Israeli Professors Go on Strike

I think this article misses the fact that these innovations are all based upon skills and knowledge that students build in “traditional” seated classroom settings.  There’s no point offering an online course in artificial intelligence to students with no meaningful background in science or who are unable to read or do math at a college level.  There is no truly effective model for reading and writing instruction online. I think math may be another story, however — which makes sense, given that computers Do Not Know How To Read but can do math like nothing else in history. 

So the first thing we need to do is quit letting our heads spin every time a new electronic toy comes out promising a revolution.  That’s usually BS — it’s advertising copy, not the stuff of policy decisions.  The next thing we need to do is distinguish between areas and student populations in which online education is effective and in which online education is ineffective — and then make sound, rational decisions based on analysis rather than advertising copy.  

I really don’t want to hear about how there’s not enough money for traditional education so long as college and university presidents are making in the upper six figures to seven figure salaries and lesser administrators are making very high salaries as well. Too many federal tax dollars that are earmarked for education are going to corporate profits.  I don’t think for-profit institutions should be eligible for federal financial aid at all.  If you want to improve higher ed, start there.

I agree entirely with antiutopia’s call for reason and principle in determining how best to educate which sorts of students in which subjects.  It is quite easy to become carried away in one direction or another by the wow of the new.  The constructive thing to do is for thoughtful people to develop a framework of principle, a mode of inquiry, and a standard of evidence for developing new educational modalities.  I’m  afraid there’s much flailing and wailing going on instead.
I would, however, look more widely than anti does for resources that could be invested in education at all levels, and anyone attending to the 1% discussions will have ideas of places to look.  For some time now I have been irritated by assertions that the problems of US education (at all levels) cannot be remedied with money.  We motivate actors, writers, athletes, lawyers, doctors, bankers, investors, and private-sector executives (among others) with money.  Why would one expect teachers, and the educational process more generally, to be insensitive to its influence?  To understand a nation’s priorities I teach my students to ignore flowery rhetoric and study the allocation of resources.

“…computers Do Not Know How To Read but can do math like nothing else in history.”

I gently caution against equating arithmetic and mathematics.  Computers can do arithmetic like nothing else in history.  Mathematicians do math.

I grant that substantial changes are occurring in education generally, and in higher education particularly.  Having been in that business at one level or another for more than sixty years, I have witnessed and/or participated in several noted eras of change, so I’m not sure this one deserves the epithet “disruptive.”  Higher education has been a relatively secure bastion of tradition for quite a few centuries.  As a colleague once admonished me, “There are some problems only a funeral will fix!”  So, while we all watch, or react to, or participate in, or try to lead, the current academic revolution, I would advise patience.

Ehackett — Actors, athletes, lawyers, doctors, bankers, investors all perform in their respective fields, and the quality of their performance is related directly to their pay, usually.  Higher ed admins usually do nothing to contribute to the actual quality of education and in fact more often contribute to practices that reduce quality in order to protect their pay levels — such as relying on adjunct or undereducated instructors — so the comparison doesn’t hold.  The for profits with the highest paid execs provide the lowest quality education.

What’s missing in this vision are the challenges to our student-level record-keeping system.  We already have enough problems tracking our nomads, accounting for credits from multiple institutions, aggregating evidence of learning to document degree-level attainment.  How do our visionaries propose to handle a new fragmented, digital world that transcends swirling behavior of place, and still be fair to students? Then, in this account, we have someone thinking that the CLA (or similar standardized tests) tell anyone anything, and that they can throw these dubious “outcomes” into the mix.

Acadmia has to let go of any idea that single dose/full time education will be (or should be) the norm. From what I can see, colleges of business have been the best adapters with MBA programs offered at night or over the weekends or in a few condensed weeks a year.

There is a lot to be said for human interaction and I don’t think that it can be replaced as with respect to quality of instruction. However, college programs that do not adapt will wither if they are not propped by the accreditation agencies.

http://austhink.com/critical/ has some online resources for critical thinking.

About what might be disruptive: curiously the next (on-line) article I read after this was in the NYTimes about Obama planning to link federal aid to affordability.  

