Payroll Glitch at Community College Leaves Part-Timers Without Pay

Yes yes yes- I’d like to help, I have the platform!

I started with an online text based tutorial that I wrote, and a number of folks liked running with it.   When my class moved online (for a  small group learning computer science for newbies),  I added video presentations going over the same stuff, and students overwhelmingly liked it.  I see no problem with videos for *presentation* of material, and that scales fine to enormous groups.  

Much bigger questions arise over the creative process of synthesizing all this and using it to solve creative problems.  I also have students work in pairs – the peer feedback is great, but that only goes so far until they hit a wall.  After my paying university students absorb videos outside of class, they get me and TA’s every day in their “flipped” class helping them engage with the creative process, and predictably getting useful feedback.  Hoping to latch onto a volunteer who knows what is going on and is helpful is riskier and slower.  The idea is to help get a handle on learning, not get answers to assigned homework, which in an intro class in particular is of no intrinsic worth.  Can you trust a volunteer actually knows what is going on and will assist in the real goal of learning rather than mostly just having today’s answer?  (There is some issue with under-trained TA’s, too.)

The point of getting into the real world was important.  Certainly gaining skills for locating and classifying helpers and collaborators who really serve you, is an important life skill.  Do you immediately throw an inexperience learner into those waters?   What environments teach them to swim with little chance of drowning or running away from the water?  

And suppose “Chris” already has those skills of evaluating people.  Chris knows it still take time to find reliable volunteers.  If Chris wants to rapidly and effectively learn something specific, is it worth going into a situation where the help is paid and organized and speedy and reliably effective?

What is worth your time? What is your time worth?

Not surprising that online learning is being pushed by corporate entities who smell the bottom line figures.  Faculty should resist this movement at every turn.  It will undermine and dilute higher education as we know it, mass producing degrees that mean nothing.  This is why the liberal arts are necessary.  Critical thinking skills, writing, and close reading cannot be taught in cyberspace.  The movement toward degrees in “Business” and other faux disciplines was the beginning.  Hold the line, or become the next wave of Oakies, picking peaches for pennies.

I am currently participating in a MOOC (really to get a feel for whether I want to use them in my teaching) and Jeff’s point about “subscribing to a city” seems to me to be right on the money, I am overwhelmed by the noise and clatter and a feeling that I am not in fact deepening or broadening my understanding of the particular topic the MOOC is dealing with. Perhaps the MOOC requires a more feminist (collaborative?) approach to learning buut I certainly don’t feel my thoughts are being challenged and I don’t feel I am challenging any of the ideas that other participants offer.  For all intents and purposes I am sitting in the middle of a massive coffee-shop or bar and in the middle of hundreds of half-baked, uninformed conversations that while they may be interesting are nevertheless, not grounded in scholarship and since the tendency is for the bloggers and tweaters to flit from conversation to conversation I have no sense of any substantial engagement with any group about any topic.

Does anyone know where such an open course would be located… my institution uses a proprietary LMS for our online courses, so we would need to “port” over courses to another medium to open them up… itunes U may house video content, but how does one recreate the entire structure of a course?

I completely agree with your assessment. I signed up for a MOOC last winter and realized very quickly that the absence of structure and constant churn of tangential discussions were counter productive. I though that maybe my dinosoaur moment had come and that perhaps this new method of instruction was just not meant for me. I believe in the power of online learning, but I don’t think “massive” is the way to go.

I haven’t seen anyone mention the ability to reach those who would otherwise not have access to the full college experience. What does everyone think about MOOCs being a solution for educating people in rural areas or 3rd world countries that don’t have the finances to attend a formal institution online? Or would we argue that there is a better way to do this? 

George Siemens is an inspirational teacher who practices what he preaches. To think that engaging in MOOCs is somehow going “corporate” is absolutely laughable. I took his Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course in 2008. Students in the course participated in discussions with George and Stephen Downes, but they also self-organized into study/discussion groups using the media that members of the groups were most comfortable with. Some were more comfortable with the LMS (Moodle) and stayed there; there was a Second Life group, Facebook, and other places on the net where students met. George also brought in other professors, professionals, and subject matter experts to lead discussions. Some participants took the class for credit. Those students probably had more attention and expectations paid to their papers and assignments, but George was always available to anyone who wanted to talk. He is the most insanely available teacher I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Despite the fact that there were hundreds of students in the class, I had more discussions of greater depth with George and Stephen than I had in many of my face-to-face classes at UC Berkeley. These courses are also an opportunity to meet students and professionals from around the world. I am still talking to people I met in that course, I am still using the materials that George and Stephen shared, and it was free. That is the real threat to colleges and corporations. Online learning and MOOCs take more motivation than traditional classes – but the upside is, you get to take a class with a lot of really motivated people!

Except that you can’t argue with or exchange ideas with 100s of people in an e-book.

I’ve participated in a MOOC; it was an interesting and very challenging experience.

I agree that SOMETHING LIKE a MOOC might be the way to go to open up opportunities for learning to millions of  people, but I am not sure that the MOOC as currently conceived will result in the learning that learners have a right to. And I am not saying this from anything other than a learner centered position. I am not criticizing the mooc because there is no teacher at the center of the universe. For me, the center of the mooc is cacophony, not the learner. 

Interesting, and IMHU as valuable as article in point, thread of comments, pros and cons about MOOCs

True. Fortunately, this is neither required nor even advisable for a great many college courses. As others have noted, a “Small Open Course” might provide better benefits to students. I am unclear as to what advantage (if any) that a “massive” class would have over a much smaller one.

