorithms as my own; instead, his work brings him into Pittsburgh public schools, talking with students and teachers, and putting technology where it can make a difference. In this post, rather than focus on essay evaluation and helping students with writing – which will be the subject of future posts – I’m going to explore the things he’s already doing in classrooms.

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