However, when several members of the Florida Board of Education contact reporters with identical responses to requests for comment, you’ve got a copycat/sock-puppet problem more than you have a test-scoring or -performance problem.

• Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don’t Know (Worldcat entry)
• Robert Rotenberg, The Art and Craft of College Teaching (2nd edition) (Worldcat entry)
• Judith Boettcher & Rita-Marie Conrad, The Online Teaching Survival Guide (Worldcat entry)

Huston is the (Benjamin) Spock of college teaching books in attitude: “Relax. You’ll be okay.” It and Rotenberg were the two books I wish had been around when I had started out as a T.A. in the late 1980s. Tremendously philosophical? Not really, nor are Huston or Boettcher/Conrad that deep in a theoretical sense,¹ but if you have never taught a college class before, you need to know what to do Monday, as John Holt would put it, or you just need an orientation so you can get behind the wheel and start navigating. All of these books will help you do much more Monday morning than lecture like you remember being lectured to. For example, this coming Monday (the start of my frenetic six-week summer class), I’ll be drawing heavily from one of Huston’s first-day-of-term exercises.

Other books that Onion hasn’t mentioned?

• Thomas Angelo & K. Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques (Worldcat entry)
• Dannelle Stevens & Antonia Levi, Introduction to Rubrics (I think a new edition is coming in fall) (Worldcat entry)
• Kathleen King & Thomas Cox, ed., The Professor’s Guide to Taming Technology (Worldcat entry)

Angelo & Cross is a classic now, a recipe book for qualitative informal assessments, some of which are now widespread such as the one-minute essay at the start or end of class. Stevens & Levi is a clear description of how to develop rubrics of different sorts, including giving teachers options for how much control to retain or give up to students. King & Cox is an accessible discussion of various technologies and is as important, I think, for its andragogy orientation to college teachers’ learning as for the specific technologies in the book. (King is a colleague in my college.)

Notes

1. The exception is Huston’s references, which include the small but important literature on threshold concepts; I’d never seen that before, and the insight was worth the cost of the book in itself.

• That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken in Blackboard.
• That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken to build in Respondus and upload to Blackboard.
• I look like I’m in some 1960s movie, but it took about three minutes to record a short video greeting for the whole class that’s the first thing they see.
• Oh, I can spend half a minute to leave a ten-second video greeting for each student after they accept the email invitation into the course.
• Hmmn… okay, I can see a workaround to get what I want to happen (a sequence of assignments, so students have to complete a quiz on plagiarism before they can upload papers, but without having unnecessary girders/infrastructure showing).
• I think I’ll give them hints about Canvas and let the interested students show the others what they can do.
• On second thought, I may definitely want to show the “What if?” feature in Grades and talk about it explicitly.
• Anticipated grading workflow: paper copy of rubric, scribble notes and a two- or three-sentence script for each, then use Speedgrader on “mute assignment” to score papers and use script from paper rubric to record a video comment. (Students will get the paper copy, too.)

I will be very curious to see how much they pay attention to the online version of the outcomes and grading scales. On the one hand, it’s transparent where I have clear expectations.¹ On the other hand, students pay attention to such things differentially (sometimes judging that if instructions are very complicated, they’ll be discussed in class).

And now, I need to pay attention to the basics of running a compressed six-week course and ignore the temptation to play with Canvas some more…

Notes

1. On another assignment that’s unique to my section, students will construct the grading criteria/rubric within the categories I establish.

Dear Colleague,

Before the Administration imposes the draconian budget cuts it claims are unavoidable, it owes the faculty answers to these questions:

1. Why, instead of imposing a hiring freeze, is it continuing with extensive hiring? Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education lists over a hundred searches at UF, compared with a total of  nine  at all the other SUS institutions. About fifty of these have been posted since the first of April, long after the Administration knew the size of the cuts UF was facing. New postings appeared as recently as yesterday.

2. What are the commitments it has made that have reduced the reserves from the audited figure of $111m at the end of the last fiscal year to the $75m it now admits to? Why are these commitments more important than the programs it proposes to cut?

