Noun and Pronoun, Subject and Object, Face and Body

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is trying to make sense of things - so many instances where we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot socially, economically, and politically - yet given my background I may come at this with a different approach than what others are trying.  So, let me begin with the following paragraph, which is from a post I wrote almost a decade ago called Is reasoning taking a beating?

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

Just to be clear on the little physics experiment in that paragraph, the instructor holds a string with a weighted object at the end.  Then the instructor tells the students, I will swing this over my head to get the object to travel in a circle.  Then I will let go of the string. The instructor then asks the students what the path of the object will be after the instructor lets go of the string.  The Aristotelian view is that the object will continue traveling in a circle.  The Newtonian view is that the object will travel in a straight line that is tangent to the circle at the time the instructor lets go of the string.  As near as I can tell, which view of this experiment the student has doesn't correlate with the student's political preference or preference about other societal issues.  We should recognize that people hold contrary perspectives, even in socially benign situations.  But in the rest of this piece I will concentrate on situations of social consequence.

So, the question I want to use to frame this post is whether learning where the evidence contradicts the prior held world view can happen in outside-the-classroom settings.  Might it be that a significant purpose of a college education is to encourage the graduate to learn in such situations?  Alas, I fear that is wishful thinking. Instead, might it be that leaders on social issues help citizen/learners work through those issues so they can gain a new perspective?  One might hope so.  Before getting to that with a concrete example, I want to give a few of my own parallel experiences.

Recently, I was required to change my NetID password for the University of Illinois.  They insist that it be changed annually (really more like every 11.5 months).  They are the only provider that does this.  Many other providers do two-factor authentication and with that the password stays fixed over time.  This includes the various financial institutions I use.  The requirement for password change predates the use of two-factor authentication and I believe it persists for that reason.  In any event, I now dread the time immediately after a password change, fearful that something will break as a consequence.  As it turns out, for my home computer there was no problem at all.  Everything worked fine.  But now on my iPhone, the mail program doesn't seem to remember the password for the Exchange server, which is the new NetID password.  It's not the end of the world to type in the password, but it is a bit of a pain.  I really wish that I didn't have to change this password in the first place.  There is some irony in this, since I was a technology guy for the second half of my academic career and in that capacity enjoyed experimenting with new toys (software applications).  But now I'm a geezer, grumpier in general than I was earlier in life, and somewhat resistant to change. I think I'm typical this way, at least for folks my age, even when the change is not of social consequence.

The next two experiences come from my teaching.   Neither of them is uplifting.  But I think they are illuminating regarding the constraints in place that block real learning. The first one happened in fall 2017, the penultimate time I taught.  This was in an upper-level undergraduate course called, The Economics of Organizations. I take a dual approach in teach this course, part storytelling and part math modelling. The former is better able for me to integrate my experience as an administrator.  The latter allows me to teach economics the way I learned it in graduate school, albeit with simpler math, mainly high school algebra and analytic geometry.  The reality, unfortunately, is that even though there is a calculus prerequisite for the econ major and all the students in my class have met the prerequisite, many of them are nonetheless not competent in the high school math I mentioned, and the math modeling becomes a struggle for some of them. So, there is real issue whether the dual approach continues to make sense.  Indeed, I'm aware of quite a few econ instructors who have dumbed down the math (for example, not teaching indifference curves in intermediate microeconomics) because the students are not up to it and doing so would simply be an exercise in frustration.  I understand that completely.  Yet I can be incredibly stubborn.  And the reality is that before I made the switch to ed tech as an administrator, I was a math model guy with the economic theory.  If the students are to get from me some of what made the Economics Department higher me in the first place, the math modeling needs to remain as part of the course. 

Mainly I've handled the instruction for math modeling via videos of animated graphs in Excel, along with homework designed in Excel that feature both auto grading and a blend of presentations of the economics ideas and assessment of student understanding, which I believe is the natural way to do homework.  Yet on one topic during the course, the students seemed even more befuddled than usual.  So, I opted to do in class what I used to do full time, but had long since abandoned almost entirely.  I gave a chalkboard lecture on the subject for about 15 or 20 minutes, at the tail end of one class session. After it was over, one student walked up to me and said, don't ever do that again.  I gather that he got nothing out of the math lecture and felt it an imposition for me to spend class time that way as a consequence. But that he felt empowered to speak for his classmates as well as himself, indicated something more than that. 

He projected his own experience onto his classmates and then felt empowered to let me know about it.  I don't believe I had yet to hear about trigger warnings then.  And even now, a trigger warning about a math lecture in an econ class sounds a bit preposterous.  Yet given the student's reaction it makes one ask the following.  How is one to distinguish a situation that is overblown in the student's psyche from another situation that truly deserves a trigger warning?  A half dozen years ago I wrote a post, Boundaries Are Always Harder to Define, where I was reacting to a then campus report on Racial Microaggressions.  I will only observe here that the student reaction itself is not sufficient to determine whether a trigger warning is warranted or not. Perhaps many students reacting in the same way is sufficient, although the requirement probably still needs to be sterner than that.

The other experience happened a couple of years later, the last time I taught.  (I did not teach in fall 2018.)  A feature of the class is that students do weekly blogging according to a prompt I provide.  This is quite unusual for an economics class.  Perhaps it is unusual for any class outside of those that have a principal aim of teaching writing.  In this case the dual goals are (a) for students to try to tie their prior experiences at work, at school, or elsewhere to the concepts we discuss in the course and then (b) for me to give some individual coaching of the student thinking via my comments on their posts.  The students are uncomfortable with this at the start of the semester.  It takes about a month for them to get used to it.  By the end of the semester, many report that it is the best feature of the class. 

The particular incident happened as we began our study of Transaction Costs, a matter of critical importance for the economics of organizations.  A significant cause of transaction costs is that some parties to the transaction may behave opportunistically.  Doing so would make the transaction ineffective or worse for other parties involved in the transaction.  So, the transaction cost in this case entails whatever is necessary to do to prevent the opportunistic behavior. The prompt for that week used the word opportunistic and asked students to recall prior experiences where they either behaved opportunistically or had the chance to do so yet refrained from such behavior.  I should note that I've used the prompt in previous offerings of the class and never had a problem with it.  But this time around, several students wrote posts that ignored the ethical dimension of opportunistic behavior and instead simply considered situations where opportunities presented themselves and then taking advantage of them.   In so doing, they entirely missed the point of the exercise. 

I became angry with this outcome rather than take it as a sign of the times in undergraduate economics education at Illinois.  I spent a good deal of the next class session in scolding the students, not usually thought of as effective pedagogy.  As part of that, I did a show and tell with a look up of opportunism at Dictionary.com.  Then I followed up with what seemed to me as simple and sensible advice.  If the student isn't sure of the meaning of a word in the prompt, one that itself isn't economics jargon, then the right thing to do is look it up online. One of the students responded that instead I should provide the definition along with the prompt. Several other students agreed with that. I don't recall what I did to indicate my displeasure with that response.  But I can report that while on the syllabus attendance was strongly encouraged, it was not required, and that attendance fell precipitously after that class session and remained low for the rest of the semester. 

There is some irony in that it was the same person, me, who authored that paragraph quoted near the top of this piece, yet who became extremely irritated with students who seemingly put in such little effort doing the work for my class.  The leadership described in that early paragraph may not be present for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that ahead of time it wasn't obvious that any leadership was needed.  But one thing that did become apparent that semester is that many students in the class were struggling emotionally, with anxiety and depression, and some of them told me about it.  The blogging probably enabled them to feel more open in communicating about their situation, in email or in a response to one of my comments.  Then it came to light for me that this was a national problem, from reading the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.  And this was pre-pandemic.  Things have almost surely gotten worse since on that score.

I took a hiatus in the writing here, perhaps for three weeks or so.  It's hard for me to tell because I did think about the piece away from the keyboard, but I wasn't able to resolve my main concerns, which focused on two points.  Are the incidents that I claim are parallel really parallel?  I'll let the reader be the judge of that.  Then, I wondered if I was being tone deaf in coming up with this approach, ignoring sensitive and emotional issues that need to be accounted for, and hence being offensive in the recommendations I have to offer.   Ultimately, I decided to get the ideas out as best as I could and hope that, as with the other posts I write, this one provokes some reflection by the reader.  That would be the best possible outcome. 

I've been asking myself as of late whether in regard to identity issues, racism for example, am I like the student whose worldview still clings to an Aristotelian view of circular motion, or am I one of the choir, so when I read Charles Blow's columns, as I do with a fair amount of regularity, it is that like preaching to the choir for me.  Or might there be some gray area in between that is worth discussing?  Let me assume there is without discussing it, but then think of Charles Blow as a teacher for us regular readers of NY Times Opinion pieces.  What does the teacher want his students to be learning?  Are we students learning anything close to those objectives?  Might the learning objectives be better facilitated by a different approach in the writing or by having a different writer make the arguments?  

I likewise have asked myself with regard to sexism whether I did a lot of mansplaining when I was working or if I was able to treat colleagues on an equal level regardless of gender.  And here I want to make an additional distinction as to whether the relationship is horizontal or vertical. Here, horizontal means the other person works in a different unit on campus or at a different university, while vertical means we are in the same organization and one of us reports to the other, directly or indirectly.  The professor-student relationship also has a vertical element.  Of course, mansplaining may only be the tip of the iceberg regarding sexual harassment, where an array of other behaviors should be considered to give the complete picture. 

I won't do that here, but instead will note my experiences with identity issues as an adult that have been painful to me have been more indirect.  In the classroom, face to face or virtual, a student commits an evident microaggression.  In my role as instructor, what responsibility do I have in to remedy the situation?  This one has happened on a few occasions.  Likewise, when I was an ed tech administrator, I had one experience where a female direct report had been the victim of sexual harassment by her previous boss.  After learning about this, I found myself stupefied and treated it as if the past should be dead and buried, then ignored.  But this was avoidance by me only, not active decision making.  

The identity issues, which are intense and justified to be brought to our attention, are almost always brought forward from the victims' perspective.  The framing of the issues and the suggested cures that result from this approach are considered by the victims themselves as to whether they would demonstrate sensitivity by others and restore fairness, should the cures be implemented in full. It may be self-evident to the victims that this is the right approach to take, for those very reasons.  Yet if my parallels are indeed on the mark, it might be that this approach does not facilitate learning by others.  Indeed, it may create pushback only, nothing more.  Let me illustrate with particular parallels for the experiences I've described.

On resisting change that is suggested/mandated institutionally, consider the pushback about defunding the police.  There is a logic to the recommendation as video capture of police violence against Blacks that is shared via social media makes evident that there is and has been a huge problem this way.  So, doing something to fix the problem makes a lot of sense.  But violence is on the rise more broadly and many people who don't feel safe as a consequence think that the police provide needed protection. So, there is a reason to resist the suggested change.  And it seems to be having political consequences, with voters moving from the Democratic to the Republican party.   Could this have been anticipated in advance?  If so, would defunding the police have emerged as the answer nonetheless? 

On my delivering/not delivering mini-lectures in my economics class, I thought of that episode while reading this column by John McWhorter, with leftist fictions the parallel of using math models in undergraduate economics. Here I have to say I'm personally conflicted, on the teaching part of the parallel.  The math models are ingrained in me and what I feel gives the essence of the economics. Of course, this means not just understanding the math, but also applying the right model in context and thereby getting some insight into what is going on.  Maybe it's too much to expect typical undergraduate students to be able to learn that so I end up teaching an elite few and not teaching the vast majority.  That's been the pattern.  Yet I've not been able to let go of teaching that way.  Perhaps the leftist fictions emerge similarly, with the ideals ingrained so much so as to make light of the practical realities.

Then, on the misunderstanding of a word or expression and leveraging that misunderstanding for political gain, there now seems to be a cottage industry for that, with Critical Race Theory the most recent prominent case.  In my living memory, there have always been soundbites in politics.  But over time there has been a change from spin, to propaganda, to brainwashing.  The deliberate misuse of language for political purposes seems to me a huge problem.  It blocks learning instead of encouraging it. Instead, it reinforces stereotypes and makes people very angry in the process.  

Is there some alternative approach that would actually educate ordinary people, so they eventually change their worldview to embrace tolerance and fairness for all?

* * * * * 

Partly because I don't feel on terra firma when considering the above question as applied to identity issues and partly because I've written a fair amount about this before, I want to focus on income inequality and consider an education approach in that context.  Of course, the identity issues are wrapped up in the economic issues, so there is something artificial about looking only at the one and not the others. Yet I think I can make more headway this way, so I will proceed accordingly. My focus will be on income inequality and on educating those in the top ten percent to voluntarily participate in income redistribution that reduces their own income for the benefit of society as a whole. 

Let me begin with this recent opinion piece by Zeynep Tufekci, which is mainly a postmortem on America's poor handling of the pandemic.  Our dysfunctional healthcare system gets a good chunk of the blame and with that income inequality is taken to task.  Near the end of the piece she writes:

After the horrors of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression between them, there was rebuilding of democracies, including constructing a public sphere geared toward preventing the rise of fascism, an expanded safety net and great reductions in income inequality. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t what you’d guess would come next, looking at the smoldering ruins of 1945.