Look for those overpaid administrators to suddenly start to look for courses and methods that educate more like 160,000 than 16, or 6.  This could become very interesting, far more so than the sterile debates between enthusiasts and obsoletos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/education/obama-to-link-aid-for-colleges-to-affordability.html?_r=1&hp

The introduction of every new communications technology has been hailed as the event which will fundmentaly change education: printing press (good argument in that case), radio, television, digital video (remember those early 12″ video discs?), computers, the Internet, tablets, and smart phones.  Experiential learning is very effective, but is inefficient because the student is often learning through trial and error.  The lecture is efficient because it can be delivered to large groups but it is a passive mode of learning for the students and is often not effective; how long can a lecturer hold the attention of 600 students?  But a college education should encompass the messy collision of young minds with great ideas, and one-on-one guidance and classroom debates led by and monitored by faculty is where those young minds come to understand great ideas.

Perhaps the lecture has survived for the same reason that Churchill said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  Pedagogies of engagement require as much or more preparation than lecture preparation,  On-line courses offered free to thousands or hundreds of thousands of students is analogous to a mode of learning which was not used as it could have been: reading a comprehensive encyclopedia.  But without clarification or guidance by an expert (faculty member), reading in isolation is not always effective.  The lecture survives because it offers the best opportunity for direct interaction between student and teacher.  The best approach may be to provide a foundation through a lecture and then have students engage in experiential learning on a regular basis (science labs come to mind).

The preceding notwithstanding, the greatest threat to access to higher education is cost.  State supported institutions were established to provide the next generation of leaders for the state.  That premise has been undermined by the mobility of our society. Graduates go where the jobs are, and the jobs may not be in the state that subsidized the graduate’s education.  With healthcare, transportation, K-12 education, and corrections/prisons competing with public higher education for dollars, and with legislators coming to understand that the return on investment in higher education is producing fewer benefits for the state, we have seen state support for higher education steadily erode as legislative bodies have stopped seeing public institutions as an investment in the future of the state but as vocational training for the student.  If the beneficiary of the education is the student and not the state, an argument can be made that the student should pay for his or her education.  And the continuing addition of unfunded mandates as a condition for the receipt of federal funding or state has created bloated bureaucracies within colleges and universities.  Much of the administrative and managerial work done in colleges – some have estimated it as high as 50% – consists of processes to comply with these outside requirements.  Failure to comply can result in loss of funding or accreditation.

As for a class with 160,000 students, I wonder how the learning outcomes were assessed?

Higher education will continue to evolve and will continue to change in response to society and technology.  It is incumbent upon institutions to embrace the changes and use them to the advantage of the institution, society at large, and the student.  There is no clear path or simple solution.  And if colleges and universities cannot figure out a way to work smarter, then who can?

“Right now, the biggest hurdle to many of these new course-delivery ideas is the corner that traditional colleges have on the credential market.  That right is conferred on them courtesy of the federal government’s student aid system, built on accreditation.”

Not so.  In the first place, the credential market is driven by employers.  Employers are the ones who decide whether a BA or an MA is a requirement for the job.  (Remember that elite colleges didn’t always require a PhD for faculty jobs — and many colleges still don’t.)  If employers decide that an alternate credential matters more than a college degree, than the corner evaporates.  That could happen if a new credential emerges, or if employers no longer believe that a BA or MA is a good indicator of high skills.

In the second place, course-delivery systems and colleges are not closed systems.  There is no reason that traditional colleges cannot adopt new course-delivery systems for part or all of their offerings.  Institutions and practices are often related, but are not the same thing.

Thanks for an interesting post.  This topic is fascinating because it forces so many of us to foreswear “critical thinking.”  Professor Thrun, undoubtedly brighter than most of us, claims that “Professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago.”  If he were to calm down a bit, he might remember the impact that Gutenberg had on education and teaching.  Of course, acknowledging the impact of printing technology on education strengthens his overall point. 

Expressing concern in the face of change is nothing new.  If I remember correctly, Socrates was said to have some doubts about the impact of the technology of writing on the minds of men.

