Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.

Educational Video on Educational Videos

Derek Muller "completed a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney in 2008. His thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education, was the subject of his TEDxSydney talk in 2012..."

And the talk (6 minutes) is here:
The principal result seems to be that, at least for his subject (simple physics, e.g. of a tossed basketball) and his subjects (introductory university physics students), it can worse than useless to provide a simple, clear, comprehensible demo of what you're trying to explain, and then test them on it. Their answers will not improve, but their confidence in those answers will rise. Why? They will actually remember statements that definitely weren't in the short video they just saw, statements that accord with their existing misconceptions, and those misconceptions will be reinforced...

Huh? Does that even make sense? Sure: they report low engagement on the clear, comprehensible demo... They're not really listening as long as they think they understand the events (and annotations) in the video, so it just reinforces what they think they already know.

How to fix this? Muller's answer: cover the misconceptions first, and use dialogue. Yes, you will annoy people who think you're actively trying to make them feel dumb, but if you don't cover the misconceptions they will not engage.

Ok, it's interesting, and it could be crucial for almost all kinds of education of almost all kinds of students, too. Start With The Misconceptions. Have A Dialogue Character Representing the Teachably Wrong Point of View. Yeah. But for some reason I'm thinking of a dialogue that started with the misconceptions, started with a character named Simplicio, Galileo Galilei's

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII, thus alienating not only the Pope but also the Jesuits...

It is not always wise to clarify misconceptions, at least not from the perspective of wishing to avoid arrest.

Or then again, maybe it's worth it. 

Civics Games

I've written a bit about educational games previously; now I see retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor getting into the act, at Citizenship goes digital: Online gaming effective in teaching civics -- ScienceDaily

Can playing online video games help students learn civics education? According to Baylor University researchers, the answer is yes. Brooke Blevins, Ph.D., assistant professor of curriculum and instruction and Karon LeCompte, Ph.D., assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in Baylor's School of Education studied the effectiveness of iCivics, a free online website founded by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that teaches civics concepts using 19 educational games.

The study, published in The Journal of Social Studies Research, shows iCivics is an effective tool for teaching civics concepts to primary and middle school students.

As part of the study, more than 250 students in two Waco-area school districts played iCivics games for six weeks, twice a week for 30 minutes. Students took pre-tests and post-tests and completed journal entries on their experience. ... Statistically, most of the grades showed improvement in their civics education, but with younger students exhibiting the most gains.

"Students in grades 5 and 8 showed improvement in test scores with eight-grade students scoring nearly five points higher on both," Blevins said. "Students in fourth grade showed a marked improvement of nearly 10 points, the highest out of all of the grades."

In the long run, there will be a large part of each kid's education which is provided this way, and it will be very cheap as well as self-motivating. I do wonder how large the part will be.

Math Games Research

Some evidence that computer games do better at teaching math than traditional exercises, reported by Science Daily at Math game more effective than paper exercises

To measure the effectiveness of Monkey Tales, a study was carried out with 88 second grade pupils divided into three groups. One group was asked to play the game for a period of three weeks while the second group had to solve similar math exercises on paper and a third group received no assignment. ...
Broadly speaking, it can be concluded that the game showed better results both in terms of motivation and learning efficiency. Further research should reveal how these additional learning outcomes are achieved by the game. Possible reasons are the continuous feedback players receive during gameplay, that the game is more motivating, that it adjusts the difficulty level to the player or -- more generally -- that it trains additional cognitive skills such as working memory and attention.
Serious or educational games are becoming increasingly important. Market research company iDate estimates that the global turnover was €2.3 billion in 2012 and expects it to rise to €6.6 billion in 2015. A first important sector in which serious games are being used, is defence. The U.S. Army, for example, uses games to attract recruits and to teach various skills, from tactical combat training to ways of communicating with local people. Serious games are also increasingly used in companies and organizations to train staff....

The game studied here was Monkey Tales Games - Educational math games. Progress. Or regress, of course. Probably one of those.

New York is #1

We're the top: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Public Schools: Unequal Spending Across States

For the U.S. as a whole, average public school K-12 current spending per student was $10,560 in 2011, with 61% of that going to "instruction," and 35% going to "support services."
But four jurisdictions--New York, Wyoming, Alaska, and the District of Columbia--spend more than $16,000 per K-12 student, with New York leading the way at $19,076 per student. Conversely, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma,and Mississippi spend less than $8,000 per student, with Utah having the lowest tally at $6,212 per student. That is, New York spends on average three times as much per K-12 student as does Utah.