That is followed a couple of paragraphs later with:

Fixing all this requires an interconnected effort that unleashes a virtuous cycle. Rebuilding the public health infrastructure and creating a sane, sensible health care system in which we don’t keep spending more than any other developed nation for poorer results will help restore trust and improve our lives. Fair taxation policies would reduce income inequality and generate resources to execute these measures. We can investigate what went wrong, with an eye to actually fixing it instead of simply finding scapegoats. Regulation and oversight can better align the incentives of social media platforms with that of a healthier public sphere. We’ve done that before with transformative technologies.

In other words, we should fix the economy now the way we did after World War II.  We know we can do it now because we did it before.  There is no recognition here that maybe the parallels are not perfect and our political divisions now make this much harder to accomplish.  

Next, do a Google search on - raise my taxes, please. The hits you get show there are wealthy people who understand the need to contribute more in taxes for the good of the order.  Yet it is not a mainstream idea at this time among the wealthy.  One might wonder why.  

Some other pieces explain that, with particular focus on those in the income distribution from the 90th to the 99th percentile.  For starters, consider this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.  According to Reeves:

So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.

If this is right, there is a good deal of denial going on coupled with intense gaming of the system among this sub-population. Both of those factors might block a willingness to have one's own taxes raised for the good of the order.  In a more recent piece, an interview with the philosopher Matthew Stewart author of the recent book, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.  According to Stewart, the underlying cause for the behavior is fear.  (Presumably this is fear that they themselves or their offspring will fall precipitously in the income distribution.)  This results in behaviors that are harmful to others and to themselves.  One might reasonably hypothesize that the mental health crisis among college students, which still exists but preceded the pandemic, is an indirect consequence of these harmful behaviors by the new aristocracy.   I do want to note here that in identifying the underlying cause, the author's discipline might matter a lot.  Instead of fear, behavioral economists might focus on confirmation bias as why the new aristocracy clings to the belief in meritocracy, while also noting that these people are largely shielded from significant interactions with others who are of more modest means.

In my own way of thinking I find it helpful to envision that these people are stuck in their own peculiar Prisoner's Dilemma.  They are aware of what is to be decent and humane to fellow citizens.  But that is a dominated strategy. The gaming of the system helps to ensure high income for the offspring, even if it is a form of selling one's soul to the devil. Having gone fairly far down this path, it is very unlikely for them to retrace their steps and start all over again with a different approach. Yet an effective education program to embrace fairness in the income distribution would seem to require the participants to do just that.

Now I want to get to my own writing.  There are a series of 6 posts written under the tag, Socialism Reconsidered. The first four were written in early 2017, before the Reeves piece appeared. The most recent of these was written in early 2019, so there was quite a time gap before it was written, meaning my thinking had to evolve enough to consider the ideas in that post.  It is the most relevant for what is being considered here, as it conjectures about what would be needed for an education program of the type we're considering here to be effective.  However, it was written well before anyone had heard of Covid, so it doesn't contemplate what accommodations to the ideas would need to be made to still be functional in the pandemic world in which we now live. 

I will give a brief recap of that 6th post and then encourage interested readers to read it in full, along with the earlier pieces in the series.  In a nutshell, I considered this learning as diffusion of an innovation.  I cut my teeth as a promoter and administrator for educational technology in the early days where the Internet was used in teaching.  The idea was to imagine pilot projects run by early adopters and study those intensively, so that other could learn from those experiences.  It is also important to do extensive evaluation of how things are before the pilot projects occur, so there are clear benchmarks about where things are.  And then there needs to be a way to make these results highly visible, so they become part of the vernacular.   

For this to be even modestly effective, the evaluation must expose some of the myths that the new aristocracy cling to.  But, I would argue this must be done in a non-punitive way or it won't work.  How might it be possible to do that? 

Note that above we've talked about percentiles in the income distribution but not about the levels of income to which those percentiles associate.  People who are at median income or below in the distribution surely do care about their income level as they struggle to make ends meet.  But above a certain point that concern vanishes and instead where they stand in the distribution becomes the more important factor. This, in essence, is the idea behind the Relative Income Hypothesis of James Duesenberry.  Flattening the upper tail of the income distribution can still preserve the notion of merit without it requiring obscene income levels to reward that merit. 

So the question I'll close with is this. Can we find an education program where a good chunk of those in the upper decile of the income distribution willingly embrace higher levels of taxation as long it their position in the income distribution is preserved?  I'm sure it will be quite a heavy lift to get a yes answer to that question.  But I'm hopeful that it is still possible.

Dinosaur_U an Introduction

From Video Description:

Dinosaur_U as a concept is a sequel to ideas in this blog post:
https://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2021/06/becoming-fossil.html 

The video is captioned. Apart from making the video accessible to those who are hard of hearing, the captioning serves quite a different purpose. It may seem that I'm winging it in the video. I do generally prefer to talk without notes. A viewer might not be able to tell how much forethought went into making this video and if the estimate is not much at all, then discount the value of the video accordingly. But captioning is labor intensive. That there are well edited captions gives evidence of some effort in post video production. The creator has paid a "time price" in making the video. The viewer can readily observe the captioning. In this way it functions like a performance bond posted by the video creator. 

Audio only version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I97Qj9ReeMDmYgoRWYp_BOfxZMIMlskt/view?usp=sharing

Transcript of Video:

Welcome to Dinosaur_U an Introduction. I am Lanny Arvan, your host, and I will explain the title Dinosaur_U and what this is about.

This video and this concept are actually a sequel to a blog post I wrote, not too long ago, called Becoming a Fossil. And it was about ageism in society, specifically in academia, and also whether senior citizens who are retired currently might somehow re-enter the labor market in some way, because of chronic labor shortages because of the aging of society.

So, this is not the immediate short run labor shortages we're seeing under the pandemic. This is a longer-term issue of labor shortage because our society is getting older and fewer people are of working age.

And so, the question is, can we do anything about it? So, one of the ideas in that piece was that retired people who are of reasonable means might enter the labor market as volunteers. And they're likely to have substantial human capital that is still of some value, even if they've been retired for a while. And that human capital can be put to good use, if deployed in an interesting way.

So, Dinosaur_U is doing that in academia. I'm a dinosaur. I've been retired for quite a while. I’m a former faculty member in economics and administrator in online learning/educational technology. And maybe some things that I possess skill-wise and knowledge-wise could be put to use as a volunteer.

So, the idea of Dinosaur_U is to collect others like me who would volunteer because it's socially beneficial to do so. Hopefully we do something that's useful and create a little marketplace where those people who might want the volunteer service, and I'm going to try to illustrate that in the rest of this video, will come and look at these little bio videos to see: Do I want to hire this guy as a volunteer? Do I want to match this person into teaching my class? Or, if in an administrative capacity, do I want a mentor of this sort? Etc.

The thought is we've learned we can do lots of work online. So, Dinosaur_U will be an online service only not a face-to-face. Coincidentally, the people who hire might be in the same geographic area as the ones who are offering their services. But that's not really necessary.

So, I now want to explain why I use the word Dinosaur for U rather than some other maybe more somber term that's equally descriptive. And I'm trying to be a little tongue-in-cheek, a little self-deprecation, and a sense of humor. Because even though ageism is a rather serious issue, making a market that works is - seems to me like a long-shot possibility and we should have a sense of humor uh at the outset.

We should know that people like me, maybe especially me, but people want to have a nap once or twice a day when other people think work should be done. and may have other priorities because of health reasons or whatnot. And the people who are hiring, who are likely to be much junior to them, may feel well this is a little bit awkward because of the age difference. So, how do we get past that?

And I’m going to make a little bit of a setup that I hope creates a general set of rules for getting past it. And then I’ll try to illustrate in my particular case.

So, there are basically two rules. We seniors or we retirees who are the dinosaurs will always be the supporting actor in any relationship. The people who are hiring will be the leading actors. So, the relationship is we’re the support; they're the lead. They, and you can also think of them as the director, they get to set the way things will go, what the usage is, etc. We might offer suggestions, but they're the ones who are making the ultimate decisions. We understand that already. We're doing it under those terms.

Why does that work for me? It works for me because I had my career already. I don't need to have a career to define, in retirement, a career in retirement to define who I am. I’ve done that already. So, I could be support and let the people who are hiring be the ones who figure out how that support might work.

So, I'm going to talk about this in the teaching context and then maybe in future videos perhaps explore other contexts.

But in the teaching context, I teach microeconomics. I have been teaching advanced courses since I’ve retired. But I used to teach intermediate micro quite regularly. I have a website, ProfArvan, which has videos for intermediate micro.

So, an instructor at another university who may be beset by having too many students, or not enough respect because they're a grad student teaching, or they're an adjunct teaching and nobody gives them resources to do the job decently, is looking for some help and they happen to be doing it in microeconomics. They watch this video, and they say, hey maybe partnering with Arvan wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

So, I’m going to list a variety of different things that might happen during the partnership.

We might have video chats, if you will dialogue, conversation about topics which normally would be presented by lecture. But online, you know if you do listen to podcasts, podcasts are almost all conversation. Nobody listens to lecture online unless it's for courses. And so, maybe if the topic is very technical lecture is better. But in a lot of cases if there are issues to extract or there are different points of view that might inform of the subject, then conversation is the better approach. So maybe we would do conversation, record that like I’m recording this, and give that to the students outside of class. And then inside the class in the live class session they can do active learning activities based on that video.

Another possibility is the instructor wants to vent. Life is tough. Nobody is being friendly to them. So, vent. Vent to somebody not on your own campus and to somebody who's okay hearing that. You can call that being a mentor. But venting is a good thing and if you want somebody for that purpose that's fine.

If you want to talk about particular teaching techniques or trying little experiments in the classroom, that can be coaching about that sort of thing. Whatever the instructor, the direction where the instructor wants to go, that would be fine.

I want to say one thing that won't be done. The arrangement has to be willing on both sides. I like teaching, but I hate grading. I will not volunteer to have anything to do with grading. Furthermore, student privacy dictates somebody who's not actually officially in the course doesn't get to see student grades. So grading is out.

However, offering office hours to students before they've turned in the work, that might be a possibility. Or helping students on a group project, that might be a possibility as well. So, there's just lots of different things that might come out of this.

Now let me say one other idea I’ve had. If a few different instructors at different campuses want to hire me and they're teaching the same course, and I get to be friendly with them, and we're comfortable with each other, after a while I might introduce them. And they might partner with each other in the future. And I can be out of the picture, so maybe help somebody else.

So, another possibility, down the road, is bringing instructors together at different campuses who are teaching the same stuff, where a collaboration between them might be useful.

So, there are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head that can be explored and tried. And Dinosaur_U will have each dinosaur, each potential instructor helper, present their own ideas about how this might help and also their own background.

I’m going to stop now so this video doesn't get keep going forever and let's perhaps resume in a sequel.

Learning Objects and Micro-Lectures Revisited - Introducing Peer Review by Students into Redesign

About two to three weeks ago I completed what might prove to be my last professional obligation.  I refereed a paper for the Online Learning Journal. I have some history with this journal, which was previously known as the Journal of ALN (Asynchronous Learning Networks).  Indeed, I have the lead article in the very first volume of the journal.  Having published in a journal, there is an obligation to referee for them.  I'd like to begin by talking a bit about refereeing and about the obligation to do so.  

I cut my teeth on refereeing not with online learning but rather with economic theory, what I studied in graduate school.  There I learned to get into the depths of a paper, to really understand what the author was driving at, but also to look for flaws in the development of the model.  Working papers precede papers published in journals and those are what most practicing economists read.  If there are flaws in the former but they are not fatal and can be remedied, then part of the refereeing process is to indicate the path whereby this can be done. Not all PhDs in economics have this skill to read a paper in such depth.  I recall my early years as an assistant professor, one colleague in particular wanted me to read his working papers papers and give him feedback, even though I had the annoying habit (to him) that having identified the flaw I wouldn't read further into the paper, until another version was produced that corrected the error. 

Writing a referee report is something more than giving feedback to a colleague.  I learned how to do it over time, by receiving referee reports on my own work, some of which I regarded highly while others I thought superficial.  And as I struggled early to get my work published, getting a handle on this form of negotiation with the referee and the journal editor became crucial for my academic survival.  It was a trial by fire, quite stressful but also very educative.  My own style in writing referee reports, after I had tenure, was borne out of that assistant professor experience.  At the time the typical process was single-blind reviewing, meaning the referee's name was hidden from the author, but not vice versa.  Most of the papers I ended up reviewing were written by assistant professors at other universities.  Once or twice, I got a paper from a well known economist to review.  My recollection of the latter is that the paper was not carefully written, which created its own set of issues.  And there were usually two different referees, a way to ensure that more than one perspective about the paper would be considered.  The editor might then be thought of as a third referee in combination with a different role, as arbitrator, to determine how the paper should be disposed.  I want to note for those who haven't ever done this that the referee typically sends a cover letter to the editor, along with the referee report, in which some recommendation for how the paper should be disposed is given. 

