Jay A. Halfond: Wallflowers in the online-education revolution
By JAY A. HALFOND
BOSTON For the past decade, we have been mired in generalizations in debating online education. Broad, often anecdotal and generally unsubstantiated comparisons have been made about the virtual and physical classroom–often taking the worst of one in contrast to the best of the other. But the range of what falls under the rubric of online distance learning is now far too vast to support simple and sweeping generalizations.
Most education conducted online is not necessarily for students at a distance—but an option for traditional, on-campus students. These students are mixing and matching, opting in and out of various learning modalities — and, in effect, voting for variety in their choice of how and when to learn. Still other institutions have developed programs offered fully at a distance to a national and increasingly global audience—which poses far different challenges.
Some institutions encourage faculty to build homespun online courses on their own, with little or no support, and of dramatically variable quality. Others provide sophisticated assistance and tools that help develop educational products with what Hollywood would call high production values. Some institutions target older, post-traditional students, who have the maturity and motivation to participate in asynchronous learning.
As with online courses, in-person classes reveal remarkable disparity, and those who know something about both have great difficulty comparing the average of one with the average of the other. Reducing so much variation into a glib opinion can be tone-deaf to the rich nuances and diversity of what is taking place. The academic landscape is vast and complex—and this complexity is humbling for those trying to understand our era or forecast its future.
But this is what survey research attempts to measure and help us better understand. The 2013 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, jointly administered by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, is the second annual attempt to gauge academic opinion on technology and teaching. Often, faculty opinion is based on little direct experience or familiarity, or biased based on their own plunge into online learning. Regardless, the evolving subjective perceptions of e-learning are fascinating to see unfold. Even when experiences are anecdotal or uniformed, this survey shows how, in aggregate, educational technology is gradually becoming a fixture within academe. But not without its nagging controversies. We are in the midst of something between an evolution and a revolution — a modification of business-as-usual and a major transformation. These findings provide a snapshot of our changing times, which will likely look dated and even naive a few years from now.
Lack of familiarity breeds contempt
More than one-fifth of America’s faculty—regardless of rank, institution and first-hand experience—agrees that online education can produce learning outcomes comparable to the traditional classroom. While 21% of all faculty respondents agree or strongly agree that “Online courses can achieve student learning outcomes that are at least equivalent to those in-person courses,” this ranges from 17% of tenured faculty to 25% of part-time faculty and 59% of Technology Administrators. (I would predict lower results had the word “can” not appeared in this question.). All faculty, though, tend to think more highly of their own institution’s capability for quality online courses, with agreement growing to 26%. And those who themselves have taught online are twice as positive as those who only teach in-person. In short, the closer professors are to the actual experience, the most favorable they are. Faculty engaged early and often in online learning become the true believers—and enthusiasts for innovative teaching that seeps into all of their instruction. The key is to make the initial experience positive—by providing adequate support, reward, and respect for the time commitment this takes.
Context matters. The faculty surveyed are more prone to be positive for any one of a number of factors: if an online course is credit-bearing, part of a full degree or certificate program, or offered by an accredited not-for-profit institution, particularly those that offer both online and classroom-based courses and has a proven track record in technology-enhanced education. The institution’s halo establishes confidence in its course offerings, including those online. Online distance learning needs to be woven into the mainstream to seem credible.
The Inside Higher Ed survey substantiates the important role that accreditation plays as gatekeepers in distance learning, even if regional accreditors are just beginning to construct their capability to assess online quality. And those who have taught online value the institution’s track record more so (91%) than those without first-hand experience (79%). Faculty with online experience place a greater emphasis on that experience in determining institutional credibility. These professors perhaps appreciate the important collective element in introducing fully online programs—that it takes a village to deliver a quality distance-learning program. Quality distance-learning programs envelop faculty with the tangible resources to succeed. Institutions with reputations at stake will not leave faculty adrift to create quality online courses.
Drilling down to the components of the learning process, faculty generally believe that the online classroom is most effective at conveying content, but less so in addressing individual student needs (such as interaction in and out of class, especially in reaching students at risk).
Across this survey, tenured faculty emerge as those most leery of the quality of the online classroom. Is this because of their relatively older age? Their conservatism, cautiousness or protective concern for the institution’s reputation? Or simply their relative lack of first-hand familiarity with the online experience? Across this survey, those who have experienced online teaching are more likely to find it equal or superior to in-person teaching especially in conveying content, responding to individual students, grading and communicating to the class. The best way to convert faculty to the cause of online teaching is to have them participate, and ideally more than once. Engagement seems to correlate with support. If skepticism dissipates with experience, what will happen as more and more faculty engage in online teaching themselves?