Of course, the money is well-spent.
Or then again, maybe not.

Education Funding: the Null Hypothesis

It's hard to believe that more money doesn't produce better results. It's hard to believe the graphs that accompany Evaluating the Null Hypothesis in Education | askblog

there is no clear correlation between funding and school average performance; for a given level of funding, there is significant variation in performance the calculated correlation coefficient between the two variables was less than 0.1. In our view, this suggests that the level of funding, per se, is almost irrelevant as a predictor of performance.

Not absolutely irrelevant; only almost.
Or then again, maybe not.

Apprenticeship Models

I tend to focus here on geeky approaches to education, but they're not for everybody. Maybe not for most. The "Conversable Economist" writes on Taking Apprenticeships Seriously that

"At ages 15 to 16, in Switzerland, about two-thirds of every cohort enter apprenticeships.... Apprentices in fields from health care to hairdressing to engineering attend vocational school at least one day a week for general education and theoretical grounding for roughly three years. On other days, they apprentice under the supervision of a seasoned employee. ...
In Germany, about 25 percent of students go to university, and apprenticeships employ another 53 percent. At 16, they sign on for a three-year stint in one of 350 occupations. ...
Other western European countries use variations of the Swiss and German model. ... The United States is an outlier: By international standards and official definitions, it has virtually no vocational education and training program."

Is there an effect on youth unemployment, and thus on career-starts? Well, our youth unemployment is much higher. This might be part of why.

Or then again, maybe not.

Granny Cloud

Sugata Mitra is mainly known for his kids'-self-education TED talks in 2007: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves and 2010: The child-driven education. He continues, with the 2013 TED Prize, to develop A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

Mitra recruited an army of retired teachers, all women, whom he dubbed the “granny cloud.” The grannies connected to Mitra’s schools via Skype, and when the kids were assembled in groups of four to six they asked questions like “Can anything be less than zero?” “Will robots be conscious one day?” and “How do my eyes know to cry when I am sad?”
Then they sat back and let the kids do the learning, injecting themselves only to offer the kind of encouragement that only grannies can. “If there is a child in trouble we beam in a Gran,” Mitra jokes. What Mitra saw was that the Granny cloud kids’ English improved, their science scores soared. By most measures they were learning more and more quickly, and doing it mostly on their own. “It just requires broadband, collaboration and encouragement,” Mitra says.
... What Mitra proposes is the dismantling of an educational machine created by the British over centuries of Empire building.... “I am not saying its bad, it’s brilliantly constructed, but it’s not needed.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud. For now Mitra envisions these cloud schools will function as a supplement...

If Mitra's vision (in many countries) seems to be working, it's likely that we'll see volunteer+paid organizations of grannies, grandpas, and others, trying to make small schools work better by a mix of "child-driven" online and offline experience. It might be effective, too.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exploration (v.?) Explanation

Khan-Academy style videos are sometimes criticized because they are lecture-based explanations rather than student-centered explorations; of course they're student controlled, but that sounds bad and contrary to Good Modern Pedagogy. The Khan Academy lead developer answers questions on Slashdot: Interviews: Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

The fundamental belief of Khan Academy is that students should engage with content they need on-demand, at their own pace. We agree that any curriculum that forces all students in a class to follow the same, preordained "watch this video, do this exercise, watch this other video" path isn't using technology in a meaningful way. ...
Our classrooms see varying implementations, but the best of them try hard to help students move at their own pace. Some students might never need to listen to Sal say a word. They can master content by experimenting on their own. Absolutely. Fine. By. Us.
Khan Academy exists to give students the freedom to engage with the content they need while giving teachers immediate feedback about who's working on what and where they need help. We think we can help teachers by making this acquisition of core skills a more personalized, efficient process.
In doing so, we hope to move teachers _up_ the value chain so they can focus on exploration-based learning and targeted coaching with the rest of their class time.
I personally think that'd be a significant advance in learning. And FWIW, we consider anybody who fights for exploration-based learning to be an ally of Khan Academy.

That certainly fits the One World Classroom vision...and it really Just Might Work.


Or then again, maybe not.