3. Why has it refused to agree to restore funding to the programs being cut, should the legislature prove true to its promise that the cuts are for only one year?

4. Why have some administrators received huge salary increases at a time when faculty are being asked to tighten their belts and staff are being fired from already-understaffed colleges and departments? The Provost’’s $50,000 raise alone could fund the salary and benefits of a staff member, or the entire ‘Operating Expenses’ budget of a good-sized department.

The Administration claims to believe in and to practice shared governance.  Yet it is making far-reaching decisions without explaining its reasons for them. To say only that spending reserves to avoid cutting is “not a viable option for UF”, as President Machen did recently, is not acceptable. Instead of asking the faculty which limb it prefers to have amputated, he should explain why the patient is in need of the knife at all.  And if the explanation is, as he and Provost Glover have often hinted, that the administration is using the budget cuts by the state as an opportunity to pursue its priorities at the expense of faculty and staff in existing programs, those priorities should, at the very least, be subject to public scrutiny and debate.

John Biro
President, UFF-UF

Ms. Holscher
Ms. Fried
Ms. Brown/Ms. Bollinger
Mr. Gere
Mr. Schnitger
Mr. Vassos
Ms. Mook
Ms. Thompson
Mr. Harvey
Mr. Knowton
Prof. Jefferson
Prof. Caplan
Prof. Stuard
Prof. Lane
Prof. Spielman
Prof. Weinstein
Prof. Hamilton
Prof. Davidson
Prof. Pine
Prof. Roelofs
Prof. Park
Prof. Katz
Prof. Licht
Prof. Engs
Prof. Fine
Prof. Hunt
Prof. Preston
Prof. Berry
Prof. Brooks Higgenbotham
Prof. Borges
Prof. Lees
Prof. Watson
Prof. Menken

Disruptiness heaven? Not quite: It is not entirely clear what MOOCs are good or bad for. Many observers have seen what appears to be a novelty effect with the first MOOCs from high-status institutions: often, it’s the professionals who know an area who are most visible in a MOOC, not the novices–professionals who may be “taking” the course as much from curiosity as a desire to learn additional material. Other observers have noted the typical problem with the MOOC as correspondence course: it rewards the effective autodidact rather than making effective autodidacts. Even with all the bells and whistles of machine-learning assessment, you have to be motivated without deadlines or peer pressure to finish the next problem set on your own. Yesterday and today, Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter Jeff Selingo has been providing a reality-check on Ooh-da-city’s Udacity’s utopian dreams (as well as the dreams of other MOOC advocates), and the structure of attending class and being pushed to develop discipline are key themes for the students Selingo interviewed. And I fully expect the bulk of MOOCs to attract not-so-M numbers: I believe Margaret Soltan’s poetry course on Udemy has all of 400-500 “enrollees” — which is far more than can take her George Washington University courses in a semester, but not the 100,000+ enrollments that the MOOC model promises.

Yet I would be careful in separating the obvious hype from the fact that experimentation with MOOCs is going to lead to a great deal of information on what works well in this format, what is possible but tricky, and what is truly horrible. Better yet, this experimentation is happening when all the guinea pigs participants are giving up is their time and energy, not thousands of dollars. Audrey Watters may have quit Udacity’s computer science course halfway through, but she didn’t go $30,000 into debt for that experience.

My best guess is that the MOOC model will work well in three cases:

• Courses that become a cultural experience, such as Jim Groom’s Digital Storytelling 106 (or DS106 as taken over by students). These will be idiosyncratic, fairly rare, and quite wonderful if DS106 is any indication of the possibility.
• Technical/technique-oriented courses where there are sufficient enrollments to drive some interesting experiments in online education (i.e., random controlled experiments in tweaking an online course). Computer science and programming are early courses in MOOC systems not only because the developers are … er, in programming but also because you can create auto-graders for code problems more easily than for, say, poetry analysis. Imagine the introductory lecture class on steroids, and you’re fairly close.
• Courses that never make the M (massive) in MOOC but provide presentation material that is interesting and valuable in its own right, as in Margaret Soltan’s lectures for her poetry class. In this last category, MOOCs will be just another source of lecture material, alongside Youtube and iTunes U.

