What I Learned Today

Today’s massively multiplayer online courses, or MOOCs, provide an opportunity for teaching, and learning, at an unprecedented scale. Universities, instructors, businesses, and students are still exploring what the benefits and limitations might be. Should you pay tuition or should it be free? Should you get a certificate of completion, and if so, how should future employers or schools value it?

Most of all: are MOOCs successful or not?

Like most things, it depends how you define success. If a MOOC is like a college class on steroids, then you can start with the same metrics used to evaluate college classes: enrollment numbers, completion rates, and (maybe) student evaluations. MOOCs have been criticized for abysmal performance in terms of completion rates, which are something like 5-10%. A traditional college class with a completion rate that low would likely be canceled (if only because it wouldn’t be economically feasible).

Yet, gradually, arguments are emerging for why the wailing and gnashing of teeth can stop. Maybe we need to redefine what it means to ‘sign up’ for a MOOC. Justin Reich and Andrew Ho point out that HarvardX MOOCs stay open even after the deadline for certification has passed — so all subsequent registrants are “dropouts the second they’ve registered” (i.e., they aren’t allowed to “complete” the class).

Or maybe we need to stop equating MOOCs with their tiny, elite, in-person predecessors and develop new ways to evaluate them.

William Spaniel offers an interesting alternative metaphor. He likens signing up for a MOOC to adding a show to your Netflix queue. I like that concept, and it makes me feel a little better about my own course-dabbling habits at Coursera. Even though the classes were free, and there was no explicit obligation to complete them, I felt sad and embarrassed each time I had to un-enroll from another eyes-too-big-for-my-stomach endeavor. But a movie queue… it’s okay if something sits on there forever and never gets watched. Right?

Then there’s the low cost of entry: you can click and sign up for a MOOC, for free. How much of a commitment you consider that to be is up to you. Contrast that with college students who may feel bound to grind through a painful or boring class because they just paid thousands of dollars for it and/or they need it to get into another class or to graduate. MOOCs eliminate that kind of pressure. Instead, the currency that matters is your time. Where will you spend it?

I’d like to go one further and propose another new metaphor for a MOOC. It’s not a college course (even if taught by college professors and employing content from a college course). It’s not a Netflix queue. It’s a candy store, where all the candy is free! Or again, more aptly, the cost is measured in time.

We’re used to valuing things by how much money people are willing to spend on them. Think of the stock market, clothing, cars, airline tickets. But how much closer to the heart is a measure of how much time you’re willing to spend on something (or someone)? What does it take for a course, to which you owe no obligation, to inspire you to spend hours reading, listening, writing, thinking, investigating, and learning?

It’s simple, really: the course has to provide something in return that you value (entertainment, new knowledge, new skills, interaction with other students, whatever). Because the main beneficiary of all that effort is… you.

When are you most engaged and inspired to learn something new? Thomas and Brown, in their book “A New Culture of Learning,” argue that play is a powerful setting, and motivator, and facilitator for learning. Sitting down to a new board game, exploring an online MMORPG, experimenting to find the best baseball swing — these are all settings that push you to integrate new information and also to explore the limits of what’s possible. What happens if I click there?

These are also settings that seem incompatible with the form that our public education currently takes.

Thomas and Brown sing the praises of the “new culture of learning,” which they define as unlimited access to information (i.e., the Internet) combined with an environment that allows for “unlimited agency to build and explore within boundaries.” Agency enables exploration and discovery, and the boundaries serve as spurs to imagination. Similarly, constrained art forms like the sonnet or haiku can provide boundaries that inspire new creations. Thomas and Brown also use the word “culture” deliberately, and not in the sense that probably first came to mind: think bacterial culture in a petri dish, something that grows through cultivation.

And in Chapter 2, something more radical emerges.

“For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur,” Thomas and Brown assert.

Wow. Yes! If a teacher is absent from the classroom, we assume that learning grinds to a halt, and that it is only through the teacher’s intervention that the students will learn anything. Yet a moment’s consideration raises a multitude of counter-examples. Have you ever read a wikipedia article out of curiosity? Watched a Youtube video to learn how to make mitered borders on a quilt? Tinkered with Legos to see how tall a tower you can build? Tried a new route to work to determine whether it’s a shorter commute? Invented a variation on a recipe? Read this blog to Learn Something New?

We are learning all the time, with or without teachers.

Thomas and Brown characterize our current view of learning as “mechanistic” in that “learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered” in which “the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can.” That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, the idea of an organized curriculum, a progression of easy to hard, sounds quite attractive to me. But it rests on some unstated assumptions that just might not be valid:

1. That all knowledge *can* be organized in a logical series of steps. Is this true of every field?
2. That the same organization of knowledge works equally well for everyone.
3. That knowledge doesn’t change much over time. (Otherwise the curriculum would be in constant need of revision.)

Thomas and Brown discuss #3 in their book. The first two are mine, and I think both assumptions are suspect.

