Minds Online

Michelle D. Miller

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674967281
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

From wired campuses to smart classrooms to massive open online courses (MOOCs), digital technology is now firmly embedded in higher education. But the dizzying pace of innovation, combined with a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of new tools and programs, challenges educators to articulate how technology can best fit into the learning experience. Minds Online is a concise, nontechnical guide for academic leaders and instructors who seek to advance learning in this changing environment, through a sound scientific understanding of how the human brain assimilates knowledge.Drawing on the latest findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller explores how attention, memory, and higher thought processes such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. The techniques she describes promote retention of course material through frequent low?stakes testing and practice, and help prevent counterproductive cramming by encouraging better spacing of study. Online activities also help students become more adept with cognitive aids, such as analogies, that allow them to apply learning across situations and disciplines. Miller guides instructors through the process of creating a syllabus for a cognitively optimized, fully online course. She presents innovative ideas for how to use multimedia effectively, how to take advantage of learners' existing knowledge, and how to motivate students to do their best work and complete the course.For a generation born into the Internet age, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning.

Chapter 1

Is Online Learning Here to Stay?

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT how cognitive science can help us shape and refine the ways in which we use technology to promote learning. But before we take on those research-based strategies, let’s set the scene for why instructional technology is such a timely concern within higher education. “Chalk doesn’t cut it anymore” seems to be the prevailing attitude at many institutions today, and whether you agree or disagree with that sentiment, it’s clear that faculty are pressed to incorporate technology when developing their teaching philosophies and pedagogical strategies.

This chapter will explore the different trends, events, and forces for change that led to the explosion of interest in teaching and learning with technology. Notably, few of these factors directly relate to empirical research in how people think, remember, and learn, having more to do with shifts in the economics and organization of higher education. But unscientific or not, these trends provide the context for why we should be investing in the best designs possible for teaching with technology.

In a short space of time, technology in higher education has gone from a smattering of fully online distance-only programs and the self-created web resources of a few motivated individuals, to near ubiquity. Most students graduating from college in the present era will experience at least some part of their education via technology, whether as an enhancement to the traditional, face-to-face approach, fully online courses, or some mix of the two; 31 percent of students report taking at least one fully online class as part of their courseload.¹ Similarly, institutions increasingly expect that faculty will be willing and able to engage in technological approaches to pedagogy, including, at some schools, the expectation that faculty will participate in so-called “alternate delivery” formats.

At my institution, Northern Arizona University, all faculty position advertisements must include interest and/or experience in technology as a preferred qualification—and as a veteran of numerous faculty searches, I can tell you that it has a measurable impact on whose application rises to the top. This has been true at NAU for over a decade now; our relative isolation in the Four Corners region was one of several reasons we became “early adopters” of online teaching techniques. NAU is located in Flagstaff, Arizona, within Coconino County, the second-largest county within the continental United States; it is over two hours’ drive from the nearest large city (Phoenix). Tiny communities dot the largely rural geographic region surrounding Flagstaff, and their inhabitants depend on NAU’s distance education programs to meet their educational needs. NAU also enrolls a substantial proportion of Native American students, who come to NAU from Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, and other Native American nations in the region. These students often face long and treacherous commutes to our main campus, and thus we’ve had to get creative about different ways to deliver education remotely. Over the years, we’ve depended on, for example, “interactive instructional television,” dubbed “IITV,” a system that used special classrooms equipped with two-way video and audio feed to approximate the in-person classroom experience. Contemporary online learning management systems have largely supplanted things like IITV in our distance delivery efforts, but we still expect that our faculty will be willing to learn and use new technologies as they come along. Historically, this made us quite cutting-edge compared to most institutions, but we are less unusual with every passing year.

