Somewhere along the lines of fifteen years ago and perhaps more, perhaps 18 years ago, I was approached at my old university about the possibilities of doing an online course.
Online education was in its infancy, at least at major universities (I'm not saying there weren't early adopters, only that there weren't many). Options were extremely limited -- no videos, very little ready-made content from publishers, and a fairly basic chat functionality.
I said no.
The technology was too primitive, and I wasn't sure how to bring a real course to students with such tools. In fact, it was more or less a correspondence course that exchanged email (and file upload and storage) for snail mail.
Things change. I am responsible for helping people teach online as well as being an online teacher myself these days, and of course the tools have changed significantly. Courses are very full featured and can be very rigorous (although just as in traditional classrooms, rigor is not always offered nor sought out). I am still not sure online education is a substitute for traditional education (caveat: studies do show that objective measurements of content learning is comparable in online and traditional classes, but I'm not talking about objective measurements...I'm talking about the co-curricular aspects of a course and college itself), but I am not going to deny that it has opened up possibilities for non-traditional students that were hard to imagine in the years prior to online.
All this as prelude to the fact that for the first time ever I will be attempting to teach a composition course online. I know I'm not the first to teach composition online, but it will be my first time, and therefore, I'm busy with pacing, assignment sequence, and the wonderful logistics of getting students to peer review using the horrible tools Blackboard provides.
I will most likely be posting updates as time goes on this summer.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
10 May 2013
MOOCs and Their Discontents, Part 1: Financial Winners and Losers
Anyone who deals with higher education has heard of MOOCs -- pronounced exactly like the ethnic slur, but spelled differently -- and the controversy surrounding their emergence, dissemination, and utilization. The Massive Open Online Course promises at this point to give access to education previously untouchable by the unwashed masses: lectures from Harvard and MIT, for example. Moreover, they promise not only to give access to these courses, but also to provide some form of "credit" for completing the course. Credit is not in scare quotes to undermine the legitimacy of the courses, but rather to indicate that "credit" can mean anything from a printable certificate, to a badge, to actual college credit hours depending on university and course.
It's this last part that has some faculty and administrators nervous. For instance, why should Student A pay $1500 for a 3 credit course in Western Civ from their local college when they can transfer in the credits from passing their free MOOC course in Western Civ? For faculty, the danger is that with fewer courses to teach, fewer faculty members are needed. For administrators, it amounts to roughly the same thing: fewer courses means fewer tuition dollars rolling in. While many administrators delight in the idea of destroying faculty power and reducing the labor costs associated with faculty, the sane ones understand that one can't really burn the village to save it: the administrators only have jobs because of the surplus value they've extracted from faculty labor.
So who benefits from MOOCs?
The first answer would seem to be students. After all, if you can get for free what used to cost you $1500 (and we can extrapolate beyond my one example to let's say, the maximum credits an institution would allow a student to transfer in, we'll pretend it's 30 credits...that's a savings of $15000), then it seems like you benefit. Furthermore, you could argue that perhaps the student is getting better instruction from a MOOC from Harvard than they would be getting from their local college or university. I'll let that point go for now, though: the issue of MOOC quality is another post altogether.
The second answer, I would argue, would be the big name brand universities that produce the MOOCs. Harvard and MIT, along with a few other well-respected universities, are nationally known names that can attract participants (or at least enrollees) in their MOOCs based on name recognition alone. Even the slightly curious might sign up for a Harvard MOOC in The Heroic and Anti-Heroic in Ancient Greek Civilization. The university gets free publicity and good will -- not an entirely bad thing when some segments of society love to hate you -- and perhaps revenue down the road through selling course materials, advertising, and other peripheral products. I would argue, though, that the MOOC revolution will stand or fall based upon its ability to make money.
The losers here seem to be nearly every other college and university. It's hard to see how they make any money accepting transfer credit from MOOCs. Now it's easy to say that they don't make any money now off transfer credits, regardless of where the student took the credit, and that's true. However, it's also true that currently most students are paying for those credits somewhere, and if MOOCs become more accepted for transfer credits, fewer students will be paying community colleges, state schools, and even the small liberal arts colleges for those credits, which means that collectively those schools will lose out on a substantial amount of revenue. More importantly, those students who spend four years at an institution, in other words those students who were taking all or nearly all of their undergraduate credits from your institution, may decide that summertime is better spent getting six free MOOC credits than six paid credits from your summer offerings.