There is also the likelihood of some real dogs in the world of MOOC, probably the majority of courses. That’s life with experimentation. And it leaves plenty of room for standard face-to-face classes. It will be very interesting to watch the development…

As historians of education such as Michael Katz have noted, one of the consequences of the common-school movement in the 19th century was to create and consolidate a common definition of “public school.” In the early 19th century, there was no direct state support for local village (“district”) schools, with tuition (“rates”) generally paid by parents to support school sessions.¹ In cities, the “public” schools in the sense of universal access were pauper or charity schools, which many poor parents avoided because of the stigma.

By the late 19th century, Northern states were moving towards limiting or prohibiting tuition (public support), putting schools in the hands of elected bodies (public control), with broad if not universal admission (public access). In addition, the history of conflict between the becoming-public schools and the Catholic hierarchy led to a growing divide between the schools with these three meanings of “public” and what has become known as the private sector.² Finally, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were several developments that led to teachers’ being considered in a new category, “public employees,” along with state and federal civil servants, municipal employees, and so forth, and in the post-WW2 period, public employees became a legally interesting category because private-employee labor law excluded them from the Wagner Act. Today, we can add “publicly accountable” for various meanings of accountability.

I have long held the view that the growth of charter schools and the experiments with vouchers have changed the landscape of schooling in part because they chipped away at the multi-level meaning of “public” that had mostly consolidated by the end of the 19th century. Analyzing the issues separately today makes sense.

Notes

1. There were local taxes that supported schools, but this was a local decision in the early federal years, and public funds were and remained stingy.
2. That division has not been absolute, as I argued ten years ago in an article about the history of special education.

Notes

1. Reminder: This is my opinion as an individual faculty member and does not necessarily represent the views of my department colleagues or my college or university as a whole. My judgment here is reasonably consistent with the views of the UFF chapter at UF and UFF staff and elected leadership at the state level.

Here are some of the fundamental limits on holding higher education institutions “accountable” in the way politicians have imposed test-based accountability on K-12:

• Because college students take different programs, assessing progress in those individual programs in a rigorously comparative way is impractical for all but the largest majors (psychology, business, maybe a few others).
• If there are common elements of what we expect students to learn in college, the options for assessing that knowledge or set of skills is in its infancy, at best.
• Many of the public and private goals for college are either noncognitive or otherwise difficult to assess.²
• Students progress through college at very different speeds and often enroll in or take courses at two or more institutions in their undergraduate years.³
• Not only do colleges and universities have different levels of resources, but they frequently have different missions in terms of serving student populations.⁴
• The common rhetoric that college is essential for individual economic advancement, along with cost-shifting from public funds to students and families, implies that (because they will be receiving the primary benefits of college) students are responsible for their own costs and effort.
• Corollary of the last point: as college is seen as a private rather than a public good, students and families make choices based on their perceived desires, which may be far from specific cognitive outcomes.

The way that regional accreditation agencies have responded to the accountability discourse has not helped much. In the South, SACS members must select program goals, identify objectives measures for those goals, report on the measures, and “close the loop” by discussing program improvement. It is a classic iterative program cycle, perfectly rational and far too unlikely to do much beyond occupy people’s time. It’s not because of rubrics. SACS does not require the creation of rubrics to evaluate the fuzzy and complex world of advanced student work (yes, SACS wants assessments for doctoral programs).⁵

The problem is the poor fit between a very generic process and the organization, work patterns, and passions of individual disciplines. At almost any level, the process can turn into paper-pushing for any of several reasons, and then the whole point is lost. Three degree programs in my department have national accreditation/approvals specific to the programs, and the specificity in those reports are orders of magnitude above what SACS expects. There is something at least mildly disorienting about the generic questions when your mind is at the level of the very specific. No one has yet phrased the closing-the-loop report as the program equivalent of an elevator pitch, but maybe it belongs there (and the forms need to reflect that).

