2 Bioengineering Pioneers Win $250,000 Alpert Prize

Carpentier revolutionized the treatment of valvlular heart disease and in particular mitral valvluar disease with the development of techniques for repair of the diseased valve apparatus in addition to designing and perfecting a tissue valve replacement that revolutionized heart surgery. The tissue valve has saved thousands of people from the complications associated with anticoagulation required with a mechanical valve. I’m not sure where the “artificial bronchus” piece came from but it seems to be reproduced from story to story. Currently there is no use of any kind for an “artificial bronchus” and if this is attributed to Dr. Carpentier it takes a very distant second to his contributions to the design of the tissue heart valve. That being said there remains a need for a tracheal replacement and there have been some recent developments in that area.

I’m both bothered by and encouraged by this report. I’m of course encouraged to see data that indicates what most of us have “known” all along — that hybrid classes are about the same as face-to-face classes. But I’m discouraged by the statement that this could reduce compensation for those teaching such courses. I’ve taught a great many online and online-enhanced (or hybrid) courses. And I can confidently say that I spend far more time per student in these courses than in a traditional course. I have to manage more technology, read more written work, and grade a great deal more (students need more feedback for the elements of the course that take place outside of the classroom, and much of that tends to be qualitative work that requires time to assess and provide feedback for further development).  I would stop teaching these kinds of courses if my institution suddenly paid me less than a traditional course or if I suddenly had far more students assigned to me “per section” because of the format. 

The advantage for cost-savings is not to short-change the instructors teaching these courses but to leverage the classroom space more effectively and to save money on facilities. It costs far more to heat and cool a classroom building than to provide server space, so by doubling up on the classes offered in a single location at peak hours of the day is to maximize cost-savings and to add value to the students’ education at the same time.  But don’t punish the instructors for having a good class that meets once a week instead of twice a week — that “online day” is far more time-consuming than a lecture class meeting for the instructor, and we do believe that good teaching should be compensated for what it is, right?

I am both a student and teacher online. I have a different prospective for each.

I teach online and find that too many of the courses are canned. There is no real incentive for the student to really learn and they don’t. Very few students get anything out of the courses, which is too bad. As the instructor I have no say in anything but the criteria for grading.

I am doctoral student in hybrid online/residency program. I have much reading to do with plenty of homework. I get graded very specifically on everything I do. I have to learn on my own. There is more going back and forth with others in my cohort.

I have taught online and in hybrid situations for the last 10 years and there is a great misunderstanding that this format is somehow less work or preferable for ALL instructors and students.  That is just not so.
Depending on your field of study, online/hybrid can actually be quite a benefit to the student who needs the flexibility afforded by this type of class.  If they want to finish an assignment or quiz at 4 am, they can.  If they want to work crazy hours while at school, they may be able to squeeze in an online course between classes and time at work.

However, many students are not interested in ‘figuring it out’ themselves.  That’s not why they paid tuition.  They want value for their money.  Any hybrid course that lacks engaging content or features a static display with a prof simply lecturing online is bound to fail.  Think of what today’s student is exposed to when they spend time online!  High quality graphics, production value to rival Hollywood and limitless content.  Can ANY institution claim that they can compete with popular video games and video sites like You Tube?  

Saving money on facilities is a lost leader.  Streamlining teaching practices is a fruitless effort.
When Google (or another company of that magnitude) fires up their engines and starts offering online education with high quality content starring Morgan Freeman, everyone else will scramble and fall down.

Some observations:

A large number of schools classify hybrid courses as courses where substantial seat time is replace by online interactions, and a number of these do so by running one class meeting per week, where there would usually be two or three. So, there are a number of schools with hybrid courses that meet on a weekly basis (including my own and the one I worked at before that).

As I mentioned in the thread above, there are certainly subjects where full online instruction would be inappropriate. Laboratory chemistry or sculpture, for example. However, absent a strong physical component and any questions of student safety or institutional liability, a number of subjects are amenable to online or hybrid learning.

One example: I’ve heard a number of English professors argue that they need direct access to students when they are writing, so they can look over their shoulders, make comments, and guide the process. Yet, in my undergraduate studies in English (second major, emphasis in creative writing) I don’t recall a single class that would have been handicapped by being delivered partially or completely online.

Yes, the real time meetings with my classmates were fun and useful, as far as time management and camaraderie is concerned. However, the actual interaction and feedback could very well have been written and delivered online. Yes, I very much enjoyed the colorful personalities of my writing teachers (the cigarette, pipe, and cigar smoke not so much), but they’re professional writers for heaven’s sake. I have no doubt they’d have engaged the heck out of me online, and in their native, written habitat.

