Good MOOC Conference, Bad MOOC Legislation

(From The New Yorker April 1, 2013)

Chris here--followed by Jenna Joo below.

The current flurry of online legislation in Sacramento includes the following: (h/t Berkeley Faculty Association):

Assembly Bill 386 (Marc Levine, D-San Rafael) – Allows any student within the CSU System to take an online course on any other campus, with some restrictions.
Assembly Bill 387 (Levine) – Mandates 10% of courses at the three higher education segments be placed online.
Assembly Bill 1306 (Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita) – Would establishes a New University of California as the fourth higher education segment. The New University will provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit, baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.
Senate Bill 520 (Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento ) – Directs the three higher education segments to identify the 50 most “bottlenecked” courses, creates a statewide pool of these classes, after a standardized review and approval process allows private vendors to offer these classes for credit.   
Senate Bill 547 (Marty Block, D-San Diego) - requires the 3 segments "to jointly develop and identify online courses that would be made available to students of each of the 3 segments for enrollment by the fall of 2014. The bill would require the online courses to be in areas defined as high demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum and to be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the 3 segments."

ABs 386 and 387 force conversion to online. SB 1306 is the absurdity degree zero of online panacea hallucination: it creates a "New University of California" that must offer credentials but that may not offer instruction.  Unless this is the Senate's answer to Animal House, I don't get the joke.

SB 520 removes the creation and approval of some college and university courses from the segments' various faculty.  SB 547 requires an as yet undetermined number of courses to be offered online, but it appears as though the creation and the approval of these courses would remain with the faculty.  Unlike SB 520, SB 547 does not concoct an artificial market for MOOCs, but given UC online's small number of offerings, MOOCs would lead the charge of the content providers.

SB 547 would also affect the community colleges and Cal State campuses more than UC, which has fewer completely unavailable courses.  It  probably won't inspire the unified opposition that SB 520 has in the past two weeks, which promoted a strong UC Academic Senate leadership letter that attracted press coverage for its accusation of legislative complicity in forced privatization; the Berkeley Faculty Association's petition, which has so far attracted nearly 1500 signatures; talking points from UCSB's Faculty Association, among others.

UC Berkeley's conference, Learning Mode: Critical Issues in Online Education, took place as the state was processing the news (particularly Tamar Lewin's New York Times article) that the legislature might thrust MOOCs upon public colleges to cure the terrible enrollment bottlenecks that the legislature had itself created with its habitual budget cuts.  I gave one of the papers for our Online Study Group, whose research has relied in large part on the tireless efforts of UCSB's Jenna Joo, a PhD student in Education.

Jenna attended the conference with me, and her report is as follows:

The conference held a total of six panel discussions where speakers from a variety of backgrounds.  Scholars, educational media developers, students, and commercial employers came together to discuss the pros and cons of online education and to raise important questions and concerns.

The conference moved between excitement (about the potential of digital technology for higher education) and caution (about the implementation and potential impact of online education I for students, teachers, and communities). The issue of online education is a hot one, but it is also complex, given the intersection of various factors of political economy that underlies its growth and development.

Personally, I moved between feelings of anxiety, hope, resentment, and optimism. By the end of the conference, I was overwhelmed—partly by the large amount of information thrown at me to digest, but mostly by the burdens placed on education in the 21^st century. 

The first half of the discussion focused primarily on the vast possibilities technology may have for improving student learning and increasing research opportunities. Improving student learning broadly involves changing teachers’ roles; reformers demand that they stay away from a “sage on the stage” model and instead become collaborators who will promote active interactions. As Sooinn Lee, CEO of LocoMotive Labs, pointed out, learning can be fun and not so painful and there are many tools available to make it more enjoyable for students.  Professor Ryokai of UCB’s School of Information argued that technology, specifically mobile devices, could help enable out-of-class learning. The Chief Scientist at edX, Piotr Mitros, pointed to possibilities of a distributed classroom model in which large numbers of teachers and students collaborate and network to promote community-based educational attainment. Finally, John Rinderle, the Associate Director of Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, emphasized the opportunities for “engineering learning,” with broader goals and contextualized student and classroom data including not only the outcome data but also the learning data across the spectrum (i.e., student progress and engagement). He also believed that such data should be open for communities to use and assess together.