A striking example of technology trends in higher education was the explosion of interest in MOOCs (short for “massive open online course”). At its peak in 2012–2013, the MOOC craze dominated news coverage about higher education, generating hundreds of blog posts, articles, and conference presentations by authors scrambling to explain the significance of this new approach to delivering college-level coursework. There is no one defining form or technique that makes an online course a MOOC, but typically these courses involve (1) collections of online multimedia source material such as video lectures, (2) online assignments and tests, and (3) mechanisms for students to discuss course material and comment on each other’s work. Interaction with the course instructor is generally limited or absent, as by definition these courses are designed to accommodate thousands of students at once; any feedback that students do get is largely provided by auto-grading or by peers within the course.² For a time, MOOCs were at the forefront of media coverage about higher education, spurred by the creation in 2012 of Udacity.com, a for-profit online education company, and the entry of a number of high-profile institutions into partnerships with other for-profit online course companies such as Coursera. Udacity’s philosophy and approach sprang from the experiences of its founder, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford computer scientist who had experimented with putting coursework online and inviting anyone, worldwide, to join in working through it.

When Thrun addressed the Sloan International Conference on Online Learning in the fall of 2012, he presented the MOOC concept as a truly revolutionary way to engage millions of people worldwide in high-quality, low-cost educational experiences, helping kick off an explosion of interest among both traditional universities and for-profit online education companies.³ Some educational leaders cautioned that MOOCs were still largely experimental and lacking in truly innovative pedagogy; one pundit, former University of Massachusetts president Jack Wilson, even compared the typical MOOC style to the “writing hand” films that dominated educational technology in the 1970s.⁴ Numerous others pointed to the alarmingly low completion rates—usually in the single digits—of the vast majority of MOOCs, questioning whether these really deserved to be seen as effective at all. As the revered academic leader and researcher William Bowen put it, “As far as I am aware, right now there is no compelling evidence as to how well MOOCs can produce good learning outcomes for 18-to-22-year-olds of various backgrounds studying on mainline campuses—and this is an enormous gap in our knowledge” (p. 60).⁵

Despite the skepticism, institutions scrambled to jump onto what they perceived as a major trend. Harvard invested $30 million in MOOCs, despite significant faculty skepticism about the value of these online offerings; San Jose State University, similarly, pressured instructors to adopt MOOCs as part of their courses, only to provoke a very public pushback from a wide swath of their faculty.⁶

Other MOOC initiatives around the country—including those at American University, Amherst, and Duke—began to experience similar backlash, with institutions announcing that they would pull back from or suspend efforts to blend MOOC content into the curriculum.⁷ The MOOC craze-and-crash dynamic even made it into the legislative realm: In California, State Senator Darrell Steinberg introduced a bill that would have drastically expanded acceptance of MOOCs for credit within the state university system. However, just a short time after creating it, Steinberg put the bill on hold pending review of other developments in public university online courses.⁸ For-profit MOOCs suffered a number of further PR setbacks at around the same time. Udacity opted to cancel a high-visibility mathematics course with 20,000 participating students due to poor quality, and similarly, Coursera shut down a 40,000-student course because of catastrophic technical and design failures.⁹

Where do MOOCs currently stand as a force for reenvisioning the role of technology in higher education? In a widely cited 2013 article, professor Richard Wellen argued that MOOCs should be considered a bona fide “disruptive” force, despite their decidedly poor completion rates and often-weak pedagogy.¹⁰ In Wellen’s view, MOOCs are important as an economic force, not an educational one, given that they represent a form of “unbundling” the components of a university education. It’s clear that in other industries (commercial music comes to mind), unbundling has been profoundly transformative, making some facets obsolete and fundamentally changing how consumers select and purchase the product. Wellen predicts that in higher education, MOOCs could push middle- and lower-tier institutions to focus solely on teaching, cutting out other activities like research that are, in a sense, subsidized by the relatively convenient and low-cost degrees the institutions provide to students.

Market forces could also accentuate a growing “star system” for faculty, expanding compensation and opportunity for the few who provide top-level content for MOOCs while relegating other faculty to low-compensation, low-autonomy positions. On the one hand, “consumers” of education might financially benefit from the ability to purchase unbundled academic “commodities” such as course content, while opting out of other pricey features of university life such as athletics, residence life, or student support services. On the other hand, such a MOOC-ified future would likely feature homogenized course content and fewer contributions of universities to the wider social good, among other possible negative impacts. Although Wellen’s dystopian vision is arguably somewhat extreme, it’s still plausible enough to suggest that we academics need to keep an eye on MOOCs and their potential to profoundly change our professional lives, entirely apart from the question of whether MOOCs are a good way to learn.

