Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from “This. Changes. Everything” techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read.
The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT’s track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they’ve proven that thoughtful, faculty-driven course redesign can simultaneously improve student learning and reduce per-student costs. Not by a little, either: Many colleges have cut costs by over 50 percent and improved learning in the bargain. NCAT’s suite of course transformation models have proved effective in a wide variety of subjects and settings, from rural community colleges to Research I universities, in courses ranging from math and foreign language to composition and women’s studies. (I’ve written previously about NCAT success stories here and here.)
Yet in many ways the most interesting part of the NCAT story isn’t the colleges that have adopted these proven methods. It’s the colleges that haven’t—i.e., most colleges. NCAT has built a better mousetrap, but the world hasn’t beaten a path to its door. This is despite the fact that the mousetrap in question improves student learning and cuts costs in a time when colleges are constantly being harangued by policy makers about learning and the economic environment has left many institutions desperately searching for ways to save money. Why?
It’s not because nobody knows NCAT exists. The New York Times featured them in an Education Life story all the way back in 2005. The blue-ribbon Spellings Commission gave them a strong, high-profile endorsement. The Chronicle has quoted NCAT founder Carol Twigg in numerous articles over the years. Higher education leaders often respond to calls for improvement by saying “more research is needed” (which is self-serving in a number of ways: It implies that failure is a result of insufficient information, not negligence; it kicks the can down the road to some unknown future contingent on meeting certain unspecified but sure-to-be-onerous standards of evidence; and colleges themselves are in the business of conducting research). But in this case the evidence is publicly available and the reforms are well-known.
Most of the answers lie with incentives. The learning issue is more obvious: Colleges aren’t racing to adopt learning-focused innovations because nobody holds anybody accountable for student learning in higher education, not at the institutional, departmental, or individual faculty levels. Whose career benefits if more freshmen pass calculus? No one, really.
The financial side of the equation demands more explanation because a lot of colleges and universities really are suffering in the pocketbook. But they still have options that don’t involve upsetting long-held norms and ways of doing business. Overall enrollment remains at near-record levels due to demographics and counter-cyclical college-going, and most college prices are subsidized below the market rate. So institutions still have the option of charging students more, enrolling fewer students, or both. The peculiarities of the higher-education labor market, meanwhile, let colleges impose faculty pay cuts with little fear of reprisal. Who’s going to quit an ever-more-scarce tenure track job over a diminished paycheck—sorry, “furlough”? No one, really.
As a result, colleges are mostly hunkering down and trying to ride out this particularly fierce financial storm with the goal of restarting business as usual once the winds and waters recede.
By any reasonable standard of comparison to other higher-education reform efforts, NCAT has been a major success. They’re acutely aware of the need to scale up and they’re actively working with state and system leaders to do so. Major philanthropies are supporting their efforts, and the number of participating institutions is growing by the year. But those efforts still amount to beating a path from the NCAT door back out into higher education. Many institutions have only participated after receiving grants to do so. What kind of organizations need to be paid to save money? Contrast this with the non-subsidized market for enrollment management consulting services. You can learn a lot about institutions by comparing the things they’re happy to pay for out of their own pocket with the things that require extra funding and convincing.
In other words, the relatively slow pace of change in using technology to improve learning and productivity in the core teaching activities of traditional higher education institutions isn’t a supply-side issue, ideas-wise. It’s a demand-side issue. The ideas are there; people and institutions just lack sufficient incentive to seek them out. Until that changes, organizations like NCAT will continue to work harder than they should have to in order to help colleges improve the quality of their courses and save money in the bargain. And if it doesn’t change fast enough, you can be sure that the rapidly growing for-profit sector will be waiting to pick up the slack.