I have to admit that open data is one of the most exciting promises of online education to me as a graduate student in Education, where obtaining a large amount of student data on my own is literally impossible. It sounds like technology can achieve things that we couldn't achieve before. We are imagining education both inside and outside of classrooms that is fun, interactive, collaborative, large-scale, and open for access and advancement.

The second half of the discussion focused on the contradictions of online education.  To take only one obvious example, Coursera, which was launched in April 2012, has attracted over 2.9 million students from 196 countries with a broad range of backgrounds.  However, the retention rates are low and the very nature of online education calls for the need for strict authentification of the student's identity if courses are to be taken for credit. Coursera's representative assured the audience that they are working with their analytics team to further understand low retention rates and how student diversity affects them.  But they have not made any of that data available. 

Professor Pieter Abbeel taught an online version of UCB’s CS 1881.1x course to a large number students (Spring 2013 version here), but only about 5% of them actually completed the course. Professor Abbeel praised the potentially democratic nature of online courses that avoid improving completion by deselecting most  students in advance, via rejection letters in the admissions process. But he also pointed out that designing and performing an online course takes enormous time and effort. He pointed out the need for “flexibility” to keep developing the courses and enhancing student learning.

What I found to be innovative about CS 188.1x was the feedback-based teaching/learning system in which students were given the chance to revise and resubmit their homework after receiving feedback on it. The feedback-based approach could allow students to reflect on their mistakes and better understand their strengths and weaknesses on the subject matter. However, it should be noted that such an approach could require a lot of time and manpower, contradicting
the idea of online education being faster and cheaper. 

One thing is clear— we still need more research and practice in order to assess feasibility of our goals for online education. So far, the MOOC providers seem busy with their own analytics teams in an attempt to understand outcomes on their own. For the moment, open access to educational data is a long way off. An alternative vision appeared in a talk by Professor Jacqueline Shea Murphy, a Professor of Dance at UC Riverside and one of the first UC Online course developers.  She suggested the need for effective systems of training that communities of practice.  Online courses need to maintain the instructional and research ecosystem for future generations of teachers and scholars.

Finally the conference addressed the question: what exactly we would like to achieve with online education? Proponents highlight  “easy access,” but “easy access” is itself not meaningful without “great outcomes.” Education attainment in the US has always been stratified by race and class, so that individuals from families of underrepresented background tend to be lower attaining students.  Christopher Newfield presented our group's research, starting with the inequalities of investment that have historically underwritten inequality in educational attainment. Our team proposed as a normative goal for online education that it reduce the inequality of educational outcomes across differences of race and income.   We argued that order to achieve this goal, we need to help lower performing students become high performing-- to make everyday people special, rather than providing access as such.   

MOOC's social contexts were raised by the other speakers on this panel - Victoria Robbins on existing and future uses of digital modes for examining social injustice, Jen Schradie on the persisting digital divide, Christian Simm on the Americanism of MOOCs, Enrique Tames on the uncertain impacts of smartphones in Mexican classrooms.  Such discussions might serve to alter the “online is better” mindset and reconfigure the definition of high quality education by reflecting on the findings of open educational research. For example, the meta-analysis released by the Department of Education in 2010, did not find online education to be superior so much as it identified value in active and interactive learning modes, including greater possibililties for self-pacing and self-reflection. These are teaching and learning strategies that will require careful design and implementation, whether online or off.

