If you run a regression
On creative expression
Regarding where you look
You'll find you were mistook.
For the workings inside one's head
Can neither be measured nor read
And while idea fragments internally seduce
Their expression typically ends as refuse.
It's within each of us
To be a creator
And do so without a fuss
First as emulator.
Then learn to immerse
In the task at hand.
Goodbye creative curse
And the feeling is grand.
#PracticeIsNecessaryButDoesNotMakePerfect
Noblesse oblige
Was under siege
That battle is done
And it's greed that has won.
Once the uber rich's predation
Would have caused a sensation
But now it is the norm
So, the rest of us must conform.
Our former Commander in Chief
Clearly is a thief
As many have suspected
And yet he might get reelected.
Bureaucracy
Hypocrisy
Kleptocracy
Then autocracy.
The tune you're humming
When you know it's coming
While the future isn't here
Surely it is near.
#TheIncredibleDreadInTurningAllRed
References
What Happens When the Super Rich Are This Selfish? (It Isn’t Pretty.)
This Is Why Google Paid Billions for Apple to Change a Single Setting
Society seemingly has wrought
Citizenry purity of thought
Yet with so much to befuddle
Better would be intellectual muddle.
#Might-ImNotSure-ActuallyBeACure
Zero sum
Is terribly glum.
It's winning the game
Without feeling shame.
So many can relate
To a future of hate.
A higher ideal
Is now incredibly unreal.
#WhileTheSoCalledLeadershipMilksItForAllItsWorth
Self-expression
One part confession
Another part prayer
Hoping something is there
Then it's going slow
Patience and finding flow.
#BeautyIsTruthAndSexIsConvex
All that gerrymandering
And this is what you get
Republicans in the House
Americans will regret.
True leadership
Requires a delicate balance
But with these schmoes
They lack the talents.
#GuffawInspiring
Recently the Wizard of Oz
Was seen taking a class on Lamaze
For he wanted to be a good dad
Yet that thought made him sad
Be-coz, be-coz, be-coz, be-coz, be-coz.
#TheCowardlyLionWasAlsoCryin
Days of the week and retirement
Is knowing which it is a requirement?
You might count with your toes
Or the online calendar shows
Yet neither makes for an inspire-ment.
#TakenAbackForNotKeepingTrack
My mind resides in an analog universe. While AI seems to be the topic of the day (and of the foreseeable future) I cling to escapes that would be but a trifling for a computer algorithm to solve, yet for me, feeling it a challenge helps to make finding the solution engaging. My latest in this vein is the Letter Boxed puzzle from the New York Times, where I search for two-word solutions. Armed with this as example, I sometimes wonder whether such engagement is typical of thoughtful people from my generation, having reached the geezer stage in life so likely with ample leisure time in retirement, but it wouldn't engage younger generations whose universe is entirely digital. Alternatively, might it be possible that this sort of engagement is characteristic of the human condition, regardless of the generation, as long as the people have ample time for reflective thought? I don't know how to answer this question. But on the off chance that it does characterize the human condition, don't we then have a responsibility to educate students in a way that encourages them to be so engaged? In the rest of this piece, I will sketch a hypothetical first day of class that aims to push students in this direction.
In retirement, I used to teach one upper-level undergraduate course a year on the economics of organizations. It is a good course for considering these issues, as the motivation of employees (or volunteers) within an organization is a natural object of study in this context. And though this was an economics course, it was quite okay to bring in elements from psychology and sociology in considering the topic. I will confess here that the last time I taught, fall 2019, things didn't go so well. I found the students under prepared and not very motivated. Then I made a botch of things by openly criticizing them in class one day. I lost many of them after that. Now, four years later, with no experience teaching during the Pandemic, my own motivation is to try to understand the students better where they are now with their learning, even if this is only a theoretical understanding, and then see if we can converge and come at things with similar expectations as to what should happen in the course.
This exposition of the hypothetical first day of class is my beginning to produce such a theoretical understanding. No doubt there is a bias toward wishful thinking in performing such an exercise. As I will likely not teach again, I can claim no-harm-no-foul for me. But if any other instructor wants to try something similar in their own teaching, they should be aware of this potential pitfall in advance. With that warning out of the way, let's begin.
Welcome to the Economics of Organizations. I am Professor Arvan. Unofficially, you can think of this course as the economics of how managers think. Managers aim to get the staff who report to them to be as productive as possible, both individually and as a team. Today we will use the following analogy. Managers are to their staff like instructors are to their students. So, as your manager, I want to understand your motivation as students to help encourage you to learn as best as possible. In today's class we will try to investigate that motivation. Does anyone have a question or a comment so far?
My experience is that most students are shy in class. Getting them to speak up is a challenge in itself. As an instructor who likes to use the Socratic method, my hope is that there are one or two students who enjoy speaking out. Yet I think this bit of introduction doesn't yet give them much to react to, so I wouldn't expect a question here. But you never know.
Now I would like to pose a little economics puzzle. There are certain jobs that feature pay for service. Examples include being a waiter, driving a cab or an Uber, and many sales jobs. If the quality of service can vary and the pay can also vary, typically in proportion to the service quality, then we understand that pay for service is a means of incentive to align the providers desires for high pay with the recipients wants of high service quality. But there are many other jobs where there isn't pay for service. Instead there is a salary. There may be a promotion possibility and/or a salary increase in the offing, but that is not immediately present. It is the cumulative performance that matters for those, as perceived by the manager, and there may be some competition with other staff members for those rewards, though maybe not. What then motivates the staff member in the present work? Is it the possibility of those deferred rewards? Or is there something else in the here and now that motivates the person?
I would hope that at this juncture a couple of students would like to speak up and offer their suggestions, though my guess ahead of time is that they wouldn't yet get at ideas about doing the work. Instead, I'd expect them to talk about manipulating the evaluations. Brownnosing might be one idea mentioned. Sabotaging the work of other staff members might be another idea. Expecting this sort of response in advance, I would acknowledge the possibility but then tell them that today I'd like to consider purer motivation for them to do their best work. I'd then ask if there are any suggestions about how that might happen. My expectation is that there would be silence in the classroom. If so, I would then post the following quote, which is one of my favorites.
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty
As an aside, the last time I taught I did use this quote. None of the students then knew who Warren Beatty is. So I would show them the IMDB page for Bonnie and Clyde, say the movie is one of the classics of American cinema, show them that Beatty played Clyde while Faye Dunaway played Bonnie, and if they are interested they should watch the movie themselves. (It costs $3 on Amazon Prime. Alternatively, the U of I Library has some DVD copies. but I'm not sure whether undergrads have access to the Main Stacks. Then I would use this quote to poll the class.
