Author: Luke

This weekend James Madison College at Michigan State sponsored a celebration of my father’s retirement after 43 years of teaching, research, and service at the university. It was a remarkable event, evidence of a special community and a transcendent academic career. Students who Ken taught in his first few years at Madison in the early 1970, and who had been back to East Lansing no more than a couple of times since, came to thank him for his influence. Wallace Jefferson, the former Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, spoke of how my father’s course on public affairs and social policy challenged and refined his understanding of compassion, righteous and actionable anger, and truth, and how he’s carried that understanding forward in a stellar legal career. Adam Wright, a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California, spoke of how my father influenced his historical imagination and drew him into a community that demanded much of him and propelled him to Harvard Law School and into practice. Dick Zinman, Ron Dorr, and Katie See spoke of building (and saving) a college with my father, of how they synthesized their disciplinary differences into a curriculum that structured student’s engagement with the world in a way that offered them a variety of paths to purposeful work. Sherman Garnett, the current dean of Madison and a former student, spoke of the enormous impact this generation of teacher-scholars had on the life of the college, and with admiration for the research on the Holocaust my father’s done over the past decade. Connie Hunt organized and presided over the weekend with great cheer and a steady watch; our family is deeply appreciative. Former student after student shared stories of Ken Waltzer’s classes, his feedback, his counseling and mentoring, and his impact.

Saturday was structured around three panels featuring former students discussing topics drawn from different areas of my father’s focus during his career at MSU. The first was on “Urban America Today,” and was convened by Dayne Walling, a Madison graduate, currently the mayor of Flint. The panel was first-rate. We heard about gentrification in Detroit, the evolving role of the Catholic church in Michigan’s cities, strategies for urban renewal around education, and the challenges of education reform in the current political and economic climate in the state. The third panel, convened by the political scientist Carrie Booth Walling, explored “History, Memoir, Testimonies, and Human Rights,” and we heard eloquent presentations of the research four students of my father’s have done on the Holocaust. We heard how he cultivated their work, and how he’s inspired a new generation of students to continue to look for and struggle with meaning in the Holocaust.

The presentations across each session were exactly what you hope for when you attend an academic conference: thoughtful, probing, contextualized, mixing reflections on process and product, generous, open to dialogue. There was pontification, but it was purposeful. Questions were answered and raised, and you got the sense of a community around Madison College, Jewish Studies at MSU (now in the able hands of Yael Aronoff), and my father’s work in the university as profoundly serious, committed, and engaged. This is something I always knew to be true, and yet seeing and participating in it congealed that knowledge in ways I’ll be chewing on for some time.

I was lucky to join three former Madison students on the second panel, which offered reflections on teaching and learning in a changing university. Deb Meizlish, the associate director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at Michigan, presided over presentations from Cheryl Maranto of Marquette University, Randy Magen of the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and myself, and we shared concerns about declining rhetorical and material support for higher education, technology, strategies to invigorate classroom instruction, and how being in the orbit of Madison College has shaped our particular approaches to these questions. Below are my remarks.

What a great weekend, what a great career, and what a tremendous way for Michigan State and James Madison College to celebrate it.

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Remarks on Teaching and Learning in the University

My father’s career at Michigan State and James Madison College in particular have had a significant impact on my sense of the university, its purposes, and the role that an engaged academic can play in shaping how an institution functions.

My work at CUNY involves fostering conversations and experimentation about teaching, learning, and using technology within the university. I think with faculty on my campus at the level of the individual assignment, and I think with administrators about policy, resources, best practices, and emerging trends in higher education at the level of a 26 campus, 500,000 student university. I also spend much time in the spaces in-between, working with faculty and students on conceptualizing and implementing projects, courses, curricula, and strategies that create new opportunities for students to explore ideas or express themselves, and chances for faculty to experiment and evolve their pedagogical practices with and without technology.

One of the most exciting aspects of this work is that I get to do it in dialogue and concert with a cohort of folks who all consider themselves part of a broad “open education” movement, and who are deeply aware and protective of the historic role of CUNY in the life of the city and in the imagination of New York City’s working class. There’s a direct parallel between those folks and the interdisciplinary cohort of scholar teachers who formed the core of Madison, who we’ve been hearing about all weekend.