Small schools can't even get in the game in the same way as the big players, although some will try, I'm sure. However, unlike traditional online courses (it feels odd writing "traditional" and "online" together like that), which many small schools have shown are viable forms of outreach for them, these MOOCs do not generate revenue: they are IT resource intensive for a small school and would to a large extent cannibalize the pay-for-credit offerings those schools have already put online.
It's this dynamic, free courses for students and the consequent squeeze-out of the small schools by the big names, that sets the stage for the questions that follow: the pedagogy and the ideology of the MOOC. MOOCs threaten fundamental structural changes in higher education in the way that online education never did: online education has been quickly subsumed into the traditional structure of colleges and universities, either as separate "world campuses" or as another delivery method in the existing continuing education structure. Sure, online education has given rise to diploma mills like the University of Phoenix and Capella, but even that phenomenon isn't new -- it's just easier to get access to, and with student loans as a lucrative revenue stream, it's not going away anytime soon. The MOOC threatens to do away with revenue altogether -- it doesn't just divvy it up differently. As such, it strikes at the core of the current university model.
It's this last part that has some faculty and administrators nervous. For instance, why should Student A pay $1500 for a 3 credit course in Western Civ from their local college when they can transfer in the credits from passing their free MOOC course in Western Civ? For faculty, the danger is that with fewer courses to teach, fewer faculty members are needed. For administrators, it amounts to roughly the same thing: fewer courses means fewer tuition dollars rolling in. While many administrators delight in the idea of destroying faculty power and reducing the labor costs associated with faculty, the sane ones understand that one can't really burn the village to save it: the administrators only have jobs because of the surplus value they've extracted from faculty labor.
So who benefits from MOOCs?
The first answer would seem to be students. After all, if you can get for free what used to cost you $1500 (and we can extrapolate beyond my one example to let's say, the maximum credits an institution would allow a student to transfer in, we'll pretend it's 30 credits...that's a savings of $15000), then it seems like you benefit. Furthermore, you could argue that perhaps the student is getting better instruction from a MOOC from Harvard than they would be getting from their local college or university. I'll let that point go for now, though: the issue of MOOC quality is another post altogether.
The second answer, I would argue, would be the big name brand universities that produce the MOOCs. Harvard and MIT, along with a few other well-respected universities, are nationally known names that can attract participants (or at least enrollees) in their MOOCs based on name recognition alone. Even the slightly curious might sign up for a Harvard MOOC in The Heroic and Anti-Heroic in Ancient Greek Civilization. The university gets free publicity and good will -- not an entirely bad thing when some segments of society love to hate you -- and perhaps revenue down the road through selling course materials, advertising, and other peripheral products. I would argue, though, that the MOOC revolution will stand or fall based upon its ability to make money.
The losers here seem to be nearly every other college and university. It's hard to see how they make any money accepting transfer credit from MOOCs. Now it's easy to say that they don't make any money now off transfer credits, regardless of where the student took the credit, and that's true. However, it's also true that currently most students are paying for those credits somewhere, and if MOOCs become more accepted for transfer credits, fewer students will be paying community colleges, state schools, and even the small liberal arts colleges for those credits, which means that collectively those schools will lose out on a substantial amount of revenue. More importantly, those students who spend four years at an institution, in other words those students who were taking all or nearly all of their undergraduate credits from your institution, may decide that summertime is better spent getting six free MOOC credits than six paid credits from your summer offerings.
Small schools can't even get in the game in the same way as the big players, although some will try, I'm sure. However, unlike traditional online courses (it feels odd writing "traditional" and "online" together like that), which many small schools have shown are viable forms of outreach for them, these MOOCs do not generate revenue: they are IT resource intensive for a small school and would to a large extent cannibalize the pay-for-credit offerings those schools have already put online.
It's this dynamic, free courses for students and the consequent squeeze-out of the small schools by the big names, that sets the stage for the questions that follow: the pedagogy and the ideology of the MOOC. MOOCs threaten fundamental structural changes in higher education in the way that online education never did: online education has been quickly subsumed into the traditional structure of colleges and universities, either as separate "world campuses" or as another delivery method in the existing continuing education structure. Sure, online education has given rise to diploma mills like the University of Phoenix and Capella, but even that phenomenon isn't new -- it's just easier to get access to, and with student loans as a lucrative revenue stream, it's not going away anytime soon. The MOOC threatens to do away with revenue altogether -- it doesn't just divvy it up differently. As such, it strikes at the core of the current university model.