At its root, even if we could get programs to think about SACS assessment as an elevator pitch, the problem is that the SACS-assessment elevator pitch is largely irrelevant to prospective students and the real choices made about colleges: “In the last year, we know that well over 80% of students competently analyzed primary sources in a 3-page paper assignment.” You know that no one chose a college based on information like this. It just doesn’t happen. What got me excited about majoring in history at Haverford was walking into Special Collections and thinking about working with archival documents, talking with history majors who had been or were currently working with archival materials. What sells Evergreen State College to many prospective students is listening to current students talking about the interdisciplinary programs they are in and the work they have been doing. What gets some potential students excited about attending Reed College is being walked into the tower of the library with hundreds of student theses and being invited to take any off the shelf and read through it. What gets some potential students excited about attending George Washington University is being walked through the business school and imagining oneself in a small seminar analyzing current business cases. And, yes, what sells many potential students about Ohio State University is the thought of painting one’s face and getting smashed on Saturday afternoons in the fall. What sells individual colleges and programs is the dopamine response that comes from students’ and parents’ internal thoughts of, “I could imagine [my child] studying here and being happy, and I like the idea.” Sometimes it’s a little less ambitious: “I could imagine [my child] completing a degree here without going crazy or $100K into debt, and I need that.” No one has ever chosen to attend a particular college or university because of SACS assessment data. Even if admissions offices do not see their job as making dopamine receptors light up on campus tours, they know their job is to encourage prospective students and their families to fall in love with a college or university. That is why parents generally do not ask, “How much do students here learn? How do you know?” (Brooks’ suggested questions), because “learn” is less concrete than individual subjects and less of a draw than “fall in love with their major.”

The hidden bet of the Lumina Foundation and the Tuning projects is that one could align general statements of academic goals with the key passions of a discipline. Oh, I know that all of the project documents refer to student learning outcomes and discipline-based expectations, and while I have some concerns about the national history Tuning project, creating a list of objectives tied to disciplinary conventions is doable in subjects such as history and physics. But while a better-grounded set of program goals is a good thing for many reasons, assessing progress towards those goals omits many reasons why students love or hate specific subjects. How could an assessment of college be complete without the passion we hope students will have?⁶

Notes

1. If you disliked Brooks, you would positively hate John Stossel. Probably do, in fact.
2. Also true for K-12 schools.
3. A less intense equivalent is true for K-12 schools.
4. This is much more intense than in K-12: if there is anything USNWR rankings have taught us, it is the perverse incentives of rewarding an elite mission with even more prestige.
5. Rubrics will often serve the purpose, at least for paper compliance. But that’s not what anyone really wants.
6. No, no solutions proposed… yet.

Generally, the way one addresses personnel issues affects far more than the single employee involved. That is why process matters a great deal when someone is being investigated, sanctioned, or let go — loads of colleagues are going to see how something happened, including colleagues who don’t know the full story. If someone is a raging jackass, it is possible that nothing you do in the process is going to be seen as inappropriate, but there is often quite a bit of sympathy even for colleagues who are known to have serious problems on the job. It’s part of human nature, and I’d much rather have people be sympathetic with colleagues than not.

So one does not pillory rank-and-file employees in public, not even John Pike. One discourages gossip about employee discipline and terminations.¹ And one does not try to do an end-run around existing rules. From my experience as an elected union officer and as someone who has been in supervisory roles, I have yet to see a case where these basic principles did not apply.

I do not know if Friedersdorf is factually accurate in asserting that public reports cannot be used in internal police investigations in California. I doubt it, but it could be possible. But I know that you have to separate the policy issues from our horror at the behavior of UC Davis police. There are plenty of policies to discuss in connection with the pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters, but neither Conor Friedersdorf nor I know whether the protection of uniformed police employee records and investigation procedures is one of them.²

Notes

1. It’s important to do this without violating the right of people to talk about conditions at work. There are a few ways to finesse that, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
2. I have read the version of the California Police Officers Bill of Rights that Inside Higher Ed has on its server. I don’t see what Friedersdorf is claiming in it.