Achievement Gaps, Teacher Gurus, and Massively Open OnLine Courses

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I'll keep this brief

Apparently someone has done a study of student achievement in so-called MOOCs, that is online courses offered in some schools.  They found that categories of students who do poorly in traditional classes do even worse if there is an online component to the course.

Interesting, eh?  I don't think everyone has yet got their prejudices lined up in this sometimes amazingly disgusting world in which we live!  What is going on here?

Well, higher education has long been the province of (rich,) smart white males.  But over the years, College has been opened up to women, minorities, Catholics, working class folks of all descriptions, and even immigrants, and each demographic slice looks at the newcomers with alarm: hey, what are they doing here?

Meanwhile, Colleges have been fighting to cope with the influx in different ways.  First of all, they raise their tuition rates, so that they can offer discounts to all those who cannot otherwise afford a College education.  Meanwhile, every institution has to offer more remedial courses for students who should never have graduated from high school.  Honestly, it is no longer the cream of society that finds itself in Higher Education; people who would have dropped out of school if they had lived in an earlier age now find College moderately hospitable.  This includes the less intellectually gifted members of very affluent families, who would normally be expected to wear a nice suit and stroll around the family business merely looking decorative.  Now they entertain aspirations to run for Governor, because it appears that College is a lot easier than anybody thought.

Unfortunately, this doesn't suit certain members of society.  The advantages of wealth that obtained admission for some people in a bygone era into very exclusive institutions of learning seem to be dissipating.  Anyone, it seems, can get into Yale, especially if they're a government protected minority.  (This must certainly lie behind some of the clamor over certain government programs, which have helped scum like Justice Sotomayor to rise to the Supreme Court.  What is she doing there, leaving some deserving old boy out of what should be this last bastion of Conservatism?  Harrumph.  But I think J. Sotomayor will probably turn out to be sufficiently conservative to satisfy some folks, and not conservative enough for others!)

Enter For Profit Colleges and Universities.  At last once again, wealth will have back its privileges.  Unfortunately, these places are not run for the benefit of affluent students.  They are run for the benefit of their administrations and stockholders.  So, like certain similar projects whose profitability partly depends on bilking the Government, you have to grab your profit and run, leaving some plodders holding the bag.  We're all waiting with great interest to see how these places will bounce back, now that everyone knows that they offer less than they advertise.

Now we have massively online courses.  It appears that they are being offered by different people for different reasons; some schools to increase their profile: what we do is so wonderful that we can offer it for free, and everyone will see how awesome we are!  In other cases, it is to make profits: we can offer courses to more people this way; the free online courses are just part of what we have to offer.  Yet others do it just because they feel that information and education should be free, and kids are just not getting what they should be getting.  It's a heady mix of idealism, ego, glamor and foolishness.

Education is not information.  In some disciplines it can be; once you know the vocabulary and some key pieces of information, you ought to be all set.  In other disciplines, education should be distilled experience.  Usually, that sort of distilled experience has to be delivered face to face, even if the amount of face time you get is limited.  Just throwing facts at the students does not amount to education.

But isn't it true that, in some distant future, you'd probably get everything over the wire?  Probably so.

But to get back to this inequity business.  Not everyone really wants non-traditional students to succeed.  I'm sometimes not sure that I want it, either.  To take it to the limit, do I want to have an appendectomy performed by someone who learned her art online?

There are two aspects to education: increasing the skills and the knowledge of the student.  But also: ranking students by ability.  Nobody realizes that they really want the second thing rather than the first.  Now MOOCs are exacerbating the difference in ranking between members of the student body.  Is this a good thing?  If you want everybody to succeed, this will bother you: MOOCs bring out differences in learning ability, which makes things worse from one point of view.  But I bet there are people out there who are rejoicing right now.  Yes!  Finally a way of making the duds hit the dirt!

I think I fall somewhere in the middle.  I do think stronger students should be sent in different directions than weaker students.  But doesn't this usurp the student's prerogatives about what to study?  On the the other hand, most schools reserve the right to admit only students who have certain prerequisites into certain courses.  I hate to be the one who has to manage that sorting.  I like to teach as if all my students are (from Gryffindor?  No, that's not it ...) have superior potential, but you just know some of them are (from, er ... Slytherin?  No...) not going to be able to handle the material, and will slow us down.

There are Teaching Gurus out there who say that everybody can learn anything.  I think that overstates the case enormously.  To accomplish that, the student has to be handed over to some specialist.  How these geniuses teach the material to underprepared (and undermotivated) students is to strip the curriculum down to bare essentials, and take a lot of time to cover those bare essentials (in a highly entertaining way).  But often, those eliminated nuisance topics are precisely the topics that hold students back further downstream.  In fact, a lot of the underpreparedness I see now could very well be the result of reckless curriculum streamlining before I get my hands on the students, in high school, or even further back.  (Some of my students had difficulty subtracting 360 from 510 without calculators.)

It is getting fashionable to say do not blame the high schools.  Just handle the problems when you get them.  The easy response is not to handle the problem at all, but just pass the buck along.  Sooner or later, though, poorly trained graduates reflect poorly on the institution, and we pay the price with fewer students, and students who are even worse prepared than before.  We also pay the price with graduates who cannot be well employed, and who are unable to contribute to the endowment of the school.

The exception, of course, is Business.  Being poorly prepared does not seem to be a handicap for Business; you just have to look good in a suit, and wear an air of confidence.  In many businesses, those who do the hiring are not very well able to tell a capable prospect from a mere mannequin.  Well, ... that's business, I guess.

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