29 April 2013
Twentieth Century Southern Literature...so many choices but not so many weeks.
I'm putting together a syllabus for 20th Century Southern Literature. I've never been immersed in a heavily concentrated bath of southern angst, depression, and morbid obsession with family honor, but I've read my share of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, so I think I have a decent basis on that end of the spectrum.
Since I'm not allowed to make the course 100% Faulkner, I've been tossing the following around in my head:
1. William Faulkner, Light in August OR Absalom, Absalom!
The list isn't complete, but these are the definite starters. I'm looking for a few more books to fill out the schedule, and I'm looking hardest right now at Alice Walker, contemplating Robert Penn Warren, and putting some outside money on John Kennedy Toole (just to keep up the New Orleans theme, which, by the way, is also another argument for Absalom, Absalom!). Hell, maybe I'll do both of those Faulkner novels.
Since I'm not allowed to make the course 100% Faulkner, I've been tossing the following around in my head:
1. William Faulkner, Light in August OR Absalom, Absalom!
- Light in August is more accessible than Absalom, Absalom!, but I get such enjoyment out of the latter book that it might make the blank stares worth it. On the other hand, Reverend Hightower's habits and commentary is absolutely priceless.
- Contemporaneous with Faulkner and an interesting counterpoint to his world, this text is so beautifully written I'd like to include it on most all my syllabi. I have better luck with this work than with Jonah's Gourd Vine.
- I like throwing in a collection of short stories, because that allows me to get more mileage out of the textbook -- we can work on O'Connor over a few classes.
- You can't really have a Southern Lit class without some Tennessee Williams, and I also find that students don't encounter plays very often (unless they're reading Shakespeare or studying the Restoration Era).
- Much like Faulkner and Hurston provide a good contrast, so too do Percy and Williams. The New Orleans of Williams simply oozes sex, whereas Percy's maintains restraint.
- Outside of Chuck Palahniuk, no contemporary writer does bizarre so compellingly as McCarthy, but that's about all the two writers have in common.
The list isn't complete, but these are the definite starters. I'm looking for a few more books to fill out the schedule, and I'm looking hardest right now at Alice Walker, contemplating Robert Penn Warren, and putting some outside money on John Kennedy Toole (just to keep up the New Orleans theme, which, by the way, is also another argument for Absalom, Absalom!). Hell, maybe I'll do both of those Faulkner novels.
24 April 2013
Novels You Shouldn't Teach in Introductory Literature Courses, Vol 1: Melville's The Confidence-Man
A little while ago I decided I would mix things up and get away from the tried and true Benito Cereno in my American literature survey. Benito Cereno is an eminently teachable text, with its 3rd person limited omniscient narrator keeping us interested in Amasa Delano's perceptions, fooling us with Delano's own excuses. Students can sink their teeth into the desperation of slavery and the transfer of power from a declining to a rising empire. It's a relatively short read, too.
However, it's also heavily anthologized and therefore one tends to see heavily repetitive essays that can be traced to such centers of scholarly learning as sparknotes and shmoop. Besides, I have never been interested in teaching the same collection of texts semester after semester.
So I decided that I would go for The Confidence-Man, a novel I read in graduate school and really enjoyed, probably for the very reasons that make it so unfit for an introductory undergraduate literature course.
By the time he wrote The Confidence-Man (1857), Melville was a bit pissed at the publishing industry and America in general. Despite early success with his novels of the South Pacific, Melville saw both popular and critical appreciation for his work decline as he produced the works that would become the cornerstone of his posthumous revival and reputation. Moby-Dick (1851) for instance, such a totemic novel that it has become synonymous with The Great American Novel and shorthand for massively serious literate society, was all but dismissed by Melville's contemporary critics.
The Confidence-Man was Melville's last novel and critics received it much as one might receive a flaming pile of dog shit on your front porch. Of course, in a sense, that's exactly what it was, because Melville was providing them with an acerbic and decidedly mean-spirited prank, published precisely on April 1, 1857. It's a fantastic novel that skewers American consumer culture, lampoons provincial attitudes, and questions all manner of trust or confidence, while at the same time it ignores the "beginning, middle, and end" of traditional plots, fails to have any identifiable central characters, and undercuts coherent narrative every chance it gets. It's a terrible novel to teach to undergraduates encountering college-level literature for the first time.