Refereeing at the journals where I participated was not compensated.  A reward for doing a good job in refereeing was to earn the respect of the editor by doing so.  In contrast, if a referee did what was evidently only a superficial job, the editor might then develop enmity for the referee, unless it was evident that some life event interfered in doing the refereeing well, in which case it would be appropriate for the referee to decline reviewing the paper.  Concocting faux life events to get out of refereeing is another way to earn the editor's enmity.  One might then ask whether there is sufficient incentive in the process for most referees to be earnest in their reviews.  Thinking this way, in my opinion, leads down the road to perdition.  It is a sense of obligation to the profession that makes a scholar do a good job in refereeing.  That sense of obligation is a necessary component to make the system function well overall. 

But, I think most undergraduates I've taught in the previous decade don't understand this sense of obligation, except perhaps in volunteer work they do.  In their understanding, the main type of work they hope to have upon graduation is all about incentives, embedded mainly in how they will be paid.  And I'm afraid that is how they go about their studies, with such a heavy focus on grades, which reinforces this considering incentives only.  I've had a few students where either I mentored them after the class ended or I've had an extended email thread with them during the course that continued afterwards, where they couldn't understand why I would do this since I'm retired. Why not simply "enjoy life" instead?  Since I'm retired, why take an interest in how the student develops that goes beyond what other instructors apparently do and extends beyond the semester where I've been paid to teach the class? They don't see the sense of obligation I have for doing this, which is much the same as the sense of obligation in refereeing. 

But being retired does insert an added wrinkle.  For how long does the sense of obligation extend?  Does it end at retirement, last as long as the person is physically and mentally up to fulfilling it whether working or retired, or perhaps is it something else - competence in the subject matter and whether it might have eroded over time - that determines the extent of the obligation. In my particular case, I am time abundant and can readily afford a departure from "enjoying life" to referee a paper.  Yet for the OLJ review I was afraid in advance that I was not competent, as the paper would invariably be about some experience with online learning during the pandemic, while I had no such experience myself, having last taught in fall 2019.  I asked the editors about this.  They left it up to me.  After the fact, I felt okay reviewing the particular paper, although the general issue remains and I asked out of them sending me papers in the future.  On a different matter, OLJ now does double blind reviews. (The referee is not told the name of the author(s) though might get clues as to that from the references and other mentions in the paper.)  Would an author want the referee to know who they are?  I couldn't figure that one out.  

But I also did wonder whether the sense of obligation can be taught - to undergraduates - and, if so, how might that be done?  In what follows, that question should be kept in mind. 

* * * * * 

Let's now turn to learning objects and micro-lectures.  I made a slew of these back in spring 2011, the first semester I taught after retiring.  These were for intermediate microeconomics.  Most, if not all, of the learning objects were Excelets made to illustrate the economics.  I then made screen capture videos where each video reviews one worksheet, demonstrating how to manipulate the controls and to understand what is being graphed.  These videos were then captioned.  The voice over, done in my usual style, was made without referring to notes.  The presentation is more casual than you would find in a textbook, but nonetheless comprehensive on the topic under consideration. At the time of teaching this course I was aware of a possibility that I might teach it again in the future in blended format (where some online substitutes for face-to-face lecture).  That didn't happen, as we got a new department head in Economics soon thereafter and he had other ideas about how intermediate microeconomics should be taught. But this explains why I went to the trouble of producing the Excelets and the micro-lectures, which took considerable effort in the making.

The students in the class didn't like the micro-lectures, but then they didn't like the class as a whole.  I gather that this was mainly because they found the exams difficult and the videos didn't seem to prepare them for the exams as they expected.  I found this disappointing, though it brought back memories from the early 1980s when I first taught intermediate micro and had similar struggles.  The story would end right here except that a funny thing happened after the course was over.  The videos continued to get hits and the occasional comment that thanked me for making the video. 

For a while it was a mystery as to who was watching these videos.  Though I don't have absolute confirmation on this, I gathered that most of the viewers were students who were taking intermediate micro or some other microeconomics class, with the vast majority taking the class at some other university, quite possibly not in the U.S.  Either their instructor or their textbook was difficult to follow on a particular topic, so they went to YouTube looking for a video from some other instructor that might be easier to understand or more thorough in the explanation provided. If that was indeed happening then the micro-lecture presentation content, which I made, was decoupled from any assessment content that the students might experience, which would be provided by their own instructor. So these students should have a different perspective from the students who took my class, as the micro-lectures could be considered simply by whether they felt that they understood what was going on immediately after watching them. 

Now we have reached the point where I can explain why I've focused only on my own learning objects and micro-lectures. YouTube provides analytic information to video creators about viewer access to videos.  I only have such data for my own creations.  It would be extremely interesting to have the analogous data from a wide variety of instructors.  But lacking that, I will maintain this more narrow focus. Below is information for the top 5 videos from the past month, 4 of which were created during that spring 2011 semester.  (Note that the average duration times are in minutes:seconds format.)

 

Each video is only a few minutes in its entirety.   Students go out of their way to start viewing the videos, as there is no requirement for them to do so.  Yet most stop well before the video is complete.  Why does this happen?  It is something of a mystery.  

Originally, before I looked further at the analytics data, I hypothesized that a small number of dedicated students watched the videos through to their conclusion, while the rest would watch only briefly and then stop.  In fact, its more a continuous falling off in the distribution as illustrated below.  This is for the Isoquants video, the top one listed above. but now it is for the past year rather than just the past month.  I switched to yearly data so there would be enough information to plot, though the monthly graph looks quite similar. 

Now let's consider a hypothetical where an evaluator gets to interview a student viewer of this video soon after they finished watching it.  If the student watched to completion, did the student feel the material in the video was well explained and easily understood?  If the student stopped before the end of the video, and maybe this should be segmented into stopping early, stopping about halfway, and stopping later but still before the end, was the student satisfied or disappointed with the experience?  Why did the student stop viewing?  Beforehand, what was the student hoping to get out of the viewing?  Could the video have been done in a different way that would have produced a more satisfying experience for the student?

Of course, it is quite possible for factors unrelated to video quality to explain the student stopping time in viewing.  For example, if the student is multi-processing, then it can be the lure of something else online that is the key factor.  Alternatively, if the student has network connectivity issues, that might end viewing the video involuntarily.

There is a way that these two different sorts of explanation overlap.  The analytics reveal that well over half of those who access the video do so via search in YouTube.  But once one finds a hit to that search and goes to it, one will be confronted with videos on the same topic that are showcased in the right sidebar.  Does the student plan to watch all of these or only one?  Which video on the subject matter gets top ranking by the search engine?  If one reason to stop watching a video is to watch another on the same topic, how does the stopping time get determined in that case?  And is the stopping time impacted if the viewer has already watched part of a video on the same topic?

Crowd sourcing video quality may be sensible for certain types of content.  I don't want to dispute that. But for academic content, which surely will not go viral, it may not be the best way.  Wouldn't it be better for a student to watch a reasonably well done video in its entirety than to flit between various videos on the same subject done by different instructors?  It may matter less which instructor to watch than to get the complete lesson.  Extrapolating based on the data I have, that seems to occur infrequently. 

To sum up, the reason why most students don't watch the video to completion can be categorized as some flaw with the video (there are needless sticking points during the presentation), or some flaw with the student (the student lacks the necessary background or gets lost too easily in the argument), or extraneous factors (mainly multiprocessing and living life online).  In what follows I will abstract from the third category as I have nothing to say about how to manage those extraneous factors.  If it proves to be the main cause, what I do say should be discounted accordingly.   I find it amusing that what remains is remarkably similar to the situation in the early to mid 1990s, when I taught intermediate micro and that motivated me to take up online learning at the time.  Then, a small fraction of the students really liked my course and got a lot out of it.  But the vast majority did not.  I wanted to know if the cause was them or me.  Was there a better way to teach the class the would engage more students and improve their learning?  That was the question then.  It's still the question now. 

I want to make one more point before getting into the redesign part of the post.  About 20 years ago I became aware of the Merlot Project, through the CIC Learning Technology Group and specifically from Carl Berger, then of the University of Michigan. Merlot was a referatory, which contained the metadata (descriptions) for learning objects, and links to those objects that resided elsewhere on the open Internet.  The idea was to encourage the diffusion of use of a learning object developed by one instructor so that other instructors teaching similar courses at other universities would bring that learning object into their own courses.  At the time Merlot provided quality assurance of the learning object via peer review.  So, in this sense, learning objects were treated like working papers submitted for review at some journal.  However, there were/are differences, particularly in how the reviewer was selected and the criteria the reviewer would use to accept a learning object in Merlot.  Would a potential instructor adopter of the learning object buy into the criteria and thereby trust the review?  Or would this instructor feel the need to perform their own review, possibly a quite cumbersome activity? 

But what if students adopted learning objects directly, not mediated by instructors?  Part of the discussion in this section is to show that is happening some now, though at present it is mainly under the radar in talking about online learning.  Would some sort of peer review process help to drive student adoption?  What might that look like?  In the next section I speculate on this some. 

* * * * * 

If there are sticking points in a video micro-lecture they are surely not there by design as the instructor/creator of the video aims for clarity.  So, in identifying sticking points, students are more expert than the instructor is. Therefore, some process is needed whereby students can identify sticking points. However, in any particular identification, it may be a deficiency in the student that gives a "false positive" rather than a true sticking point. The solution is to trust strength in numbers.  If many different students independently identify the same sticking point, then there is reason to believe there is a problem with the video that is there in spite of the instructor/creator's best efforts to avoid such problems.  

As a rule, students who don't understand some course content are reluctant to admit that to their instructor.  A process needs to be identified where students are comfortable opening up on these matters.  The previous paragraph assumes such a process has been identified.  Some years ago I wrote a post called Rethinking Office Hours, which I believe has the elements of a good process.  If you couple that with having most if not all presentation content coming via online micro-lectures, quite possibly created by other instructors, along with homework/assessments that entail both identifying sticking points in those micro-lectures and the students writing up summaries of the videos in their own words, then in total you have the makings of such a process.  This same process might have to be done on multiple campuses and entail the same video micro-lectures, to pool the results where students have identified sticking points. That would entail a good deal of coordination across campuses that currently does not exist.  Here, I will simply assume it is possible to do and move on.

Having identified the sticking points in the video, let's consider two different possibilities to address them.  If the sticking point is caused by students not having the background that the creator assumed they would have, then a possible solution is to link to other content, text or another video, that provides the requisite background.  This potential solution will make viewing all the necessary content a longer experience than is indicated by the duration of the original video. So a full solution here requires encouraging students to take on this additional burden.  And part of that may mean not simply linking to other content that already exists, but instead producing a condensed version that is sufficient to make sense of the original video yet is not too time consuming to view or read.

The other possibility is that the instructor was needlessly obtuse in providing an explanation or in offering a discussion of a result.  In this case the video content should be replaced by something that is more straightforward, as if one student was explaining the content to another.  But in this desire for greater simplicity, one must be sure not to omit critical bits of content.  So, here we note that the instructor who made the original video is an expert in the subject matter, while a student who explains the material to another student may understand the content, but is not an expert.  The ultimate arbiter of whether the content omission was critical or not should be the instructor or other instructors who teach the same subject.   

There is a copyright issue to contend with as well.  Either the modifications of content meet the requirements of what counts as Fair Use or the creator of the original video must give permission to allow changes to be made to it or the creator must be the one who makes the changes.  If my situation is any indicator of how this issue might play out, 10 years after creating those micro-lectures for intermediate microeconomics, I lack the energy to modify the videos in a substantial way.  Putting small changes in the description (perhaps with links to other content) would be okay.  Beyond that, somebody else would have to do the work.  My only concern then is that the new versions don't end up tarnishing my reputation, because the new work ends up being of much lower quality than the original. 

Let us note a larger lifelong learning issue here.  Eventually, students need to learn to get themselves unstuck, either by researching the appropriate background information that they didn't have at hand at the outset or by working through a seemingly complex explanation so they can make good sense of it by themselves.  If this education in identifying sticking points in micro-lecture is to advance the student as a lifelong learner, then the student should also be involved in creating the revised video, at least some of the time, as that will close the circle on this lifelong learning issue.

Further, if the student can see how the effort in identifying sticking points produces a benefit to other students, who get to view an improved revised video, then the student gets first hand experience at acting responsibly.  A sense of obligation may then develop out of a sufficient number of such experiences.  How long that would take is anyone's guess.  But I suspect one course done as sketched above would not be sufficient, not even close.  So one should envision a series of courses, perhaps taken in a prescribed order, that would be necessary for the student to take to produce the desired result. 

In the review process of papers submitted for publication at a journal, it is possible for there to be outright rejection and it is also possible for the paper to go through a second round of revise and resubmit.  We should envision the analogous things are possible for our micro-lecture videos that undergo review by students.  Those videos that survive the process should be without sticking points and should be reasonably intelligible to student viewers.  If there is a consortium of universities that have parallel classes which do this type of video reviewing, then the consortium has the ability to give a virtual stamp to those videos that have made it through the process.  This is the analog of getting a research paper published in a journal. 