Let's see where you are on this matter with regard to your coursework, both what you do while attending class and what you do outside of the classroom on your own time. I will give you three possibilities to consider. They are: 1) coursework is really all play, 2) coursework is a mixture of play and work, or 3) coursework is all work. Please raise your hand for one and only one of these. We'll get a rough sense of where the class is on this from the results.
Here I would guess that the all play alternative would get no takers and the mixture alternative would get only a few. The bulk of the class would opt for the all work alternative. If that's right, I would then point out that although Warren Beatty isn't a social scientist, by his definition most of the class hasn't yet achieved success as students. In turn, I would expect this to evoke responses mainly about grades and that those students with reasonably high GPAs would argue that they are successful in their studies and that they'd be quite defensive about this. Indeed, some student might adopt a pedantic tone and say something like - of course schoolwork is work as work is part of the name. Reaching this point, I would need to diffuse the reaction in some way.
Let me make a few points that might help you to consider things differently. Knowledge work is different from physical labor. While there may be a few people who like to mow their lawn, shovel the snow, or clean their apartment, most people might regard these as necessary tasks, but definitely not as play. It is different with knowledge work. If you read a good book, you can become so absorbed in the story that you lose all sense of everything else. Likewise for watching a good movie or playing a video game. These examples might be thought of as leisure activities, but the same thing can happen with work activities. This sense of absorption may be so complete that you can't tell whether it is enjoyable or not at the time. It is only in retrospect that you can tell. Then, if you want similar such experiences, that would be an indication that the past experience was enjoyable. This is what is meant by play here.
Then there is the question of whether the play is productive or dissipative. With regard to learning, the latter means its a time waster but doesn't otherwise help you learn. I confess that when I'm not teaching I often play Sudoku. It may help to stave off the Alzheimer's. But given that my deductive logic skills are already well honed, it doesn't help me learn anything else. We may tend to think of most play as that sort of thing. But when in that state of full absorption, depending on what it is that has captured your attention, you can learn. Indeed, you can learn quite a lot.
Now let me say one thing about GPA which you might find disturbing. It has a short half-life. You will have it featured on your resume, certainly, so it surely does matter when applying for your first job after graduation. And if you intend to go to grad school, it matters for that as well. But after a couple of years out of school, while your degree might still matter some your GPA won't matter at all. What does matter is your ability to continue to learn, even if this learning happens without taking courses. Doing knowledge work demands more or less constant additional learning. Are the skills that produce a high GPA the same skills that will make you good at this additional learning after you are out of school? If not, what skills will do that?
Now I would expect the class to be quiet, as I'm guessing that they haven't thought through this before and are trying to come to terms with what I said. After a moment or two I will say something like - I hope it won't surprise you, but I think being a success as a student in the sense that Warren Beatty means is a good indication that you are well prepared for this later learning. In a little while we will get into how to cultivate those skills, but now I want to give you a different quote to consider.
We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
This one needs another aside. I would first ask the class whether anyone has read the book, Fahrenheit 451. I would hope to see one or two hands go up, but maybe none would. Then I would exempt those who raised their hands from answering and ask the rest of the class about what the book title refers to. Do any of them know that? When they hear it is the temperature at which paper will burn spontaneously and that the story is about a society that burns books, perhaps they won't need much convincing that the story is still relevant for now. I will then encourage them to read is for recreation, perhaps over a vacation when they have the free time.
Then we will move on to being bothered. I will note first that I am deliberately trying to bother those who answered that schoolwork is all work and that they are not a success at school according to Warren Beatty. I hope they will consider that further between this class session and the next one, during which we'll discuss the matter further. For now I will want them to make a distinction between two different types of being bothered.
The first is by an external stimulus that can be removed so that the bother goes away. An example would be a piece of clothing that is uncomfortable to wear or a type of food where eating it causes an allergic reaction. The second is being bothered by an idea, where once aware of the idea it then becomes difficult and perhaps impossible to make it go away.
Because I'm afraid that pushing on this second one might create a can of worms, I will then go to a benign example, the face-name matching problem. If you see a face that you've seen before, can you recall the earlier context and, if so, does that give you the name of the person? When it's a face from a TV show or the movies, IMDB is incredibly useful for identifying the earlier context and the person's name. I will then tell that class that these days I do much of my viewing on my computer and I will stop the show then and there to go to IMDB and do a search. I can't keep watching without knowing where I previously saw the person. That might generate a little bit of discussion among the class.
Then I'd go to a less benign example, but one far more relevant for our class. When you are trying to figure out something you may have a sense of things to try. If you've gone through your list but still haven't figured it out, you're stuck. Being stuck is bothersome, no doubt. You need to find a way to get unstuck, but how is that done? I would let the class noodle on this for a while. They'd probably start with the easiest case, where they'd expect that somebody else they already know has the answer. Then the obvious solution is to ask that person, even if it is a little embarrassing to do so. Getting past that one, you need them to work through getting unstuck when there is nobody else to ask. If they can noodle on that some, it would be very good. If not, I can offer a few different suggestions - do background reading to better understand the situation, sleep on the problem and let the subconscious have a go at it, and reframe the issue to something else that you can solve and that sheds light on the original issue. And I would leave them with this - getting unstuck is a crucial meta-skill for being able to learn on one's own. It all starts with being bothered. Being bothered is quite absorbing, but it surely is not enjoyable, which is why we are distinguishing it from play. And learning this meta-skill requires quite a lot of practice. Then I would jokingly say, I threw in this last bit to bother about it further. Are students getting such practice in their classes now?
I want to get to yet a third source of motivation by beginning with this very simple example. Sometimes when I walk up the stairs and into the building where our class is held, some students will see me coming. They will notice that I walk slower than they do. My pace may seem somewhat labored. On occasion one of them will hold the door open for me. It is a very small thing, but it definitely an act of of kindness done for another person. Why do they do it?
My hope is that many students in the room will raise their hands to answer that question. I'm guessing that most of them will say that they were raised to help others who are in need. After a few answers of that sort I would do a quick poll of the class to ask them whether they too got such training when they were kids? And I'd ask a follow up question, where did the training come from? Was it from within the family, from school, a social organization such as Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, or somewhere else?
After that I would bring the idea to focus on such behavior within organizations. I'd start with academia, where the behavior is termed being collegial - providing an academic favor without any expectation of reciprocation, but with the hope that eventually the recipient would pay it forward. I would then add that I much prefer to work in a collegial environment and when I was working full time a good chunk of my effort was in making contributions in that vein. Then I would note that outside of academia the behavior might be referred to as being a good citizen and organizations might encourage good citizenship in each organization member for the benefit of the whole.
At this point I would guess that some students would want to bring up the sports example and talk about teamwork. I would tell them that's fine and the notion of being a good team player goes right along with what we've been talking about, but then I'd cut it short because the sports example has a tendency of favoring the boys in the room over the girls and then the conversation can go on and on with no apparent stopping point, while I still have quite a bit else I want to discuss with the class.