There can be little doubt that a profound change is happening today.  Some will ignore it, others deplore it and many celebrate it.  Since we can’t stop it, the best approach would seem to be to attempt to adapt to it in a way that preserves the things we value most.  My guess is that we will see extreme disruption, many failed colleges and a much greater variety of available higher education experiences.

Because higher ed was doing just fine before the for-profits came along, right? Not counting the millions of students who have attended for-profit schools because they met their education needs when traditional higher-ed institution couldn’t, of course. At least at traditional higher-ed schools, no one is making a profit, right? Everyone is just working for expenses only. Wait – people get paid salaries there? Well, at least they don’t get federal taxpayer funds. Wait – they do get federal funds from student tuition to pay salaries for teachers and administrators and for their beautiful buildings and campuses? Well, at least their investors must get a good return on their investment in these facilities, right? Wait – your state taxpayers and the donors don’t get anything back for their generous contributions to these institutions, and they still have to pay tuition for their kids to attend that has risen more than double the price of inflation every year? Oh, they get research results published in prestigious journals from their high-paid faculty! Wait – they have to have expensive accounts to private databases to access the research reports they paid for? Well, at least these brilliant faculty were passing on their knowledge to the taxpayers kids in class, right? Wait, the kids were being taught by other kids who were TAs, because the brilliant faculty couldn’t be bothered teaching mere underclass students?

It’s obvious getting rid of the for-profit schools will fix all of this!  Be real. There are plenty of problems in higher education to go around. I’ll be the first to agree that too much money in for-profits goes to advertising and administration, just as too much money in traditional schools goes to administration and overhead. I’ll also agree for-profits have some faculty that are less than stellar, just as traditional schools. The for-profit I teach for has a much more aggressive program of training, follow-up, peer-review, and weeding out the sub-par performers than the traditional schools I’ve taught for, though. I’ll agree some for-profits don’t do a good job educating their students, just as some traditional schools. The for-profit I obtained my doctorate from had a much tougher curriculum and a much more challenging program with far better faculty and much more faculty engagement than either my master’s or bachelor’s programs at traditional schools, though. The same is true of the graduate and undergraduate programs I teach in at this for-profit school, relative to my own education experiences and to the not-for-profit schools for which I teach.

Broad-brush praise or criticism of any single grouping or type of delivery system or mode of education is as ridiculous as any kind of universal declaration of right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. If you want to solve the problem, the first thing you must do is admit there is a problem. Then you have to look at the entire problem, including the entire education system beyond the secondary level and the entire population of potential students (not just those currently deemed sufficient by the traditional higher education model) and how they all fit into the system. Only then can you start using some empirical evidence to start deciding what different groups in that population need to learn. Then you can focus on the best ways to deliver the best types of programs to the different populations that must be served by our education system. Simply saying “get rid of this monkey on my back and let us get back to where we were” is neither productive nor helpful – and it’s not going to happen.

Rising cost is due to keeping teachers in front of small classes? Hardly, faculty salaries have mostly been stagnant while the ranks and salaries of high and mid level administrators who justify their positions by floating “innovative” solutions to replace models for how humans actually learn, get mentored, become good citizens, and get ready for careers.

I thought something similar. When I was an undergraduate, instructors were using projectors, no one ever showed a youtube clip, and lectures consisted mostly of reading off a sheet of paper. Fast forward just ten years, and I’m teaching students with smart classrooms, showing youtube clips, using clicker quizzes, posting materials on our course website, having them write blogs – all while some of them read our selected readings off an iPad.

It seems like a ridiculous and unhelpful exaggeration to say that professors teach “exactly the same way they did 1,000 years ago,” or even that teaching hasn’t significantly changed in the past 30 years. Most institutions are modernizing and putting in digital technologies. I’ve yet to see, you know, an actual survey of teaching practices that shows that only 5% or something incorporate digital technologies into their classrooms. My equally unjustified intuition is that it’s half the professoriate or more. Everyone in my department at least incorporates a Blackboard site into the classroom. Most use multimedia to keep students active and engaged. About half require digital-based assignments like blogs or wikis. Our department even has a 1,000-student grammar course taught entirely online for 1 unit in conjunction with a more traditional comp class.

