Rosenstone's Proposal for Super-Courses

As I teach online, I struggle with trying to figure out what  the new technology means for university philosophy teaching. Here is one attempt to make sense of that.


Some Thoughts About Online Instruction
Peter Shea, October 7, 2011

Minnesota Public Radio reported recently on Steven Rosenstone’s remarks concerning online courses:
Most MnSCU colleges and universities offer their own courses online. Rosenstone said the system could trim those courses and offer a standardized online course for students across the entire state.
"We need to explore the possibility that we could create one absolutely spectacular online English course or psychology course or political science course, putting together the very best faculty in the system to create the very best course and actually making it available to students in multiple colleges and universities," he said.
Amanda Bardonner, a senior at St. Cloud State University and a member of the Minnesota State University Student Association, supports the idea of MnSCU-wide online courses. She said statewide online courses could free up resources and allow MnSCU colleges to spend money in other areas.
"If we have that unified course that is across the system, then campuses can use a resource that that they were using to build that course curriculum on something else," Bardonner said.

I wonder whether Rosenstone is conscious of the implications of what he is suggesting here. 

The basic spine of courses such as Rosenstone imagines already exists, in the Teaching Company lectures. It would be very surprising if locally grown courses could surpass the best of these. The Teaching Company, however, markets internationally, and that raises a question: if a standard intro course is the right approach for MNSCU or for Minnesota, why not for the world? The same arguments for not needlessly duplicating courses within MNSCU apply to the system of university education world-wide.

I see no good reason for limiting these principles to introductory courses. Indeed, there may be much less controversy about mid-level lecture course content – and thus the nature of a good mid-level course – than about appropriate introductions.

It is stupid for universities to deliver, badly, introductory content that The Teaching Company delivers well. For a range of courses, universities should have licensed this material decades ago and stopped giving inept lectures. On that point, Rosenstone is clearly right.

Once system-wide online courses are in place, institutions will need no faculty to teach them. They will need graders and secretaries. They may not need even graders and secretaries for courses that rely on multiple choice exams and other machine-gradable measures.

One can surely imagine a university that is just a server, providing online lectures, giving machine-graded exams, churning out digitized degrees. That would not be the worst education in the world. For some purposes, it would be quite acceptable – as one-minute clinics are quite acceptable for a range of medical needs. What we have to avoid is going half-way to the online, untouched-by-human-hands university and then stopping because of union demands or the need to maintain jobs, physical plants, etc. – the need that is, to pay people to do things that no longer make any sense, just to keep them happy.  That would be supremely stupid.

The temptation in any institution facing budget problems is to increase class size and decrease personalized instruction, especially comments on student writing. If institutions are encouraged to make use of standard, online lecture courses, this trend will be amplified. At the same time, the question: “Why should I pay university tuition for a course I can access much cheaper by purchasing a package from the Teaching Company?” will become urgent.

Rosenstone’s remarks make urgent this question: what is the role of a teacher, in introductory and mid-level courses?

What is needed is a clear picture of what teaching can be, in the 21^st Century. What roles can teachers assume, given that some of the traditional jobs are well accomplished without teachers? For example, what does the course lecture become, if it no longer has to convey the traditional framework of concepts for the field of study? It might become unnecessary. It might become a minority report on that traditional framework. It might do contemporary, relevant applications of basic concepts. Whatever happens, it has to change, when competent online lecture series become widely available.

Beyond that, there is a huge field for the development of teacher-student interactions, online and in person. That is where the conventional, meat university needs to put its brainpower, if it is not to simply abolish itself, step by step, going down the path Rosenstone indicates in his speech.

Three caveats:

In my experience, the key to doing a bearable online course is decent video. Course designers must be able to freely access a range of materials, including web video, instructor generated material, and feature films. If copyright barriers or barriers caused by the disability access requirements (captioning, for example) block the designers of courses from free and extensive use of video, online courses will become so boring that no sane person will want to take them. 

The move to any kind of standardized intro and intermediate courses will come at a terrible cost. It is very important in the development of scholars across a range of disciplines that they be required to re-invent the basic concepts of their discipline in the design of introductory courses. I suspect that it is very important for progress that introductory material is being constantly re-worked – and that the re-workings are being constantly tested by beginning students. The loss of this climate of development, at the basic levels, will be a serious loss, one that must be weighed against any gains in fluency and completeness achieved through expert courses.

Introductory and intermediate courses are staffed to a significant extent by adjunct faculty. To transform their role from “instructor” to “grader” would, in most cases, transform a dignified and important low-paying job into mindless drudgery. One can stand to grade 40 papers, when one has designed the over-all experience in which that writing fits. Otherwise, one is just a teaching assistant to an absent professor.