These three sources of motivation - turning work into play, being bothered especially by getting stuck, and being a good citizen will be our focus in the course, with the first one receiving the attention in the remainder of the class session. But for completeness we should also mention yet another source of motivation - pride in one's work. This is typically present in highly skilled people with a lot of experience. Taken together, these four sources of motivation might give a reasonable breakdown of what is termed intrinsic motivation. This is to be contrasted with extrinsic motivation - generated by money pay in the work environment and grades in the school environment. The psychologists tells us that when both are present, intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. So a good manager will try to tap into their employee's intrinsic motivation if at all possible.
I would hope at this point that some student would ask, are you saying that extrinsic motivation doesn't matter for those who are intrinsically motivated? I would then respond like this. If you are a saint or an artist of the ilk of Vincent van Gogh, extrinsic motivation doesn't matter. Yet very few people are in that category. For the rest of us, extrinsic motivation matters crucially at certain junctures. If you have a decent job and then get a job offer to work elsewhere, the pay at the new job will be a significant factor in accepting the offer or not. And, indeed, my experience is that large pay increases over the life cycle come with job switches, not from staying within the same job. But once you've taken that new job the pay fades into the background as a motivator and intrinsic motivation can do its thing, at least till the next job offer or promotion opportunity comes along, or somehow you get tapped out on the work because the opportunities for further learning don't appear to be present. Then you might consider retirement.
I would open the floor for questions and comments on this. One that the students might not come up with, so I might contribute it on my own, depending on how much time was left in the class session, is that maybe some people rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation in their job but then have a hobby or volunteer work where intrinsic motivation takes over. And other people may have family obligations that are so intense that there is no time left for the beloved hobby or volunteer work. To this I would only add the following. In the twentieth century many were afraid of the consequences of automation, that their jobs would disappear because machines would do the work instead. Now, even with knowledge work, one might wonder whether AI will be able to perform the job adequately in the not too distant future and therefore render such work obsolete as an employment prospect. Given that, one either must accumulate enough wealth ahead of time to take (very) early retirement in this case or one must retool to become employable in some other line of work. Understanding that, the idea of continual learning in the workplace doesn't seem far fetched and indeed probably is a necessity of work life.
* * * * *
Part of learning is telling a story to yourself. You do such storytelling repeatedly, to reflect your current understanding and to raise sources of confusion or doubt in what you are learning. A natural question arises. Even if the learning happens in many steps, as it surely will, do you take a step or two and then tell the story so far, or does telling the story get you to think about the next step, where you wouldn't have had that thought had you not told the story? In my view, it happens both ways.
Then it may be that you tell the story to others, not just to yourself. If you have a conversation with a friend or a colleague about what you are learning, storytelling will become part of the conversation. Alternatively, you can externalize your thinking in writing, have this conversation with a hypothetical reader or perhaps a known reader, if you are so fortunate to have one or perhaps several of those. Writing for a specific reader may be more enjoyable than writing for a hypothetical one. The ideas that occur to us while writing that allow us to take the next step in the learning are one of the things that makes it fun. This is why we give the process a distinctive name - writing to learn.
But, actually, much of the thinking happens before your write anything. You shouldn't expect to be able to sit down at the keyboard and have the words flow out of you. Instead, you need prior thought about what you will say. This prior thought is termed pre-writing. It is a necessary part of the process. At first, it will seem quite awkward to you, as something new usually is. But after a while it may very well become enjoyable. That too is part of the fun.
For economics students, the bulk of their courses don't demand a lot of writing. Some courses may require a term paper, which many students come to dread as there are a lot of rules they need to follow to produce something that is satisfactory and, perhaps equally important, there is an instructor expectation that the student has done a lot of reading to produce the term paper, yet many students likely take steps to bypass that instructor expectation. Formative writing in an academic setting, in contrast, is likely not something the students have experienced much if at all. I make it a feature in my course.
Then I will walk the students through what I think is the likely sequencing of activities in their other economics classes. Many if not most students come to the class unprepared, in the sense that there may have been required reading to do ahead of time but the students have not done it. So the lecture becomes their introduction into the topic and their goal in class is to produce good lecture notes. And if they can't make class, then their goal is to get the lecture notes from somebody who did attend. Memorizing the lecture notes is the way to prepare for exams and most students seem to expect that the exams are written in a way to reward such preparation.
Prior to the exams there might be lower stakes assessment by way of homework. The homework is intended in part to see what the student got out of lecture and in part as additional preparation for the exam. An issue is whether students take the homework seriously. In some classes the homework is given via automated assessment delivered within the campus learning management system and often the homework is set up there so students have multiple tries at the the questions. To the extent that students view this as a hoop to jump through rather than as an opportunity to learn the material, they will either ignore the homework entirely (after all, it is low stakes) or they will find a way to get through it that doesn't enhance their learning.
I want to note here that in upper level classes there are apt to be students who will graduate after the academic year concludes (or even earlier, after the fall semester concludes). Such students are on the job market and spend considerable time in job interviews or ancillary activities that are part of job seeking. Alas, that time often overlaps with class meeting time. So, missing class doesn't necessarily mean the student is cutting (or is sick). And while I put in my syllabus that a responsible student will let the instructor know ahead of time about the job interview, that pretty much goes for naught. If one presses students about why they missed class, grandmothers seemingly die at a very high frequency under such circumstances.
In my class, many of the learning activities will start with a writing-to-learn exercise. There will be one such exercise each week. It will enable you to give some early thought on course topics before we get to discuss those topics in class. We do have an advantage in this course which might not be there in other courses you take. Each of you have a variety of prior experience in organizations. By tying those experiences to course themes you can create learning opportunities for yourself. The writing to learn exercises will encourage that. I hope they also encourage relevant reading on those same themes, either from our textbook or from pieces you find online that deal with the topic. Weaving together a narrative from the readings and your experience should help in that.
Let me get more concrete. I will give you a prompt to write to. The prompt offers a broad strokes way to come up with a writing topic. You will always have the option, however, of coming up with a prompt of your own and writing to that, provided you can tie it to course themes. In this way I want accommodate your own curiosity. If a particular topic is of interest to you and you think it is relevant to the course then choose it over the prompt. You will then write at least 600 words on the topic. This minimum word requirement is there so you do spend some time in pre-writing and then some additional time in writing to learn activities to generate the text that you submit. You need to make this an effortful activity and such effort takes time. I will read your piece and give a written reaction to it, providing you with feedback that I hope you will soon learn to want. You will respond to the feedback in a way to show you are still thinking further about what you wrote.
In a subsequent class session we will then discuss the prompt and what students wrote about it, as well as any other topics that have come up by students writing to their own prompt. The discussion will make mention of individual essays that students wrote, in an attempt to let their prior thinking drive the class discussion. My hope is that we go still further in that discussion, pushing the learning by the class as a whole beyond what individual students came up with. This is how learning happens in a well-run workplace, where staff members do their homework in advance of a group meeting and where that meeting produces a synthesis of what individual staff members produced in their homework.