Incentives v. Grading

Academic grading is usually not questioned; it's the way we do things. When it is questioned, there are two common answers: grades as credentials for future work, and grades as incentives. A psychology professor (best known for self-experimentation) thinks about the way we depend on others in our groups to develop whatever expertise we lack, and asks What Happens If I Stop Grading?

My theory of human evolution says we changed in many ways to facilitate trading. ... The more diverse the expertise within a group, the more members of the group can benefit from trade. Following this logic, mechanisms evolved to increase diversity of expertise among people living in the same place with the same genes. ... The theory implies that there is something inside every student that pushes them toward expertise — they want to learn — but they are being pushed in many different directions — what they want to learn varies greatly. If you accommodate the latter (diversity in what students want to learn), you can take advantage of the former (an inner drive to learn).
... Human nature: People who are the same want to be different. Formal education: People who are different should be the same. At Berkeley, most professors appeared to have little idea of the diversity of their students. (At least I didn’t, until I gave assignments that revealed it.) Almost all classes treated all students in a class the same: same lectures, same assignments, same tests, same grading scheme. ... The more freedom I gave them, the more they learned. ...
The more freedom I gave my students, the more difficult it became to grade them.... I had an idea: no grading. Maybe other sources of motivation, would be enough.
... The students’s work was the highest quality I have ever seen...
I think several things caused students to learn a lot:

• 1. The material was interesting.
• 2. To some extent — far more than in other classes — they could choose what they wanted to learn, especially during the second half of the class.
• 3. Peer pressure. They wanted to look good in front of their peers. It would have been embarrassing to not be able to do a presentation when called upon.
• 4. The instinct of workmanship. Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called The Instinct of Workmanship. People inherently want to do a good job, said Veblen. I agree.
• 5. Doing is fun.

What did I learn? I learned that I can stop grading and things get much better, not worse. I learned that motivations other than grades are plenty powerful.

I'm inclined to focus on 3, peer pressure, but I'm not going to deny the value of the others. And my own experience tends to support his; I went to the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

While traditional (A through F) grades are given, the culture of the school de-emphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student.

It seemed to me that we were working harder than any of the conventional classes I'd been in, or those I taught later, but I learned my grades when I needed them for graduate-school applications -- in effect, as credentials of my ability to do well with an academic workload. Incentives? We had plenty. I suspect that an online experience with student group structure, one which let peer pressure work (to a schedule), would also be fine in this particular regard.


Or then again, maybe not.

update: Of course K-12 is different in many ways, and some may think that younger-than-college kids are immune to peer pressure, don't feel any urge to please the teacher (or other adults), don't think "doing is fun", don't want to learn interesting stuff for its own sake... Hmm. Well, experiences vary.

Smartphone education

Alex Tabarrok, co-creator of online Marginal Revolution University, reports on something that offline courses might consider using. New Teaching Tools

Instead of prohibiting smart phones in class, we require them …We then automatically deliver to their device a difficult conceptual question. We then give students a few minutes without discussion to reflect on the question and to indicate their answer on their device.
…Next, our system automatically puts students into groups of 2–5 [the system tells the students which other students to talk with and where to move in the classroom to find their group...

It's easy to think of lots of variations on the idea, but this is a version that does seem to be working. It appeals to me in part because it works via using new tech to facilitate a very very old tech: the study group, and I suspect that this is crucial; the teach-yourself books and teaching machines of decades past might have done much better if they hadn't focused so much on the (already) independent learner.
Or then again, maybe not.

Federal yes-and-no

The American Enterprise Institute has interesting opinions and lengthy arguments on What Uncle Sam can (and cannot) do to improve K–12 schooling: Lessons for the next four years

We believe that federal policymakers are uniquely well-suited to put particular education issues on the national agenda, tackle discriminatory practices that violate constitutional protections, push states to adopt cut-and-dried policies like annual assessment or data disaggregation, and promote transparency by collecting data and requiring states to report on student achievement. At the same time, Washington is ill-suited to change what happens in schools or classrooms and to compel state and local officials to conscientiously do things they are not inclined to do. Attempts to mandate school improvement models, teacher evaluation frameworks, professional development, or other interventions that depend on the skill and commitment with which they are implemented are likely to disappoint for the same reasons that have hampered even the best-laid federal plans for “fixing” schools.

I'm not convinced by much of it -- in fact it's not at all the infrastructure focus I'd choose for Federal policy, but it's worth reading.