The Devil is in the Details: Against SB 520

Watching Senator Steinberg’s press conference on the push to give credit for online courses, one can’t help but think that he is on the right path. After all, thousands of Californian students can’t get into classes, and MOOCs offer a new opportunity to deal with this problem in an efficient manner. Steinberg was also quick to stress that the faculty would have final say on which courses would be used, and so quality would be maintained. However, once one starts to look into the details of this deal, everything becomes much more complicated and problematic.

According to the outline of the new senate bill, three professors from each of the three segments would form a committee that would review classes and decide which needed classes would be put online for course credit. The first question to ask is who are these professors and what qualifies them to make curricular decisions for thousands of other faculty members. Also, how will they decide which courses to use and what defines a high-quality course? Moreover, is it possible to design classes that are appropriate for all three segments?

There is also the problem of who will get the revenue from the cross-system enrollments. Does the funding stay with the initial provider or does each campus get a cut of the action? A related concern is how do they decide when a class is over-enrolled, and will campuses be motivated to cut their lower-division classes so students will be forced to take less expensive online versions?

It is clear that this online move is being imposed from above, and it fails to take account the reality on the ground. As I have stressed with lawmakers, if you remove the bottleneck in lower-division courses, you will create a bottleneck in the upper-division. Moreover, these bottlenecks are in part caused by the fact that since too many students want to get into the same majors, lower-division courses are used to weed out lower-performing students. Also, many students come to college and university not fully prepared for higher education, and putting them into MOOCs will not help this situation.

Senator Steinberg has assured us that this new program will not be a substitute for public funding of higher education, but it is clear that the state is using online courses as a way to hide the chronic underfunding of all levels of education in California. Not only has the state reduction of funding for the UC system resulted in larger undergraduate classes and fewer course options for students, but the students now entering into the university system are the products of large classes and low per student K-12 funding. Online education will not fix years of educational neglect.

To voice your opposition to Steinberg’s Bill, please sign the UC Berkeley Faculty Association petition here.

So Much for the Freedom of Inquiry

As part of their passage of legislation to keep the Government running, the Senate voted unanimously to support an amendment offered by Tom Coburn to limit NSF funding for Political Science grants to projects that develop "national security or the economic interests of the United States."   Coburn's hostility to Political Science research can be found here.  The text of the amendment itself is provided here.

Although everyone recognizes that topics go in and out of favor for funding by granting agencies, Coburn's amendment and its voice vote approval is a terrible development.  It is another example of politicians effectively limiting the freedom of inquiry under the guise of fiscal restraint.  In this case, it is particularly striking because if you read Coburn's statement above you will see that he objects in quite fundamental fashion to research that helps clarify how American politics actually operates.  I wonder why.

MOOCs Have Become a Straight Business Play

This period in the MOOC lifecycle is reminding me of a couple of years I spent in the late 1990s as a consultant to a water-treatment start-up company.

The company was pitching a promising but unproven technology to some of the worst non-point-source polluters in California.  These operators couldn't control stockyard waste runoff, chemical drainage from olive packing, and many other kinds of dispersed pollutants that didn't come out of a pipe and that thus were impossible to filter.  Our company was pitching something new to a conservative tightfisted industry--agriculture--and it had limited money and not very good connections in that industry.  So how could they find customers while they were improving the actual technology?

The answer had several parts.

(1) Carefully select technical results for the sales pitch to potential customers.  The chemists looked for results from streams that were "most like" the one they were being asked to treat, but this also meant exaggerating positive results with the best of intentions, based on the commercial chemist or engineer's "we'll fix that tomorrow" optimism that really does solve a lot of hard problems sooner rather than later.

 (2) Claim a finished product for a work in progress.  The phrase was "this machine can be dropped off the truck" and was "plug and play."  That this was not true was an open secret. The customers knew that the machines had to be monitored and tweaked with enormous human input during every day of operation.  But "plug and play" was a validating fiction that reassured all parties that everything was moving in the right direction.

