The future of education may be more blended learning, but I'm still not convinced it should be

Long-time readers of this blog will recognise that I am a skeptic when it comes to online education, massive open online courses (MOOCs), as well as blended learning (for example see here or here). Back in 2016, I argued that MOOCs were approaching that 'trough of disillusionment' section of the hype cycle. The key issue for me isn't that online learning doesn't work for some students - it is that online learning works well for self-directed and highly engaged students, while actually making less self-directed students feel isolated, leading to disengagement with learning.

So, I was really interested to read this April article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Selingo on the future of college education:

As online learning extends its reach, though, it is starting to run into a major obstacle: There are undeniable advantages, as traditional colleges have long known, to learning in a shared physical space. Recognizing this, some online programs are gradually incorporating elements of the old-school, brick-and-mortar model—just as online retailers such as Bonobos and Warby Parker use relatively small physical outlets to spark sales on their websites and increase customer loyalty. Perhaps the future of higher education sits somewhere between the physical and the digital.

A recent move by the online-degree provider 2U exemplifies this hybrid strategy. The company partnered with WeWork, the co-working firm, to let 2U students enrolled in its programs at universities, such as Georgetown and USC, to use space at any WeWork location to take tests or meet with study groups. “Many of our students have young families,” said Chip Paucek, the CEO and co-founder of 2U. “They can’t pick up and move to a campus, yet often need the facilities of one.”...

As the economy continues to ask more and more of workers, it is unlikely that most campuses will be able to afford to expand their physical facilities to keep up with demand. At the same time, online degrees haven’t been able to gain the market share, or in some cases the legitimacy, that their proponents expected. Perhaps a blending of the physical and the digital is the way forward for both.

So, it seems that the limits of purely online learning are being reached, and (some) students are wanting something different. But reading Selingo's article, it still seems to me that it's the self-directed students that are arguing for something more than purely online learning. Again, those are the students who thrive in this model, but they are not necessarily the students that we should be focused on as teachers. And it we are trying to extend the reach of higher education to more non-traditional students, then a move to more blended learning is even more unconvincing to me. I'm still yet to see an online approach that incorporates a meaningful (and effective) way of engaging students below the median of the grade distribution, and keeping them engaged through to course completion.

Read more:

• The changing business model for MOOCs
• MOOCs and the changing role of teachers in higher education

Why sports stars are paid more than teachers

Last September, Don Boudreaux wrote this letter:

Ms. Montgomery:

I regret that you’re offended by my claim that “Only by thinking at the margin can we correctly understand why the wages of life-saving first-responders are lower than are the wages of NFL players and of Hollywood starlets and why this fact is a good thing for society.”  You allege that “Real people know it’s wrong and dangerous that men playing games get paid so much more than men and women who save lives and educate our children.”

I agree that most people are troubled that the likes of Tom Brady and Jennifer Lawrence earn far higher pay than does any firefighter or school teacher.  But this reality reflects not people’s correct understanding of a failing economy but people’s incorrect understanding of a successful economy.  It reflects also a failure of economists to better teach basic economics to the general public.  So let me ask: would you prefer to live in a world in which the number of people who can skillfully fight fires and teach children is large but the number of people who can skillfully play sports and act is very tiny, or in a world in which the number of people who can skillfully fight fires and teach children is very tiny but the number of people who can skillfully play sports and act is large?

Boudreaux's argument is that sports and movie stars are paid more than teachers or firefighters because there are fewer of them relative to the demand for their labour. In comparison, the higher labour supply of teachers and firefighters (compared with demand for them) leads to lower equilibrium wages. However, labour supply is only part of the story. The more important part is that the supply is low 'relative to the demand for their labour'. It isn't so much that there are few potential sports and movie stars (arguably there are many wannabe stars who are nearly as good), but that the demand for them is so high.