Open education, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, holds at its core the idea that access to education and educational resources should constantly be broadened, opened up. Among other things, that means pushing back against notions of artificial scarcity in certain realms of academic publishing. It means embracing open source technologies because of the freedoms they allow their users. It means embracing pedagogical practices that open curricula to interdisciplinary and experiential practices. And it means seeking and seizing moments of connection between what students are learning and the worlds around them.

Our work at CUNY and my place within that work is resonant with many of the ideas, values, and goals that have been at the heart of my father’s career at Michigan State. James Madison College in particular has played an outsized and perhaps a bit distorting role in my perception of what university life should be.

• I grew up thinking faculty members everywhere had deep, sustained ties with their undergraduates, so it’s still a bit jarring to me to encounter faculty members who know little about their students and students who at the end of a semester don’t know the name of the person teaching their class.
• I grew up taking for granted that everyone wrote a lot in college and took writing seriously, so when I work with faculty members who refuse to assign writing because of fear that they can’t possible read it all, or that students will simply plagiarize, or that “it’s the English department’s job to teach writing, not mine,” I cringe.
• I grew up thinking that teaching and learning, that a liberal education, happened outside of and around the classroom as much as it did inside the classroom.
• I grew up thinking faculty offices everywhere were converted dorm rooms.

Growing up in the orbit of James Madison College also gave me a strong sense of how community and a sense of belonging can intensify and contextualize the teaching and learning that happens in a large, public university. Building community at CUNY, where the vast majority of students commute to campus, is something that we constantly struggle with, and which requires ongoing care and attention, and technology is regularly implicated in that work.

• Blogs@Baruch is an open source publishing platform I launched at Baruch in 2009. Based in WordPress, it’s a flexible space that has been integrated into a range of courses and co-curricular activities and provided a structure for a culture of writing, and dozens of communities of writers, to emerge on our campus.
• Our largest community on Blogs@Baruch is around Freshman Seminar, where 1200 incoming students are blogging in a networked space in response to three prompts which ask them to reflect critically and creatively on their transitions to college.
• Learning communities are connected to the Freshman Seminar experience, creating clusters of students who move together through several courses in their first year. Though they are not a replacement for the residential experience, learning communities address some of the disconnection that happens on a commuter campus. They can give student cohorts from which to explore course material, and they foster collaboration between faculty members and across disciplines in potentially exciting ways.
• Faculty development seminars bring faculty members together into communities that reflect dialogically on pedagogy and classroom praxis. We’ve been working on developing hybrid courses across the discipline for the past year, and our process has been to carve out space for faculty members to articulate the risks and opportunities they see in changing their instructional modes, to construct assignments and assessment plans connected to specific learning goals, and to explore, select, and deploy the technologies they’ll be using in their courses. The communities that are forming in and across these seminars will become resources for the college as it determines how to go forward in the distance and blended learning space.

Another core component of my father’s career that is at the heart of my work at CUNY’s identity as a working-class, immigrant institution. Our mission is to serve the social (though not actual) descendants of the people who my father has spent much of his career studying. CUNY is very much the “people’s university,” one whose structures and values are grounded in the history of working class New York, and whose politics often revolve around how to protect or update that identity given swiftly changing political, economic, and cultural contexts.

Since I started at CUNY in 1999 the university has changed immensely. There have been concerted efforts to recruit accomplished researchers, to unify administrative and business process across the system, to raise the university’s public profile, to align the general education experience of students across the university, to address the implications of reducing state aid, and to sort through what it means that increasing numbers of our courses being taught by contingent faculty who are members of the same union as the tenure faculty members whose work they subsidize.

Each of these questions are huge, important and complicated, just like CUNY, and they each in their own way require reassessment and reassertion of the core values of the institution. We are going through trying times in public higher education. Scott Walker is attempting to eviscerate the Wisconsin system. Governors like Daniel Malloy in Connecticut who just a few years ago pushed significant investment in higher education is now taking some of that back. Next week NY state’s budget will be set, and CUNY is preparing for significant cuts to its base operating budget even though we’re at the end of a five year process of gradual tuition hikes. The ebbs and flows are dizzying, and those of us who support teaching and learning are constantly assessing the impact of these trends on the pedagogical opportunities in our communities.

