Friday, June 7, 2013

Using MOOC-like technologies in the new media classroom

MOOCs are a victim of the rhetoric peddled by their boosters. The far-fetched claim that MOOCs will eliminate higher education has prompted an enormous amount of backlash. This is unfortunate because the tension between MOOCs and contemporary college classrooms is a false dichotomy. 

This posting describes my experience with a web design course that used MOOC-like technologies and "badges" to nurture students in a process of self-directed learning.

Course Overview

At least once a year, I teach a course titled "Interactive Multimedia: Web Design." As with most courses offered in the Department of Communication, this class combines hands-on practice with a healthy dose of communication theory. Students are asked to read essays on a wide range of topics, including: the importance of programming literacy (Douglas Rushkoff), the importance of usability (Donald Norman and Steven Anderson), programming as cultural practice (Ellen Ullman), threats posed by the rapid acceleration of technology (Bill Joy, Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski), the rise of symbolic labor (Robert Reich), and maker culture (Cory Doctorow). 
Students can choose between badges in the
following categories: empowered users, graphic design,
entrepreneurship, industry analysis, programming, and
user experience. They can also propose their own badges.

Students are sometimes disappointed when they are asked to read essays about technology criticism, cultural studies, and metacognition in a web design class. "Can't we just learn CSS and HTML?" they ask. My stock answer is that the process of learning will not end after they graduate from Trinity. If we were to devote all of our time in the classroom to mastering the tools of web production, without any discussion of the broader context in which these technologies are situated, it would be an enormous disservice to the students. In the short run, they might be happy, but in the long run -- when CSS and HTML have evolved into something entirely unrecognizable -- they would realize that they squandered their tuition dollars on a short-lived set of concepts. 

It's cliched to point this out, but the rate of technological change is accelerating. It's not just that things are changing quickly; the rate of change is speeding up. How do we prepare our students to function in such a landscape? Two years ago, in an attempt to adapt to the changing landscape, I completely overhauled the web design course and folded in MOOC-like resources along with a badge component. 

Course Structure

During the first half of the semester, we cover basic HTML, cascading stylesheets, and basic JavaScript. All of the students are asked to create three miniature web sites -- each site slightly more complicated than the one that came before it. Along the way, we focus on theoretical concepts (e.g. interface design, typography, tools for usability engineering) that cut across specific programming skills. 

For example, the empowered user category
included badges about Flash Animation,
Garageband, Adobe Illustrator, the pesky
Pen Tool, Photoshop masks, UNIX, and
web server configuration. 
During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)

Each badge requires students to explore a topic on their own, using technical manuals and relevant on-line trainings from Lynda.Com. After working through the tutorials, students demonstrate their mastery of the concepts by applying the skills in their own work. Last, but not least, students earn the badge by documenting the experience in a blog posting that reflects on their own learning style, analyses the utility of the skill/tool mastered, and explains how these things came together in their creative work. It is not enough to simply work through the tutorial and create something with the tool. The students' critical self reflection is the most important part of the process. 


The semester culminates in student presentations during the final examination period. As with our Capstone course, the presentation component is important. Students are asked to dress up (business casual) and to deliver rehearsed presentations about the work they accomplished during the semester. During the final presentations, I quietly listen for the presence of two factors that help me assess whether or not the course was a success: 1) the confidence that students display in their own technical abilities and 2) an ability to reflect on how their own learning style intersected with their work on the badges. 
Badge deliverables invariably included a MOOC-like
tutorial (video or print-based) and a series of creative
deliverables. Students completed the circle by posting
a reflective blog essay that connected work to their
own learning style and overarching course themes. 

I'm not a neutral observer; we see what we want to see. However, by the end of the semester, most of the students seem genuinely excited about what they've accomplished, they seem confident about their ability to master unfamiliar material, and they are eager to tackle new technology-related topics on their own long after their time at Trinity has come to an end. 

Links to MOOCs

As they work on the badges, students dip into an educational ecosystem that includes many MOOC-like ingredients. The tutorial videos on Lynda.Com are, in essence, miniature courses that teach students how to master creative tools and programming languages. Though these resources don't mimic the flow of an academic semester, and though they don't have quizzes or tests, they have much in common with MOOCs. These are massive, online, self-paced courses. Since Trinity underwrites the subscription to Lynda.Com, these tutorials are also "open." 

As an instructor, this approach makes it possible for me to cover a wide range of topics while still using the traditional framework (discussions and class meetings) in a meaningful way that intersects with the badge work. Each student chooses a unique, personally meaningful path through the world of web design, but there are also shared, collective elements there are common to all students in the class. 