Now envision that the consortium stamp is readily viewable by potential student viewers of the videos who are at universities that are outside the consortium.  Will those students be attracted to these videos when there are other videos available that don't have the stamp and/or are made by instructors from universities outside the consortium?  Likewise, if students are attracted to videos with the consortium stamp, will they be more likely to watch those videos to completion?   The hope is that the answer to both of these questions is yes.

* * * * *

The devil is in the details.  The previous section, which gives a high level overview of the ideas only and no implementation plan whatsoever, may make it seem plausible when in actuality it is not.  Let me mention one bit to consider here.  The methodology part of intermediate microeconomics is pretty time invariant - more or less the same things would have been taught when I started back in 1980 as would be taught now.  That method might then be applied to current events - Econ in the News.  It's the videos about the methodology that should be the focus here.  A video about a current event is surely possible, but its durability will be less as it becomes less timely. Here the focus is on methodology videos that are apt to have substantial durability as long as they are perceived to be of high quality.

Even with that qualification, the overview may be entirely implausible.  Yet I find such speculation an attractive exercise.  It points to where we are stuck in our current approach and perhaps some things to try that might improve matters.  I wonder if a reader of this post would agree.

Dieting As Learning About Oneself

"Observe due measure; moderation is best in all things."
Hesiod

Based on weighing myself yesterday morning, I've reached a milestone of sorts. My weight is now approximately the same as it was during my senior year in high school, down about 20 pounds since February.  I was overweight in high school, no doubt.  So there is still quite a way to go to reach my ultimate goal.  Yet that high school weight itself varied quite a bit and, indeed, having a sense that my weight was out of control contributed to the depression I experienced in 10th grade.  A diet of sorts followed a period where I got counseling for the depression.  The diet was aided by medication to reduce my appetite.  That worked for a while and I did take off some pounds.  But after the diet ended, I reverted to my old ways.  That issue remains with me now.  I also sense that the distribution of my weight in my body is different than it was in high school.  Not surprisingly, the abdomen is larger.  The arms, with a geezer's sagging skin, are smaller.  Humor may be found by contemplating the changes in some of the impossible to observe internal organs over this time period.

I will give a brief background of my weight's trajectory since high school and then provide a rationale for dieting now. That is meant as background for the purpose of this piece, which is about the thoughts I need to make the dieting work and the various compulsive acts I'm prone to engage in that make that thinking more of a challenge.  It is further about whether an old dog can learn new tricks via this sort of reflection, which is what I hope for, or if the bad habits are so imbued that they will evidently return, once the diligence from the current dieting regime is in the past tense, which is what I fear. 

* * * * * 

My sister and I took a drive trip to the National Parks (e.g. Yellowstone) during the summer between high school and college.  I lost about 10 pounds during that trip. In my time in college I more than made up for it.  During sophomore year at MIT, where the depression I felt in high school had returned, I had some eating binges.  I don't recall doing that once I had transferred to Cornell, but I know I developed a taste for beer then as well as Black Russians, on occasion.  Also, there were the various indulgences that college kids did at the time  The effect of this on my weight surely was there, but now I can't parse one cause from another about what happened then.  The upshot is that when I graduated from college I was about 15 or 20 pounds heavier than I was in high school.  

After returning home from Ithaca, before heading to Northwestern for graduate school, I went on a crash diet.  The motivation was to improve my amorous life, which until then had gone nowhere.  For about two and a half months I had only one meal a day, dinner, with no seconds.  I lost about 50 pounds in that brief time span, enduring the feelings that sustained periods of low blood sugar will generate.  At the other end of the tunnel, I appeared normal and not overweight.  Other than one couple who were friends of my sister and hosted me while I looked for an apartment, I didn't know anyone else at Northwestern and they didn't know me, so they had no knowledge of what I was like at Cornell.  Though normal in appearance, I still had the mindset of a fat person.  That in itself was a big deal.  Maybe I'll write about it in a future post.  

The relevant point here is that I stayed at approximately the same weight for the following 16 years.  There would be a little drift upwards as winter came, mainly because I exercised less.  Then I'd shed some pounds during spring and early summer. So there was a bit of a sine curve in my weight, but no trend either up or down.  I ate and drank normally (for me) during this period.  I also got a reasonable amount of exercise.  I had been playing tennis since I was a kid and continued to do that some.  Golf was something new I got into as an assistant professor at Illinois.  And I started to do jogging regularly.  I had reasonable balance between the exercise and my food and drink intake.  I wish I could have sustained that until now, but I didn't.  

Our first child was born near the end of August 1992.  Parenting was a wonderful experience.  We liked it immensely.  But it did include sleep deprivation and with that impulse control is less.  The usual weight increase during the winter months wasn't offset by weight reduction the following spring and summer.  I began what proved to be a long upward climb in my weight, ultimately with more than a 100 pounds weight gain. 

But I still had golf and jogging, which helped to provide balance, though the former became too time consuming to do regularly.  A few years later, after our second child was born, I made a career switch from economics to ed tech.  That matters here regarding work stress and how it is managed.  Both types of work had some stress to them, but with the ed tech work I was much more visible on campus.  And some of the ed tech work meant overseeing online applications that instructors used in their teaching.  There was much stress related to that.  Humorously, the first inkling I had of such stress was when we stopped supporting PacerForum, as the company that made this application went out of business.  We had a group of hard core instructors who were quite attached to PacerForum.  They did not care one whit about the business side in supporting the application.  Some of them had become friends of mine.  Nonetheless, I got quite a lot of grief from them for making what was evidently a Hobson's choice.

For about 5 years there was a moderately slow upward drift in my weight.  I don't have a chart of that time to recall the pattern exactly, but maybe I reached a weight about where I am now at the end of that interval.  Then, around 9/11, I stopped jogging because my knees were shot and simply hurt too much to do it.  I made a grievous error after that.  I didn't find alternate exercise for quite a while.  Ultimately, I took up walking and then using the exercycle, which we used to have in the basement, during the winter months.  But for quite a while there was no exercise and the stress really started to pile up.  I put on a lot of weight then.  The peak occurred about 5 years later at my brother's 50th birthday party in Ann Arbor.  I had a bad fall and ruptured all the tendons in my left leg between my quads and the knew.  I was out of commission for a couple of months.  This was a wake up call that I needed to do something about my weight. I had switched jobs (from the campus to the College of Business) during the time when I was recovering from the fall.  I retired about four years later.  By then, I was about 35 pounds lighter, a definite improvement though still much heavier than I am now. 

Now let me note a different factor that complicates matters some.  In fall 2009 (I retired the following summer) for the first time I experienced pain in my leg merely from walking.  As my dad had sciatica, I assumed that's what I had as well. That proved incorrect.  I was diagnosed with arthritis and bone spurs in my lower back.  On occasion that would pinch a nerve, which was the cause of the pain.  The rheumatologist recommended exercise as the main way to cope.  I did increase the amount I walked after I retired as a consequence.  But, obviously, while a good solution, it was not perfect.  So, even though my stress level dropped considerably, I drank pretty heavily most of the time.   It did conceal the pain, if only for a short time. And the habit was pretty entrenched.  My dad was quite a drinker too.

The obesity and the drinking can each individually cause high blood pressure.  I began to take medication to control that.  Sometime later I became aware that the drinking can cause high pressure in my eyes as well.  As I'm now being treated for glaucoma, that is something to be avoided, if possible.  

Sometime in 2014, well into retirement, I started a period of no alcohol.  I can no longer recall what motivated that effort, but it must have been something health-wise.  I lost a good deal of weight then, getting to a few pounds less than I am now.  I recall taking a lot of clothes to Goodwill, most if not all of the stuff I had that was labeled XXXL.  But I did go back to drinking after that and my weight drifted upward as a consequence.  Less than a year later, when I turned 60, I was about 5 pounds heavier.  Three and a half years after that, when I was treated for prostate cancer, I had gained more than 30 pounds.  Further, aside from my lower back, there had been episodes of pain elsewhere, in my neck and in my feet. 

The neck pain I have since been able to control with medication.  The foot pain, which I believe has multiple causes, oscillates in its intensity.  The lower back pain and right hip paid has gradually gotten worse.  In March 2019 I saw an orthopedist who said I was a candidate to get a hip replacement.  I found that recommendation unsurprising, but I opted to put off doing it for a while.  In 2012, I had rotator cuff repair in my right soldier.  The procedure went okay, but about 6 weeks later the wound started to ooze and upon inspection by the doctor I learned that it was infected.  I ended up spending 5 days in the hospital, with 3 trips to the OR to scrape out the gunk.  I found that experience excruciating and would really like to avoid a repeat in the future.  Further, my mom had her hip replaced more than 10 times.  Each time it would get infected, so they'd have to do it again.  Eventually they removed all the bone and she became completely wheelchair bound.  It seemed to me that the risk of infection from getting a hip replacement, with the risk increasing due to being overweight, provided justification for putting off the procedure.

So, the weight loss regime I'm now on is there either to lessen risk of infection or to lessen the pain enough so I don't feel hip replacement is required.  But, as this story has made it agonizingly evident to me, one of the reasons to write this post, I need to think through how to avoid my historic pattern of having the weight drift up after a period of weight loss.  Unless I solve this issue long term, I don't really have a solution at all, even if I can get down to a normal weight in the not too distant future.

* * * * * 

When I was a teen my mom, who was a native German speaker, would call me a fresser.  She was a fresser too, as was my sister.  For whatever reason, my brother was not.  Using English, you might call me a gourmand or a foodaholic, with motto - to eat is good; to eat more is better.  Only it really isn't.  It's better in the present.  It's worse for it's impact on the future.  I want to note here that I'm not prone to excess consumption in other things.  For example, the car I drive these days (with decreasing frequency) is a 2008 model.  Having it sit in the garage most of the time may be almost as environmentally friendly as buying a current electric model. 

The lack of impulse control with food and drink may seem to belie my rationality.  

I interrupted the writing after completing the above sentence to go for an appointment with my eye doctor.  It began with a visual field exam.  With my glasses off and one eye covered with a patch, I stare into a machine with the other eye and am told to focus on the bright orange light that is approximately in the middle of the screen.  When the test starts little flashes of white light appear at different places around the screen.  I'm holding a clicker and am told to click every time I see such a flash.  But I'm also told to keep my focus on the orange light.  And the technician kept telling me to do this throughout the exam.  Yet it is very difficult not to move the eye to look at where the the white flash appeared.  I'm supposed to use only my peripheral vision for that. I wanted to do the test as instructed, but I felt that I was cheating some while it was going on.  When the doctor reviewed the results with me, he said I did pretty well in focusing on the orange light.  It occurred to me that this visual field test provides a great metaphor for having difficulty with impulse control, one that those who have never struggled with their weight could identify with.  Instinct sometimes trumps thoughtful intention.

Indeed, given my formal economics training and general preference to think things through as fully as I can, I'm probably more rational than most people, academic friends included. Yet as behavioral economists have taught us, none of us is fully rational, even well trained and very accomplished economists.  According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, there is Thinking, Fast and Slow.  It is the slow thinking that can be associated with rationality.  Fast thinking is more impulsive.  One of Kahneman's core hypotheses is that slow thinking is fatiguing (except, perhaps, when the person has achieved Flow). Once fatigued, the person reverts to thinking fast. Understanding that, ahead of time one might put in place incentives to minimize the damage created by the inevitable impulsive behavior.  

Such an incentive is called a Nudge. I understood the idea intuitively before I ever heard of behavioral economics.  When I was single and of normal weight, I would never buy ice cream to keep at home, which I might otherwise consume in the evening after dinner, going out for ice cream then being too much of a schlep.  Though I much prefer married life to being single, marriage requires making compromises on decisions of this sort.  So, I needed to find other nudges that can work under the circumstances.   Some of those will be described in what follows.  Yet the nudges are, of necessity, incomplete.  What is required in addition is to develop new habits that are healthier and abandon old habits that seemingly provide pleasure but are in fact self-destructive.  Much of the learning I want to consider is in regard to habit formation of this sort.

I tend to do my initial thinking in my head without writing things down.  Subsequent written reflections, such as this blog post, happen much later. So, in what I say here about initial goals, please understand that these weren't quite as well articulated up front.  That said, I wanted to reduce my drinking.  I wanted to change my eating so a good deal of it was fruits and vegetables and comparatively little of it was starch - mainly bread and pasta.  I also wanted to mainly eat at mealtimes.  And if I snacked, I wanted those to be healthful.  One of those things I implicitly knew at the outset is that sometimes I snack to satisfy an oral fixation rather than because I'm hungry.  Chewing on a stalk of celery can satisfy that want, though most people wouldn't consider it snacking. 

I also knew two other important facts.  My impulse control varies with the time of day.  It's much better in the morning and not so good in the evening.  Then, alcohol weakens my impulse control substantially.  If I'm going to lessen my drinking overall, it has to happen by going cold turkey over some time period, then resuming to drink for a while, followed by another interval of going cold turkey.  Over time doing this, one might compute the average amount drunk per day.  Seemingly one would get the same results by having that average amount, and no more, on a daily basis.  The quote that begins this piece seems to recommend that approach.  But that won't work for me, at least not yet, because with that initial drink I'm very likely to consume another.  Further, I'll do snacking of the foods that I'm otherwise trying to avoid.  So, I knew going in that my approach would have periods of no drinking and sticking with the diet and other times of indulgence that couldn't be considered dieting at all.  If it is two steps forward and one step back, that's still overall progress.  That's what counts. 