Flipped Classrooms -- Continuing

Progress (in some direction) continues... we see Yahoo News (from AP) on students whose Teachers flip for 'flipped learning' class model:

spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble.
It's a technology-driven teaching method known as "flipped fearning" because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for homework — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice.
... the online community Flipped Learning Network now has 10,000 members, up from 2,500 a year ago, and training workshops are being held all over the country...
Under the model, teachers make eight- to 10-minute videos of their lessons using laptops, often simply filming the whiteboard as the teacher makes notations and recording their voice as they explain the concept. The videos are uploaded onto a teacher or school website, or even YouTube, where they can be accessed by students on computers or smartphones as homework....
"The first year, I was able to double the number of labs my students were doing," Sams said. "That's every science teacher's dream."
In the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township,...Flipping yielded dramatic results after just a year... Green attributed the improvements to an approach that engages students more in their classes. ....
The concept has its downside. Teachers note that making the videos and coming up with project activities to fill class time is a lot of extra work up front...
Explaining to adults that homework was watching videos was a little harder, though. "My grandma thought I was using it as an excuse to mess around on the Internet," Nguyen said.

Note that "making the videos" is to some degree a one-time cost; videos are shared to similar classes. The "buzzes from desk to desk" teacher-activity should to some extent be a slightly-older-student activity, as suggested by the "explaining the concept to other students" which precedes it. And "coming up with project activities to fill class time"...well, that's also to some extent a one-time cost. Hmm.
Then again, maybe not.

K-12 Education and Life Expectancy

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones points out that Not Everyone is Living Longer

Longer life spans, it turns out, really do depend on just how privileged you are.

He's referring to a MacArthur Foundation Research Network report that Differences In Life Expectancy Due To Race And Educational Differences Are Widening, And Many May Not Catch Up :

Drop in life expectancy for least educated whites, slight increase for least educated blacks. It is important to note that the size of the least educated subgroup of the U.S. population has been shrinking in recent decades (down to about 8% for whites).

Their graph summarizes:

So the data is compatible with what Drum claims: it appears that life expectancy has dropped for the less educated. In the course of 18 years, a randomly selected white female dropout has lost 5 years of life expectancy while a randomly selected white male dropout has lost 3 years...but that's not the only interpretation. The white female dropout population of 1990 (WFD90) has different people in it than the white female dropout population of 2008 (WFD08).
Imagine that we could rank people in some combined ordering that combined intelligence with emotional factors including "grit"; think about perseverance, focus on a plan, supportive family, all kinds of factors that make it easier to finish an education and that also make it easier to do well in life, not only getting and keeping a job but seeking and following medical advice from stop-smoking and stop-eating-so-much to recognizing the symptoms of a heart attack and taking the pills you've been prescribed. In my understanding of the world, these factors very often (not always) go together.
Now, think of WFD08 as being an exact copy of WFD90 except that we've pushed education harder, so that the dropout population is a smaller part of the population (hey, it is). Some of the top dropouts in WFD90 have gone into the high-school graduate population instead, but perhaps some or all of their other life-factors are no different. In that case, part of what we're doing is simply lowering the margin below those who were the top of the bottom group: it could be that every individual of 2008 is better off than an identical individual of 1990 would have been, but we'll see that the average lifespan of a dropout is less. Finishing high school may have helped the graduates live longer, or it may have made no difference at all -- the data is compatible with either.
A lot of research has this kind of ambiguity; a set of international-comparison studies that were much discussed this week led economist Arnold Kling to write Good News: School Doesn’t Matter!

In my view, the policy implication is that we should spend a lot less on classroom education and instead spend more on better research, including randomized controlled trials, to find out what, if anything, makes a difference. For now, I see no evidence that the money we spend on education is anything other than an enormous waste.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do think it would be a better world if people were more careful with their inferences.
Or then again, maybe not.

Common Core: One More Year

I've mentioned Yong Zhao and his book, and his thesis that American entrepreneurial success (in business and in science) has been in substantial part a result of our schools' failure in the perpetual institutional quest to squelch creativity. He has Five Questions to Ask about the Common Core, and he fears that

the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all American children are exposed to the same content, delivered by highly standardized teachers, watched over by their equally standardized principals, and monitored by governments armed with sophisticated data tools.

I doubt that the chaos will end, but he has convinced me that the Common Core is likely to do somewhat more harm than good. In educational practice as in home repair, it's all too easy to fix something so that it never quite works again.
Or then again, maybe not.