I will then let the students know that it will be awkward for them at first, as this practice is different from how things are done in their other classes. It will take time to adjust to the approach in our class. My experience is that getting comfortable with the approach takes about four weeks of the process. Then I will tell them that they should suspend judgment on whether the approach is effective until they've reached that comfort zone.
Two things will concern the students up front. Many of the students will believe that they are not good writers. They will be concerned that they are at a disadvantage as a result. Students will also want to know how this writing to learn homework is graded. On the first of these, I will talk about the benefits of practice and that weekly formative writing offers just that. Further, they may begin to anticipate the comments I would make before receiving them and adjust their writing in advance, done to account for this anticipation. So there is a built in mechanism in the class for how their writing might improve. On the second, I will let them know that we'll use portfolio grading for the writing assignments. Individual assignments will not be graded, but I will record that the work was submitted. There will be one grade for those pieces written during the first half of the course and another grade for those written during the second half of the course. This sort of grading is in accord with the idea that the extrinsic motivation is via deferred reward.
What I will not tell them, in part because I hope they will discover this later for themselves, is why they will come to like my comments on their writing. It will be like I'm coaching their formative thinking and once they get used to it they will want such coaching, especially when it is dissociated from a thumbs up or thumbs down judgment on that thinking. I should note here that office hours also offer the potential for such coaching, but students tend not to take advantage of office hours. They are afraid of looking stupid in public, especially in front of an authority figure such as the instructor. That fear exists with writing as well, which explains some of the awkwardness students will feel early in the semester as they do these assignments. But it is easier to write to a computer screen, with no immediate evaluation at the time the piece is being composed. So they can overcome this fear and then reach a comfort zone with the writing.
With all of this, I need to let the students know that real thinking takes time and, consequently, formative writing takes time. Further, you can't know in advance how much time is needed. It takes as long as it takes. For some of the students, especially those who so far haven't been very persuaded, this likely gives them a reason to drop the class. They will tell themselves that they can't afford to take this class as it will overburden them time-wise and make doing everything else very difficult. For other students, who may see this approach as a refreshing alternative to what they are getting in their other classes, they may then want to explore my views on how they should go about their studies in their other courses. Some may note that they likely can manage the increased time requirement that my class will impose on them, but they couldn't manage it if all their classes were being taught in this way. How would I suggest they go about things?
* * * * *
Much of the previous section is based on my actual teaching of this course - when the approach seemingly worked reasonably well. Here I want to speculate about something I've never tried. While I have tried putting the students together in teams of 3 so they'd comment on the writing of other team members, this has not worked very well, as the students were different in their motivation to read the pieces of other team members and make comments on them, even if there was some grade given for the commenting activity.
So, what I have in mind here would be opt in only. For those who do opt in I would try to pair them with one other student. I would ask them for a listing of the courses they were taking (which I can't discover on my own because of FERPA) and tell them in advance that the only reason I want to know this is to see if I can pair students based on them taking at least one other course in common. Then, I would encourage them to use an approach in this class they have in common that borrows from our course, but is distinctive from it in some ways.
The students would themselves come up with a prompt based on the course syllabus and where they were in the semester. They'd alternate weeks doing this. Then they'd do something like pre-writing, but instead of writing a piece about the prompt, they would meet face-to-face (or online in Zoom) and discuss the prompt. And they'd do this before the instructor lectured on the subject. As with my class, I would tell them that the process would take some time for them to become comfortable with it. Once they've reached that comfort zone, the question is whether they thought the discussions were interesting and useful.
In other classes they wouldn't have such a partner and the question then is whether they would continue to rely on their prior methods vis-Ã -vis the lecture notes, perhaps in the interest of saving time, or if instead they embraced some modified version of the approach in my class. They'd be in a position to compare their learning across the classes they were taking and compare their enjoyment in these classes as well. Purely as an extra credit exercise, they might write up their findings on this near the end of the semester. I would be especially interested in the case where they felt the discussions with their fellow students were quite good, but their exam grades suffered some because they didn't spend as much time memorizing the lecture notes and the instructor in the course was teaching to the test. Such a finding, if it did happen, would give us a lot of fodder for reconsidering how we go about teaching and learning, including its evaluation.
My fear in suggesting this is that the better students might take advantage of having such a partner while the mediocre students would opt out - too shy on these matters because of the fear of looking stupid. Yet it is the mediocre students who would benefit the most if only they would overcome this fear.
So, I've also thought of having mandatory office hours with me, scheduled during regular course time, where the student pairs would first meet. But this begins to look very coercive and frankly it might make the approach objectionable because it isn't in accord with university rules. So, I'm afraid, there are limits to what can be done here and I lack a sense of how to go beyond those limits.
* * * * *
In this concluding section I want to bring AI back into the picture. Will students defeat the intent of the pre-writing and the writing to learn activities by using AI instead of thinking things through? Alternatively, might the sense of Aha still be preserved with these activities even as the student employs AI? And might some students, while aware they could use AI for doing this homework, nonetheless refrain from doing so because they do want to experience the Aha and are concerned they wouldn't get that with AI?
I'm afraid that my theorizing can't get beyond posing these questions. Answers are needed, certainly. But I'm unable to provide them. However, I do have one other thought that I think worth mentioning here.
Upper level courses in the major sometimes suffer from too many students with senioritis. I stopped teaching in the spring semester because it was palpable then. My more recent teaching seemed to show the issue had become relevant even in the fall, when the students were expected to graduate after the following spring semester. Therefore, some of the method suggested in this piece might be better tried on students before they reach the senior year. I don't know of any courses that target sophomores or that target juniors. But there are freshman seminars. Perhaps such classes would be better candidates for this sort of experimentation.
And then, if the experiments proved somewhat successful, the students could be tracked over their remaining college careers, to see if they went about things in a different manner than other students in their subsequent courses and learned in a deeper way as a result. Surely, that is the hope we would like to see realized.
There once was a geezer named Lan
Who solved puzzles as catch as catch can
But when there would be a word
Of which he had never heard
Recalling it was definitely not in the plan.
#Inurn
My post is a reaction to this opinion piece in today's NY Times, Can America Age Gracefully? While the title of that piece seems even handed, I felt while reading the body of the piece that I was hearing an argument I'm afraid we'll be hearing quite a bit from here on out. To wit, senior citizens are social leeches, sucking resources out of the economy, with those resources to be used for their healthcare and their living expenses. Implicitly, then, it would be better if the senior citizens as a group pulled a Kevorkian, thereby relieving the rest of society of this burden.