What can we do instead?

Thomas and Brown suggest viewing learning in terms of an “environment” (the boundaries mentioned before). The learning culture emerges from the environment in which people operate, and they learn through engagement in that world (not by being externally instructed). Learners are not constantly required to prove that they “get it” but can instead embrace what they don’t know and keep asking questions and exploring.

I am reminded of the critique of education levied by Sir Ken Robinson in 2010, brilliantly illustrated by RSA Animate (“Changing Education Paradigms”):

It gets especially relevant around 6:30 when he discusses the historical evolution of our approach to public education and how influenced it has been by the industrial revolution. What was most striking to me was the point about how we educate children in “batches” by age. Really, does this ever make any sense?

Moving to an emphasis on the environment and play opens up entirely new approaches to learning. It also places more responsibility on the learner: to be active, to explore, to prioritize his or her own learning. This is a natural outcome to reach as an adult, free of the pressures of obligatory schooling — yet so often we are consumed with life maintenance that we do not carve out time for learning or for play.

Thomas and Brown suggested that this is, or at least has been, a natural shift in priorities. They argue that historically, as children grew up, the world seemed more stable with age. People figured out how the world worked, and then could settle into a mostly static view of the world and the best strategies for interacting with it. But they argue that today, the amount of change (driven by technological advances) renders this strategy less successful.

It’s certainly not new to claim that today’s citizens experience a higher rate of change than those in the past. However, this is the first time I’ve seen a prescription for coping that encourages, effectively, more play. “Embrace change,” Thomas and Brown advocate. Open your arms, and your mind, to a rich environment that provides endless chances for learning and growth.

I will quibble slightly with one of their claims. I don’t think it’s uniquely the Internet that makes this kind of endless learning possible. Some people manufacture a learning environment wherever they go, constantly wondering “how does that work?” and “why does it look that way?” and “could I make one myself?” It’s all already there, anytime you want it.

Play on!

James Paul Gee, a professor of Reading, decided to explore the world of video games. He picked up a copy of “The New Adventures of the Time Machine” (inspired by the work of H. G. Wells) and was surprised by its difficulty. “Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex […] and yet enjoy it,” he wrote in a paper titled “Good video games and good learning”. As an educator, he wondered what elements of these video games could be used to improve learning in a more conventional school setting.

Gee identified 16 learning principles that good (effective, successful) games use. I won’t go into all 16 here, but some are interesting to consider, especially in terms of how they might be adopted in schools or universities.

He posits that good games require the player to take on a new identity, inspiring “an extended commitment of self.” The game is a world that you at least partially inhabit. It’s personal. Learning in a class can be the same way, asking you to commit to see the world through the eyes of a physicist or a francophone or a mathematician. Personal investment changes your experience radically from memorizing facts to actively seeing the world in a new way.

Another important principle of effective games is that they give players the opportunity to experiment, and possibly fail, with a relatively low cost. Even if your player dies, you can restart the game. In traditional school environments, failure is often much more public and much more costly: feedback may come in the form of “that’s wrong” instead of “try again.”

Gee also posits that good games are “pleasantly frustrating” in that they keep you within, but right at the edge of, your “regime of competence.” Tasks are doable but challenging. I think this is my favorite regime in which to live, period: challenged but able to make some progress!

A final principle that caught my eye was what Gee calls “well-ordered problems.” Good games give you a series of problems to solve that provide a learning progression: easier tasks first that lead to more difficult ones. In the field of machine learning, some researchers have been studying the best way to present examples to a learner (human or machine). One theory that matches with Gee’s observation is called “curriculum learning”: start with easy examples and progress to more subtle or nuanced ones. Humans tend to use this kind of approach, which perplexes some machine learning researchers since it is provably better to first show the hardest or most ambiguous examples first, because they give you the most information. For example, if I wanted to teach you how to tell whether a child is tall enough to ride a roller coaster, I might point to a boy who is 35 inches tall and say “he’s too short,” and then point to a girl who is 36 inches tall and say “she’s tall enough.” Curriculum learning instead would give you examples like “that man who is 6’4″ is tall enough” and “the 21-inch infant is too short” and only gradually work their way to the harder examples closer to the threshold. However, many learning problems aren’t easy to map to a linear scale in which you just want to pinpoint a threshold, and in those cases, curriculum learning seems to be more natural and more effective.

What else can we learn about learning from how games are designed? Do game designers know something that educators don’t? Not necessarily — but their incentive structure is different, which may lead them to create new kinds of playing, and learning, environments that educators can borrow from.

The Library Science program I’m in (at San Jose State Univ.) has a career guidance site that includes a recommendation to take the Eureka self-assessment to learn more about your “interests, skills, and personality characteristics.” Like all such instruments, it can only tell you what you already know at some level, but who doesn’t enjoy being categorized by a quiz?