Let me describe some of my nudges.  As I have a sweet tooth (who doesn't?) I needed some way to indulge it that was still manageable.  So, I moved to a regime that when I am dieting I will have a sweet baked good, whether intended to be consumed with the morning coffee or as dessert for dinner, to be eaten only in the morning.  I would have it first, before the rest of my breakfast, usually with the second cup of coffee.  That satisfied the craving without wanting even more.  The second nudge is to have a quasi-plan for both breakfast and lunch (the fruit which served as a dessert for lunch would typically be melon, a relatively new thing for me) where my wife and I would eat entirely different things for those meals.  And we've reached the point for dinner where maybe two or three times a week a good meal is made with plenty of leftovers.  The rest of the time we each "scrounge," so have individualized meals then. I do allow myself an afternoon snack, typically an apple or some other fruit, which is before dinner but in some sense serves the purpose of having dessert.  The third nudge is the biggie.  I try to go to sleep very early, which now that the sunset is before 8 PM isn't as hard as it was earlier in the summer.  This nudge is facilitated by one of my medications, which tends to make me drowsy.  Taking that at the appropriate time encourages me to want to go to sleep.   The idea behind this nudge is to not allow the lack of impulse control to take hold.  I've already gone to sleep before it can work its evil ways. 

I'm pretty sedentary much of the day, but I do try to get exercise on a daily basis by walking on the treadmill and then doing some light weightlifting as well. I discovered a few years ago that while walking outside will cause the lower back pain to flare up (nowadays after only walking 1/4 mile or so) walking on the treadmill and bearing some of my weight with my arms takes the pressure off my back.  I try to do that at a sufficient pace so there is some aerobic benefit.  It's not nearly as effective that way as the jogging I did 20+ years ago. But it is real exercise.  To relieve the tedium of the treadmill I watch some show on the TV.  (I'm currently in the middle of season 4 of Star Trek the Next Generation, which is on Netflix.)  It also helps as a timing device of sorts, to let me know how much I've worked out.  Sometimes I overdo it and am in pain afterwards as a consequence.  And on some days I've got pain (perhaps from a cause unrelated to the exercise) so I won't do my workout at all that day.  

Physical pain is one of the big reasons while I will drink that evening.  It's a bit of feeling sorry for myself and a way to numb the pain.  I confess it's not the only reason.  Another reason is a sense of fatigue.  I get up in the middle of the night several times to go to the bathroom - old man's disease.  The issue is whether I can get back to sleep or not.  If I don't, I feel drained the next day and then want to pamper myself.  Going off the diet is a kind of pampering.  Then, like many others, I have bouts of anger about our national politics and the stupidity of many in not getting vaccinated.  Drinking is surely not a healthy response to that anger, but it is a response of a sort.  Last night I had some drinks to celebrate reaching the milestone with my weight.  Kind of ironic, wasn't it?  

I've learned over time that sometimes it isn't even two steps forward and one step back.  I might drink for several days in a row.  It takes some near-term plan to stop that and get back into the diet routine.  A big part of the learning is to accept that these failures will happen.  The goal, I've discovered, is not to eliminate these episodes.  Trying to do that, I believe, will ultimately have me abandon the dieting altogether.  So, I can't punish myself after the fact too much.  Instead, what I need to do is manage these episodes so that overall there are more steps forward than there are backward.  

There are aspects of my personality that make this a challenge.  It will probably not come as a surprise to my friends and former colleagues, but I do have my compulsive side, which now has me weigh myself a few times a day.  There is a learning aspect to this, about understanding the cycle of one's weight over the course of the day and whether there is a downward drift overall or not.  Sometimes, what appears to be an upward drift can motivate me to stop drinking.  But it is also clearly neurotic.  I don't do anything like this when I'm not dieting.  One weighing per week is probably more than sufficient then.  

I've also learned that there can be other rewards, ones I hadn't anticipated, from losing the weight.  My clothes started to seem baggy.  The shirts and jackets I had been wearing were all XXL.  The shorts too.  I had XL shirts that I kept from an earlier time.  Lo and behold many of them fit.  That felt like victory.  (I also discovered that across brands there is substantial variation in the XL and XXL boundary.)  This sort of reward does make me want to persist to where I can experience wearing shirts marked L, though then I will need to purchase them. 

And I have learned that there needs to be experimentation along the way, not a completely fixed plan.  Some of this is simply to match the circumstances.  My wife in her retirement has taken to gardening big time.  Episodically there is a bounty from the garden and somehow I try to incorporate the bounty into my eating plan.  How to do that requires experimentation.  And as too much repetition gets boring, there needs to be different foods to try or some variation in the routine, just to keep things interesting.  This includes, for example, how much to eat at a meal as well as how fast the weight should come off.  Having that memory of the crash diet I did when I was 21, the frequent weighing now does suggest the idea to eat less than I've been doing, even when on the diet path, to speed things up.  I do wish I was 21 again, but that's not going to happen.  My rhyme yesterday was about slow and steady winning the race. Rationally, I do understand that.  Alas, there is thinking fast and being impatient.  Economists refer to it as HRTP (high rate of time preference).  Somehow, I have to deal with that as well. 

* * * * *

My original weight goal was to return to the weight I reached during those 16 years when I was normal in appearance.  Now I'm thinking I have to overshoot some, so I can experiment with approaches to keep the old pattern of upward drift in my weight to return after the dieting has concluded.  The ideal, of course, would be to truly embrace the quote at the top on a daily basis.  But I'm beginning to see another possibility, which is that my pattern while dieting becomes the pattern for the rest of my life, with the forward steps and the backward steps more or less equalizing out.  We're not there yet and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. But I do normally make conjectures about this sort of thing.  The conjecture here is that if I can get my exercise level up then I can achieve moderation in eating an drinking.  But, if not, there is an alternative that might still be effective for me. 

 

Should Learning Technologists Have Tenure? A Gedankenspiel

I had something of an epiphany earlier in the week and I'm going to write up the thoughts that led to it here. 

Though retired now for more than a decade, I remain on some listservs that target learning technologists.  While I have certainly not done a careful research about the postings, my distinct impression is that most of them are about administrative issues with particular software or with a specific vendor.  There are hardly any postings about evaluation of learning issues, something you might expect during the pandemic, or about novel adaptations of software to enable a new pedagogic approach to address specific learning issues. If that's happening, it's being done either behind the scenes or by others, notably instructors who are not affiliated with the learning technology organization, or it's not happening at all. I'm on record from quite a long time ago, this post from near the end of January 2007 after the ELI conference that year articulates the view, that the technology itself should linger in the background and hardly be noticed at all if it functions as it is designed to do. Putting the technology front and center is having the tail wag the dog.  The post itself elaborates on what else should be the focus.  While in some ways things are quite different now, in this regard I believe that learning technology as a profession is still making the same error.  So, one might ask what could shock the profession in the right way to bring the learning issues into focus. 

A few years after I became involved in learning technology administration (spring/summer 1996), first with SCALE and then with the Center for Educational Technologies (CET), I became a member of the CIC Learning Technology Group.  (The CIC has now become the Big Ten Academic Alliance.  Back then there were fewer universities in the Big Ten and the University of Chicago was part of the CIC, though it is not in the Big Ten.)  Let me note a few distinct features of the LT Group at the time I joined it.  It was funded by the Provosts.  Later that changed and it became supported (though with less funding) by the Campus CIOs.   There was a mixed membership with both Learning Technologists and Associate Provosts for Undergraduate Education.  The latter drifted off the group over time.  When the CIOs took over sponsorship, there were only Learning Technologists remaining.  Among the Learning Technologists, some were tenured faculty members like me, while others were full time staff (though some may have had fractional appointments in an academic department) and were without tenure.  It is also worth mentioning that the faculty with tenure among the group were all men, while those who were full time staff without tenure were mainly women.   I got along well with everyone in the group, but I had a tighter bond with the those who were faculty members, one of whom, like me, was an economist.  Apart from the evident collegiality, the others were all extremely professional in their approach.  That might seem a good thing, but I will challenge that assumption below.

Now let me introduce one more idea before getting to my epiphany.  This one is from Daniel Pink's Book, A Whole New Mind.  While much of the book is about taking a creative approach to the work we do, there is one particular framing of this that I liked very much - celebrate your amateurness.  My rewording is to be experimental with the approach, which then makes the recommendation very much in the spirit of Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner.  Experimentation is part and parcel of reflective practice. Of course, experiments can fail. The experimenter has some control over this by selecting the degree of riskiness in the experiment.  It is safer to have less risk.  But the big gain may come only when taking larger risks.  This latter argument holds especially, when many are taking like risks and the gain is the result of the pooled activity of the various experiments.  

For quite a while, I thought that the head learning technologist on campus should be a faculty member, precisely because the person would direct the learning technology organization to be experimental.  In the mid to late 1990s, that made a lot of sense to me.  Five to ten years later, however, I believe the profession as a whole saw a trend away from that, toward having the head learning technologist be an academic professional, without tenure.  Indeed, in a post from around then I referred to myself as a dodo-head, meaning my type of learning technologist was going extinct.  Was the profession as whole doomed as a consequence?  I thought so, until I had this epiphany.  

Maybe it's not the faculty mindset but rather the contractual arrangement (tenure) that makes the learning technologist willing to be experimental.  Indeed, isn't the core logic behind tenure based on the notion that it promotes intelligent risk taking?  If so, and if a sober analysis of the profession as a whole came to the conclusion that insufficient risk taking was happening, might the profession then conclude that at least part of the answer would be in giving learning technologists tenure?  

That's as far as I got with the epiphany.  I want to make a few caveats and then close.  How one would go about giving tenure to learning technologists without making them faculty, so the requirement on scholarship wouldn't be too onerous, or by making them faculty a la academic librarians, is beyond the scope of this post.  Don't put the cart before the horse.  Implementation is its own problem.  Here let's stick to reasoning through why such implementation might be desirable. 

Then, I want to argue about lessons I've learned in retirement, where though experimental in some ways I'm now definitely an old dog and highly averse to learning new tricks. So there is a question about whether flipping a contractual switch will have a significant impact on mindset or not.  I don't know.  This question might then lead to consideration of other factors than the contractual mode that might encourage risk taking, budgeting for example. 

One further point is that experimentation is greatly facilitated by the availability of soft money, so grants from external foundations might be part of the answer to the question in the previous paragraph.  But, if my experience in the 1990s is any guide here, the external foundations have their own agenda and often the agendas across foundations are uncoordinated.  There is an implicit argument here toward more coordination with soft money funding and in a way that satisfies the needs of higher education overall.  I don't know if this is possible or not, but it is certainly something to discuss.  

As I wrote in my previous post, there are experiments I wanted to see happen that never occurred, but I'm sufficiently out of the current conversation to not know whether what I'm suggesting here makes sense, if only as a topic of conversation for the time being.  I would be delighted if this post does promote subsequent discussion.  That's the most I hope for now.

The (Virtual) Road Not Taken

 As this is another very long post, I've made a Google Doc version here.

This is an odd post.  While it will mostly be about developments in ed tech during my personal history with it (roughly from 1995 to 2010), where those developments had at most mild influence on the profession as a whole, and quite possibly no influence whatsoever, it is also meant as an extension of a critique of Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education by Joshua Kim and Edward J. Maloney.  I know Josh through the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute.  He attended it when it was held in Burlington Vermont. summer 2009.  I was a faculty member at that institute, the last of three times I did that.  Apparently what I said made some impression on Josh at the time.  On a few occasions, he subsequently wrote kind things about me in his blog and then in his Inside Higher Ed column.  I feel some obligation to return the favor, although I've been retired for upward of 10 years and am more than a little outside the current conversation. 

The pandemic manifest soon after the book was released.  In the interim, Josh sent a message to the Leading Change Institute list (formerly Frye Institute list), in an effort to promote the book.  Josh had previously sent me a personal message about the book.  I responded to the personal message as follows.  I did order the book and read the introduction (first chapter). Based on that I sent Josh extensive comments.  I think they still are appropriate. But I said I wouldn't read the rest of the book for a while.  I felt I wasn't part of the intended audience, because of what I wrote at the end of the previous paragraph.  I have recently picked up the book again and am about halfway through it now.  My reaction follows.  Before getting to that, however, I want to note there was no further discussion of the book on the LCI list.  Josh may have gotten private emails from individual LCI members.  I have no way of knowing that.  My sense of things is that list members who were working full time became so overwhelmed with the prospect of the pandemic that they had no mental bandwidth left for considering the book.  We may now have reached the other end of the tunnel.  I suspect that most will be thinking along the lines - what from before should be retained and what adjustments made during the pandemic will be part of the new normal?  My guess is that this would give short shrift to what came before.  Reading this book is a way to give that its due.