The issue has always been with us, but it is exacerbated as of late by the underlying demographics. Retired people are living longer now and there are fewer working age people per retired person. One might reasonably ask whether sufficient increase in worker productivity could offset these demographic trends. Let me point out the productivity increases are not uniform across the board and in our system as it is presently configured, there are income caps to FICA contributions. If it is the very highly paid workers who generate most of the productivity increases, which in our knowledge economy makes sense to me, then it is they, their co-workers and their employers who capture these gains. The system that supports senior citizens doesn't benefit so much.
Given that, one might then ask where the senior citizens themselves might produce productivity gains, by doing socially useful work in some manner that they aren't currently doing, but the system at present doesn't encourage that. Might there be changes made in social arrangements that would produce such productivity gains? Let me unpack that question a little and consider what I have in mind.
To do the unpacking, I will bring this down to my own recent experience doing volunteer work in support of Universal Love Alliance, a human rights organization in Uganda. I had no prior experience working with with a human rights organization, so it might seem that what I was doing was going back to square one. But what I found is that much of what I do is ghostwriting on behalf of ULA, grant proposals and correspondence with important contacts give two examples of that, and my prior experience in higher education was quite relevant for that. So, I was well situated to do this work, skill-wise. Of course, as a volunteer, much of the time I want to do the work. (There are the occasional squabbles with work, ULA is no different that way.) If we're going to extend this example to other senior citizens, would they too volunteer, or must they be paid, or in some other way be coerced? Let me get to that question in a bit.
Readers will likely be familiar with the Peter principle, where in a hierarchical organization a person rises to their level of incompetence. It is meant somewhat tongue in cheek, but also has more than a little validity since being a good performer in the prior job is no guarantee of performing well in the job that's the next step up the ladder. I'm not yet ready to offer the following up as a principle, but I think it can be said that often retirement is the next phase after rising to that position of incompetence. Climbing the ladder comes with increases in pay at each promotion. The person may very well still be productive at rungs lower down the ladder, but the person would find it insulting to be paid less than before. So that rarely, if ever, happens within the same organization.
Aging may, however, impact productivity in ways that should be accommodated. I, for example, like to take a nap sometime during the day. Further, I know how much stress I experienced when I was a campus administrator and I really don't want to have ongoing stress of that sort again. Part-time work might be a better fit for me and for many other senior citizens, for these sort of reasons. Part-time work is not the norm, however. So the system would have to modify to accommodate that.
Let me make two more observations about the nature of work for senior citizens. Remote work done online seems here to stay. It existed before the Pandemic (and indeed my volunteer work with ULA is in this category) but it became mainstream in the last few years. It might be a huge enabler of work done by senior citizens, as it cuts out so much of the hassle of work done at the office. Second, and although the current unemployment rate is quite low, 3.8% in August, it might be better to conceive of the work that most senior citizens would do as transfer of their human capital to later generations, rather than as substitutes for these later generation workers in the labor force. How this transfer, i.e., education, would occur I will leave to a subsequent post. Let me simply note here that young people today, in general, with their heads in their phones have poor schmooze skills. Baby boomers, in contrast, generally like to schmooze, and if the number of participants is low enough Zoom chats are a reasonable alternative to face-to face for such schmoozing to occur.
Now, let me get to this issue of whether the work would be for pay, purely voluntary, or have some elements of coercion to it. First and foremost, this should depend on the income situation of the senior citizen. I would guess there is a strong positive correlation between those with substantial human capital and those who are financially comfortable. It would be great if people in this category would willingly volunteer. But I wouldn't count on that. So, let me mention a practice with funding Medicare that those who are not comfortable financially or are not yet retired might not know about. It's called the Medicare Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount (IRMAA). It is consistent with the principles of progressive taxation, which I subscribe to. So, what I'm arguing here is again consistent with those principles, but this time the payment would be in kind.
This sketch makes the ideas seem simpler than they actually are. A real challenge will be in matching the senior citizen to a productive use. What's needed is kind of a massive employment agency, but one that also tracks the effectiveness of matches ex post, to see whether productive outcomes were indeed obtained. Further, this organization needs to determine up front whether the senior citizen does have productive human capital to be exploited and whether the senior citizen's health will enable that to happen. How that would occur is beyond me just now.
Yet I wonder if I've written enough here that is effective to convince at least some that the senior citizens as social leeches view is too grim and that we can do better if we put our minds to it.
There once was a teacher from Manhattan
Who taught her students in pig Latin
To whatever she'd say
They'd reply okay
That is until she let the cat in.
#IllySayIllyBay
There once was a man from Cádiz
Who had an unusual sneeze
Instead of his nose
He relied on his toes
The result made him weak in the knees.
#TharSheBlows
There once was a dragon named Puff
We sang about him and other stuff
But then there was rock
And occasionally Beethoven and Bach
Yet of folk songs are there ever enough?
#MusicFromChildhood
When we used to drink Fresca
And do puzzles by Maleska
Enthralled by what was on paper
But now that's become all vapor.
#BecomingCrossAboutWords
For whatever reason, on July 19, 2023 I was able to successfully complete the Letter Boxed puzzle in the NY Times with only two words, the first time I had done that. I don't have a screen shot of my solution but I know the first word I used was cybernetics, since I wrote a little post about it to my Facebook Friends. I had been doing this puzzle for a few months, either after completing the Spelling Bee or when I was stuck on the last few words there. I had been satisfied with simply getting a solution until then, though if I could get one with three words that seemed like an accomplishment.
But now I have the bug to find two-word solutions and as of late I've been reasonably successful at it. Moreover, this has actually become more interesting to me than the Spelling Bee, even though that is much more popular, because it seems that these solutions to Letter Boxed are not prescribed, so there is more freedom to come up with solutions of your own making.
Now I'd like to know whether the puzzle is designed so there always is a two-word solution or if it is just a happy coincidence that I've been finding them as of late. Also, has there ever been a one-word solution? I haven't tried for that yet. At present it seems impossible or, if not that, then certainly out of my grasp.
I had been updating this blog post with screenshots of the recent solutions, but it seemed that blogger didn't like my doing this - the screen shots would "evaporate" and what remained was only a text-based summary of the solution. So, I've made a Google Docs version of the screenshot solutions. I hope to keep that up to date and will try to do so as long as this activity holds my interest.
Silly and Ability were proud of what they did
For Silly and Ability had produced a kid.
From this the best of the parents tried to converge
But the independent child thought instead to diverge.
#HistrionicsAboutSomePhonics
My longstanding ability to pay attention
Seems to have opted for taking an abstention
Then having already decided on the previous thing
After moving to the next the prior one doesn't ring.
#ForgetMeNot
I used to disagree with Paul Krugman fairly frequently in this blog, back when he was writing about health economics. More recently I stopped doing so, even if I didn't buy into everything that he argued. Since much of it was taking an economics perspective on our national politics, I didn't see a good reason to air my occasional misgivings. But I will do so about this column from yesterday, No, ‘Socialism’ Isn’t Making Americans Lazy. My thought here is that the questions I offer up might be instructive to consider in their own right, to push the argument further along.