Just a few years ago, we saw a knee-jerk negativity toward distance learning—both as pedagogy and as relevant to the academic mission. There was a casual association of online and for-profit education, and a tendency to hold upstart alternative means of course delivery to an even higher standard than the conventional classroom. Online was vilified and the traditional classroom glorified. The skeptical spotlight was on new modalities and rarely on the mixed success of prevailing modes of teaching.
But when experience conflicts with beliefs, cognitive dissonance sets in, and those beliefs are forced to adjust. And that is what has been occurring across academe—as professors alter their attitudes toward online education to match the evidence from their own teaching and among colleagues and institutions they respect. A surprising 29% of the faculty respond that they have taken at least one credit-bearing online course—and 49% of those who teach online indicate they had had also been a student in an online course. Fundamental assumptions and beliefs about teaching and learning are slowly being questioned, re-examined and debated. All students—both those who learn at their computer as well as those who attend courses on campuses—will benefit as a result.
Prejudice against the virtual classroom is evolving towards a more balanced view. Academic DNA inevitably generates a healthy skeptical perspective—but faculty minds are now opening up to new possibilities.
Tempered view toward MOOC-mania
America’s faculty, according to this Inside Higher Ed survey, are not swayed by MOOC hoopla. MOOCs are so remote to their world, involve only a tiny fraction of faculty at a still very small number of institutions, and, thus far, do not represent an enviable or desirable form of academic delivery. Only 14% of faculty respondents say MOOCs are offered on their campuses, and 17% say their institutions are planning to offer MOOCs. More than three-quarters of the respondents accuse the news media of overstating the value and importance of MOOCs, and only one-quarter believe MOOCs have great potential for positive impact. The fact that elite universities are offering some MOOCs has done little to improve online learning, according to all but 19% of the respondents. They are simply not persuaded that this is a development that matters much, or at least as much as pundits claim. Those who champion this revolution might very well be underestimating the counter-revolution it likely could generate.
Only 22% are inclined to believe MOOCs are creditworthy, and 67% fault the offering institution for not granting credit to its own students who enroll in MOOCs produced by their own faculty. Only 10% find MOOC completion rates acceptable. However, about half feel that MOOCs have some potential to address the high cost of higher education for students and their families. Only 13% say that MOOCs make them excited for the future of academia. Perhaps this is because any potential impact of MOOCs would be a double-edged sword. To address the challenges of tuition cost and student access, online education would need to become so scalable (with a much higher student-teacher ratio) that fundamental changes in teaching would occur. While adaptive learning, competency-based curricula and sophisticated analytics are very promising, faculty are likely to be concerned that any new structural model that addresses cost inevitably disrupts their roles, independence, satisfaction, and even job security—and likely to be questioning whether MOOCs, pedagogically, are a step forward or backward.
Those elite schools offering MOOCs have done so often outside their own internal and external processes. This skunk-works approach helped launch these efforts, but faculty believe they must now be drawn back in to justify the institution’s brand. Indeed, 81% of those surveyed believe that the accrediting bodies should be evaluating MOOCs, and 82% believe that these first need to be reviewed internally by the institution’s faculty.
Disrupting the advocates of disruption
Despite its spotlight, online teaching is still nascent. Almost three-quarters of all faculty have never taught online, and a surprising 30% of those say they have never been asked to. Robust distance-learning programs are still a minority activity across the vast array of American academe. From this survey, we learn that only 27% of the schools where these faculty teach even have degree programs offered at a distance, and only another 23% of these institutions provide random online courses. (This likely understates reality since faculty might not be aware of particular online efforts at their institution.
This also raises the definitional question of what constitutes an “online” course or program.) Thus, half of America’s institutions might not even be in the business of online education—yet. Though the prophets of disruption are either premature or perhaps sublimating their own hopes, they may yet prove correct as elearning evolves gradually over the decade ahead. But we should not underestimate the resilience and openness to managed change within America’s faculties. Professors may tinker with the technology and integrate it over time into being better teachers—but perhaps with a speed and subtlety that frustrates those calling for quick and comprehensive solutions.