(3) Use (1) and (2) to obtain a steady series of trial installations of the new technology at problem sites.  To do this, the company bid below cost to get in the door, both to get upfront market share and to accumulate technical experience that could improve the product.  The company lost money doing this, but gained visibility, reputation, and know-how that brought its exaggerated claims onto a glide-path toward reality.

(1) plus (2) plus (3) equaled ongoing financial losses.  This was a start-up company with a high burn rate of mostly angel funding.  In the two years during which I was associated with this particular firm, they never achieved accurate estimates of "normal" long-term operating costs.  This wasn't because they were dishonest, but because there were no "normal" operations in this entry / development / sales / start-up mode.

The most important part of the process was (4), moving regulation towards the existing technology.

The company hired Washington and Sacramento lawyers with personal ties to legislators, including a couple of pro-green Senators, and to officials in organizations like the EPA.  At the time, non-point-source pollution was a growing regulatory concern--a major hurricane had just spread hog farm waste over much of eastern North Carolina--so many politicians and senior agency managers were interested in this company's work.  On one trip, the company also met with representatives of large engineering firms. Their project VP laid out the market penetration process: we get you further installations, we collect results together, we validate your results, we explain the results to officials, and we help insert the results into the details of a policy's enactment.  Getting into a market meant creating a market of which you the company were already the center.

Until I attended several meetings like this, I had assumed a difference process, which might be called "how a finding becomes a rule."   I thought regulators tracked findings of scientists that were studying an important pollution problem, and then wrote pollution standards that used formal study findings to define correct health and environmental goals.  Science and regulatory standards would come first, and then the public and private sectors would partner to meet regulatory standards.

I learned in 1999 that the reality was the reverse. Technology of commercial interest to a firm was presented to regulators via brokerage through lawyer-lobbyists.  The technology would help define the scientific parameters of the pollution problem.  Since all of the firm's capital had been raised by promising angels and other investors a major share of a "trillion dollar market" in global water treatment, the company presented only those technological solutions which offered the company potential market share, meaning technology over which they had a monopoly via a combination of patents and trade secrets, mostly the latter.

The private firm's business plan was blended with appraisals from third parties and regulatory intentions from public agencies. The agencies, ideally, would recognize the company's results as valid and then write the standards to fit the company's technology.  The explicit and sanctioned goal is sometimes called "regulatory capture" -- regulations would conform to the strengths of a potentially important technology, which was also the technology controlled by the company in question.

Today, MOOC leaders clearly understand the process of adapting state regulation and social needs to the technology they happen to control. They are proceeding systematically through the steps above:

(1) Sales momentum has to stay ahead of the accumulation of negative product results.  Sometimes results are misstated.  Coursera's page about its "pedagogical foundations" links to the famous Department of Education meta-analysis of about 45 studies of online education's effectiveness. Coursera says, "This analysis demonstrates very convincingly that online learning methods are, on average, at least as effective as face-to-face learning."

In reality, the study comes to different conclusions. It finds that "the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium" (52). It suggests that the benefits of "blended" online / face to face techniques may flow not from the technology but from the fact that they "involve more learning time, additional instructional resources, and course elements that encourage interactions among learners."  The most cited online study to date raises the intriguing possibility that the benefits of the only good kind of online--relatively expensive "blended" modes--don't actually come from "online" (p. xiv), but from instructors and students having more time and money.  

Sometimes results are simply ignored.  For example, a new, high-quality study of 500,000 online courses in the state of Washington (Xu and Jaggars 2013) found,

Overall, the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses. While this negative sign remained consistent across all subgroups, the size of the negative coefficient varied significantly across subgroups.  Specifically, we found that males, Black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grade.. . . These patterns also suggest that performance gaps between key demographic groups already observed in face-to-face classrooms (e.g., gaps between male and female students, and gaps between White and ethnic minority students) are exacerbated in online courses. This is troubling from an equity perspective. (23)

Online may not only not improve educational outcomes.  It may worsen them. It may take a higher ed system that has for years been worsening race and class inequalities and make them more terrible still.  But in a start-up sales regime, momentum depends on minimizing or ignoring findings that contradict the company line.