Let me begin with what I liked most in what I read, which challenged my prior assumptions about why innovation with learning happens in higher education.  The authors argue that it is the maturity in the science of learning, with all agreed on the fundamentals of what is needed to advance learning on campus, that makes the mission of Centers for Teaching and Learning clear, to catalyze and support innovation in teaching and learning on campus, and brings that mission in line with campus administration as well as with the various academic departments.  This is an argument not just about what should be done now.  It is also an argument that this effort can sustain, because there is agreement on the fundamentals. In contrast, I believed that it was novelty in the technology that inspired innovator and early adopter faculty to embrace learning innovation, which was considerable on my campus, particularly in the mid to late 1990s.  But once the technology itself became more ho-hum, additional innovation would  be more of a struggle and perhaps peter out entirely. Further, I believed and continue to believe that - if it ain't broke don't fix it - so that innovation is an explicit or at least tacit indicator that some things weren't working as well as they should have been with teaching and learning prior to the innovation.  But campus administrators were loathe to admit that, especially if it seemed like what was broken was specific to their campus.  Doing so would generate bad press that they did not need.  If, as the book argues, campus administration now will truly embrace learning innovation, perhaps they've solved this issue of bad press by casting things forward rather than in the past.  That really should be considered a major accomplishment. 

I did want to note that maybe it is easier to do this at Dartmouth and Georgetown (the home campuses of the book's authors) than it is at Illinois, where I spent my career.  Private universities may be under less scrutiny this way and the smaller scale at which those campuses operate may enable a more coherent centralized approach.  We are very decentralized at Illinois, a virtue and a curse simultaneously.  I would expect that the main hypothesis of the book does not yet apply to Illinois, though that's more a guess than anything else and is biased by my prior experience, which is dated.  I know far less about the current situation, so could be quite wrong in my assessment.  

Next, and I mean this paragraph to be a bit tongue in cheek, reading this book made me feel very old.  Most if not all the references I will give below are from an earlier time than is contemplated in the book.  I think many of those references still have relevance, and might be read for that rather than merely as historical curiosities.  Further, when I did campus ed tech, many of my peers in the CIC Learning Technology Group (the CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance) were previously regular faculty members who then embraced ed tech administration, while other peers did not have this faculty background.  As for me, I started by running a small soft money organization, SCALE, that later became part of a still small organization called the Center for Educational Technologies. Though an administrator, I felt entrepreneurial and innovative in this role. After CET merged with the larger IT organization, that feeling gradually eroded till it was pretty much gone.  I could still be a strategic thinker about ed tech matters.  But regarding getting things done, where before I could be nimble, after it felt like walking in glue.  My perspective is informed by this background.  Those who are junior to me, who have quite different formative experiences, are better able to see the possibilities that lie in front of us.

Let me turn to two topics that appear in the book, the Learning Management System (LMS) and cost reduction in instruction that might manifest from innovation and effective use of educational technology.  I'll lead off with this post from long ago by Leigh Blackall. 

Die LMS Die!  You too PLE!

The post exemplifies that many ed tech professionals at the time were against the LMS, because it seemed antagonistic to real learning.  I will explore that some below, but first it is worth asking why the LMS prevailed in spite of these criticisms.  Here is a partial listing of such explanations.

• Legal Restrictions - In the U.S., the two biggies are copyright and FERPA (student privacy).  If you read Blackall's post, there is a distinction made between closed systems, of which the LMS is one, versus open systems, which learning technologists of Blackall's ilk preferred.  On big campuses and/or campuses with deep pockets, Illinois is one of those, there is a great fear of liability and thus efforts are taken to reduce exposure.  In this arena, the LMS is a safety play.  Going with an open system is taking on some liability risk (nobody knows how much).  Further, some instructors are ignorant of these risks, while others who are innovative are more willing to take them on than the campus is.  (And with FERPA, the penalties for noncompliance fall on the institution, not the offending faculty member.) Thus, institutions have a preference for closed systems, while innovative faculty members might opt out and do some alternative on their own. 
• Back-End Technical Considerations - The learning system, whatever it may be, needs to be integrated with the student information system, which records who is registered for what classes.  At the beginning of the semester, registration information needs to flow from the SIS to the learning system.  At the end of the semester, there might be grade information that flows in the other direction.  These flows need to be highly reliable.  From an IT perspective, it is better to have one enterprise learning system for this than to have a host of alternatives, each which would require the same type of integration with the SIS.  This too favors the LMS.  
• Political Economy Considerations - Funding for IT units at universities largely follows the business cycle. During a recession the CIO, like all other campus administrators, will be asked to engage in what is euphemistically called "belt tightening."  In this situation, the CIO will prefer to be supporting mainly applications that have a very large audience, so service cuts there would be very unpopular.  In turn, this creates a preference for large applications even when budgets are more friendly.  It also means that services that are targeted for termination, then become something of a political football and users lobby hard for such services to be continued for a while rather than be terminated (what they deem as) prematurely.  This too favors one large LMS.  

And, of course, many students and instructors who currently use the LMS will point to the convenience benefit it affords.  In case its not evident, however, the convenience benefit and the above are factors that taken together support lock-in to the LMS but are orthogonal to teaching and learning considerations. Given that, we should inquire about what teaching and learning considerations embrace of the LMS might block.  It's a large question to ask and I will take it on in several steps.  

Perhaps surprisingly, the first step will be to take a look to the past.  In the SCALE Library, there was a paper by William H. Geoghegan called Whatever Happened to Instructional Technology that might still be worth reading.  I recall that it introduced me to the ideas of Everett Rogers on diffusion curves and the various players who make diffusion of an innovation happen - the innovators, the early adopters, the majority, etc.  Yet the paper itself was about why instructional technology didn't seem to be diffusing faster than it actually was. It was one of the first papers I read about ed tech, and it took a historical view.  There is a lesson in that. 

At Illinois when I started as a SCALE administrator, in spring/summer 1996, roughly a year after I had started to play with online learning, quite a different thing then from a functional viewpoint, there was a very large past that cast a big shadow on what we were trying to do, though I didn't realize that immediately.  Plato had been a huge success at Illinois and gave the university an international reputation for computer assisted instruction.  (I believe that Arthur C. Clarke made the HAL computer in 2001 come from Illinois as a consequence of real world Plato system.) Plato was internalized in the instructional practices of many STEM departments at Illinois.  It therefore may not be surprising that with the advent of the Web some of the the early programs for instruction that came out of my campus, notably CyberProf and Mallard, were in some sense Plato derivatives.  I became the first instructor at Illinois outside the College of Engineering to use Mallard in my teaching, where before I had no experience with Plato.  The Internet opened up this smart homework with auto-grading functionality to audiences that hadn't experienced it before.  It caught on and became quite popular on campus and on other campuses too.

Illinois was not the only place where such tools developed.  At Michigan State a system called CAPA also came out of the Physics Department.  (The CyperProf developer was a professor in Physics.)  CAPA too spread to other campuses and became one of the first systems, to my knowledge, where objects designed for the CAPA system could be reviewed and then shared by instructors across the campuses that supported CAPA.  With that the system got a name change to LON-CAPA.  As for CyberProf and Mallard, their histories were determined largely by the level of support these applications received, but also the Tech Transfer policy in play at Illinois during the late 1990s.  The campus had bungled the licensing of Mosaic, and mistakenly looked to the new Web tools as potential money makers, so wouldn't let the developers bring them to market.  But further, the CyberProf tool had a lot of functionality the the science departments wanted, yet from a performance point of view it was not very good.  During sessions near to when homework assignments were due, students would experience a lot of slowness in the system and that produced frustration.  Eventually, Physics built an alternative with similar functionality but which was more efficient under the hood.  That alternative is called Tycho and is still in use today, but as far as I know it is only the Physics department that uses it.  (An interesting aside is that the original developer of Tycho was previously a Plato developer.)  Both Biology and Chemistry at Illinois moved to LON-CAPA, which is now supported by ATLAS, the IT group withing the College of LAS.  

In other words, at Illinois none of the big science departments use the campus-supported LMS.  (That is now Canvas, where previously it was Blackboard, and before that WebCT.)  And this is because from their point of view the quiz/homework functionality in the campus-supported LMS is rinky-dink. 

The Mallard history is a little different because while it did start in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it eventually got substantial use in non-science LAS departments.  For example, it was heavily utilized in foreign language courses, particularly the large introductory classes.  So an argument could be made that the campus should have supported Mallard indefinitely.  But that didn't happen.  The programmer who was keeping Mallard afloat eventually came to work for me in CET, at the request of the CIO.  He didn't want to provide funds to what had been a faculty development project. The arrangement with the programmer worked for a while, but eventually she wanted to move on to other work, so she could continue to learn about new developments in educational programming.  I had no resources to bring in yet another programmer to replace her.  So she wrote a version of Mallard that would seem bug free and that would remain fixed thereafter.  Mallard survived that way for many years, even after we had moved to an enterprise LMS.  But it couldn't sustain this way forever.  Eventually the instructors who used Mallard had to move to the LMS.  They were none too happy about this, but there really was no alternative.  

One more point should be made before completing this discussion of the first step.  A vision arose somewhere in the mid 2000s about having smart tools like Mallard be able to plug into the LMS as long as each followed the standards as specified by the IMS Consortium.  This vision was an attempt to get the best of both possible worlds.  The vision should have also helped in migrating from one LMS to another. But, to my knowledge, this vision failed.  The incentives to obey the standards were weak and applications developed prior to the standards had little reasons to engage in substantial redevelopment to meet the standards.  

The tool set within the LMS meets the needs of most instructors, but there a niches of instructors, perhaps discipline based, perhaps who have early adopter mentalities, who find these tools limiting and unimaginative.  Developments with more interesting functionality might have occurred if the LMS narrowed the toolset it did support, so the interesting tools could work in concert with what the LMS did.  For homework tools, in particular, that didn't happen. 

Regarding the next step, let me assert that instructors often learn to use ed tech in their own teaching by imitating other instructors who have already implemented that bit of ed tech. Seeing the actual implementation is a wonderful way to transfer the practice.  Here I will give two examples of practice being transferred this way.  I was directly involved in these.  Readers, I'm sure, will be aware of many other examples.  

About a year and a half into writing posts for this blog I came across Barbara Ganley's blog at Middlebury College, bgblogging.  We had substantial online interaction and became friends that way.  Later I invited Barbara to campus to talk about her teaching experience.  Barbara taught writing at Middlebury and used student blogging as an integral part of what she did.  I was able to look at her course site with a Mother Blog, that was a way of aggregating the output from the individual student blogs.  I found it fascinating, but because I worked 100% as an administrator then and only occasionally taught a class, and then it was done as an overload, I couldn't immediately put in place what I had learned from Barbara.  Then in fall 2009 I taught a CHP class, the only time I taught a non-economics undergraduate class.  I used student blogs in that class and have since used student blogs in teaching the one economics class I've taught in retirement.  Here is an example from a class that performed reasonably well.  Note that the student blogs can be found in the left sidebar.  I've used Blogger for this teaching and utilized their blogroll tool for the student blogs.  Barbara, I believe, used TypePad when she was at Middlebury.  The two blogging platforms had somewhat different functionality.  So I didn't replicate the Mother Blog concept in my teaching.  But what I did was to take this idea from Barbara and then retrofit it to another platform and to teaching economics rather than writing.  This, it seems to me, is an interesting way for novel teaching practice to diffuse. 

I don't believe that Barbara was concerned with FERPA when she was teaching with blogs at Middlebury.  There students blogged under their own names.  I did have at least some concern for FERPA, which is why in my econ class students blog under an alias.  A friend with whom I'm still in touch in Facebook and who used to work for me back in the 2000s remarked that what I do might not be giving the students sufficient privacy protection.  So there is some risk with the approach.  Is there a more than offsetting learning benefit?  I'm convinced that there is as many students have told me that the blogging was the best part of the class, while also admitting that before the class they thought of themselves as poor writers. 

In this next example, I play the role as innovator and somebody else in higher education embraced my innovation. Scott Sinex became a maven and the main promoter of using Excel as a visualization tool across many disciplines to illustrate some elementary dynamics or comparative statics in the subject matter.  I learned of Scott in this email exchange from back in 2008.

From: SCOTT SINEX <sinexsa@pgcc.edu>
Date: Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 6:49 PM
To: Arvan, Lanny <larvan@uiuc.edu>
Subject: RE: Who coined the term "Excelets"?

Thanks, Lanny.  This works for me.  I'm working on making it a household
word!!
Scott

Scott A. Sinex, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering
Prince George's Community College
Largo, MD 20774-2199
301-341-3023
http://academic.pgcc.edu/~ssinex
e-mail:  ssinex@pgcc.edu

>>> "Arvan, Lanny" <larvan@uiuc.edu> 04/20/08 9:58 AM >>>
Scott - Perhaps I did.  I know in my own use (summer of 2001) I was
futzing with graphs in the Web version of Excel, not happy with that,
then learned about the "spinner" and the "spin button"  (the latter is
the activex control)  and stumbled on the fact that with the latter the
rendering of the graph changed continuously as the parameter that the
button controlled changed.  So for my own purposes I thought why not
used the full Excel rather than the html version.  Then I produced a
variety of those type of animations and made the Web page called the
Excelets Page.  A little bit later I wrote some of these for the
Intermediate Microeconomics Textbook by Besanko and Braeutigam.