4 Responses to The Better-Mousetrap Problem
nordicexpat - May 28, 2010 at 2:30 am
Don’t worry Kevin, I’m sure the changes you are advocating are inevitable. The move to standardization in the name of increased efficiency and productivity has been the trend ever since the first model Ford was rolled out, and it is only a matter of time before that trends hit academia (well, it has — look at the increased use of adjuncts). I think the NCAT might have a better chance of success if it didn’t have such contempt for academics (contempt for academics is a trend I have noticed with people in thinktanks). But again, contempt for academics is pretty much universal across the general population, so I don’t really see that as standing in the way.Not that it matters much, but I would like to see exactly how 1) the cost savings were estimated and 2) it was shown that the redesigned courses improved learning. When I looked at the notes to find out the answer to (1), the reference was either to an email from a department head or other administrator or (2) to a chart that simply reiterates the claim given in the body of the text. The reason I ask is that I know that designing the kind of elearning you are describing is not cheap. Here is one site estimating the costs of elearning. I strongly suspect that the courses of actually designing the costs were not built into the estimates, but I have no way of knowing because the cost per student is not broken down (adjuncts making $2000 per course without benefits are pretty cheap, so I am curious exactly where the savings come from). Ditto with the achievements. The references were either to personal correspondences or to reports of NCAT, without any breakdown explaining how the figures were arrived at. My experience with a lot of these claims is that they don’t hold up under close scrunity (think here about the claims made concerning charter schools –and I’m not against charter schools just oversold claims made on their behalf). My own experience is that courses where students “progress at their own speed” tend to have a higher drop-out rate over time because many students don’t have the self-disipline to pace themselves. I’m fully open to the idea that I might be wrong on that score, but I would like to see actually evidence. Anyway, all of this is more or less academic, given the historical trends in place. By the by, what I see happening is much more radical than what you describe here. Right now, the pilot programs described by NCAT are only working because the people designing the courses are more or less donating their time to create the courses. They are not going to do that when it becomes clear that the aim behind such courses is to eliminate their positions. So they are going to demand that they be paid like non-academics involved in e-learning. Designing elearning is going to become too expensive for each university to do itself, so universities will purchase ready-made courses from the private sector (standardization is good, right?). Since a lot of universities will all be purchasing courses from the same sources, there will little or no difference among universities, so there will be a race to the bottom to see who can provide the cheapest education. Universities that maintain traditional campuses are going to find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, because they will have a large number of empty classrooms that nevertheless must be maintained. Gradually, virtual universities will all but replace the traditional campus. . . McDonalization of higher education will be complete.
kathden - May 28, 2010 at 8:18 am
I’m sorry, but the study proves very little except that what is basic in a discipline can be routinized, perhaps even commoditized. Not even at the high school level do we think of courses that routinize learning as “good preparation” for the “college experience,” however. As you work your way up from the basic and elementary into the intermediate, advanced, and frontier levels of work, there is far less that is merely routine–in no small part because there is not unanimous agreement on the best conceptuality and methods (not even in the hard sciences or even mathematics!). I think there is a bit of know-nothingism in the report where the author makes fun of sections of Florida Gulf Coast University’s “Understanding the Visual and Performing Arts” course as it was previously taught. Horror of horrors, some professors discussed Foucault and Derrida, and one benighted teacher read from the arts listings of the local paper! As someone who has actually read Foucault and Derrida and who has encouraged freshmen to get an idea of the variety and liveliness of local work in the arts by reading through magazine and newspaper reviews, reports, and ads, I know that including these in an introductory course on visual and performing arts might well have a solid and productive pedagogical purpose–especially if this is the *only* course in the arts the students will have to take. Or perhaps we should also teach the students to have standardized responses to works of art, responses that could be tested under state-mandated rubrics (hey, maybe we could put electrodes on their heads!). I note with further chagrin that at Fairchild University in Connecticut teachers of introductory biology occasionally used to mention something about their own research. Tsk, tsk! I’m glad we’ve gotten rid of those differences between sections! Forbid the thought (take that literally) that students in an introductory course would get any sense of how research works.
dank48 - May 28, 2010 at 10:23 am
The responses to this article seem almost to have been set up to reinforce Kevin’s point. It occurs to me that the pseudonymous discussions here amount to a sort of Academia Anonymous. In that other AA, it’s said that there are only two things we don’t like:1. The way things are.2. Change.”Race to the bottom” and “McDonal[d]ization” indeed. Despite the claim above, I don’t really think it’s true that “contempt for academics is pretty much universal across the general population.” But the general population has seen higher education’s cost rise exponentially, even while it’s ballyhooed as the only way to avoid consignment to the underclass.Elitism is not excellence. Efficiency is not shoddiness.
nordicexpat - May 28, 2010 at 10:51 am
Ok Dank48,Have you actually designed any elearning courses? Because I have, so I have a pretty good idea where they work and where they don’t. Admittedly, my reference to McDonaldization was a bit far-fetched, but I do think the logic of the agenda behind NCAT’s (and Carey’s) scheme leads that way for the reasons I gave. It is not going to be cost-efficient for each university to devise its own elearning courses; it would, however, be so if they purchased them from an outside source (which would guarentee more standardization, which is what Carey has been pushing for some time now). I am also fully aware of the cost of higher education, but, if you followed the link above that I provided concerning the price of elearning in the so-called real world, you would find that academia is actually far more efficient than the private sector, where the cost per hour for elearning is much higher than most universities would be willing to spend. As I also said in the post, a lot of intro courses are now being taught by adjuncts getting roughly $2000 per course, without benefits. So it could be argued that the actual costs per teaching hour has been going down, even though tuition has been going up. (and ask yourself: has the tuition at the institutions running these pilot programs gone up or down. I suspect I know the answer).About contempt for academics. Well. Again, maybe overstated, but . . . And NCAT was rather cavalier about faculty members. One complained that their initiative was counter to academic freedom. NCAT was “surprised,” because they didn’t think teachers had any. But, the teacher was reassigned somewhere else, so no problem. Maybe contempt is too strong a word, but it doesn’t exactly demonstrate respect, either.