To make this a sensible solution there needs to be some forecast for how long online instruction will remain an across-the-board activity. If we are to rely only on official pronouncements, those go only as far as the current spring semester. What about in the summer and then the fall and perhaps even next spring? I have not read about student internships/jobs for this summer but I'm guessing that a good number of them have been cancelled or will be cancelled and the prospect of students finding other work will be nil. Indeed, this may be true even for those who graduate after the spring semester. I want to repeat that I'm simply guessing here. I have no information on this point. But if the speculation is on the mark, then the demand for courses may be much larger than usual, as taking them would be a way to accelerate time to graduation or adding additional qualifications post graduation, and the students' opportunity cost of time will be remarkably low in this instance. Further, if a vaccine is only first available during the spring 2021 semester, and its date of availability won't be known in advance, then this situation will persist into that semester.
Admittedly, the situation might be different for incoming first-year students, who opt for community college alternatives as a way to avoid paying higher tuition. (That the university might itself offer tuition discounts while in this totally online phase is an interesting possibility, but I won't consider it here. Perhaps I will write a subsequent post on that.) There is complexity in this because if a student doesn't enroll at the university in the fall does the student retain a place at the university to be exercised when face-to face instruction resumes? I haven't seen this matter discussed yet. I'm sure it will come to the fore soon enough.
While many instructors will be scrambling this spring to get their courses online, the forward thinking among them will start to consider the possibility of division of labor. If other alternatives don't avail themselves then these instructors might very well consider redesigning course assignments and course projects so that what students produce could potentially be deployed as instructional materials in the subsequent semester. Pedagogically, this would be an instance of - you really learn something well when you have to teach it to others. So the teaching idea would be that students would learn some aspect of the course deeply, enough so they can teach fellow students on that topic. Indeed, 20 years ago, I had thought this sort of thing would have become a big deal and was fully integrated into the instructional process.
Such integration has not yet happened and, to be blunt, if students are producing course materials that are productive, in that the instructor does use them in a subsequent offering of the class, then this is work and the students should get paid for doing such work. But the instructor won't have funds to pay the students and, indeed, if the approach required student payments it would not work. So I'd like to ask what it would take for the students to be willing to donate their creations as gifts to other students who might use them in the future. That is the issue addressed here.
My belief is that this requires creating an ethos where all students donate such creations willingly. Such an ethos would be greatly facilitated if the instructor also donated course materials that the instructor created. If this actually were to happen, then the creators would be interested in how the materials were subsequently utilized. One of the motives that would drive the willingness to share is a sense that others will utilize the materials and get something out of them.
Based on my own experience, there can be two different types of sharing. One you might call planned sharing, which would be with students who take the same course from the instructor in the future. It's the planned sharing that would drive changing the class assignments in this way to produce useful instructional materials. But there is another type of sharing that might very well happen, which I would call serendipitous sharing. Others, students and instructors elsewhere, find the content available online and access it. Then the normal social media rating scheme of likes and dislikes directs these users to content they'd likely be interested in.
For the serendipitous use to happen two things must be done. First, the content must be publicly available. If it is in a closed container that precludes such use a priori. Some years back I experimented with putting some of my content at archive.org. (This included an experiment where I read my blog posts aloud, so they could be podcast.) There was some serendipitous viewing, but only a modest amount. I also have a profarvan channel at YouTube. While some of the videos there have hits of the same order as the stuff at archive.org, there are other videos with 2 orders of magnitude greater hits than the archive.org stuff. Admittedly, this is a small sample on which to draw conclusions. But it is my belief that if one wants to promote serendipitous use of instructional content, then put it where users are likely to find it. That matters, a lot.
Should serendipitous use count much (or at all) in making these decisions? I will speculate here as I don't believe my past experience speaks to the question well for a few reasons. I have not tried to share student created content publicly. So I don't know whether there would be much serendipitous use of such content. At present the use of this sort that I get is from students who are taking the course elsewhere, where they are finding their own course materials inadequate for some reason, so are looking to supplement them online. I have only a little experience of other instructors adopting my content for their course. The question then is whether instructors would do that if the material was available at scale. Roughly 15 years ago there was intense interest in the Merlot Project, which aimed at promoting such reuse, via peer review of the instructional materials. I wonder who uses Merlot nowadays. I surely don't.
What I might do now, instead, is have my students screen some externally produced content and let them rate it. The stuff that gets a rating of at least as good as the stuff in our class, with this coming from several students in the course, I would then look at and consider deploying the next time I taught. If instructors at other institutions did likewise, this would give a mechanism through which quality content, whether produced by instructors or by students, gets redeployed for what I've been terming serendipitous use. Were such a process in place, then serendipitous content should count.
There is then a chicken and egg problem that needs to be solved. There must be a sufficient volume of publicly available content already out there for this sort of serendipitous use to manifest. My view is to be idealistic at present. Make the stuff publicly available and findable now, in the hope of jump starting this process down the road. This makes sense even if we return to on ground instruction eventually, as long as such instruction has a substantial online component thereafter. At the individual instructor level, I buy this argument.
At the institution level, it's a different matter, of which there are two main concerns, copyright ownership and the possibility of diluting the university brand. If the university puts in real and substantial resources in producing online content, the copyright is likely held by the university. The examples I've been giving above don't feature university contribution of that sort. Then there is the question of why students would pay big bucks tuition at a well known university when they can get all the same content online for free. In response, I'm reminded of the line from Good Will Hunting:
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
Nevertheless, this sentiment might not be very reassuring to institutions that have been struggling to identify recurring sources of revenue. Surely, they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, if they can avoid it. So they are very unlikely to go all in on sharing of online instructional content. Yet, if you asked whether such sharing would be publicly beneficial, I think a strong argument can be made that it would be, at least if the serendipitous sharing I discussed above would become a reality in this case. Institutions need to come to grips with this argument, maybe not immediately, but soon. And they need to work through as well, how the benefits from instruction are not the same as the value of the online materials used in instruction. I'm not saying this will be easy, but it is necessary to consider this and come up with a reasonable response.
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