These badges are non transferable

So far, the badge approach seems to have worked, and I plan to continue this experiment in future versions of the course. Now that I have written the descriptions for 33 badges (no small task), it will be relatively easy to add and subtract badges as the landscape changes. 

However, based on this experience, I am deeply skeptical of those who argue that higher education should replace (or at least supplement) grades with a badge-like system that certifies the acquisition of certain skills. I have been particularly troubled by those who envision our education world as a universal MOOC with badges used to certify our accomplishments. 

It was hard enough for me, as a single instructor, to flesh out a workable badge framework within the context of this web course. Luckily, I was protected by academic freedom and the widely shared belief that instructors have the right to decide what happens in their own courses. 

If these badges were suddenly treated as transferable commodities -- if they started to show up on student transcripts as a way of certifying mastery of certain technical concepts -- it would be necessary for some sort of standards setting body to flesh out what constitutes sufficient accomplishment. Suddenly, an approach that I incorporated in the hopes of fueling student creativity and my own pedagogical experimentation would turn into something much less exciting. Before too long, the badge approach would become just another strategy for "teaching to the test." I have no interest in being part of such a world. 

As for those educators who argue that students need badges to certify their accomplishments, I would tell them the same thing that I tell my students: The proof is in the pudding. And the pudding is the student's portfolio.

Certifications, grades, and badges are extremely rough indicators of an individual's capabilities and accomplishments. More than once, I have been involved in hiring processes in which we offered programming jobs to candidates based on the alphabet soup of certifications at the bottom of their resume. More than once, those have turned out to be "Very Bad Hires." They looked good on paper, but were a disaster in the workplace. 

More than once, I have hired individuals based entirely on what I have seen in their creative and technical portfolios. Did they comment their code? Did they know how to write meaningful and humane error messages? Could they explain the rationale behind their creative work? These individuals lacked certifications, and I never saw their transcripts, but they were great employees and excellent colleagues. The proof was in their portfolios.

College is about much more than the classroom and the syllabus

"MOOCs might be a threat to certain universities, but they are not a threat to small liberal arts colleges such as Trinity University." 

During the past semester, the previous sentence (or a close approximation) has escaped my lips at least half a dozen times. This typically happens when confronted with dire predictions such as the following: 
  • "The storm is coming and half of the higher education institutions in the United States will be dead in the next 15 years." (Borsch, 2013) 
  • "In 50 years, he [Sebastian Thrun] says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education, and Udacity has a shot at being one of them." (Leckart, 2012)
  • "Most of college -- the expansive campuses and large lecture halls -- will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online." (Ferenstein, 2013) 
I'll be the first to admit that my reply is a defensive -- even reactionary -- response to predictions about the death of higher education. It emerges from my lizard brain, the fear-drenched part of my mind concerned solely with self-preservation, as an answer to predictions that I find deeply troubling.

I love being a teacher. Education is an avocation -- a calling -- that caught me entirely by surprise in my early 20s. After all, I was hardly the world's best student. I flunked multiple courses as a sophomore, and was forced to go on academic leave for a year. I never anticipated ending up at a place like Trinity. I never dreamed that so much of my identity would be wrapped up in my role as an educator. 

But it has. And this is why my immediate, reactionary response to the threat of MOOCs is very much concerned with my self-interest and with the continued sustainability of institutions such as Trinity. 

The fact that this is a reactionary response does not make my argument any less compelling. Even if MOOCs are wildly successful, I am confident that there is a place for institutions like Trinity in the educational landscape of the 21st Century. 

But once that's out of the way -- once my fearful lizard brain has been placated -- I can step back and look at the bigger picture. I can revisit my claim that "certain universities" might be threatened by MOOCs.
This is *not* the Trinity experience.
First, let's cut through the euphemisms. Spoken in hushed whispers, the phrase "certain universities" is an obvious reference to R1 institutions with tens of thousands of students. This contrast between places like Trinity and places like the University of Texas is a standard trope ripped directly from conversations with parents and prospective students during Trinity In Focus. They (the R1 schools) are big. We are small. They focus on research grants. We focus on low class sizes and intensive contact between teachers and students. They teach most of their classes with graduate assistants. We don't have graduate teaching assistants. They create specialists; we create generalists. You know the drill. 

This is our pitch, right? This is what we tell ourselves, and it's what we tell prospective students. And, it's true. There is a world of difference between a place like Trinity and a place like the University of Texas. I believe every word of the pitch. This doesn't mean that one approach is necessarily better than the other. But there is definitely a difference. 