My father’s involvement in academic administration and the conversations we’ve had over the years remind me that these ebbs and flows are not new. But one of ways this moment is different is in how technology is implicated. Those of us who are working in open education feel a particular burden because our machinery is also the machinery of “the barbarians at the gates”; our language and tools and methods are easily co-optable by forces who do not share our values. For instance, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were first invented as connectivist spaces that sought to harness for the purposes of experiential and experimental pedagogy what was truly empowering about the World Wide Web as a network. When Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller at Stanford got ahold of the idea, they transformed MOOCs into massive information delivery systemz that, for the most part, construct students as vessels into which knowledge can be transmitted. Here’s an idea, the MOOC, that began as a complex, messy, provisional space for experimentation, from which much could be learned. But it was quickly snapped up, its history erased, its coming hegemony proclaimed.

Now, more than ever, those of us who care deeply about our institutions must use history and our values as guides as we assess the rhetoric around the changing university. We must ask how emerging trends and initiatives impact pedagogical spaces, and we must defend those spaces. As I go forward, Ken Waltzer’s career and the ethos of James Madison College will be invaluable guides.

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Finally, here are some photos we put together for the toast roast:

Coursera announced last week that it will be partnering with ten state university systems to “explore MOOC-based learning and collaboration on campus.” The news revealed what many of us who have been working in this field for some time have known since about when non-Canadians started talking about MOOCs: grand proclamations about the inevitable revolution coming to higher education via Silicon Valley are being propelled by a significant amount of hot air. Eduprenuers interested in changing higher education by developing new technological tools and curricula are going to have to do the same thing that a lot of us have been doing already for years: experimenting, failing better, iterating, scaling, dreaming, scratching and clawing within/against existing institutional frameworks, and persisting.

The most troubling aspect of the MOOC hype has been how quickly this approach to teaching and learning with technology has been seen by a variety of constituencies as a tool/excuse for slashing public funding for higher education, for “doing more with less,” and (in the spirit of capital accumulation) for proclaiming that only the elite universities can lead us through contemporary communicative changes. The MOOC hype has somehow squeezed another tier of employment into the system — “course guiders” — who will sit below adjuncts and slightly above peer mentors on the hierarchy of academic labor (and will displace both in some spaces). Proponents and detractors of xMOOCs agree on one thing: the primary goal of all this is “disruption.” The proponents are certain that whatever replaces the status quo in higher education will be better, while the detractors see such thinking as reckless academic planning at best, and mendacious privatization at worst.

The second most troubling aspect of the hype is how poorly informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning so much of what’s happening in the xMOOCeshpere has been. In announcing their partnerships, Coursera noted that “studies have shown many benefits to blended learning.” They tried to link the word “benefits” to this study but screwed up the html in the post so that the link is dead (it’s still dead nearly a week after first posted). The study they failed to link to is focused primarily on K-12 instruction, and its citation evidences a sloppiness and a carelessness about this stuff. It suggests either they don’t know what they’re doing or they don’t care what anyone else thinks about what they’re doing. It’s actually kind of edupunk, if you convince yourself to think that way about it.

Much of the same sloppiness is embedded in the design of the Coursera learning platform. As Alex Usher and others have noted, Coursera just announced to the world their service is essentially an LMS. If you’ve not taking a Coursera course, I encourage you to do so — with a pseudonym, if you like — because it becomes clear that absent the hype and praise from the New York Times op-ed page, Coursera is Blackboard with a hipper stylesheet and a slightly enhanced feature set.

Which is to say, Coursera is pretty meh as a space for teaching and learning. Online courses take place in spaces, and just as the physical environment in which we teach impacts the ways we communicate with our students, virtual environments can be structured to make certain things possible and other things difficult. The design of Coursera as an LMS reinforces traditional notions of the “class” and the classroom, and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to think about and experiment with new structures. Just like Blackboard.