Krugman uses employment data to make his case, which would be convincing if having a job (and keeping it) meant the person was not lazy. A potential alternative would be that some jobs enable the people who fill them to shirk to some extent, yet that behavior becomes the norm so such people won't be fired as long as they conform to this norm. The first question, then, is this: do such jobs exist, and do they constitute a significant fraction of all the jobs in the labor market? I do want to note that one can go to the other extreme and observe that there are certain jobs where the people who fill them put in 60 hour weeks or more and with no increased compensation because such people are salaried and then put in the time based on what the job requires. So we might be willing to agree that employment or not is a binary variable, but effort while working is closer to a continuous variable and laziness may refer to the effort level rather than that the person has a job.
The second question is this: what sort of jobs enable shirking as an equilibrium outcome? Now I will shift gears and give two examples from my personal experience. How much this generalizes is anyone's guess. A parallel question to what is being asked here is in the teaching and learning arena. Can students shirk somewhat and yet expect to get reasonable grades in the courses they take. My prior post suggests just that. And the teachers shirk too, by enabling this sort of student behavior. George Kuh referred to this sort of behavior as the Disengagement Compact. (See page 6, first column, of his article about the National Survey of Student Engagement.) Then, I get a huge number of solicitations from vendors who think I'm still working for the University of Illinois as an academic technologist, even though I retired back in 2010. I've complained about this to friends who still work in this area at various universities around the country. Their response is that these sales people are lazy - they don't do their homework. It's easier for them to simply blast an email to whomever is on their list without updating that list to ensure it is current and without making the message highly personalized so it appears to the recipient that the person is really trying to communicate.
How much work is of this sort, I really don't know. But consider this. Another column from yesterday, this one by Peter Coy, is about doing away with the 'Representative Agent Model', which invariably produced results consistent with Chicago School thinking, and instead replacing it with the Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, which needs computers to produce the outcomes but then the results obtained are far more realistic. Reasoning by analogy, we need a Heterogeneous Jobs model, which would admit that some jobs do enable shirking in equilibrium, while others do not.
But there is still a different way to think about things, which has to do with preparation for entering the labor market. Way back when in Development Economics, there was the Harris-Todaro model to explain from rural to urban migration based on income differentials in the two locales. Again reasoning by analogy, if there are certain jobs that differ substantially in the wages they offer, with much of the differential explained by the human capital requirements of the higher paying jobs, then there is a puzzle. Why do those who are stuck in the low paying jobs not try to acquire the human capital and thereby raise their income. Does laziness explain that? A certain fatalism or lack of wherewithal? Or something else? And when it happens across generations, particularly in males who seem to feel emasculated, what can overturn this sort of lock-in?
The decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service sector were phenomena of the 1990s. The movement to online work in a big way is a product of the last decade. The nature of work is not static. Krugman assumes a job is a job is a job. That just ain't so. He should be held to a higher standard in making the sort of argument that he made.
From this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed, it appears that American's view of higher education is fairly grim and has been declining recently. The article points out a substantial difference in perspective on this point between Democrats and Republicans, no surprise there. Much of this difference reflects a general decline in respect for institutions. For higher education, it seems the guilty parties are Wokeness in general and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in particular. There has been so much press available to the general public on these topics. Yet there has not been much at all on learning in college, broadly considered. I will take on some of that below.
I was surprised that the polling didn't report about differences across respondents based on their own highest degree attained, and/or whether they were in college at the time of responding to the poll. One might expect that the greater the degree attainment, the more the respect for higher education.
But those who have read my blog regularly, focusing only on the posts about my college teaching experience in the past decade and reflections about higher education more broadly during that same time period would find that I too have lowered my expectations about higher education. Let me give a brief overview of the criticisms.
Student Prior Preparation
I'm reflecting on this opinion piece in the New York Times about Shirley Jackson's story, The Lottery. It claimed that readers became very disturbed from reading the story. I read it in school, perhaps elementary school or maybe junior high school. That detail I don't remember. What I do remember is that there was a surprise ending to the story. What I don't think happened at all was me becoming disturbed and, further, most if not all of my classmates didn't get disturbed by reading the story as well. So I began to ponder whether reading it as a kid is different from reading it as an adult.
Some years ago I learned that to make good meaning about what one is reading, the reader needs to supply the context, which the writer might only hint at. Is The Lottery simply a story, the context supplied within and thus to be read for itself, or is it intended as a metaphor of some kind, so the context needs to be applied to the events in the larger society? I doubt that I considered it as a metaphor when I read it as a kid and I'm not even sure that I knew what a metaphor was at the time of this reading. (I do recall that we learned about metaphors and similes at the same time, but where that was in my school trajectory I can't recall.) If considered simply as a story, is The Lottery disturbing? Can it still be a good read even if it is not disturbing?
I'm not sure whether what follows are good answers to these questions, but they make some sense to me. Admittedly, answering a question with a question is not completely satisfying, but it is what I will do here. Are we so inured to violence in fiction, TV, the movies, and video games that none of it seems disturbing? Or might it be that some of it remains disturbing but which bit that is would be very hard to predict in advance? I recall as a kid having nightmares after watching The Giant Behemoth on TV, the scene where the monster steps on a car and crushes it terrorized me for some time thereafter. I was in elementary school then. There were, of course, many movies I saw when I was older that were frightening at the time of viewing; Psycho comes to mind, but I don't recall nightmares from most of them or lingering dark thoughts. Perhaps Repulsion and The Pianist (both directed by Roman Polanski) were disturbing, but it is now so long ago and these were not childhood memories of those movies, so they are not as strong.
My guess it that a person will find a story disturbing if it triggers a fear that is preexisting within that person and perhaps makes the person reflect on that fear in a different light. As an adult, reading a story metaphorically might bring that many more possible fears into play. If that happens the story is no longer merely entertainment. It becomes a form of ethical instruction.
Ruth Franklin, the author of the Times opinion piece, wants us to consider the benefits of this ethical instruction, even when it comes at the price of being disturbed. This may be meant partly as a counterargument to all the book censoring seemingly going on. But it also may be meant for readers like me, whose access is unrestricted by censors but who may nonetheless opt for "comfortable fiction," which for me is now mainly murder mysteries. They do provide entertainment, but they don't challenge the reader on ethical grounds; at least there is not much of a challenge.
I confess that for my own self preservation I read much less of the newspaper than I used to, including fewer opinion pieces. So reading Franklin's piece is more exception than rule for me. Much of it is just too depressing and my curiosity is not engaged by most of the non-opinion pieces. The intersection of what is good news and what is a good read seems rather slight for me now. And if I develop sufficient guilt feelings regarding my ignorance, by reading the posts of friends in Facebook on some news item, I can do a bit of self-education then and there, even if that leaves me a bit behind the times. Keeping up with everyone else does not provide motivation for me.