But this picture of MOOCs as a tidal wave of disruption gets more complicated when you consider the results of a recent large-scale survey conducted by the Babson Research Group, a major player in the national assessment of online teaching and learning.¹¹ According to lead researcher Jeff Seaman, the study sample of over 2,500 chief academic officers at institutions of higher education in the United States revealed deep ambivalence about MOOCs. Most institutions don’t currently offer MOOCs, and about half called themselves “undecided” as to whether they would offer any in the future. Substantial proportions of respondents cited concerns about both the sustainability of MOOCs—i.e., whether they would take up too many resources to build and run—and their quality. The survey also contradicted the often-related vision of globally connected students engaged in collaborative learning across cultures and geography, with most respondents stating that most of their MOOC students hailed from the same geographic regions as their face-to-face students.

As for the potential value of MOOCs, opinions were eye-opening: zero respondents stated that “generating income” was the primary benefit, but many—over 50 percent—cited the ability to learn more about how to build bigger, more effective forms of “traditional” online courses. In other words, MOOCs could be useful testing grounds for new instructional techniques. And although institutions don’t see MOOCs as income providers, they do see them as good public relations—a way to draw potential students into the standard credit-bearing courses that do add to the bottom line. This is especially tempting for smaller, more obscure institutions, for whom MOOCs can essentially serve as a relatively low-cost form of advertising.

There’s one other view of the value of MOOCs—particularly relevant to the purpose of this book—that’s currently percolating to the top of the discussion. The content of MOOCs is often highly modular, meaning that it can be pieced out topic by topic; this modular quality, coupled with open access, can make them ideal building blocks to complement rather than replace traditional courses. Coursera CEO Daphne Koller is one advocate of this view, envisioning a future in which MOOCs are an essential part of “blended learning” approaches, where students master basic concepts online, then spend face-to-face class time practicing, discussing, and actively engaging with the material.¹² In this formulation, MOOCs aren’t a replacement for more personalized instruction, but a form of course content selected by the instructor to accomplish specific aims of the class. The president of the not-for-profit learning venture EdX, Anant Agarwal, points out that this blended approach has already taken off at his home institution, MIT, where half of all students currently use EdX materials in a blended-learning fashion.¹³

Time will tell whether MOOCs fundamentally transform education as we know it, disappear like an overnight fad gone stale, or something in between. But if nothing else, MOOCs were a major wake-up call for faculty and administrators who hadn’t yet fully engaged with technology and teaching. Perhaps that is one reason why MOOC-mania took off the way it did, reflecting not people’s reaction to MOOCs per se, but rather to educational technology in general. And although it’s possible that MOOCs themselves may have peaked and crashed, educational technology decidedly has not.

So with MOOCs as a case in point, what is driving the trend toward technology in higher education? Some of the major forces pushing it forward are as follows.

Factor 1: Economics

This factor is often cited cynically by faculty and enthusiastically by administrators, particularly in financially squeezed public institutions. Faculty commentators have raised alarms over what they see as the drive to replace highly skilled, tenure-track faculty with less-skilled, non-tenure-track instructors whose job it is to merely supervise the delivery of prefabricated online content.¹⁴

Judging from the business model of the University of Phoenix and similar for-profit institutions, there is some basis for this claim. While the specific arrangements vary, these institutions tend to favor highly standardized content and little leeway for individual instructors. Technological delivery of material facilitates this standardized approach, but isn’t one and the same with it; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Is Online Learning Here to Stay?
• Chapter 2: Online Learning: Does It Work?
• Chapter 3: The Psychology of Computing
• Chapter 4: Attention
• Chapter 5: Memory
• Chapter 6: Thinking
• Chapter 7: Incorporating Multimedia Effectively
• Chapter 8: Motivating Students
• Chapter 9: Putting It All Together
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index