In a nutshell, the novel follows a riverboat along the Mississippi during the course of a single day. Passengers come and go at each stop and it's unclear if one or several confidence men are working the boat in the narrative...we as readers are never let in definitively on the identity of the con artist(s) touching the marks. It lends itself to rich readings in a few post-structural veins (performative identity, to name one), but it does not give the novice reader much to hang his or her hat on: no compelling characters to follow, no plot to unwind (the mystery of the confidence man/men is never really presented as a mystery and in any case there's never a resolution as to the motives or identity of the confidence man or men), and nothing to follow more than conversations among passengers. To make matters worse, Melville sprinkles numerous references to contemporary political, economic, and cultural events throughout, putting those who haven't had a good dose of Emerson, for instance, at a severe disadvantage (and I mean a good dose...not a poem or an essay, but an extended exposure).
I dearly love this novel, but I am seriously considering the less imposing Typee or the intimidatingly iconic, but much more teachable, Moby-Dick for the next go-round.
However, it's also heavily anthologized and therefore one tends to see heavily repetitive essays that can be traced to such centers of scholarly learning as sparknotes and shmoop. Besides, I have never been interested in teaching the same collection of texts semester after semester.
So I decided that I would go for The Confidence-Man, a novel I read in graduate school and really enjoyed, probably for the very reasons that make it so unfit for an introductory undergraduate literature course.
By the time he wrote The Confidence-Man (1857), Melville was a bit pissed at the publishing industry and America in general. Despite early success with his novels of the South Pacific, Melville saw both popular and critical appreciation for his work decline as he produced the works that would become the cornerstone of his posthumous revival and reputation. Moby-Dick (1851) for instance, such a totemic novel that it has become synonymous with The Great American Novel and shorthand for massively serious literate society, was all but dismissed by Melville's contemporary critics.
The Confidence-Man was Melville's last novel and critics received it much as one might receive a flaming pile of dog shit on your front porch. Of course, in a sense, that's exactly what it was, because Melville was providing them with an acerbic and decidedly mean-spirited prank, published precisely on April 1, 1857. It's a fantastic novel that skewers American consumer culture, lampoons provincial attitudes, and questions all manner of trust or confidence, while at the same time it ignores the "beginning, middle, and end" of traditional plots, fails to have any identifiable central characters, and undercuts coherent narrative every chance it gets. It's a terrible novel to teach to undergraduates encountering college-level literature for the first time.
In a nutshell, the novel follows a riverboat along the Mississippi during the course of a single day. Passengers come and go at each stop and it's unclear if one or several confidence men are working the boat in the narrative...we as readers are never let in definitively on the identity of the con artist(s) touching the marks. It lends itself to rich readings in a few post-structural veins (performative identity, to name one), but it does not give the novice reader much to hang his or her hat on: no compelling characters to follow, no plot to unwind (the mystery of the confidence man/men is never really presented as a mystery and in any case there's never a resolution as to the motives or identity of the confidence man or men), and nothing to follow more than conversations among passengers. To make matters worse, Melville sprinkles numerous references to contemporary political, economic, and cultural events throughout, putting those who haven't had a good dose of Emerson, for instance, at a severe disadvantage (and I mean a good dose...not a poem or an essay, but an extended exposure).
I dearly love this novel, but I am seriously considering the less imposing Typee or the intimidatingly iconic, but much more teachable, Moby-Dick for the next go-round.
01 September 2011
A new semester brings new challenges.
I have a fairly big semester in front of me. I'm teaching a new class on modern and contemporary poetry. After a few preliminaries with background information on poetry and the modern era and some tales about steel cages in Pisa and epic poems about industrial cities in New Jersey, as well as a scheduled trip to the library next week, we will be ready to launch into Walt Whitman, the sturdy first poet of any anthology of modern poetry.
I love Whitman's encyclopedic lists, his complete commitment to inclusiveness. Of course, we follow him directly with Dickinson, who couldn't be more different in style. Two very different souls throwing open the gates of modern poetry.
Let's see what happens.
I love Whitman's encyclopedic lists, his complete commitment to inclusiveness. Of course, we follow him directly with Dickinson, who couldn't be more different in style. Two very different souls throwing open the gates of modern poetry.
Let's see what happens.
02 July 2011
Let's talk literature.
So part of my professional duties is to teach literature. I recently completed a course in American literature in which I asked the students to read Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It's an amazingly simple story in that it takes place aboard a Mississippi steam boat and involves nothing more than conversations between characters. However, it's also an amazingly intricate story in that it involves shifting roles with one character constantly reappearing in the guise of someone else: in other words, a confidence man.