It also makes clear the idea that effective teaching online requires experienced, thoughtful, and engaged teachers. There’s a lot of bad models out there, which, when combined with bluster and grand proclamations, has led to some deliciously loud failures this year. If you look at the primary modes of interaction that Coursera affords, you see a platform that, just like other LMSs, places significant barriers before the instructor who wants to do something new, something open, or something connected.

What follows is based on a review of 8-10 Coursera courses that ran in Spring 2013.

The 15 Minute Video Lecture
Students, we’re told, need to have lecture content broken down into digestible chunks, and these chunks must be less than 15 minutes. Universities that partner with Coursera have to bear their own costs for producing the courses, and much of the investment (which tends to be around $50k a course) goes into high definition video content. Coursera will help you integrate a quiz into your video lecture, which in theory isn’t a bad way to make a lecture more interactive. Courses provide a transcription of the lectures (which are often sloppy), but do not offer audio files, which makes listening to them on the go quite difficult. Coursera tells you when your account has viewed a lecture, but it’s up to university partners to name the lectures, sometimes leading to titles like Rousseau 1, Rousseau 2, Marx 1, and Marx 2. University partners can also annotate lectures, but rarely do (it happens more in the math classes than others). In many cases you wonder where that $50k is going.

I don’t really have a problem with the idea of the chunked lecture, as long as it’s by a seasoned lecturer. If I were ever to teach a course on the American Civil War, I’d draw heavily upon David Blight’s work, and would extract specific segments to combine with other texts. I do though have a problem with the fact that within Coursera these bits of content are usually locked into specific courses run during specific time periods on a specific service that requires a specific log in. It’s clear that most Coursera courses view video content as the sine qua non of instructional modes. So did the Sunrise Semester.

A recommendation to colleges producing content for Coursera: make sure your video content lands in your institutional repository, and consult the librarians (always consult the librarians!) on ways to make this content discoverable and reusable. And, make it truly open.

Forums
Most student activity is located within the Forum area of a Coursera course, which, again, is planned, organized, and supported by each university partner. The faculty and/or course assistants must establish and name subforums in a way that fits the structure of the class. In any course this is a pedagogical process, where teachers first imagine what conversations they would like to nurture and then adapt the structure of the space to fit the dialogues that are actually emerging. In a fully online course, the stakes of instructional design are heightened. There’s a lot of room for error within this process, and it requires experienced, adaptive teachers.

The forums for each course are sortable by creation date, activity date, level of activity, and threads to which you’re subscribed to; you can also see “top forum posters,” who are awarded points and ranked “based on the sum of the square root of all the votes received for each post.” (I don’t know, either). There are many paths to interact with the content, but if you dig down there’s very little sustained dialogue actually happening within the forums. Good ideas are raised and responded to once or twice, and then things tend to peter out. There’s little to no remix and iteration — which are central modes in innovative digital pedagogy — in part because the forums make it difficult to do this type of work. Technical questions are mixed with task-oriented ones; content-based questions often go without response; students get anxious.

Fine. This stuff happens in all classes. But a good teacher anticipates concerns and confusion and corrals it towards productivity. In the Coursera courses I participated in, very little to none of this redirection happened. Posts in forums can be tagged, but rarely are. Useful tagging requires instruction, and instruction on tagging requires a sense of how to structure taxonomies. (Consult the librarians!).

Until recently, Coursera didn’t support permalinks in the forums, which made it very difficult to find your way around. Permalink functionality is now present, which allows email subscriptions to include anchors to specific comments in a thread, and for each member of a course to see a compiled stream of their forum posts from within that course. This is a massive improvement in the platform over what it was just a few months ago. At this moment, however, the activity stream is not extracted to the platform level; it’s only available within a course, and that course must be currently active or archived in order for you to access your posts, which you can only do by clicking into the course. Each course is atomized, just like in Blackboard, and thus there is no space currently on the platform for thinking about or working at the level of curricula.

Forums behind logins that are not permanently available are not open.