But, does this difference mean that R1 universities are more vulnerable to the threat of MOOCs than places like Trinity? As far as rhetoric and salesmanship are concerned, the answer is "yes." The rise of MOOCs has come at an excellent time for expensive, small universities that privilege face-to-face interaction between teachers and students. MOOCs make it even easier for us to highlight our key differentiators. In rhetorical terms, MOOCs are a boon for us and they force admissions counselors at R1 schools to work a bit harder. 

In the long run, however, I do not think that R1 institutions are seriously threatened by MOOCs. For one thing, they can point to other differentiators -- things like D1 athletic events, amazing libraries (though Trinity's library is also quite amazing), nuclear reactors, access to cutting-edge research equipment, off-campus housing -- when making their case. But this is just part of the picture. 

R1 institutions are not seriously threatened by MOOCs for the same reason that Trinity is not seriously threatened by MOOCs: the college experience is about much more than what appears on the course syllabus. 

As an undergraduate, I attended UC Berkeley. A large, public institution, it was an excellent example of the things we love to criticize about R1 schools. Nearly half of my courses were taken in lecture halls with anywhere between 150 and 500 students. The few times that I attempted to meet with my professors, I encountered long lines of students who were waiting for just a few minutes of interaction with their professors. 

But this was only part of my experience. My education also included heart-to-heart conversations in dorm rooms in the middle of the night, it included the discovery of interesting things that could be accomplished with a lighter, a thumbtack, and a small juice glass, and it included amazing spaghetti dinners that my TA, Omid Mantashi, hosted for his favorite political theory students.

Barrington Hall was a cross between a dorm, an
art installation, and a post-apocalyptic refugee
camp. Created in 1935, it closed its doors in 1990.
My education included conversations with street people who lived in People's Park, it included late night runs to Top Dog, it included eerie and marvelous journeys through the graffiti-drenched corridors of Barrington Hall, and it included an accidental introduction to the Internet years before the global network was made available to the general public. My education included endless games of Hearts at Cafe Botega, punctuated by wild-eyed debates about the future. Would the Cold War ever end? Was a proper Marxist revolution imminent? Would we someday measure memory in Gigabytes? Could a Black man ever be elected president? Could a woman? (Spoilers: Yes. Definitely not. Oh yes. Yes! And, not yet, but soon.) 

In sitting down and attempting to convey even a handful of fragments from those years, I'm overwhelmed by the intensity and depth of those memories. So much of my education at this large, impersonal public university happened outside the classroom when I fed ideas from my classes back into my lived experience. I loved every minute of it. 

I'll be honest. When I imagined college as a teenager in 1985, academic considerations were  low on my list. The furnace of my expectations stoked by a healthy diet of pop culture, I dreamed of parties (Animal House), self-discovery and romance (The Graduate), sex (Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds I-III), and revolution (Woodstock, 1969, The Strawberry Statement). Yes, I knew that class sizes were huge. Yes, I knew that there were 35,000 students. But, as a hormonally-driven teenager, I actually *liked* those numbers. This meant 35,000 chances that I might finally get laid. 

Of course I didn't put that on my college application. 

My language might strike some as coarse, but I honestly don't think I was that much different at the age of 17 than today's prospective students. 

These are the sorts of things we rarely mention when discussing the future of higher education. College is about so many different things; academic accomplishment and classroom instruction are just pieces of the overall experience.

For me, the most important thing about college was the opportunity to spend four -- OK, five and a half -- years in an entirely new community composed largely of other young (or at least young-at-heart) people much like myself. My classes mattered, and I had some great professors and teaching assistants, but my education became most meaningful when the ideas and insights from the classroom were fed into the crazy, dynamic feedback loop of my lived experiences. Gradually, bit by bit, these interactions with other people helped me understand more about myself. It was exhilarating. It was heartbreaking. I failed miserably. I succeeded wildly. It was an adventure. 

Years later, from my vantage point as a middle-aged college professor, I get the sense that many of our students at Trinity are experiencing their own crazy versions of the college adventure. And I believe that the same thing is true for students at places like the University of Texas. 

MOOCs can be terrific educational tools, but they do not come close to offering the depth of intense experience and the unpredictable life lessons that emerge from the adventure we call college. 


Steve Borsch, 2013. "Why Higher Education is Dead," Connecting the Dots, May 30. 

Gregory Ferenstein, 2013. "How California's Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It," Tech Crunch, January 15.

Steven Leckart, 2012. "The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever," March 20.