Why is demand for sports and movie stars so high? Because of 'superstar effects', which were first described by Sherwin Rosen in the 1980s (and which I have written about before). If a worker can satisfy the demand (for entertainment, in this case) from many consumers, they get paid a higher wage (a 'superstar' wage). Essentially, the worker is rewarded for generating very high revenues for their employer. Since movies or sports are watched (and paid for) by many consumers, this generates a lot of revenue for movie production companies and sports teams, who pass on some of these high revenues to their stars as higher wages. I'm sure that if teachers or firefighters could satisfy the demands of a much greater number of consumers (presumably students or victims of fire, respectively), then they could earn superstar wages as well.

Maybe in the future, teachers who teach on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will earn superstar wages? After all, "Massive" implies that they will be satisfying the demand from a lot of students. Of course, MOOCs would need to start making some money first (which is another topic I have written on before, see here and here).

[HT: Marginal Revolution, last September]

The changing business model for MOOCs

Yesterday I wrote a post about MOOCs and the changing role of teachers. Part of that post was a consideration of where MOOCs sat on the hype cycle. Then, soon after hitting the 'post' button, I read this Times Higher Education article, about Coursera changing its business model:

Coursera last week announced the release of dozens of new courses and course sequences, which it calls Specializations, in subjects ranging from career brand management to creative writing. But many of the new MOOCs came with a new barrier to enrollment. To sign up for Michigan State University’s How to Start Your Own Business, for example, budding entrepreneurs have to pay $79 up front for the first of five courses in the Specialization or prepay $474 for the entire program.

So, what was previously free is now becoming not so. Note that Udacity (another MOOC provider) moved to a pay model a few years ago as well. Of course, having a pay model will likely reduce the number of enrolments by students who fail to complete each course (but not entirely - many university students fail to complete courses despite much higher fees), but it also reduces the 'open' aspect of massive open online course (does that make them MOCs instead?). As might be expected, Coursera has been criticised for making MOOCs less accessible, particularly to those on low-incomes (including those in developing countries).

However, this change clearly demonstrates that the free online model wasn't sustainable. As noted in the article:

The education writer Audrey Watters called the shift “significant,” but also “inevitable.” In an email, she pointed out that Coursera has needed to develop a business model that satisfies its investors -- “although I’m not fully convinced that this move will be it,” she added.

Which suggests to me that MOOCs are approaching that 'trough of disillusionment' section of the hype cycle. The technology is failing on its initial promise, and producers are trying to find the right business model to fit. Up to now, MOOC providers have been essentially assuming that education was mostly about content provision (which MOOCs are great at). However, a substantial part of education is about signalling and credentials (I've written about signalling in education previously here), which relies on separating high-quality from low-quality students - since MOOCs are open-access (and free) and identity verification for assessments is difficult (but not impossible), MOOCs are less good at demonstrating a student's quality to employers. If employers don't recognise a MOOC certificate as signalling a high-quality employee, then it's hard to argue that it holds as much value to a student as a university qualification. In order to be a financially sustainable business though, this is a problem that MOOC providers are going to have to solve.

Read more:

• MOOCs and the changing role of teachers in higher education

MOOCs and the changing role of teachers in higher education

The research and advisory firm Gartner produces an annual 'Hype cycle for emerging technologies'. Here is the picture for 2015:

In the hype cycle, a new technology is expected to go through a series of five stages starting with the 'innovation trigger' where expectations grow rapidly, then a peak of inflated expectations (which are generally not met), followed by a trough of disillusionment (where interest wanes due to repeated failures of the technology), a slope of enlightenment where the true benefits of the technology start to become apparent (and are often different from those initially envisioned), and finally a plateau of productivity when the technology achieves mainstream adoption.