But, I guess William of Ockham was giving mass comp-based grammar instruction too. How little the university changes!

Where I teach, the instructors (no professors at the community college regardless of degrees or length of time teaching or works published) have had only minor, cost-of-living pay increases over the past several years.  In fact, insurance coverage has eroded and, of course, retirement accounts have taken a hit.  Meanwhile, student tuition has risen at an incredible clip.  Could that be because the administration has given itself a 40% pay hike?  Or maybe it is because the burgeoning IT department works seven days a week nearly 24 hours a day installing the ever more rapidly supplied software updates, updates that actually, at least in the short term, make teaching and learning more complicated?  Could it because of the marketing department’s budget?  As a state run community college our chief competition seems to be the neighboring community colleges and technical schools, mostly public as well.  This means that the state is spending a lot of money competing with itself, spending that raises both taxes and tuition.

If only this new student driven model cut back on administration–say one president and two vice presidents for every five community colleges–and consolidated IT departments and planned updates in three year cycles rather than allowing the software and hardware industries to dictate when this support material is installed and forced on the all ready over-burdened faculty, support staff and, yes, students.  Finally, while slick advertising might help justify the marketing jobs and garner awards for the administration, cutting back here would only make sense. A good web design is important as is clear signage on the campus itself, but do we need billboards and ads at the movies and ads on the boards of professional hockey and baseball games?  I would argue that we do not.

School boils down to teachers and students whether it is delivered on a campus or over the internet.  Cutting back on administration, IT, and marketing while cutting student tuition and making sure that teachers are paid fairly and have adequate health insurance would be my way of rebuilding an distressed  educational system.

Higher education will never be reformed and “retooled” unless the political will is found to reduce the sizes of college administrations and have other cost-cutting measures take place to reduce the overall cost of education for students. As an older person who returned to college in order to expand my training and knowledge in a particular field, I was struck by the number of times I thought to myself, “this could be done remotely … or in a way that waives the need for buildings,classrooms, and other things colleges are fond of acquiring.” With the Internet and modern technology, the days of in-person lectures, dorms, proctored tests, and other staples of the college experience are numbered. But colleges and their political masters will fight this to the end; no one is going to willingly adjust or reduce their piece of the higher education pie in order to make the whole system less costly, more efficient, and cheaper for students – unless they are forced to from the outside. I believe these kinds of changes will come from states that are adept and innovative about this; the federal government will NEVER promote these types of changes, unless you have a forward-thinking President like a Newt Gingrich who would be willing to do away with the Department of Education (a good thing to do in my book), and return the direction and costs of higher ed to the states, where it really belongs in the first place.

…on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them.

I suspect that number 16 correlates to a multiple of the maximum number of students in an effective study group, the multiplier being the number of study groups that can be formed.  All this new internet goodness and multimedia technology pizazz may not move those numbers much.  Classes taught in lecture halls to hundreds of undergrads may have already corralled the low-hanging fruit, additional average gains in instructor productivity may be relatively small percentage-wise.

Rush Limbaugh educates over 16 million per week.

Whether I agree with his politics or not, I must admit that his audience is being educated about American practical politics, government, and constitutional principles at least no more poorly on average than the kids enrolled in most state college American Government classes.

The idea of more digital learning is just plain scary to me. I’ve experienced so much cheating with this model.  At my job any number of my colleagues earned PhDs doing very little writing and research on their own. They wrote up partial chapters, passed them on to online professors for editing then passed that edited copy to their own paid editors and data analysts.  Their degrees were recognized with hefty promotions.  No…I no longer work there….but they still do. This is just one example. I do think tightening budgets will force smaller, weaker institutions into more online learning. Traditional schools will thrive on the influx of foreign students, while the old American guard slowly fads away.  Take heart it will take awhile.  