Yet short stories rarely find their way into my routine. Instead it's book-length fiction and sometimes book-length non-fiction, some magazine non-fiction, TV series perhaps on Amazon or Netflix, or the occasional full-length movie. Franklin's piece is an urging to expand the repertoire to include challenging short stories on a regular basis.
I actually have a prior disposition for doing short story reading, as indicated by this page on short stories called Appetizers that I made early during the Pandemic. The page is part of a Website to encourage college students to read more. The issue for me that remains is how to select interesting and challenging stories. I suspect that my sense of taste is not so common, if not entirely unique to me. In other words, just because a friend liked it doesn't mean I will like it as well. I'm willing to engage in some experimental consumption, in which there will be misses as well as hits. But I'd want a decent batting average.
Maybe after trying this for a while, I will write another post to consider how I've managed this question about selection of readings. But I'll only do this if what I come up with seems to be working. All I can promise now is to give it a serious try.
An idea expressed with elegance
The product of true intelligence
A demonstration of presentation done right
Thus giving the learner true insight.
#TheProofIsInTheMarginButTheInkHasBled
The self-declared genius
Took intravenous
To keep his thinking fluid.
While seemingly clever
In this endeavor
He kept confusing a Dryad for a Druid.
#AllWetBehindTheEars
I came up with this metaphor in late January of 2007, in a post called Learning Technology and "The Vision Thing". This was soon after the annual ELI conference and in my prior post I had been quite critical of the conference and the supposed vision it was attempting to convey to attendees. So, I provided an alternative in this post. The metaphor itself is explained early on as follows:
Let me begin with a little personal philosophy; I subscribe to the
Umpire Theory of Technology. According to that, in a baseball game the
umpire is absolutely critical to make the calls in an unbiased way. But
if you watch a game the only time the umpire gets noticed is when he
makes a bad call. If the umpire does his job very well, he becomes
invisible. Learning technology well employed should be invisible too.
It then follows that the visioning itself can't be about the technology. The technology only plays, at best, a supporting role. The visioning then must either be about aspirations for teaching and learning, in this post I articulated my aspirations about Humanism Across The Curriculum, a next generation view of Writing Across The Curriculum, or it must reflect current issues/problems with teaching and learning and then offer up problem solving solutions. (On the issues/problems I will offer one possible look in the discussion that follows.) Learning technologists might benefit themselves by an embrace of the Umpire Theory, at least temporarily, to give them a perspective where they can be self-critical about their beliefs and their practices with the technology. My belief is that such an exercise would be quite useful to learning technologists prior to a complete embrace of AI.
But in this piece I will have a historical look only, where I know something about what happened, and not discuss the present at all, since I've been out of it for some time. Yet I think the history tells us something about the present as there are persistent patterns with new technology adoption. Considering those patterns is where I hope there is benefit in this post. First, there is a tendency for learning technologists to become highly enthusiastic about the next big technology innovation. That enthusiasm served as one of the drivers for learning technologists to enter the field. And a certain fraction of instructors will likewise be so enthused, call them innovators or early adopters. This feeling that technology itself will drive major change is fueled by what the innovators and early adopters do with their teaching as a consequence of the technology.
I felt this way in the late 1990s, when the online components of instruction seemed to give courses a new vitality and in my campus role I got to talk with these early instructors who were doing wonderful things with their teaching, even if by current standards the technology itself was quite primitive. The drive and and creativity of these instructors infected me. For a while I became a true believer. Then, my little Center for Educational Technology, which had just come into being, had as its implicit mission to get as many courses as possible onto one of the learning management systems we then supported. I embraced that mission, at least for a while.
A variety of political economy issues got in the way of fulfilling that mission in a satisfying manner. We were underfunded from the get go and remained that way. There were other campus systems in support of instruction that had developed prior to the forming of my center, and those would have to be abandoned eventually. The transition to the learning management systems was painful. While we did offer small grants for adoption, followed by attendance at a multi-day workshop that would give instructors ideas about how to implement, we couldn't afford to make such workshops a pre-condition for adoption and many other instructors simply adopted the LMS, perhaps after getting some training on its functionality from one of my staff, though perhaps not. After a couple of years of this, we stopped giving out the small grants and providing the multi-day workshops, with the funding redirected into my Center's budget. Fast forward now several years to where scaling considerations forced us to embrace an "Enterprise Learning Management System" and convert courses from the previous systems or have the courses start anew, it was determined that upwards of 90% of the class sites used the LMS in such a lightweight way that conversion was unnecessary. Those facts were in the background when I wrote the visioning post.
Let me fast forward again another 5+ years and consider a different technology entirely, so as to begin to ask whether the prior experience generalizes. The following is from an email I sent to the Educause CIO listserv, which at the time was discussing the pros and cons of lecture capture technology.
It is interesting to read all these testimonials about lecture capture and how popular it is. However, given the recent NY Times piece about the value (or lack) of laptop initiatives, http://goo.gl/mzVge, it behooves us to remain skeptical about the value of lecture capture on learning, in spite of the admitted popularity. The argument against must be something like this – lecture capture encourages student effort to focus on the ability to reproduce the lecture. But we know from the How People Learn volume of a dozen years ago, http://goo.gl/ZZ8vQ, that learning happens primarily via “transfer.” At issue then is the impact of lecture capture on student efforts aimed at transfer. If students find transfer difficult but mastering the lecture within grasp, their preference for the technology is understandable. And instructors who want students to like their classes have reason to feed that preference. So it seems possible that the technology can be popular but the impact on learning might be nil. It would be good to gather data on this parse to try to relate lecture capture to transfer activities.
I want to note that my hypothesis at the end of this paragraph is not novel at all. It follows from what George Kuh called the Disengagement Compact, in this piece, What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE. The operative paragraph is here:
And this brings us to the un-
seemly 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 tak-
ing full advantage of the resources in-
stitutions provide.
Real learning is labor intensive. Technology can't change that, though perhaps it can save some time the student spends in activities that support the learning. I would argue that real teaching is labor intensive too. When I first started as an assistant professor in economics, back in 1980, almost all the faculty were tenured or on the tenure track. Then the reason to shortchange the time devoted to instruction, particularly at the undergraduate level, was that the added effort beyond some minimal level didn't count for promotion, tenure, or salary review. Nowadays, most of the undergraduate instruction on campus is done by adjunct (specialized) faculty. They have a different reason for participating in the Disengagement Compact. Lacking tenure, their job security hinges on students being satisfied, as indicated by the course evaluations administered near the end of the semester. If students are entirely instrumental in their approach, motivated by grades alone, not at all by learning, then by giving them good grades for comparatively little effort the instructor gets decent evaluations and to teach the course yet again.