Notably absent from the hype cycle in the Gartner report is online education. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are one of the most endemic buzzwords in higher education at the moment. The idea that there are thousands of potential students willing to study online, at very low marginal cost, is appealing to university administrators. The reality, from what I have seen, is that only a very small proportion of MOOC students complete, and the costs of developing a high-production-value MOOC are very high. Serious questions should be raised about where on the hype cycle MOOCs lie. Are they about to crash down a trough of disillusionment, and would universities be better to wait until others have identified where the real value in online education lies, before investing heavily? And how should faculty react - should we be upskilling for the new online regime, or waiting until things are more settled?

On the latter question, late last year the Journal of Economic Perspectives had two interesting papers that present contrasting (and sometimes complementary) views on the state of online education (with a particular focus on economics, as your might expect). The first paper, by Michael McPherson (Spencer Foundation) and Lawrence Bacow (Harvard Kennedy School) paints what I consider to be a realistic picture of the pros and cons of online education. They actually present a variation on the discussion I have with my ECON110 class every year - that the incentives for universities to be involved in MOOCs are different for the top quality and for the low quality universities. They write:

We noted earlier that more-selective and prestigious colleges and universities make less use of fully online courses than other institutions do. What explains this pattern of adoption? A natural explanation is that more-selective institutions compete on the basis of personal service, prestige, and brand while less-selective places are offering something closer to a commodity product...

One natural conclusion here is for the education market to rapidly devolve into two tiers: (1) a 'top tier' that uses high-quality (and expensive) online (or hybrid/flipped classroom) instruction to differentiate themselves, and as a quality signal and marketing tool to students (and their parents); and (2) a 'bottom tier' that offers a commoditised education based on modules drawn primarily from the online offerings of the top tier, with online tutorial support that is automated and involves minimal human input, at the lowest cost possible.

What happens to the mid-range universities in this system, that can't compete on quality, and can't compete on low cost either? Will we see a hollowing out of educational institutions? These are important questions for universities in New Zealand, for instance.

McPherson and Bacow provide some hope. They note:

...for those who believe that brilliantly produced online courses taught by a handful of the very best faculty in the world will eliminate the demand for live versions of the same courses, we note the continuing vibrant and growing market for live concerts, theatrical productions, and sporting events. Cheap digital downloads of music have not eliminated the demand for live concerts, nor has the availability of live sports on TV (often with better viewing angles, instant replay, and simplified access to bathroom facilities) eliminated the demand for tickets to live sporting events.

Moreover, it is difficult (read: expensive) to integrate current events, locally-specific content, and interactive teaching into online lectures, so students who want this type of learning (which, from my experience, is vastly superior to alternatives) will seek out institutions that offer it. My feeling then is that economics faculty should be focusing on the value-add they provide in-class. If you are teaching straight from a textbook, using the pre-packaged textbook powerpoint presentations and the instructors manual questions, then you are first in line to be replaced by a MOOC. Maybe that's what you intend (it would allow more time to focus on research, after all), but it doesn't bode well for long-term job security. However, how far away is that future? As McPherson and Bacow note, there are a lot of thorny issues that remain unresolved, foremost of which are intellectual property issues.

In the second paper, Peter Navarro (UC Irvine) presents a much rosier picture of online higher education (from experience - Navarro has been teaching using a flipped classroom model for many years, and in MOOCs more recently). He also presents some good arguments for (particularly new) faculty to up-skill on online (or hybrid) delivery modes. He notes that:

...online education technologies will both substitute labor and complement labor. For example, while MOOCs may spell doom for some type of teaching like traditional lectures that cover the basics of a discipline, a shift to more hybrid courses might increase the demand for other types of teaching, like personalized in-class discussions of examples and applications. While the overall effect on labor demand is unclear, there certainly will be distributional consequences, with winners and losers among educators depending on their skills, willingness to adapt, and ability to innovate.

Again, a good argument for preparing an offering that is different from the standard textbook treatment of a topic. Of course, the relationship between teaching and job tenure assumes that high-quality teaching is valued by universities alongside high-quality research, which is by no means a given in the current funding environment. But that is an argument for another time.