And of course you have demonstrated with controlled tests how “traditional” classroom settings are at all effective in developing skills and knowledge. On the contrary, there is absolutely no risk in experimenting with radically different delivery methods because that “traditional” classroom setting is an utter failure according to every measurement method (learning outcomes, NSSE student engagement, critical thinking studies just released, student satisfaction, or employment after graduation. Highly selective colleges produce the best graduates because only the most intelligent, best prepared, and highest motivated are accepted (according to yet another study). But the current system is great for us profs. We can’t be fired, forced to retire, or required to be effective instructors.

What a ridiculous claim to make.  The traditional classroom setting is a total failure?  How have people managed to learn to read and write all these years?  For the last 1000 years?  The people doing the testing learned in traditional classroom settings — but you trust them to be able to accurately administer a test. 

Face the facts: every student and every technological development from the MRI to the computer to… you… is the product of a traditional classroom setting.  The problems that you’re seeing now in colleges begin around middle school and culminate in secondary schools graduating students who can barely read or write, so colleges and universities are required to give HS level or lower instruction to students who have never been made to do anything.  

Fact is I’ve seen, educated, and am proud of students that I’ve educated myself, in traditional classroom settings, who I thought had no business being in college when they first came to me in a classroom and then wound up writing A papers about a year and a half later.  

I’m all for trying new classroom technologies, delivery methods, and pedagogical techniques — because I have had completely online students who have been success stories like that too. Just not as many. But, I am not at all for sleazy money grubbers raking in millions of dollars in student loan debt but providing no meaningful education in return.

Don’t know if you saw the Megan McArdle piece on this topic (sort of): 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/the-tyranny-of-meritocracy/248061/

It points up some fairly hinky data in exactly what it is that the 1% are doing that makes their children get into the elite schools.

Of course a system of standardized tests for “assessment of these standard courses” already exists in the form of CLEP and DANTES, and is extended by Excelsior College Exams (ECE).  I’m thinking that the MITx assessment may provide an additional extension of these systems.  Perhaps these systems of assessments will be accepted and combined on a very much larger scale, if or when the higher education “disruption” occurs. 

Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

“While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them.”

One limitation of “productivity gains” is the limitations of the learner.  Maybe the prof (or the robot or the website) can talk much faster…increasing productivity,  but the student is still likely to learn at the same rate. Productivity-need-driven increases in pressure and speed may actually lessen learning instead of increase it. 

Perhaps the most available productivity gain is scaling the professor through video, but that approach only works for some students. It has been possible for some time to replace much of college with reading the textbooks and testing out of the courses, yet that solution has not been that popular.   Was that unpopularity driven by the preferences of institutions and individuals for the slow, labor-intensive but money-earning method of the ”lecture-course”, or does the lecture and discussion structure of traditional college courses address some fundamental learning requirement? 

Digital learning often allows the student to use or view material repeatedly, where attending a live lecture will not. Digital learning can allow the student greater flexibility as to when the material is used, easing some challenges, and perhaps helping the student manage time, and energy. Yet flexibility is a problem for those students who need structure.

It will be interesting to see how the disruption plays out.

Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

This has always bothered me:  productivity is defined as input labor per unit output.  If the output is students who have mastered the curriculum, then primary and secondary education are the only industries where lower productivity, i.e., smaller class size per teacher, is considered a good thing.  Of course, the goal is students who actually learned the subject matter, and you can argue that smaller class sizes are actually more productive because the failure rate goes up non-linearly as you load the teacher.  Still, the whole thing seems bass-ackwards to me.  Shouldn’t the goal be genuinely higher productivity?

Some questions for you re. students who can’t do distance learning:

1) Do you think this is an intractable technological problem?

2) Do you think this is an intractable pedagogical problem?

3) How do you think distance tutoring on demand as a supplement to distance learning changes the problem?

4) You said, “flexibility is a problem for those students who need structure,” which certainly contains an odd contradiction.  Is the real problem simply that some students need somebody over their shoulder flogging them on?  This sounds more like a primary and secondary ed problem than a higher ed one.

5) Do you think that you can use distance learning as a privilege to give students an incentive to develop self-discipline?