Here is what I learned from Eureka about myself:

• Personality: “You are a natural leader.”
• Learning style: Logical/independent.
• Most important values: Education, independence, integrity, accomplishment, and health.
• Least important values: Money/wealth, recognition, security, family, and belonging.

The first one made me reflect for a little while. I don’t think of myself as a leader, and certainly not a “natural” one (“natural” to me implies something that comes with ease). If anything, I’m a reluctant leader. And yet there’s something that drives me to step in when leading (or organizing) needs doing. Maybe that’s what they meant. If only I had more charisma and less cynicism, I could go into politics :)

Their longer description of this characterization did resonate with me:

“You respect competence and intellectual abilities both in yourself and in others. You may want to understand and control the realities of life, and are on the lookout for new projects, new activities and new procedures. You are usually the driving force behind any organization or activity in which you participate.”

Also:

“You tend to lose interest once the work is no longer challenging.”

The second statement is that I am a logical/independent learner. Their text includes this gem: “If you are a logical learner, you may like using your brain for logical and mathematical reasoning.” I enjoyed this characterization:

You may use phrases like these:

• That’s logical.
• Let’s make a list.
• Follow the process, procedures or rules.
• We can work it out.
• There’s no pattern to this.
• Prove it!

Those are all very familiar!

Another great quote: “Out of order issues, materials or people may cause you stress.”

The summary of my values pretty much nails them, except that I’d place family higher. (The questions about family all were phrased as family you live with, which I don’t.)

The site also encourages you to discuss these results with those who know you to gain additional perspective. If you agree/disagree with these items, feel free to comment!

One of the assignments in my first Library Science class is to write a blog post reflecting on the “personal skills needed to succeed as an online student and as a member of an online team.” We were encouraged to review “Is an online program right for you?”, a checklist apparently crafted with me in mind. Based on this list, I’m well suited for an online program: I’m habitually organized and disciplined, I’m self-motivated, I work very well independently, I have tech skillz, and, oh yes, I *love* a challenge.

Next we received some tips on study habits and time management, emphasizing how the online course experience differs from in-person instruction. Online courses provide more flexibility (you work when you’re available) but therefore also shift responsibility onto the student’s shoulders. Suggestions include using a calendar to track deadlines and designating regular times to work on the course. I would have done the former anyway, but I appreciated the reminder about the latter; diving into the class opportunistically, as time permits, is not a recipe for success when all of your other daily demands crowd around!

We were given two videos to watch that focus on the skills involved in successful teamwork. I gather that we’ll encounter group projects in several classes during the course of the degree. I found these videos very interesting, realizing as I watched them that I’d never been explicitly taught how to approach group work. I’ve experienced my share of frustrations, disappointments, and communication failures, but I attributed this to the necessary evils of group work. In terms of personal skills, I’m a natural organizer, I’m very reliable, and I’m a good communicator and editor. My weaknesses include naively assuming that everyone has the same goals I do, imposing possibly unreasonable expectations on others, and a perfectionist urge to jump in and “do it right” instead of trusting others. Being aware of these things helps me head them off.

The first thing I learned from Dr. Haycock’s colloquium on “Working in Teams” was the power of the term “team”, as opposed to “group.” A team consists of people with a common goal and individual accountability. “Group” covers a range of gatherings, possibly with much looser structure and lacking defined goals and ground rules. Dr. Haycock also enumerated factors that lead to team failures: lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. These can be addressed by having clarity in team goals (including, for coursework, the desired quality of the resulting product; what grade are we aiming for? It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d need to ask this question!), clearly defined roles/responsibilities, and established ground rules (expectations for team meetings, how information will be shared, how to serve as checkpoints on each others’ work, consequences if rules aren’t followed). I was persuaded that taking the time to converge on these items up front could head off a lot of problems later.

Dr. Haycock then described four stages of team development: Forming, Storming (dissatisfaction), Norming (resolution), and Performing. Two comments he made struck me here: that all four stages are normal (so expect some dissatisfaction and know that there are ways to work through it), and that not all teams make it through all four. He noted that many teams hand in their final project, never having made it to the Performing stage. Sounds like a painful experience!

I liked his suggestion to designate a “process observer” within the team whose job it is to take a minute or so at the end of each meeting and comment on whether the team succeeded in sticking to its ground rules. Presumably this could be a rotating duty, and presumably this internally generated feedback could help to remind members of the rules or to inspire changes in the rules, if needed.

The second video was “The Monster Inside Library School: Student Teams” by Enid Irwin. She offered additional advice for successful team experiences, including learning about your teammates’ skills and being willing to mentor teammates (the latter skill being something you may use day-to-day in a library position!). She also noted that one reason teamwork figures prominently in the SLIS program is that librarian jobs often include a lot of teamwork, so learning functional team skills now will serve you well later. I reflected that I participate in several groups (not all what I would consider “teams”) at work, and none of them are as structured as the ideal described here. Perhaps I can incorporate some of these ideas into improving teams at work, too.