Future Finance: NY

Back in December, I noticed but did not blog when the NY Times said
Experts Warn of Budget Ills in New York State, Lasting Years

New York State faces long-term budget problems that are compounded by the teetering finances of its local governments, an aging infrastructure and the possibility of severe cuts in federal funding......New York’s problems had been “papered over with gimmicks” for decades...
... outsize spending on health care and education, its vulnerability to the ups and downs of Wall Street, and the struggles of its local governments to pay retirement obligations. ... “Albany has increased dependence on a small number of very wealthy taxpayers to keep the state going,” ... New York... is particularly vulnerable to possible cuts in federal aid resulting from efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit....The report said New York’s local governments were “facing a rapidly deteriorating fiscal future.” ...Syracuse... annual pension costs had increased 50 percent since ... 2010, to $30 million from $20 million. “If you say to the municipality, ‘You’re just going to have to figure out how to pay for it,’ what you are saying is that now bad people aren’t going to be arrested, fires aren’t going to be put out,” she said. “Snow will not be plowed from the roads. Trash will not be collected.

The 69-page PDF Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force reports on many sources of instability and unsustainability, including

A new top rate of 8.82 percent applies to individuals with taxable income above $1 million and married couples above $2 million and does so in a more concentrated way than has occurred previously. Further, this “millionaires” bracket brings increased dependence on a relatively small number of taxpayers (estimated to be 31,000), roughly half of whom live outside the state.

In other words, the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.

State general aid to local governments is moderate ($873 million in 2010), and is procyclical, increasing when state revenues are strong and remaining flat or decreasing during downturns. Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

And the result for K-12 education?

95 percent of school district leaders said they were drawing on reserves to pay for recurring operating expenses, with two-thirds indicating they were “very concerned” at the extent to which they were doing so. Compensation costs represent 70 percent of school district budgets, but contractual cost relief is difficult. Few districts are negotiating contracts with zero across-the-board increases. Built-in annual step increases remain in place; increases in pension and health care costs are in the double digit range. Further, the savings from the generational turnover of teachers seems to have peaked. All other things remaining constant, status quo contractual terms and ordinary retirements will drive larger average annual salary increases than in the recent past. Add to that any increase in costs other than compensation.

Unsustainable trends will not be sustained indefinitely. They will end.
Or maybe not? No. They will end.

Khan Academy in Idaho -- and in the movies

Slashdot reported last week that Khan Academy Will Be Ready For Its Close-Up In Idaho

Education officials ... say they are arranging to have Khan Academy classes tested in about two dozen public schools next fall in Idaho, where state law now requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits. 'This is the first time Khan Academy is partnering to tackle the math education of an entire state,' ... film director and producer Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth), who will be in Idaho in January filming The Great Teacher Project, a documentary which will highlight positives of education, like the Khan Academy pilot in Idaho.

One of the Slashdot commenters adds

My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.
The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.

Davis Guggenheim is

the only filmmaker to release three different documentaries that were ranked within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud, and Waiting for 'Superman').

In the origin of Davis Guggenheim: "Waiting for Superman" to Save Our Public Schools

I actually said "no." I thought that the subject of education was too complicated. The next morning I was packing my kids up in my minivan and taking them to school with juice boxes and backpacks. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to see the local public schools that I was driving by. And it started to haunt me that my kids whom I send to private school were having a great education, but the kids in my own neighborhood were not. I said, "Well, maybe that is the approach that I should make for this movie....

And now he's working on Khan Academy, and presumably related trends. Could be helpful.
Or then again, maybe not.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

Online Smicha

A different note on online (higher) education at Using latest technology to train rabbis - Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews

Employing the use of cutting edge video conferencing, online forums, and a private discussion board, onlinesmicha.com in the past two years has ordained doctors, lawyers, chaplains, and other working professionals....
To receive smicha, students must pass written and oral tests covering the laws of Shabbat and Isur V'Heter in-depth, and must participate in a final test administered in person.
The rigorous, yet flexible program offers students of varying backgrounds with a Standard track and an Accelerated track both covering the laws of Basar B’Chalav (Meat with Dairy), Ta’aruvos (Mixtures), Melicha (Salting), Shabbat, and more.

I'm not certain that the "written and oral tests" are online, but of course they could be; the oral would presumably be handled via videoconference.