Thus far, the evidence does not suggest that a significant portion of the student population—especially those in the traditional years of college—want to abandon the on-campus experience altogether in favor of distance learning. The excitement of our times is that students at each successive stage of their higher learning now have choices. Opting for newer modes or opportunities does not mean relinquishing traditional ones. The menu simply has grown.
We are still at an early phase — and the Cassandras will need to be a little more patient for patterns to emerge. Responsible academic leaders, observers and writers will need to temper their enthusiasm that online learning will be the panacea for all that ails academe. The overwhelming majority of America’s faculty have little first- or second-hand familiarity with online teaching.
Until they do, they are less likely to fully recognize its value and virtues. Online teaching is still a minority and marginal component of higher education—though rapidly seeping into the mainstream. As it does, we are likely to see its growing acceptance, along with a more discerning view of the benefits and rich diversity that digital technology provides in reaching and educating an ever-growing segment of the population. When that happens we are also likely to hear far fewer generalizations, even in opinion surveys. We could also see a renewed appreciation of the traditional classroom and residential campus.
Jay A. Halfond is former dean of Boston University’s Metropolitan College, on sabbatical before returning as a full-time faculty member at Boston University, and currently the UPCEA Innovation Fellow and Wiley Deltak Faculty Fellow. This originated on the news and opinion Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (www.nebhe.org), on whose editorial advisory board I served.
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Take it on faith
"Garden of Faith,'' by GABRIEL MARTINEZ (2013, archival inkjet, silkscreen, 24K gold leaf on paper), at Samson Gallery, Boston.
Adventures at the Andaz
By ROBERT WHITCOMB (This piece originated at www.cmg625.com).
NEW YORK
I wandered down to the Wired (magazine) Data/Life conference here on Nov. 5-6 on the suggestion of a Cambridge Management Group colleague. There was a lot of interesting stuff that can help people understand where health care, health-care economics and health-care technology are going. And, perhaps especially, where health-care capitalism is going; how fitting that the conference was held at the Andaz Hotel, on Wall Street.
There was remarkably little talk about Obamacare or even about Accountable Care Organizations.
Personal- and population-health data, behavior modification and neat new devices were in the spotlight, and the attendees saw them as considerably more important than Obamacare in the long run. The confab was sponsored by Poland Spring (healthy product, except that oil is used to make its water bottles), IBM (whose Watson computer, with its impressive analytics ability, seems to hold considerable promise for improving health care) and Withings, which makes self-monitoring health devices. Such self-monitoring was a big theme (and marketing play) of the conference.
The first major speaker, Rushika Fernandopulle, M.D., set the stage by noting that great challenges in improving the bad (for the Developed World) U.S. health-care system outcomes and the system’s bankrupting costs include boosting primary care and moving from focusing on acute care to chronic care of diseases, especially such lifestyle-related ones as diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. As later speakers made clear, new technology and better date are revolutionalizing, by rationalizing, such care already.
Then there was Dr. David Agus, a sort of rock-star (big on TV) cancer doctor and a pioneer in new technologies for personalized health care. The doctor, wearing blue jeans, said it was important to get back to the focus on being able “to die of old age’’ instead of highly preventable diseases. To do this, let’s make far more use of population-health data – think like a climatologist, looking at the earth from above. And let data be your skeptical guide. (Remember when margarine was said to be less bad for you than butter?) And look at the data associated with inactivity -- for instance, that sitting for five hours every day does as much danger to your health as smoking a pack and half a day, he told the crowd.
And, he said, such seemingly small things as going to bed and getting up, and having meals, at the same times of day can be very health-improving. There are real data about this.
Remember, he said, that 50 percent of our health problems are environmental. And read data showing how statins and a baby aspirin cut your risk of heart attack and cancer. (But a later speaker, Dr. David Newman, raised some questions about claims for the routine use of these substances.)
At the same time, Dr. Agus said, some stuff is over-rated or worse, such as taking supplemental doses of Vitamin D. He noted that America spends more on badly or untested supplements than it does on cancer research. Watch the data, with more and more of it available weekly!
While pressing for more data, and pointing to greater patient access to their own personal health data, he also raised the point that constantly watching these data can cause stress…. (Which another new device will monitor?) Which brings up an issue of the whole conference: We’re all supposed to be monitoring ourselves much of the time. Can that get out of control? Will it lead patients to drive doctors and nurses crazy?
It also occurred to me that much of what the conference speakers touted seemed to assume, wrongly, that virtually all Americans can be digital-saavy. In fact, many still don’t have computers and have no idea how to use the Internet. (Going digital is, however, a handy way to lay off more employees and jack up operating profits in the health-care sector and other industries.)