(2) The distinctive feature of MOOC marketing in 2013 is the shift from being an exciting experiment to being offered as a working solution to budgetary and access crises.  Hence the legislation proposed last week by the California State Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg simply presumes that online courses  could put "quality first" and offer expanded access with no real loss of educational value.  MOOC leaders will themselves note various weaknesses and unrested assumptions in their approach, as several did at UC Berkeley's Learning Mode conference this weekend (#learningmode).  The flaws in MOOC quality are open secrets, but they are subsumed by plug-and-play claims embedded in the rhetoric of Big Data and related tropes of inevitable technological progress.  This powerful combination swamps both the history and the current reality of on-line limitations, some of which harken back to the correspondence schools of the late 19th century, which 130 years ago also promised increased individual attention and the bypassing of the "sage on the stage."

The Steinberg legislation marks the synthesis of MOOC steps (3) and (4), in which large scale trials are being insured through a state-created artifical product market revolving around Udacity and Coursera in particular.  The business problem is this: Large-scale trials must be had at any cost, or the product momentum will die, investors will have doubts, money will dry up, market penetration will fail.  MOOCs have shown that lots of people will sign up for a free online course--and that a tiny proportion actually persist.  If students are required to pay tuition, as with UC online, they currently don't sign up in the first place.

Thus 2013 may not be Year of the MOOC II, in that it may reveal that MOOCs may have no large natural market of tuition-paying students.  To head off this possibility, the firms have shifted focus to regulatory capture.  This is what happened when Udacity was hired by San Jose State University to run 3 remedial courses.  The formal signing ceremony put founder Sebastian Thrun on the same level as the governor of the state and the chancellor of the Cal State University system.

The bigger payout of this regulatory lobbying strategy appeared last week, when California's public college and university community learned in The New York Times that state legislation "would force colleges to honor online classes" ("force" has been altered to "seeks" in the current online title, h/t Wendy).  The article appeared a few hours after I happened to hear a report about Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun leaving the capitol offices of State Senate Pro Tem President Darrell Steinberg, the author of the legislation.  There are other signs of the kind of regulatory capture I witnessed in my corner of 1990s start-up culture.  Ry Rivard reports on the secrecy that surrounded the writing of SB 520's amendments, which do force all three higher education segments to accept online courses approved for credit by a separate state-established panel.  The fact sheet calls for "a thoughtful and strategic harnessing of Silicon Valley's innovations in online education"--signalling the skewed history typical of lobby capture.

MOOC momentum is being driven not by educational need or proven technological achievement but by a business lobby with connections and resources as good as Wall Street's, and with a better social cause.  The movement's systematic exaggerations, the lack of concern for impacts on public university ecosystem, the staged benevolence towards a hostile customer--all are hallmarks not of technical or pegagodical progress but of a carefully designed business strategy.  We won't be able to assess the technology correctly unless we see this.

UC’s Failure to Respect Shared Governance and Union Contracts Concerning Online Education

UC Santa Cruz is the only campus with union representation for its senate members, and since the faculty association (SCFA) has the right to bargain over local employment issues, it has determined that the university failed to meet its basic contractual obligations when it signed off on an online program without union approval. Meanwhile, UC-AFT is also in the process of filing grievances over a similar set of issues, and now we are moving to a confrontation that could have national implications.

In the SCFA Request for Information letter to the university, the Faculty Association points out that the recent deal with Coursera conflicts with several legal and contractual requirements. The first issue concerns who owns the intellectual property of a faculty lecture or class: “In 2000, CUCFA successfully lobbied for legislation establishing that individual professors, and not the University, own the intellectual property in their live performances and course materials. . . Viewed within this legal framework the contract template that faculty will be expected to sign before their courses can become available on Coursera appears to put the UCSC campus in the position of becoming the publisher of this material on Coursera and other platforms.” In other words, UC is asking faculty to sign away their intellectual property rights.