My major in art is another story, but even there, the history component would easily transfer online, and even some of the studio work, particularly the work we did outside of the classroom, sketching and painting landscapes and passers-by, would migrate with only minimal distress, particularly if balanced by the in-class component of a hybrid course. If anything, it would play to the individualist nature of the artists in training.

the biggest cost increases are administrations including overbloated CEOs in 1965, i knew personally the dean at university of pennsylvania and regularly sat and drank coffee with full professors. similarly in graduate school at rutgers. other students are a major learning resource. now the dean is driven around campus in a limosine. all the secretaries knew my dog. now they never look at my face. online courses don’t need more administrators.  online courses do not have to be fill in the blank. i designed online courses at Sultan Qaboos University in the 90s. The University had a very limited library and virtually no trained librarians. Engineering learners were assigned a problem to solve. we used appropriate technology and ecology and assigned groups developed regional or country development plans. Impossible to plagiarize. For example permaculture in India was not an acceptable project although permaculture in Niger might be. Internet, computer skills, writing, reference library, research, documentation, biography, discourse, skills and a wide spectrum of basic science, philosophy of science, and other knowledge were incorporated into one course’s curriculum. Across the sciences scholars were able to enhance the practical effectiveness of limited University resources in a country which a little more than a decade earlier had no education at all. There was no additional budget. Just better allocation of teaching time and educational resources. Learners better prepared to take responsibility to know what they needed to know.

There is a mention of reducing teaching costs. But whether the course is online or not, someone has to grade all the papers. And in any course involving writing, that is a huge task that takes probably more time than lesson planning and in-classroom teaching combined. Rather than “reducing teaching costs,” universities should be paying MORE to faculty –especially adjuncts, whose hourly rate of compensation comes out to something around $12-$15 an hour when grading papers is factored in.

One might also suspect that:

“the average score increase was 5 percentage points”

could be explained simply by those students that dropped out or by the fact that one might suspect a lack of attention to the pre-course running of the CAOS test.
 
The reality may be that neither regular nor hybrid courses achieve anything of value.  And if one were to get CAOS results 6 months later what would they show? 

I have taught hybrid courses in the mix with traditional courses for two reasons. First, as a graduate program director, I saw the challenges of of scheduling courses and of giving working graduate students choices. The hybrid classes had a smaller footprint on the course schedule, at the same time, I was confident that I could design an equal or better learning experience for the students in the mixed mode format. I also teach a general education, writing intensive course as a hybrid course. There, my goals are to expose students in a carefully structured way to some rich online resources and to encourage students to write more and in more different formats (online discussion, blog, essay questions).  Other than taking a small amount of pressure off of classroom and parking space, these hybrid courses in no way save the university funding and the courses certainly didn’t save on faculty time.

Unemployed_Northeastern, you point is excellent.  Though the damning result of only a 5% improvement in CAOS scores over the WHOLE hybrid course that is hidden in footnote 19 seems very much worth pursuing.

It should also be noted that the article quotes someone who appears to be the same William G. Bowen who came out with a 1989 study that predicted a Humanities Ph.D. shortage.  Many seem to forget Lynne V. Cheney’s New York Times Op-Ed rebuttal “The Phantom Ph.D. Gap”?   They also seem to forget the Bowen and Sosa rebuttal letter http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/09/opinion/l-we-can-act-on-coming-faculty-shortage-now-414089.html
which says:

“The severe shortages of faculty members that we project for 1997-2002 are not caused primarily by ‘faculty members retiring, dying and otherwise leaving the academy,’ but rather to known population trends that will affect enrollment in the late 1990′s.”

As with many studies and articles on studies your “many grains of salt” are valid.

MakeCash10.comONLY

The “significance” of the finding of “no signficant difference” would be enhanced if the instructors made use of quality assured open educational resources, thereby reducing the costs of student learning materials to near-zero.  With students now paying textbook costs that equal 25% of their tuition, they would flock to courses where learning outcomes are the same as those that require high priced textbooks.

The article starts, “Students learn just as much in a course that’s taught partly online as they would in a traditional classroom . . .”

But based on the referenced study (footnote 19) wouldn’t it be more accurate to start:

Students learn nothing or almost nothing in a course that’s taught partly online just as 90% would largely fail to learn in a traditional classroom. No harm is done because both are almost equally ineffective. But both collect the money and generate the credit regardless of whether 90% learn nothing beyond the very short term.  Even over the short term the hybrid course only resulted in a 5% average improvement in standardized test scores, before and after taking the hybrid course, which might only be due to students dropping out.”

Critical thinking is developed discursively; that’s been true for the last 2500 years, at least. The premise that this will suddenly change with online hybrid courses is one which will, at minimum, have to prove itself with positive demonstrations, and these do not exist. It’s erectly possible for people who have never met each other in the flesh to develop strong discursive relationships, but it takes time — more time than a face to face class, NOT LESS. And less is what is made available. 