Kuh's essay is from 20 years ago. Apart from the move to adjunct instructors, what has changed in that time and are things better or worse than they were then? My guess is that if you surveyed instructors who have been teaching undergraduates for the past 20 years or longer, many if not most would say that things are worse now. I would point to three factors to explain this. One is the decline in reading, particularly as a recreational vehicle and to stay informed about the world (in other words, non-course reading). Another is the mediation of communication via the smartphone, so face-to-face interpersonal skills don't have a chance to develop well. The third, something we've been talking about only comparatively recently (but this talk began well before Covid) is that so many students suffer from emotional health problems. In turn, this can be explained by the artificial nature of the game that is school which students play coupled with the high tuition they or their families must bear.
I want to make a few more points before giving some very broad stoke thoughts on what a fix might look like. One is about having an open conversation regarding these issues. Sometime after I became aware of Kuh's essay, I learned that the U of I participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement, but it didn't release the results publicly. We were strong in some areas, not so strong in others. Having the areas of weakness be considered in public media might have damaged the university's reputation. Why risk that?
The university did make some internal changes to address the findings. One of those was to develop a formal program of undergraduates engaged in research. But only a fraction students were involved in that, with the more elite students much more likely to be involved. This is another issue with a focus on student engagement, one I've found over the years in my own teaching. The better students liked my course a lot, though they were only 10-15% of the class. For much of the rest, it was a struggle. It is reaching the rest that is the real challenge.
There is a lot of inertia in how most instruction occurs. If a particular instructor tries to innovate in teaching, his students might find it a refreshing alternative to what they are getting in their other classes. But it can go the other way, with the students so accustomed by how their other courses are conducted that they are put off by the instructor's attempt at innovation. I've taught one course a year in retirement, ending in fall 2019. My experience is that it was the first way from 2012-2014, but became the second way during 2015-2017 and was even worse in 2019. (I didn't teach in 2018.) My current view is that for innovation to be successful it must happen across the board, not just in one course at a time.
On the other hand, the Center for Teaching, which most campuses have, tends to make their offerings opt-in for instructors. Unless there are mandates for innovation from individual colleges or departments, the opt-in approach is what's available to them because they don't have the leverage to do otherwise. But then those who do opt in are the usual suspects and only a small fraction of instructors while those who don't end up teaching courses that become very static.
Now to the suggestions. When I was still teaching, the discussion about student mental health focused on the lack of mental health professionals on campus, so the difficulty that students had in getting appointments with such professionals. There was essentially no discussion about whether the overall academic environment was creating many of these mental health problems. Now, with Covid in the rear-view mirror (we hope), it seems time to ask that question in a systematic way. This will require a serious evaluation effort of students, their friends and families, their instructors, and possibly the people they worked with during internships. In other words, lead with an evaluation, one where student mental health is the driver, but where the Disengagement Compact might linger in the background as an explanatory factor.
Campuses are unlikely to do this on their own, for reasons I've mentioned above. So outside foundations need to step up here to encourage this, with implied funding for remedies after the evaluation has produced its findings. Implicit in how I've written this post is that the issues I've identified will be found as significant factors in explaining the findings. The next few suggestions are based on that assumption.
There needs to be a major effort to move instruction from credentialing to learning. I've written about this a lot, for example in this post called Excise The Textbook. One should anticipate substantial resistance in making such a move, from both instructors and students. So there needs to be a plan to overcome that resistance. As I'm an economist, I'd look to incentives for doing this. Grant funding might very well be deployed to provide such incentives. Assuming that the initial resistance is overcome, at least for some subset of students and instructors, one question is whether this move to learning has legs that will endure beyond the grant funding. Another question arises if the initial group provides promising results. Will other groups then form that follow a similar path, even if there is no grant funding to support that?
Then there needs to be drill down on what a move from credentialing to learning looks like. My view is that high-stakes assessment, via exams and term papers, needs to be diminished if not totally eliminated. Regular low-stakes assignments must be done with much more attention to the student getting good feedback on those and that transfer of some sort is required to complete the assignments. The hope is that after the initial resistance students come to appreciate this alternative approach, want even more feedback, and begin to understand why the alternative has been put in place. Beyond that, one might hope that students learn to create their own low-stakes assessment as they begin along the path to self-teaching, one of the meta goals from moving to the alternative approach
There is the matter of who will write these new low-stake assessments and who will provide the feedback. On the latter, during the first year of writing blog posts I had a series on Inward Looking Service Learning, seven posts in all, based on my experience with peer-mentors who had previously taken my course as the ones providing the feedback, mainly via online office hours held in the evening. I thought it the biggest innovation in my teaching at the time, with the technology as an enabler, an early example of that. The INSL posts tried to generalize from that experience. But I want to note that in the course I was teaching, there hadn't been graduate student TAs. The undergraduate peer-mentors weren't substitutes for those. They could be afforded because my lecture went from about 60 students to about 180 students. So the approach de-emphasized the lecture and made the online office hours held by peer-mentors a feature.
Now there is a big deal with graduate student TAs unionizing because of feelings that they are being exploited. In courses where there are graduate student TAs, it would have to be worked out in advance that the use of undergraduate peer-mentors would be an addition to the overall labor in instruction. I'm afraid that under the current circumstances, where everyone seems to be feeling a budget pinch, that's unlikely to happen. But again, grant funders might come to the rescue, at least at first, so that pilot projects can demonstrate the feasibility (or not) of this suggestion.
As to the writing of the assessments, I've done that in my own teaching, so tend to minimize the effort entailed as well as the sense of competence in the subject matter that such authorship requires. But there is also the matter that it might seem to be a lot of work, so individual instructors will balk at it for that reason. This might be addressed by creating a team of instructors who teach the same course but at different institutions, to divide up the assessments to be written, with an agreement that the products will be part of an OER and that they will use the assessments written by other members of the team in their own teaching. This means they will also serve as peer-reviewers of these assessments as those are still in draft form. The authorship and the peer-review function will go hand-in-hand.
Sometime later, the students who do the work to complete these assessments can themselves be considered as reviewers, so their feedback on the assessments can be used in revising them. Further, students can be given extra-credit projects to write additional assessments and/or to revise the extra-credit project that was completed in a previous offering of the course, under the proviso that these extra-credit projects would also find their way into an OER. This would provide a mechanism for the assessments to stay current and students might then come to see themselves as authors, another step in the direction of self-teaching.
Let me wrap up. There may be a lot of wishful thinking in this visioning exercise. I have no doubt about it. I hope that readers aren't put off by it. The point is that it's been done without making technology the driver of the change. That makes as much sense to me now as it did when I originally came up with the Umpire Theory of Technology. And for learning technologists who typically assume technology should be the driver, it might be useful to think through for themselves an alternative view.