Assessments
There’s basically two modes of assessment within a Coursera course: quizzes and short peer-evaluated essays. There’s some space here for thoughtful pedagogical work that reinforces certain ideas from course content (quizzes can be useful). The prompts for the essays however are widely varied: in one class I “took” the same prompt was used for every reading in the course:

Please write an essay that aims to enrich the reading of a fellow student who is both intelligent and attentive to the readings and to the course. Each essay should be between 270 and 320 words.

The essay should focus on this unit’s reading and the subject may be any literary matter that you studied in that reading: plot, style, theme, structure, imagery, allusion, narrator reliability, and so on. Such matters are discussed in the video clips.

This is a terrible prompt for many reasons: the target essay size is incredibly small and distracting, not even enough space for a blessay. And the focus — “any literary matter that you studied” — is far from what my comp/rhet friends would call an “enabling constraint.” Other prompts I’ve seen are stronger; one asks students to hone in on a text’s arguments, exposition, and use of evidence, and then provides a detailed rubric that defines what it means to do that well.

The peer assessments are double-blind, and there’s no quality control or opportunity for continued exchange after the review phase is over. Students often create a forum thread to solicit more dialogue about what they’ve written. This is a microcosm of one of the overall structural problems with Coursera: the inflexibility of the platform locks communication into specific spaces, which poses significant challenges to iteration. What about making rubrics available outside of the assignment, or even outside of the course? What about allowing students to know whose work they’re reading, and who’s reading their work, to force more honest dialogue and accountability?

Openness on the web requires the flexibility to loosely join small pieces, and to directly engage whomever is engaging you. Coursera fails on this count. Not open.

Data Lock
Coursera students have no way to extract their content (other than to copy and paste) or to delete their account, and the only way to delete previously published content is to navigate to it individually and delete comments one by one. Users retain “ownership” over their content, but grant Coursera the right to do whatever it wants to do with it. What kind of ownership is that?

This data lock-in, more than any of the other structures, makes clear the level of concern Coursera has for students who use its platform. Disallowing a user from deleting their account and extracting their data? Not. Open.

MOCs

Openwashing: n., having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices.

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) March 26, 2012

We’ve established that these are most definitely massive online courses. There’s a specific set of pedagogical benefits that truly open education offers students and the world: it foregrounds connectivity and puts the student at the center of his or her own learning; it prioritizes the generative iteration that is central to the evolution of ideas; it is skeptical of expertise; and it posits that learning is not limited to specific spaces but instead flows across them.

The design of Coursera as an LMS makes those learning goals very difficult to integrate. A good teacher can teach well using any set of tools, and it’s certainly possible to have “good” courses inside of Coursera. But the structures and design of these platforms matter, their settings and capabilities are ideological, and the notion that an institution can simply choose to scale up without experimentation, trial, and error is foolhardy. Spending $50k to do so is an outrageous waste of resources. Maybe Coursera is realizing all this and has determined that there’s more potential profit in changing their mission and competing against Blackboard under some perverted notion of “openness.” They’ll probably have a better chance of making a buck there than if they try to go toe-to-toe with the Canadians.

Hi All:

As you may have noticed, the Baruch College website and all web services, including Blogs@Baruch and VOCAT, are not available. Baruch is without power, and though backup power kept things running through Tuesday night, they ran out of fuel. CUNY will re-open tomorrow except for Kingsborough, BMCC, CSI, and Baruch. CON ED claims all in Manhattan will have power back tomorrow or Saturday, so assume information and access will increase then.

Hope you’re all weathering the storm well. As far as I know, I’m the only member of the f/t staff who currently has power, as I’ve fled NJ for family near Philly. You can email me at lwaltzer at gmail.com, or call my cell (in the sig of the emails you’ve gotten from me) if you need anything. Mikhail and Tom are without power in NJ, though occasionally charging… you can reach them at mikhailgershovich at gmail.com and thomasharbison at gmail.com. Suzanne is in the city, and I’m not sure if her power situation, but her non-Baruch email is suzaep at gmail.com.

Hang in there folks. Looking forward to us all getting back to our work soon.