The faculty contract with Coursera states the following: "I hereby irrevocably grant the University the absolute right and permission to use, store, host, publicly broadcast, publicly display, public[sic] perform, distribute, reproduce and digitize any Content that I upload, share or otherwise provide in connection with the Course or my use of the Platform, including the full and absolute right to use my name, voice, image or likeness (whether still, photograph or video) in connection therewith, and to edit, modify, translate or adapt any such Content.” So UC is using Coursera to get faculty to sign over their courses, intellectual property, and their IDENTITIES. Forgive me for being paranoid, but does this mean that if a faculty member signs this deal, they no longer own their own name, face, or image?

As the SCFA argues in its letter to the university, the UC should have first bargained with the union before it signed a contract with Coursera that changed the terms and conditions of UCSC senate faculty. This same problem is currently facing lecturers, where the UC has also failed to bargain with UC-AFT before it started several online programs affecting the terms and conditions of lecturers’ employment.

SCFA has asked the university the following important questions: “Was there a confidentiality agreement between Coursera and the campus? If so, at whose initiative was such an agreement undertaken? Who were the parties to this agreement on UCSCs side? If any Senate faculty were parties to the agreement, does the administration consider them to have been acting on behalf of the Senate? Was there any other form, official or unofficial, in which the Senate was consulted prior to signing the contract with Coursera? Has any member of SCFA's bargaining unit, other than administrators, signed the agreement needed to post their classes on Coursera?” The implication of these questions is that the university administration circumvented both the academic senate and the faculty union by making a deal with Coursera, and this deal may include a confidentiality agreement that would force the university to hide the details from its own faculty.

In light of Senator Steinberg’s recent push to have UC students take courses with online providers, everyone should be concerned about the level of secrecy in the current deals with Coursera.

The Academic Senate and Others Respond to SB520

The Chair and Vice-Chair of the System-wide Academic Senate have responded to SB520.  You can find their letter here.

The Berkeley Division has also sent out a letter (co-signed by their EVC).  You can find it here. 

For those of you who may have been wondering how this bill may fit in with UCOP's continuing desire to promote UCOE you may want to read the fascinating Senate Report on the Continuing failures and false promises of UCOE.  It came out in December.  I am sorry I missed it.  But you can find the link here.

STEINBERG'S PROPOSAL:

You can find the text of the proposed legislation here.   Senator Steinberg's office has offered a "fact sheet" to persuade everyone it is a good idea.   Steinberg's proposal is actually an amendment to his earlier proposed legislation to create a California Virtual Campus.

OTHER RESPONSES

Bob Samuels has dissected the strategy towards outsourcing embedded in SB520.

Both Angus Johnston and Jon Wiener have noticed how it is predicated on the continuing privatization and defunding of public education.

Kevin Carey offers some fawning praise of the idea.

NEWSPAPER COVERAGE

The NYT story that first highlighted the bill.

The LAT "reporting" can be found here.

Some context from the SacBee.

And some more context from Insider Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education has coverage here.

Outsourcing UC

Senator Steinberg is pushing a bill that will potentially outsource many of the University of California lower-division courses to outside course provides like Udacity and Coursera. Here we see one of the clearest examples of privatizing a public good. The state cuts the UC budget for years, and then the same people who cut the budget say we should now turn to online education to deal with the mess. Of course they add that faculty will have a say, but the question is which faculty, and can they stop a plan that is supported by the university president, the governor, and now the legislature?

As I told people in the governor’s office and various legislative staff, there is no evidence that this will save money or move people through the system in a more efficient manner. There is also ample evidence that the students who need the most individual attention will end up having their courses online. I have urged the Academic Council to fight this move, but it looks like the senate is either being co-opted or pushed aside.

This move is a recipe for administrative bloat and the further undermining of shared governance in the University of California. Already people are questioning the value of a UC degree, and so we must ask, who will fight this change?