About a year ago UT Austin announced the demise of its Project 2021 after only a two-year attempt at implementation (which for universities is rather short, given that only a few iterations of a course can fit into one academic year). I thought it'd be useful to revisit it as we in higher education are constantly talking about online education, both as a tool to help undergraduates master the curriculum and as a way to attract graduate students who cannot relocate near the university.
When Project 2021, as it was called, was launched in 2017, The Daily Texan described it as "based on research aimed at enhancing students’ experience and strengthening their social ties with peers and faculty." The lead faculty member said: “I frequently ask alumni the three most formative experiences they had in college and I feel lucky if one of them is something that happened in the classroom", while an economics senior "said his social experience in college has been far more memorable than academics and that teachers should focus more on the interaction aspect of education to make classes more engaging." This was perhaps not an auspicious beginning and in hindsight it may be no surprise that the project failed. A recent study suggests that the quality of video productions positively affects knowledge retention, making online learning an expensive value proposition.
UT Austin still seeks to provide more experiential learning to its students. "Launched this January, the Experiential Learning Initiative is a pilot program housed by the Faculty Innovation Center that seeks to accomplish Project 2021’s goal of providing students with real life situations that develop problem solving skills related to their field." This raises its own set of challenges as projects in fields like computer science need to be designed in a way that removes the incentive to hire someone else to write the code, for instance through Upwork. You'd think students want to learn and most do but a few may have other priorities, especially if the course is difficult and they have a full-time job that also needs their attention. It's a problem I was confronted with last semester (note that I don't work for UT Austin), although the vast majority of the students were hard workers. There has to be a way to design experiential learning like hackathons so that the students who submit the work are the ones who truly did it.
I am reminded of what Clayton Christensen said about products, which is (I paraphrase) that companies had to understand what "job" customers were "hiring" the product to do when they purchased it, otherwise any attempt at innovation was bound to fail. I recall he gave the example of enhanced textbooks that had failed to gain traction among students, because it turned out most students weren't particularly looking to master all the nuances of the material and go above and beyond what was expected of them, but really just wanted to pass the course. Graduate students don't just pay tens of thousands of dollars to get another piece of paper at Commencement but also to benefit from a network of peers and alumni and the atmosphere of discovery on college campuses. Videotaping the lectures and putting them online is better than nothing, but I think the university that will master the "soft" (social) aspects of online education will have an advantage over its competitors. edX attempted to do something like that when it encouraged the creation of local communities of learners, but if anyone can register for a M.O.O.C., then students have no idea whether they have anything to learn from other students enrolled in the course or if their peers are hopelessly behind. One possibility is to use local companies in the vicinity of the university (something that is far easier to do in Austin or Dallas than in other parts of the country), as they might send their employees for an online Master's degree as part of their employee benefits, which helps with recruitment and retention. Those employees may benefit from knowing each other, as professionals seeking the same educational goals.
When it comes to giving a taste of the university's intellectual atmosphere, too often it is all or nothing: either a lecture isn't videotaped, or it's videotaped and posted on YouTube for everyone to watch. But there should be a middle ground with a website that is accessible only to current students (and perhaps dues-paying alumni) that allows them to watch content others cannot see and also, when possible, to submit online questions to the speaker and interact with fellow attendees. If universities only treat online Master's students as cash cows to meet their tuition goals, they may not get much loyalty from such students once they are turned alumni, depriving current students from the opportunity to interact with rising stars and benefit from alumni's insights and advice.
Online education at the undergraduate level, in my opinion, makes the most sense to provide refreshers of prerequisites and in the flipped classroom model. "Refreshers of prerequisites" are particularly important these days where universities are bracing for a change in demographics and are trying to attract new segments of the population, including transfer students and non-traditional students. Those students may have completed their Associate's Degree several years back and most likely will not have the money to retake a course they have already passed even if it would make their path to graduation smoother. Universities need to take into account both that those students want and often need to graduate as fast as possible for financial reasons, and that their success may require support that traditional students, who entered college at 18 and stayed a straight 4 (or 5 or 6) years there would not have needed. As for the value of the flipped classroom environment, it has been subject to debate, with some researchers noticing benefits in learning and others discerning no effect at all or a positive effect only for white high-achieving males (admittingly at West Point, which attracts a very specific type of students and is not known for its large number of female students, but since the white paper is from MIT, this report will probably get more attention than it should based on its contents alone).
When it comes to online learning, it might be that the burden of producing professional-quality videos should be on textbook publishers rather than universities. Of course all universities want to showcase their experts, and M.O.O.C.s have been a good marketing tool for that, but ultimately universities may want to put their resources elsewhere (although of course that might just provide textbook publishers with another incentive to increase their already exorbitant prices). I particularly like what McGraw-Hill is doing with its Connect approach. A smart book "personalizes learning to individual student needs, continually adapting to pinpoint knowledge gaps and focus learning on concepts requiring additional study. For instructors, SmartBook tracks student progress and provides insights that guide teaching strategies and advanced instruction, for a more dynamic class experience." The online resources also place students in immersive real-life scenarios as they apply course concepts and include videos to help with challenging topics. Further, Connect Master replaces narrative-driven chapters with 2- to 4-minute-long professionally-produced videos on 250 topics. So perhaps the future of online learning is through connections with textbook publishers that will produce and disseminate high quality videos and supporting tools to a far bigger segment of the student population than would take the course at a given university. That also means that the universities whose instructors are being videotaped for such textbooks may seem more knowledgeable or prestigious than those who aren't, and may increase disparities between universities, with some producing novel content and taking a more creative role and others assigned the task of communicating content developed elsewhere to their own students. It is perhaps not very glamorous but, with the tuition pressures looming ahead, fewer and fewer universities will have the resources to spend on high-quality videos of their lectures. The other thing that may happen is that universities may cut out the middleman altogether and directly purchase online-augmented courses from each other. Either way, it is a fascinating time to teach at the university level.
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