Except cheapening education, of course.

If we could only figure out how to use and advance  technology, get some out of work teachers, professors hired, maybe there could be a platform where no one gets pushed off, you simply dive in.

@chronicle-90e485ed7b5ac1522067719226b7d465:disqus : “For all intents and purposes I am sitting in the middle of a massive coffee-shop or bar and in the middle of hundreds of half-baked, uninformed conversations that while they may be interesting are nevertheless, not grounded in scholarship and since the tendency is for the bloggers and tweaters to flit from conversation to conversation I have no sense of any substantial engagement with any group about any topic.”
One of the things we’ve emphasized with open courses is the role of creation, contribution, and sharing. An open online course is not like a classroom where you consume what faculty members have selected for you. Your contributions, dialogue, and interactions with others determines your capacity for meaningful learning and engagement. If you’re only consuming content and not creating, you’re not getting the full experience of an open course. Can you point to what you’ve created (images/videos/blog posts) related to the MOOC? If you and your ideas are findable, then they can serve as an engagement point for others.

@chronicle-90e485ed7b5ac1522067719226b7d465:disqus I’m going to take “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” approach to your comment about too much disconnection :). 

When Stephen and I ran our first open course (CCK08), we intentionally structured fragmented the course structure. The disorienting diversity of conversations and spaces of activity is not accidental – it’s intentional. I think a teacher who does the thinking for students by pulling together resources into a coherent whole does learners a disservice. (I’m assuming that the learners are somewhat knowledgeable and competent – novices require more structure than more advanced learners. If learners possess some comfort with the content, they are more capable of handling complex interactions than someone who has not yet mastered basics such as the vocabulary of a discipline). Deciding how the pieces or the concepts of a discipline connect is an excellent learning opportunity. Why not let students do this for themselves? Yes, the teacher is still active – prodding, directing, questioning. The processes of sensemaking and wayfinding in complex settings are wonderful, authentic, and valuable for learners to experience. If I get a textbook, someone has done this connecting for me. And I’m poorer for it.

I’m part of the Change 11 MOOC: it’s a lot of things. Corporate shill is not one of them.

There are three organizers: George is one. There are 36 faciliators, each taking a week to present innovative research and ideas related to educational change: I am one, though my week comes at the end. Until then, I’m a participant. None of these people are paid. It is, if anything, a huge and impressive collaborative effort, one that turns the idea of education-for-profit-motive on its head. And most of the people involved, teaching and learning, ARE teachers and educators.

So. Teaching and learning is being explored and collaborated on by teachers. As a volunteer activity, in hopes of learning and engaging and building new networks. If that’s your idea of corporate shill, you may want to check your definitions.

@George Siemens “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” – I teach online and I really dislike textbooks so I use as the texts published papers in the the field  – (medical sociology). But the learners need to find their own papers and use them in addition to a few papers I have provided to start their thinking. What I am getting at is not simply about a lack of teacher directed material – THAT is not a problem. The problem is the sheer massiveness of the material that is immediately presented to anyone participating. Perhaps I can provide a different metaphor. My stepson just returned from a two day activity organized by his school that took the kids from the city into the country. Fabulous. He returned with over 700 photographs taken by the organizers of the event. 700. That would take almost 24 hours straight  to view each photo for 2 minutes. But it was just a two day event for 11 year-olds. When everything is viewed as worth recording then nothing is understood as worth recording. That sense of drowning in data and noise rather than in information is what I experience in the MOOC. And that may say much about me and not the tool… But that is not clear, at least to me. 

Sorry, I can’t follow your argument since it is online. But it appears you suggest we may turn into some sort of Oak tree?

After our 2000+ year experiment with restricting top knowledge to rich elites, it might be nice to dedicate 5 or 10 years to experimenting with the opposite, opening access to 7 billion people to top college knowledge.    Of course this is self limiting—access quickly will wear off as interesting and motivation will plummet and we will end up with a globally distributed NEW elite–while the dullards and dillettantes dabble.  

AND one can teach nearly ANYTHING in pure lecture or video form.   Movies and arts and shows give people on shot at something and much learning happens.  Courses use multiple channels with re-formattings of the same ideas and grounding suggestions.  Why should we expect perfect 100% taking of those tactics?    Other shows achieve 7% impact with understanding and stay viable and liked.   

I share many of your concerns. As a former bench scientist who blogs for a corporation, I don’t fit neatly into any category either. I don’t know anyone at the conference personally. However, I will say this: the scio12 community has been great and friendly online, and I have no reason to suspect that openness will not translate to the in-person event. I’m excited about the conference. I look forward to meeting another cannot-quite-be-classified science blogger as well! I suspect I will learn a lot and meet a host of incredible people who love communicating science as much as I do.

I feel very similar.  As a scientist who is venturing kind of willy-nilly into science communication, I know few people; I’m relatively shy too, and I’m not really sure how it all will go. But those I do know who are going are super cool.  So… cheers, hope to see/meet you over a cocktail or two!

So how is it going?  I hope that you are having a ball. I’ve enjoyed unconferences in the past, but then no one would describe me as shy.

Do you have an organisation like the Australian Science Communicators over there?
http://www.asc.asn.au/about/
They do an excellent job over here.

I definitely enjoyed it – the sessions gave me a lot to think about and inspired a lot of new blog posts. I made some new friends and new connections. I do think that things were a bit cliquey in the evenings at the bar, but it was probably for the best that I went to bed early without drinking too much!