That's what I know.  There very well could have been an earlier use of
the term that I was ignorant of when I made my Web page.

Lanny
________________________________________
From: SCOTT SINEX [sinexsa@pgcc.edu]
Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 8:08 AM
To: Arvan, Lanny
Subject: Who coined the term "Excelets"?

Lanny-
Do you know who first coined the term "Excelets"?  I've always assumed
it came out of economics.  Got any history on it?
THANKS,
Scott

Scott A. Sinex, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering
Prince George's Community College
Largo, MD 20774-2199
301-341-3023
http://academic.pgcc.edu/~ssinex
e-mail:  ssinex@pgcc.edu

It is conceivable that Scott learned about Excelets from my Webpage about them, which dates back to 2001.  If so, that is quite a lag from when the page appeared to when Scott contacted me.  I do want to note that I did nothing outside of my own campus to promote Excelets (I did give a lunchtime brown bag presentation on campus about them) but then nothing further, as I was a full-time administrator and had other things to occupy my time.  Nevertheless, Scott found out about them.  I have subsequently used them in my own economics teaching, such as here, and made a tutorial to show others how to make them. The tutorial has received enough hits that it seems likely some others who watched it then went to make their own Excelets, though the analytics on the tutorial video show the typical result - most viewers don't watch the video all the way through. 

I hope these two examples are sufficient to illustrate the general idea.  If a novel teaching approach is available out on the open Web, those who find that page might very well implement the teaching idea in their own courses.  With a closed system such as an LMS, even those that allow some course pages to be made public, this particular mode of diffusion of teaching practices is either not available altogether or is very difficult to achieve.  The innovative instructor either can't show her methods to outsiders from within the LMS or the effort in doing so is more than she wants to put in.  This is an argument for open systems and gives some of the reasoning behind that Leigh Blackall post linked above. Therefore, I would be curious about instructors who regard themselves as innovative as to whether they use the LMS in their teaching.  While I mainly use a blog for my class Website, I do use Moodle for the grade book, a little bit of the quiz tool, and for posting documents I deem should not be made public.  The rest of my content (PowerPoint files, Excel files, and some PDF files), however, is openly available in Box.com, an alternative service the university provides.  People outside the class can have access to these files by following the links to them on the course site.

Let me turn to the third step, which is about sharing learning objects rather than sharing ideas about teaching.  And with that I want to note that Kim and and Maloney do talk about OERs in their book, with reference to MIT's Open Courseware Initiative and specifically with regard to teaching innovation at Cal State Channel Islands.  But they don't talk about the production of learning objects at Dartmouth or Georgetown where these objects might be then reused, elsewhere in higher education, perhaps in AP classes or regular high school classes, and perhaps in colleges in LDCs that are desperate for content of this sort. At this broad strokes level, this idea might appeal more to Land Grant Universities, which have outreach as a significant component of the university mission.  But really, if you view the education sector as a whole and wanted to consider how to achieve cost reduction throughout the sector, learning object production and sharing might be a big part of the story. 

Now I'd like to talk about some concomitant developments.  The Merlot Project began in the late 1990s. I'm not sure when I became aware of it, but I know that happened through the CIC Learning Technology Group and the the instigator was Carl Berger, then of Michigan.  Merlot is a referatory, not a repository.  The former has information about the learning objects and gives the links to where those learning objects reside, which may be anywhere on the open Web.  My sense of Merlot is that it was an interesting concept, but it didn't quite work because the information about it didn't diffuse sufficiently to non-insiders.  Also, Merlot has a novel idea about how others would evaluate learning object quality - through the use of peer review.  But who would evaluate the reviewers?  Where for journal publishing scholars in the field develop a sense of taste about what is publishable research, making online learning objects was too new to get anything close to consensus on what makes a learning object effective. 

In my own thinking, I developed a concept called Dialogic Learning Objects, and was beginning to produce these for principles of microeconomics, in Excel (of course).  The dialogic idea was confirmed for me a couple of years later when I became aware of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, where they referred to the idea as embedded assessment.  The core insight is that our ideas of in class instruction and homework had been formed when the homework was done on paper, students had to turn it in during the class session, and then expected the graded homework to be returned at a subsequent class session perhaps a week later.  This thinking was retained even as homework moved online.  But the reality was that this separation between presentation and assessment no longer was necessary.  A bit of presentation could be given online, followed by a question to see whether the student understood the presentation.  The student would receive immediate feedback about the answer given to the question.  If the answer was correct the student could proceed to the next bit of presentation.  But if the answer was wrong, the student could try again with a different answer.  If still stuck there might be additional help for the student to understand what was going on.  This is a more natural way to learn online, though authoring content with embedded assessment was more difficult than simply writing the presentation content and the homework questions, which in turn was more time consuming than using such content as supplied by the textbook publishers.

Within economics, there was another development that caused excitement at the time.  The economist Paul Romer founded the company Aplia, which instead of marketing textbooks marketed smart homework that operated within the Aplia system. Good assessment content is scarce and writing it is laborious.  Romer's ideas grew out of his own frustration with the supplementary online content provided by textbook publishers.  Instead, have the assessment content with its own market and allow it to be used with a variety of textbooks on the subject matter (which increasingly the students weren't reading).  Alas, managing Aplia was too much of a burden for Romer and he sold Aplia to Cengage.  To my knowledge, there has not been another experiment of this sort, where the market focuses on the assessment content only and ignores the presentation content.  

Use of the LMS, with presentation and quiz content uploaded there, discourages re-use of such content as learning objects, because there is effort involved in moving the content to where it can be re-used and coming up with ways for others to find the content.  But much of what is done probably wouldn't warrant re-use, even if it was publicly available.  There is a question of whether having an open container instead of an LMS would "embarrass" the instructor into producing better and more re-usable content.  I really don't know.   I will simply go back to the point that apart from MIT, it doesn't appear that elite private schools have made much of an effort in the OER space.  Then again, neither has Illinois.

There is a different way to consider this from the point of of the academic department monitoring instructor effort in teaching.  I don't recall ever having the department head come to my live classroom to observe a class session.  The closed container approach with the LMS likewise precludes any monitoring of this sort for the online part of instruction.  In my experience, outside of the course evaluations the sole way the academic department gets information about instructional quality is via a group of students going to the department office and complaining about the class or, at the other extreme, having such a group of students wanting to nominate the instructor for a teaching award.  Maybe in smaller departments with fewer students there is more scrutiny about instructional quality.  With the norm being very little scrutiny, it may be that both students and instructors get used to that and develop a passive preference for it. That's something to keep in mind in what I say when discussing the "Disengagement Compact."

Let me close this section by noting that in my own teaching I've since combined the smart homework tool with the dialogic learning object approach.  If you'd like to experience this you can find the Excel files here.  They must be downloaded to be usable.  I would try the Tutorial first.  You need to enter something for the NetID (at least 3 characters) and then choose some alias from the pulldown menu.  I believe the Tutorial is pretty self-explanatory, although I've experienced some students who have completed the Tutorial but don't seem to have mastered the lessons there. After the Tutorial I suggest trying the Math of Risk and Risk Preference.  This is not the first real homework, but this particular homework may best illustrate the approach.  Again the file should be downloaded and the login part is needed.  You should also hide the Ribbon to give you as much vertical space as you can.  Note that as you answer the questions correctly more of the graph is plotted.  So an additional benefit of the approach is that students get to understand the graphical approach.  I do have a video that explains the concepts using an algebraic approach. Between doing the calculations for the random variable x and then some more more calculations for the random variable y, there is discussion about why x is more risky than y and what that means in comparing the expected utility of x to the expected utility of y. So there is some presentation along with the assessment content, although less than in other homework.  Also note that for some questions it is necessary to use the calculations from previous questions. The exercise builds on itself that way.  In the LMS, each question in a quiz is independent of the other questions.

Undergraduate Student-Produced Online Content That Is Re-Usable

For my very first class Website, I hired an undergraduate in Engineering to write the HTML while I provided the content for the site, which judged from the perspective of now was quite primitive.  At the time, I didn't know HTML commands at all and wouldn't have been able to produce that Webpage.  Subsequently, I learned enough of FrontPage to manage that Website myself.  With the homework content I put into Mallard, I likewise hired former students of mine to put the content into Mallard, with me as the content designer but not requiring me to master Mallard's syntax for course developers, which was more than a little arcane. At the time I had an internal to campus grant from SCALE to support my own instruction and this seemed a sensible way to spend the grant money.  

What I want to pose here is a question, one for which I never got a real answer. It is this. If students were given the designer role as well could we then treat the activity as educative enough that it would be compensated with course credit and possibly with waiving some course requirement(s)?  I want to briefly review a few different cases in mind.  

• Students do learning object design and development in lieu of writing a term paper for a course.  Students also agree that their learning object work can be readily shared with others, without concern for copyright. Then, much like in open source software development, subsequent iterations of the course allow the projects to be refinements of previously created learning objects, rather than starting from scratch.  After a few iterations of this the resulting learning object becomes of sufficiently high quality that it is re-usable. With this and the subsequent approaches in this list, a public archive is maintained so that all versions of the learning object can be accessed. The identity of the author of a particular version can be released or concealed at the author's request.
• A special topics class is conducted where one of the main purposes of the class is to produce learning objects in the subject area.  Otherwise the case is similar to before.  If in such a course, one might expect students to write two or three term papers, then this approach would have more intensive learning object design as compared to the previous approach.  It might then be that each student works on more than one learning object, for example, initiating one while adding polish to another. 
• Learning object design is done as an extracurricular activity within a Registered Student Organization.  There is a faculty advisor who helps with directing the work, but here the students themselves have more control regarding what learning objects should be made and how those learning objects should perform.

I have no experience with any of these approaches, so this is pure speculation on my part, the type where I'd like to see experiments done this way with others leading the way.  The last time I taught I did give the password, which is the same on each worksheet of my Excel Assignments, to a mathematically inclined student.  With that password he could unlock the worksheets and then, presumably, reverse engineer how I constructed them.  I think this reverse engineering approach might be a good way to learn how to build similar assignments.  But I never heard back from the student and before too long the pandemic was here.  So I don't know if this can work or not.  I maintain the belief that in certain circumstances it is better to have smart functionality on the client side rather than on the server.  (For example, if used at the high school level some schools might not have the resources to support server side functionality.) The approach with Excel does that.  I also want to note that what I have done requires no programming whatsoever.  It relies entirely on built in functionality in Excel.  That, I would think, should make it easier for students to learn how to make these objects. Of course, I'd also guess that somebody with a lot of programming knowledge would pooh pooh this approach and want to develop something else.  I'm quite okay with that, if the alternative approach this person comes up with is sustainable.  

On Achieving Cost Reduction In Instruction Via Effective Use Of Online Technology And A Different Role For Undergraduate Students

I took over for Burks Oakley in running SCALE about 3 or 4 months after I had joined SCALE to help out, with no specific portfolio of projects in mind.  As things turned out, my first activity after joining SCALE was to assist with the SCALE evaluation, interviewing SCALE Instructors along with Cheryl Bullock.  Though I didn't realize it till later, what we learned there was quite important for talking about cost reduction. 

Burks had promised the Sloan Foundation that ALN (what we then called online learning) would produce cost reduction because an instructor could answer a student's query once in an online bulletin board and therefore not need to answer the same sort of query over and over again during office hours.  There was some logic to this although I wondered to myself whether those other students who came later to the bulletin board and read the student query as well as the instructor response would get the same learning benefit as the original student did.  In any event, precisely one instructor whom Cheryl and I interviewed reported that their time in instruction went down as a consequence of the mechanism that Burks outlined.  Many more reported the opposite result, that their time devoted to instruction increased, as did the quality of their course offering.  The reason, which we later referred to as the "shy student problem," is that these instructors had great difficulty in getting students to talk up in class.  The instructors reasoned that it might be easier for the students to open up online.  That turned out to be true.  But then what the students wrote required responses from the instructor, and since the students didn't write about the same thing, the instructor needed to respond to each post individually.  Eventually instructors found strategies where students responded to other students, somewhat lessening their own time commitment, but at that early date with online learning, spring 1996, those strategies had yet to play out. 

Let me point out something else.  Some of the faculty whom Cheryl and I interviewed were merely using FirstClass, the online conferencing system that SCALE supported at the time.  Other faculty we interviewed had received large internal grants from SCALE, in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars, and most of those faculty were hoping for a renewal grant from SCALE.  Yet with the exception of my colleague in the Economics Department, Larry DeBrock, and me, where our SCALE projects were explicitly designed to achieve cost reduction, none of the other projects were designed for that purpose and the faculty who ran those projects seemed entirely unconcerned with whether cost reduction would be achieved or not.  So there was an ethical conundrum for me.  Sloan was not happy with us in not showing cost reduction yet the faculty receiving these internal SCALE grants seemed entirely unconcerned with that.  That ethical issue wore on me some.  