In any case, having much more peer-reviewed data transparency – for medical professionals and patients alike – will be key to improving America’s health outcomes, he suggested.
Then there was David Newman, M.D., of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and editor of the very interesting www.TheNNT.com – a data-based site focused on, among other things, on the need to be wary of such panaceas as statins (which, he noted, can give you diabetes). If one has already shown that he or she has heart disease statins can be helpful, but for those who don’t, it can do more harm than good, he said. (The present writer has “severe arterial disease’’ and recently had a triple bypass after many years of taking statins. He’d like more data himself!)
Dr. Newman lauded Affordable Care Act incentives to encourage more skeptical use of stents. He said they’re overprescribed (because lucrative). Indeed, many folks at the conference cited favorably the ACA’s interest in incentives that encourage cost controls that simultaneously improve outcomes. And a more personalized approach to individuals’ risk is needed. We must learn how to better customize treatment.
Beware, he said, of industry-tainted promotion of certain lucrative drugs and procedures.
All in all, he said “Health care has under-treated those without easy access to the system and over-treated those {affluent and/or with insurance} those with it.’’ And what he called “information asymmetry’’ (Iack of transparency) explains much of the medical and economic failures of America’s system.
Ronald DePinho, M.D., president of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, spoke of Anderson’s ambitious plan to sharply reduce some major cancers in the next decade through better use of data (such as using IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence) and public education (e.g., reducing sun exposure amongst children to reduce the likelihood of melanoma later). The idea is to be able to reduce the number of people who go to Anderson and instead be able to diagnose and treat from afar through better data use. Physicians and hospital officials should monitor the Anderson plan carefully. Anderson is, after all, the world’s biggest cancer center.
Martin Blazer, M.D., of New York University, for his part, spent most of his time talking about the beneficial uses of bacteria and the overuse of antibiotics, especially in early childhood. We must, he said, restore our internal “eco-system’’. And we must learn more about our “metabolic pathways.’’ Again, Big Data makes this easier.
Then there were the new medical systems being promoted by some businesspeople. Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos, talked up her company’s full-service, very patient-friendly laboratory services for drugstores, with only pin pricks needed to get enough blood for full analysis. Theranos has an agreement with Walgreen’s.
Sean Duffy, for his part, talked up Omada Health, which helps patients at risk of diabetes track their behavior through such things as coaching and digital tracking. And Mike Huang talked up Glow, with its mobile app used to predict a woman’s daily fertility cycle, thus, he says, making it easier for couple to conceive. There’s even a financial-assistance program for those who fail to conceive naturally after 10 months!
Life gets more and more intense.
My favorite was Neurotrack, which, as co-founder Elli Kaplan explained, is developing a cognitive test that can detect the earliest neurological effects of Alzheimer’s, thus allowing patients to act to delay its full onset.
Finally, there are devices, discussed in much detail at the conference, with the hope, of course, that venture capitalists there would bite. The conference reminded a little of a car dealership promoting its new models.
Consider David Icke’s company, MC10, which is developing new flexible electronic devices to be worn externally or internally to help diagnoses and therapy. An interesting one is a device to be worn on a football helmet to monitor concussion danger. Then there’s Jawbone, represented by its vice president for software, Jeremiah Robison, like most of the speakers young (and newly rich). It makes wearable devices and audio devices to, among other things, get people to take walks and go to bed to improve their health. (Orwell for president?)
In other words, we and medical professionals will be tracking ourselves every minute. Self-consciousness raised to new levels.
Several speakers suggested that it’s past time to even let the patients, of all people, know what their procedures will cost ahead of time – in the face of secrecy by many health-care institutions and insurance companies, which will fight such transparency all the way because its means they won’t make as much money. Speakers and attendees saw great promise in getting patients to start asking what medical stuff costs. Such questions will change the course of treatment.
The conference made it clear that more transparency was coming with better and better measurement of health-care outcomes. “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,’’ as David Icke of MC10 remarked to the conference.
With wearable health-monitoring devices, much more data and better ways to monitor and analyze it and heightened consumer participation through social media and other new tools, it’s clear that the revolution in health care – and health-care financing -- can only accelerate. It all almost makes the ACA seem inconsequential.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people might become billionaires based on what they learned at the Andaz conference. They’ll be selling stock up the street at the New York Stock Exchange.