Absolutely! On the one hand we have the ‘Wannabbee University” syndrome that drives up the cost of eduction at lower tier schools as they strive to become more like their elite big brothers and sisters. On the other hand the increasing reputation of those lower tier schools gives the students who attend them a fighting chance (the good students who attend them anyway). The disruption you speak of will never hit the top elite schools. The total number of seats at the elites is puny compared to the demand. The Harvards of this world will exist, far into the future, in the same way they do now. Students able to gain entrance will be taught more or less the same way, and they will still learn the critical liberal arts curriculum that will give them the insight they need to lord over those from the lower tier—disrupted higher ed system. The 99% will be taught by on-demand video presentations. And what that will create is a permanent underclass, well trained for a job yes, but not educated in the manner it will take to speak truth to the power of the 1% who will still attend the traditional elites. This disruption will probably be turned into a form of class warfare if it hasn’t already.

Thanks for the reply, TheRadicalModerate. Based on what I have read before, online/distance courses have a higher dropout rate than on campus courses. Plus I have observed students who barely seem to be able to complete even on campus classes, without personal outreach and encouragement and it seem to me that those maybe difficult to provide online.

Are there some students who can’t complete online classes under any circumstances? I think some students are prone to procrastinate, mis-prioritize, or get so caught up in everyday life that they are much more likely to complete the course if they first have to arrange their life for the requirements and structure of attending on campus. Flexibility is a blessing for most, but for others its an invitation to undefined study time, shifting priorities, and caving-in to others demands. Of course, most students have no problems completing online.

If you visit online program websites they often provide a series of questions to students asking if they are ready for online learning, so I think online students face certain kinds of challenges that on campus, in person students may not face, just as on campus students face challenges online students do not face.

Is the problem intractable technological or intractable teaching issues? I wasn’t really conceiving the problem that way…the problem may be the student’s. Increasing technological or teacher interventions may enable more students to complete, but there are normally some reasonable limits to what resources are available.

My point about productivity in education is that one limitation on productivity is the speed at which the students’ learning occurs. It’s not just a function of the instructor.

Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

Selingo is right in saying that the “unbundling” of higher education is a trend that is not going away.  But there’s a missing part in his argument.  

In this unbundling, he points out two things that are getting plenty of attention: certification/credentialing, and wholesale content delivery. In fact these are the only two options Selingo sees for “traditional colleges”. But there is something else: something we can facilitate in “traditional colleges” that is truly transformational, that is hard to measure and that may be impossible to measure quickly. We can’t promise to deliver it in any particular course or to any particular student; we don’t know how often it happens; and it’s hard to know exactly why it happens or how to promote it (though there are plenty of opinions about these things). 

This third thing—for the sake of argument I’ll call it liberal education—is not getting much attention in this debate; it is not accorded much value in the discussions of badges or the cost of higher education, and Selingo doesn’t even acknowledge that exists. So why are so many people lining up to spend $50k/year to go to schools that do it really well?  

When MIT created Open Courseware—the essential precursor and spiritual progenitor to MITx—they did it in part because they realized they were not in the business of content, so it made perfect sense to give that away for free. However you characterize MIT’s actual business, it’s accorded a lot of value in the real-world, real-money marketplace where MIT—and other very expensive, very selective schools—have a reputation for delivering it. Badges and certifications and wholesale content delivery and even the Khan Academy don’t deliver it, don’t measure it, and in some important way are neglecting its value. (I’m not knocking them—they do, or have the potential to do, other things very well. But there is something going on at great “traditional colleges” that they don’t replace.)

A good friend and senior administrator at a liberal arts school recently put this as succinctly and beautifully as I’ve ever heard: “The problem with the assessment movement is that it is seeking to provide accountability by accurately measuring the least important thing we do.”  I call this “weak assessment”, and I agree with him that it is a one-sided, and thus dangerous, metric. “Strong assessment” would measure the more important things we achieve, but we don’t know how to do it. The best proxy we have is reputation (a poor indicator with an absurdly long lag time). 

So what does this mean for schools that aspire to provide liberal education to a broader group of students, and that don’t have MIT’s reputation? Are they simply out of luck? Is there a need for education that is neither, on the one hand, acclaimed, selective, and expensive; nor on the other, the efficient and affordable provision of the (relatively) easily-measured parts of an education? 

