Covid-19 Response: Evidence of How Higher Ed Can Be Completely Restructured?

[sprout]

[. . .]

students are going to see things from their own particular POV, and there is not much you can do about it under these circumstances.

Often that POV is "the education part of college means sitting in a classroom being lectured at while I sit there doing nothing." Exercising self-direction and independent effort is not part of the definition of learning or teaching.

There was a study comparing active learning to regular lectures which found that students learned more from active learning, but felt they learned more from regular lectures, since it wasn't so HAAAARD.

Reason #1 I waited until after tenure to try flipping my class.

[spork]

"It doesn't make sense to pay 20 grand to sit at my computer at home and take online courses," he said. "You can get the same education from a community college."

Evidence that the product many colleges and universities have been selling is not a post-secondary education.

[spork]

Similar editorial, about tuition refunds:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/your-money/college-tuition-refunds-coronavirus.html.

The author fails to list "recreational experience" as one of the reasons people attend college.

[marshwiggle]

It fascinates me how many of these articles bury the lede:

The coronavirus pandemic hit at a time when American higher education, which employs about three million people nationwide, was already suffering from a host of financial problems. Many liberal arts colleges have struggled to meet enrollment goals in recent years because of rising tuition costs, concerns about student debt and a shrinking population of young people.

The "shrinking population of young people" is THE issue; the other things are consequences of that. And it's the thing that no legislation or policy can "fix".  But that's exactly why it's not the issue people want to mention first.

[Wahoo Redux]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html

[marshwiggle]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html

A couple of interesting quotes from the article:

There's the education certification and then there's the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it's not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus.

I'd be curious to hear the writer's opinion of STEM and professional educations.

I think a lot of young people, especially boys, could use another year of seasoning experience, work experience, or some sort of service. A lot of these kids just aren't ready for the competition and the kind of intense environment that is college.

To me there's nothing unique to the covid situation to make this more true than it always is. If 20 or 30% of the students who come now worked or did something else for a year or two first they'd probably be much better off.

[spork]

I pointed out to an acquaintance who sent me this article that Galloway repeats many of the same points made in Kevin Carey's "The Siege of Academe," which was published in 2012:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2012/the-siege-of-academe/.

[spork]

Entire Cal State system will be online-only for fall semester: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/cal-state-online-classes.html.

[spork]

And no NCAA sports at these universities either: https://goccaa.org/news/2020/5/12/general-ccaa-suspends-ncaa-competition-for-fall-2020.aspx.

[marshwiggle]

I pointed out to an acquaintance who sent me this article that Galloway repeats many of the same points made in Kevin Carey's "The Siege of Academe," which was published in 2012:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2012/the-siege-of-academe/.

Ironically, written from the "Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco". Prescient or what???

[polly_mer]

General chemistry labs are being reexamined https://cen.acs.org/education/undergraduate-education/Questioning-value-general-chemistry-labs/98/i18?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN

[marshwiggle]

General chemistry labs are being reexamined https://cen.acs.org/education/undergraduate-education/Questioning-value-general-chemistry-labs/98/i18?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN

From the article:

Oftentimes, general chemistry labs teach what educational experts refer to as "cookbook chemistry"—prescribed experiments in which students follow a set of instructions to achieve a particular outcome. Research backing up the assumed educational benefits of these labs is limited at best, critics say.

You could replace "chemistry" with any other discipline and it would be just as true.

[spork]

General chemistry labs are being reexamined https://cen.acs.org/education/undergraduate-education/Questioning-value-general-chemistry-labs/98/i18?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN

From the article:

Oftentimes, general chemistry labs teach what educational experts refer to as "cookbook chemistry"—prescribed experiments in which students follow a set of instructions to achieve a particular outcome. Research backing up the assumed educational benefits of these labs is limited at best, critics say.

You could replace "chemistry" with any other discipline and it would be just as true.

The glaring problem that exists in undergraduate education, at least at the type of university I work at, is in skill development, or lack of it. And I'm classifying "thinking like a scientist when in the chemistry lab" as a skill. I see a very small percentage of students who, for example, study piano in a way that's going to result in an improvement in their ability. These few students practice, practice, practice while getting some coaching, and in the end, are better piano players than when they arrived on campus. Same situation with foreign language study. A few put in the time and effort and acquire greater proficiency. The rest take whatever is required to check a box and move on. As for the courses that I teach, the few students who started as acceptable or even good writers at the beginning of the semester don't become spectacular writers by the end of the course. And the ones who started as bad writers remain bad writers. This is true whether the students are in the major or not. And while it's possible to make the argument that students' higher-order "understanding" or "knowledge" of a subject might have increased over the semester, the only way I can attempt to assess this is through their writing. By that measure, nothing significant has happened. It seems immensely inefficient in time and money.

[Hibush]

This question is addressed in an article in the NY Times.

The expected hype: "John Rogers, education sector lead at the $5 billion Rise Fund which invests in ed tech. 'That really is the difference-maker. The pace of adoption of those tools will accelerate.'"

The reality: "More than 75 percent said they don't think they're receiving a quality learning experience, according to a survey of nearly 1,300 students by the online exam-prep provider OneClass. "

My colleagues seem mostly in in line with Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan "Faculty will ask themselves,  'What part of what we just did can be substituted with technology and what part can be complemented by technology to transform higher education?' "

[marshwiggle]

The glaring problem that exists in undergraduate education, at least at the type of university I work at, is in skill development, or lack of it. And I'm classifying "thinking like a scientist when in the chemistry lab" as a skill. I see a very small percentage of students who, for example, study piano in a way that's going to result in an improvement in their ability. These few students practice, practice, practice while getting some coaching, and in the end, are better piano players than when they arrived on campus. Same situation with foreign language study. A few put in the time and effort and acquire greater proficiency. The rest take whatever is required to check a box and move on. As for the courses that I teach, the few students who started as acceptable or even good writers at the beginning of the semester don't become spectacular writers by the end of the course. And the ones who started as bad writers remain bad writers. This is true whether the students are in the major or not. And while it's possible to make the argument that students' higher-order "understanding" or "knowledge" of a subject might have increased over the semester, the only way I can attempt to assess this is through their writing. By that measure, nothing significant has happened. It seems immensely inefficient in time and money.

I put a lot of this down to the "osmosis problem". All kinds of labs, assignments, etc. require students to use some tool or process to complete the lab or assignment, but the emphasis is on the result. Developing the skill is going to be done by osmosis. But the problem is that the students see the point (understandably) as getting the thing done. The emphasis suggests the skill is peripheral and relatively unimportant, even though, ironically, the task is often created in order to develop that skill.

I have explicit lab exercises of things like using a spreadsheet so that the "result" is clearly just the verification that they managed to complete everything. Most importantly, I've had students from other disciplines tell me later that they're glad they learned how to use spreadsheets and now they use them for their other work.

But to do this, I have to commit the implicit heresy of saying that illustrating one more physics principle in a lab isn't as useful as teaching them how to use a spreadsheet, which doesn't have anything explicitly to do with physics (GASP!!!).