In reference to “pedagogic habit,” the pressure imposed by sexy technology is to remove discussion from the classroom and thus to remove it from normal time: to make it asynchronous. Most per discussion board I’ve seen in my experience of hybrid courses resemble community help desks where students aid each other in resolving software difficulties and (at the limits of controversy) establishing common definitions for terms used in the readings.

I would agree that teachers who can’t inspire critical discussion in class will fail to do so online as well, but that failure can be more easily hidden online, and that is where my argument with the current state of hybrid classes lies.

“It was also surprising that for almost all items, there was a noticeable number of students who selected the correct response on the pretest, but chose an incorrect response on the posttest.”

This interesting tidbit is contained in a report that footnote 19 of the study references.

That report provides background on the development of the CAOS and the testing of the CAOS 4 version of it:

“Although statistically significant, this was only a small average increase of 9 percentage points (95% CI = [8.2,9.9] or 3.3 to 4.0 of the 40 items). It was surprising to find that students were correct on little more than half of the items, on average, by the end of the course.”

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/serj/SERJ6%282%29_delMas.pdf

So 9% in that report while this study reports the even sadder:
 
“Among students in our study who took the CAOS test at both the beginning and end of the semester, the average score increase was 5 percentage points.”

Worse results than the verification test results, so one might expect even worse results in real life when no one is paying close attention.

my buddy’s sister-in-law makes $66 every hour on the computer. She has been unemployed for 6 months but last month her check was $18143 just working on the computer for a few hours. Read more on this site CashLazy.c&#111m  

One premise that is questionable is focusing on instructional costs (faculty compensation).  Food for thought – according to the recent report “A Very Slow Recovery”,

“Over the past three decades tuition has increased at a much faster rate than full-time faculty salaries. The contrast is starkest at public institutions, where tuition and fees have increased over the past decade by 72 percent when accounting for inflation, largely in response to declines in state support. During that same time, the salaries of public-college professors, when adjusted for inflation, rose by less than 1 percent at doctoral and baccalaureate institutions and fell by more than 5 percent at master’s universities.

Reported here in the Chronicle.
http://chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Group-Says/131432/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Make no mistake, the push for increased online/hybrid courses over the last decade has *not* been to increase student learning or improve course availability. The major driver overwhelmingly has been to cut instructional costs. Virtually any college administrator or consultant who says otherwise is either ignorant or completely full of #%^.

So long as the primary motivator for online/hybrid continues to be financial and not educational, we as faculty will lose out on our ability to teach online/hybrid in a manner that improves student success rather than simply cheapens it. Anyone that *effectively* teaches hybrid/online knows full well that the amount of work involved matches if not exceeds that for teaching traditionally.

It is surprising that the study didn’t examine the very cost effective scenario of NO instructor.  The CMU course was intended to allow no instructor.  As footnote 17 says, “Both the statistics course and other courses in the OLI suite were originally intended to be comprehensive enough to allow students to learn the material independently without the guidance of an instructor.”

Since under the hybrid scheme, “the average score increase was 5 percentage points” it seems likely that the top 10% of students could beat this number without an instructor, especially if they would get a full refund for the course if they got better than 50% on the CAOS test.  It would be interesting to see what the results would be in general if the course cost was reduced to $100 in exchange for no instructor.

Even odder is the lack of randomization based on “prior exposure to statistics”.  Even though the students were asked:

“1. Which of the following best describes your prior exposure to statistics? (Please check one of the following.)
□ I have had no prior classroom exposure to statistics before this course (STAT 101)
□ Before college, I saw a little statistics as part of another course (for instance, some topics covered in a high-school math class).
□ Before college, I took a whole statistics course but I did not take the AP Statistics exam.
□ Before college, I took a whole statistics course and I took the AP Statistics exam.
□ I took a whole college-level statistics course before this semester.
□ Other (please specify): ”

I don’t see any mention of this as either a basis for randomizing the trial or as a factor in exam/CAOS scores or any other measurement.

I would have thought that someone who did very well on AP Statistics would hopefully do well on both CAOS and the final exam, regardless of regular or hybrid course.  If they didn’t then that ought to be an important result and in fact would be any correlation between “prior exposure” and current results.

Of course, if I had run things, the Baseline Survey would have asked things like:

What are the dates of each of the times that you took the AP Statistics exam and what score did you get for each of them? 

And then for each of the questions the answers would be cross-checked against the university admissions information. Discrepancies would be very interesting.