The story is based on trust, or confidence, and the necessity as well as danger of confidence.
It is, I have decided, not a text to be served up to freshmen in an introductory literature course.
Introductory lit students seem to think the text is plotless, and to an extent it is, and they view that as a great fault, which it can be but isn't always, and I would say that by and large they are not fans of the book.
One of my students, however, did me the great honor of giving me her copy of the book after class: it was the Norton Critical Edition, whereas the official book was the Penguin edition. Now for those of you who aren't in the know, the NCE is a series that includes not only the text of the book with explanatory notes, but also several essays about the author and/or the text. They're very nice scholarly editions, so I appreciated that gift, even though it also told me that the student didn't see much value in keeping the book.
I have a few books that I've decided need to be reserved for more advanced students. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are among those books. I also don't think I would surprise them with anything of Toni Morrison's beyond Beloved (although I might think about Jazz). Sula, on the other hand, is a great introduction to Morrison.
I will continue to teach Melville in the introduction to American lit, but it will most likely be my favorite, "Benito Cereno," or "Billy Budd." Maybe Typee.
The story is based on trust, or confidence, and the necessity as well as danger of confidence.
It is, I have decided, not a text to be served up to freshmen in an introductory literature course.
Introductory lit students seem to think the text is plotless, and to an extent it is, and they view that as a great fault, which it can be but isn't always, and I would say that by and large they are not fans of the book.
One of my students, however, did me the great honor of giving me her copy of the book after class: it was the Norton Critical Edition, whereas the official book was the Penguin edition. Now for those of you who aren't in the know, the NCE is a series that includes not only the text of the book with explanatory notes, but also several essays about the author and/or the text. They're very nice scholarly editions, so I appreciated that gift, even though it also told me that the student didn't see much value in keeping the book.
I have a few books that I've decided need to be reserved for more advanced students. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are among those books. I also don't think I would surprise them with anything of Toni Morrison's beyond Beloved (although I might think about Jazz). Sula, on the other hand, is a great introduction to Morrison.
I will continue to teach Melville in the introduction to American lit, but it will most likely be my favorite, "Benito Cereno," or "Billy Budd." Maybe Typee.
02 June 2011
It's all about the Benjamin.
My summer reading has hit a major snag.
I am currently teaching one summer class and I am swamped. Swamped in work to grade. Apparently, when you assign work for students, you also have to grade it. OK, I knew that, and I knew I would lose my leisure reading time, but seriously, I didn't expect to lose it so quickly.
Let's look at the assigned reading so far: Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Paine's Common Sense, Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity, and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. I've read them all, so a little light re-reading was in order. However, I got sucked in to the Autobiography again. Franklin is a very seductive writer. And fascinating on so many levels.
Part One of the Autobiography is addressed to his son, William, and is written prior to the American Revolution. Franklin is already 65 years old at this point. Then comes the Revolution, William remains loyal to the British, and Franklin basically cuts all ties. However, he never bothers revising Part One to eliminate the few pages that cast the Autobiography as a letter to his son.
At the close of the Revolution, Franklin returns to writing the Autobiography and he's still working on it when he dies in 1790 at the age of 84.
A self-promoter, a businessman with sometimes shady practices, a thoroughly creative inventor, and a tremendous diplomat. We could do worse for a founding father.
I am currently teaching one summer class and I am swamped. Swamped in work to grade. Apparently, when you assign work for students, you also have to grade it. OK, I knew that, and I knew I would lose my leisure reading time, but seriously, I didn't expect to lose it so quickly.
Let's look at the assigned reading so far: Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Paine's Common Sense, Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity, and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. I've read them all, so a little light re-reading was in order. However, I got sucked in to the Autobiography again. Franklin is a very seductive writer. And fascinating on so many levels.
Part One of the Autobiography is addressed to his son, William, and is written prior to the American Revolution. Franklin is already 65 years old at this point. Then comes the Revolution, William remains loyal to the British, and Franklin basically cuts all ties. However, he never bothers revising Part One to eliminate the few pages that cast the Autobiography as a letter to his son.
At the close of the Revolution, Franklin returns to writing the Autobiography and he's still working on it when he dies in 1790 at the age of 84.
A self-promoter, a businessman with sometimes shady practices, a thoroughly creative inventor, and a tremendous diplomat. We could do worse for a founding father.
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