I also felt under prepared to run SCALE, though in retrospect I was the right person to do it, both because of my temperament and because of my economics orientation.  Regarding the latter, I understood that measuring faculty time was a red herring when talking about cost savings.  While there is a percentage allocation of faculty time to research, teaching, and service, we don't measure faculty time on an activity basis.  Further, this approach meant that the person who would capture the cost savings would be the faculty member teaching the ALN course.  We needed an alternative approach where the savings could be captured by the Department, or the College, or the Campus as a whole. That much was evident to me at the outset.  And under prepared or not, it's also true that necessity is the mother of invention. There was a need for an alternative approach.  I came up with the SCALE Efficiency Projects for the fall 1997-98 academic year, where most of internal grant money that year was spent. This proved successful.  Sloan was happy with us and we were able to obtain a renewal grant from them as a consequence.  And I learned a lesson that I probably shouldn't have learned - there is a creative aspect to ed tech administration.  I continued to feel some of that with CET, but much less of it after that. 

Here I want to remark about where the profession was at that time regarding online learning and cost reduction.  Much of the work came out of NLII (National Learning Infrastructure Initiative) which was the predecessor to ELI (Educause Learning Initiative).  However, most of this work was entirely theoretical.  The only actual implementation I learned about from NLII  was the CUPLE Physics Studio at RPI.  It was interesting to learn about, but RPI is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Illinois, and it seemed the approach at RPI wouldn't translate to Illinois. I already knew about the work at Michigan State with CAPA. And I would soon learn about the Math Emporium at Virginia Tech, but not in time for that to appear as a reference in our paper  Further, I learned that the science departments at Illinois had already achieved substantial cost reduction under Plato, but the savings had already been captured and wouldn't count for the Efficiency Projects.  The examples there were all new, since the SCALE grant started. 

The timing of the publication of the Efficiency Projects paper was fortuitous.  It would be less than a year later that Carol Twigg would form the National Center for Academic Transformation and initiate their program in Course Redesign, which did a lot to popularize the idea that effective use of learning technology can lead to cost reduction while keeping quality of instruction intact or even improving it.  This program got many more institutions involved with implementing this idea.  Burks introduced me to Carol (I think at some Sloan Consortium meeting, but of that I'm no longer sure).  She read the Efficiency Projects paper and showed a great deal of interest in it.  She used me as a consultant on documents for the Course Redesign program, which I was happy to do.  And I was pleasantly surprised that at the January 1999 NLII meeting, Carolyn Jarmon delivered a plenary session where the Efficiency Projects were featured.  In one fell swoop, my name became known to those in attendance.

Yet there was a surreal aspect to all of this.  The larger economy was in the middle of the dot.com boom (bubble).  Money was flowing very nicely on campus. While there may have been strategic reasons for course redesign in specific courses, why do this across the board when the economy is going gangbusters?  The mature answer to that question is that the economy won't be going gangbusters forever and engaging in course redesign is then good preparation for when the next recession hits. Nobody, however, is that prescient.  At Illinois, the Efficiency Projects didn't generate the attention that they did at the NLII conference.  In the background there was "The Spanish Project" and one of the Efficiency Projects was redesign of SPAN 210, a mid-level course.  The campus had made the foreign language requirement more stringent and the expectation was that the demand for introductory Spanish would go through the roof as a consequence.  The issue was how to meet that demand without putting a huge drain on available resources.  The SPAN 210 redesign was a pilot for what would subsequently happen in the introductory course. This is an example of a strategic reason for course redesign.  When the recession did come after 9/11, the campus wasn't prepared for it. In some courses that had been lecture-discussion, then became straight lecture.  Cost reduction was achieved, but at the expense of the quality of instruction.  That is the grim reality of what happened. 

I want to change perspective now and talk about my intermediate microeconomics class, which was one of the efficiency projects.  While I introduced a variety of innovations over time, pretty much from the outset the main innovation was to use undergraduate TAs, who held online office hours during the evening, 7 - 11 PM, Sunday through Thursday.  They interacted with students initially through the class conference in FirstClass.  Over time that segued more and more to using the chat function, which the TA would then copy and post to the class conference.  And after a few years I switched from FirstClass to WebBoard.  But the mechanism was largely the same.  The students had homework that they would submit online, end of chapter problems from the textbook, and submit that on a problem by problem basis.  The students were grouped into teams.  I allowed re-submission if the original didn't receive the maximal grade and if the re-submission was done by another team member.  And they could re-submit multiple times, as long as it came in before the deadline. While some of the contact with the online TA happened before the initial submission, I believe the bulk of it happened after that. 

I had written up solutions to the homework problems that the TAs had. I coached them not to give away the problem answer but rather to help the student think through how to solve the problem.  Likewise, the requirement that another student on the team had to send in the re-submission was meant to encourage the team members to discuss the homework among themselves. This mechanism was far from perfect, but it did engage at least those students who took the course seriously. 

As with the smart homework, I took the idea of undergraduate TAs from some engineering classes I learned about.  And I took the idea of resubmitting homework problems from the Writing Across the Curriculum folks, who treated revision as a critical part of writing and who regarded response as the essence of good teaching.  Doing an economics homework problem is not like writing an essay, but why not try this idea about revision with the homework problems?  

This use of undergraduate TAs providing online office hours was unusual in teaching economics, and I suspect in teaching many other social science subjects.  One colleague told me that it shouldn't be publicized, because if the Chicago Tribune found out about it, we might get harsh criticism for doing it.  I do want to note that during that time the standard practice for intermediate micro was to give the instructor a grader, usually an international student whose English wasn't good enough to be a TA, but there was no discussion section and no graduate student TA.  Some other departments, Chemistry for one, were using undergraduate TAs to run discussion sections.  That is more problematic.   

The efficiency that enabled this unusual use of undergraduate TAs is that the size of the lecture tripled, from about 60 students to about 180 students.  No doubt lecture quality went down as a consequence.  (I was still doing chalk on blackboard lectures then.)  I know I couldn't read what was on the blackboard from the last row of seats.  And since the auditorium where I lectured had more seats than that, plus attendance was far from perfect, I encouraged students to move closer to the front.  Nevertheless, it was harder to make a visual connection with many of the students this way.  Eventually I produced PowerPoints with audio narration to compensate for this deficiency. 

I want to make one more observation about this from the the TA perspective.  I paid them an hourly wage, perhaps a dollar over minimum wage, so they felt they were treated fairly.   Some of them surprised me by letting me know that being an online TA like this proved to be an attractive credential when they went for job interviews.  It made me wonder whether the TAs were getting a learning benefit that should be investigated further.  I didn't do that at the time, but I speculated a lot about it later. 

In the Kim and Maloney book there is a lot of respect paid to "active learning." I've always struggled with this some, first on the question of how time enters into the equation, second on the question of whether discussions that promote active learning might depend quite a bit on who participates in those discussions. On the first question, my experience is that many students expect ahead of time for learning to be a snap.  But in reality, learning takes as long as it takes.  Thus, one of the meta-lessons students need to master is to put in the requisite time for learning to happen and not let the dictates of schedule determine their time input.  On the second question, if in a discussion with a pair of students where one student is reasonably well prepared while the other student is poorly prepared, is there learning benefit created or not?  When active learning activities occur in the live classroom, there are implicit assumptions that (a) the time allotted to the activity is ample and (b) the students who argue through the matter are more or less equally prepared.   The mechanism I used with online TAs in intermediate microeconomics allowed for the time to be more open-ended, since it was happening during the evening, and for there to be a clear asymmetry in the participants.  The online TAs had taken my class previously and were chosen because they had done reasonably well in it.  The current students knew that.  Participation in the online office hours was opt in.  This asymmetry encouraged the current students to do just that. 

I last taught that large intermediate microeconomics class in spring 2001.  After that my appointment as administrator became 100%.  After that when I did teach as an overload occasionally, it was in a small class that was conducted more as a seminar than as a lecture.  So I had no further experience with utilizing undergraduate TAs.  But the potential benefits from that stayed with me and in August 2005 I wrote a series of 7 posts for this blog on Inward Looking Service Learning, which allowed me to speculate about scaling up the idea to the entire campus and then deploying these students in other ways than I had deployed them in intermediate microeconomics.  I want to note here that in talking about innovation with teaching and learning it is quite common to reference some technology that might be useful for the purpose, but it is highly unusual to consider changes in the social arrangements in how we go about things.  If someone reads those posts on Inward Looking Service Learning now and finds them not entirely convincing, might it still be true that other modifications in the social arrangements on campus could have a big beneficial impact on learning, particularly at the undergraduate level?  It is something to ponder.

Is Learning Really Happening in College?

Kim and Maloney cite Arum and Roska's Academically Adrift for a counterpoint to the argument about the movement toward learning. They want to acknowledge this counterpoint, it is the intellectually honest thing to do, but they don't want to drill down into analyzing it.  I will do a little of that here.

First, I want to mention one piece prior to Academically Adrift that influenced me quite a bit.  It's by George Kuh, appeared originally in Change Magazine in 2003, and is called, What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE. NSSE is the National Survey of Student Engagement, which Kuh led at the time.  This particular paragraph, which appears near the end of the piece, is worth pondering some.  

And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the "disengagement compact": "I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades--B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning--on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.

It makes you ask, why would an instructor be disengaged and why would a student be disengaged?  There are apt to be multiple answers to this.  One has to do with time commitment.  A faculty member with tenure who has a heavy research agenda may view undergraduate teaching as necessary evil, nothing more.  Putting effort into it won't enhance the professor's reputation as a researcher.  Similarly, the undergraduate student who has lots of extracurricular activities or paid work that is unrelated to school, might simply not have the time to put in to be really engaged in learning.  Alternatively, the undergraduate student who wants to party like mad before entering the world of work, assuming that will be a grind, would prefer taking a course that is a "gut."   This makes disengagement seem like what economists call shirking. In this case the disengagement compact should be interpreted as mutual shirking that goes undetected, because there is no monitoring of it external to the class. 

A different explanation might make sense for teaching faculty who don't have tenure.  They want to keep their job and minimizing student complaints is a safety play that way.  Grade inflation is a result.  Further, they understand the lesson that behavioral economist Richard Thaler has taught us.  Even if the class is graded on a curve, the raw scores students obtain on exams and other assignments matter regarding their satisfaction.  Higher raw scores generate higher satisfaction. So the instructor has incentive to teach an easy course. On the student side, the student might be more of a grinder than one who gets nurtured from the intellectual stimulation the course aims to generate. The latter type of student, increasingly scarce in my experience, is engaged via intrinsic motivation. The former remains uncertain that the course material can be penetrated, so stays with the tried and true method of memorizing the lecture notes.  

The last time I taught, fall 2019, I learned that there can be a different fundamental cause that makes the student appear like a shirker to the instructor.  This is poor student mental health, which the instructor won't know about unless the student is forthcoming about it.  Student mental health became a national issue in 2019 (and perhaps earlier) but almost always was discussed in terms of the inadequate number of mental health professionals students would try to access.  In my very incomplete reading of pieces about this, what has yet to be considered is whether the way we go about teaching and learning is a source of poor student mental health.  

The story I have in mind, which I don't think is so hard to believe, is that students come to realize fairly early in life, perhaps in high school or even earlier, that they must market themselves to be able to get to the next step on the educational ladder.  This need for marketing oneself makes school and co-curricular activities as well seem like one big game of paper chase.  Credentials are it.  Actual learning is of secondary importance.  Students take it for granted that they want to play this game, but its artificial nature eventually catches up to them and the mental health issues ensue. If they have substantial college loan debt, that only adds to the stress to make the situation worse. 

The way Kim and Maloney seem to argue, either they are right or Arum and Roska are right.  It's one or the other.  In my way of thinking, there are some segments on campus where the move to learning is evident and elsewhere where the Disengagement Compact holds sway. This would allow a somewhat more complex view of matters, which I think would be helpful.  

I know that Illinois participated in the NSSE in the 2000s, but declined to make the results public then.  The results did impact the thinking of campus leadership.  There was a big push in programs to encourage undergraduate participation in research.  But, to my knowledge, there was no direct confrontation with the Disengagement Compact nor, indeed, even an admission that it might be present in some places on campus. That's how it has always been.  The better students have great learning opportunities at Illinois and that's what is marketed to the public.  The average students, not so much, but we don't talk about it openly.  I'm ignorant at how this goes elsewhere.  It would be delightful to learn that it really is across the board engaged learning at Dartmouth and Georgetown.  But I've been trained to be skeptical about this sort of thing and wonder what evidence might be amassed to show this.  

Wrap Up

This post is more an unbundling of my idealistic thinking on teaching and learning, centered on my own teaching experience, than it is a reasoned argument of where teaching and learning should be headed, based on a firm understanding of where we are at present.  I lack that firm understanding.  I'm not sure I had it even 15 years ago.  The generalizing from personal experience can get one in trouble. But here, I'm just talking things through.  I have absolutely no influence on current implementations.  Perhaps there is value in talking things through, to encourage others to do likewise.  And, if not, it was still good therapy for me to write this piece.