The deliberate strategy of delaying the start of kindergarten for your child to give them a long term advantage in life, is discussed in a 60 Minutes piece “Redshirting: Holding kids back from kindergarten”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57390128/redshirting-holding-kids-back-from-kindergarten/

As a side note, this Harvard Health Publications article publication gives the impression that some Kindergarten’s seem to be operating a levels that exceed what appears to be happening in some middle schools:

“Today, kindergarten is drawing, writing, literacy, reading, and science
and math and all those subjects that kids didn’t used to get until
first or second grade.”

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/kindergarten-redshirting-is-popular-but-is-it-necessary-201203064455

So maybe the Baseline Survey should have asked about private school and pre-school?

 Thanks the lecture on the importance of knowing how to use technology properly and for providing a link so that I can inform myself on its wonders, but the link you supplied doesn’t work.  As a professor, I think the goal of the university is not to function as cheaply as possible but to instruct as well as possible.  And, I would guess all those large, air-conditioned,well-decorated administrative offices cost at least as much as classrooms.  Perhaps you can explain to me why the well-compensated Gordon Gee, for instance, recently cited  Ohio State’s  faculty’s unwillingness to pay for parking when discussing high tuition with THE NEW YORK TIMES.  And perhaps you can explain to me why there is one administrator for every faculty member in the colleges and universities in this country.  The biggest financial problem universities have is all those administrators, but the media constantly asks these administrators what the problem is and the administrators persistently shift the issue away from themselves to the faculty. 

It is possible that the reason for all the lecturing at Institution A was that the CMU course didn’t cover all the material that needed to be covered in the regular course at Institution A.  Yet that reason for 90% lecture is not provided. No reason was provided.

It would have been interesting to have collected personality, behavioral, intention and attitude data to differentiate between those who volunteered for the experiment and those who didn’t.  It would have been interesting to compare the CAOS and exam results of those who volunteered and those that didn’t and if there were any correlations with the personality etc. data.

The study reports:

“Among students in our study who took the CAOS test at both the beginning and end of the semester, the average score increase was 5 percentage points.”

This sad result, which appears to be true for both the traditional and hybrid Intro Stats courses, seems even worse than the CLA results reported in “Academically Adrift” and related reports (assuming you believe in the CLA and the handling of the data, please see earlier threads for some of the issues).  The most interesting aspect of that data was going to a “High Selectivity” college or taking certain majors produced maximum differences among treatments, over 4 years, of 5-6% of the lowest average scores.

The important take away from this study combined with “Academically Adrift” is not that hybrid courses “do no harm,” but that college does NO real good in the majority of cases, no matter what is done.  This is something that should get more attention.

@chronicle-15bf71a93d53f3fa044dd3b5f99a7a58:disqus 

In regards to the IHE article, I’ll put on my hat of flippancy and say it’s just another step towards the ultimate goal of using the children of Siri + Watson to take over all instruction, while administrators charge $100,000/year so as to repay their second mortgages in Newport or Newport Beach.

On a more serious note, I think this sentence is the takeaway from that article: “A hybrid teaching model could shift a great to deal of the teaching burden from tenured professors to teaching assistants and support staff.”  So, third-party for-profit vendors make bank by getting Max Headroom to deal with the mewling, indebted students so that the tenured profs can cloister themselves even further from their supposed mission of, you know, teaching, to create more [profitable] scholarship for the institution.  Sounds like a great deal for everyone except the students, but who cares about them, anyhow?  What do they bring to the equation aside from the debt-financed capital that keeps all of higher ed swimming in money?  Why not go all the way and just have them be taught by the Clippy the Paperclip from MS Word?

Incidentally, does anyone actually read IHE?  I ask only because with a mere 10 comments posted there, I seem to have become a Top 100 poster.  Which is sad for all parties concerned.

I taught a hybrid class a few years ago and the biggest problem was really the lack of classroom time. We felt we really needed more time to engage and interact and I found the online components so much less satisfying than the classroom parts. Part of it was the material and my teaching style, but I feel the format is certainly better for most things than just all online when it’s feasible.

 NanBunge:  I would like to politely disagree with you.  At my community college, online courses do not necessitate more administrators.  I teach online courses all the time; there are no new people staring over my (virtual) shoulder.  Further, I teach mathematics, so it is very dificult to make my online classes “work” as you say; but usually half the students pass which is not bad (though not satisfactory) for online mathematics classes.

On the other hand, in my experience, hybrid classes definitely have higher retention rates than do purely online classes.  There are always a few people who hate computers and wish they were elsewhere, and there are always a few who love working with computers.  Most students live in the middle, doing their work to one extent or another.  Life for me is a little easier when I teach hybrids; at least I don’t have to grade homework.  Theoretically, life is a little easier for my students; they can use the HELP buttons when they are at home.  However, students who take hybrid classes want a face-to-face teacher to supplement their computer learning.  Students who take purely online classes either don’t need a teacher, or are unable to get to campus.