Khan, MITx, badges, Apple: there’s important stuff here. Our relationship with information is changing dramatically and the way we approach learning and knowledge has miles to go. But there’s a baby in that thousand-year-old bathwater, Mr. Thrun. The White House and Department of Education recently announced a push for education that better prepares students to be engaged and informed citizens, rather than focusing solely on job preparedness (http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/duncan-white-house-launch-civic-values-initiative/).  They are reacting to a widely felt trend in the nature of our social fabric. I don’t think another civics class is going to provide the fix we need; what we need is for students to graduate with some of that liberal-education mojo.  And it’s not just the top few percent of students who can benefit from it or deserve it; we need to reach many more. Let’s not neglect that in our discussions. 

So many students are unable to do math at the high school level, even
junior HS level at community colleges. They are stuck in a vortex of
remedial/developmental classes. Those classes are taught the same 19th
century way – teacher at the blackboard – student alone with only a
textbook to do homework, that failed these students, mostly from
underprivileged backgrounds.
What
is needed is a new approach – and finally one is available.  And it
seems to work.

Check out Adaptive Learning from Knewton [watch  http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/knewton-prepares-to-take-education-by-storm-tctv or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGYh7zM4BCM ]
The
world biggest textbook publisher, Pearson sees the value.  It invested
millions and announced that all its online material will use Knewton
[read Forbes: http://diigo.com/0kuub or Mashable: http://diigo.com/0l2k2 ]

Adaptive
Learning’s student centered approach goes beyond Khan Academy and the
flipped classroom to individualization of each lesson.  Each lesson is
presented based on best learning style for that individual student.
 Like other industries, Knewton uses “big data”, tailoring lessons based on
how others like think this student succeeded  - think Amazon – “Others
like you ordered this book.”  
Better
ways for students to learn are being made available at an exponential
rate. Faculty who don’t learn and use the new technology are robbing
students of their chance to be full citizens of the 21st century.

I wrote a response here: http://hamiltonmj1983.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/a-response-to-a-disrupted-higher-ed-system/

I think that the major problem is that the student now views his or her self as a consumer, not as a guest in the classroom of someone who has mastered the field.

The problem is not the way that higher ed presents itself; the problem is in the student’s point of view. How do we change that?

It is an interesting paradox how some colleges strain to protect academics while easily avoiding changes to how they teach and conduct research

The misapprehension in all of this is that there is insufficient attention to the feedback a student gets while learning. It is not that hard to optimize input; educational films and TV have done that for decades. The important issue is ascertaining what students have learned and helping them find ways to express it. This cannot be done on a huge scale and cannot be done on the quick; it requires people who (unlike computers) can read and understand. As soon as you try to operationalize that understanding to make it computer-friendly, people will find ways to game the system and make the assessment all but meaningless.

Some people seem to be under the impression that colleges claim that all the education you need is what you get in 4 undergraduate years. That is the beginning of becoming educated, which is a lifelong process. Colleges can only certify that a student has achieved a certain minimum.

A last note: Critical thinking is not something that you can easily teach and learn. Some people define critical thinking down far enough so that they make it teachable. But critical thinking, like creativity, begins exactly at the point where you cannot teach it explicitly. It will accrue to people as they intensely study a subject area and think about it. It is unlikely to come to people who take some textbook- or computer-based intro course in the hope of obtaining a credential. If credentials were all they are talked up to be, large corporations would not need recruiting departments (nor most HR). A credential (from an A.A. to a Ph.D.) is a minimum, and then you try to find the critical thinkers after that.

A guest?
Like in a hotel?
That is a Customer.
Customers choose to be there or not
There are many less costly and more personal alternative available to the student/customer today.

This is an interesting post.  It seems that with the development of technology almost anything is a possiblitiliy.  I agree that there are many more  non traditional students than ever and I can understand why many students are turning to online courses. However, I do agree with the last the last comment from Antiutopia that traditional instiutuions will continue to attract all student types,  I also agree with A. that these new “electronic toys” are not going to take precedence over the traditional classroom.