The Professors’ Big Stage
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I just spent the last two days at a great conference
convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of
Residential Education” — a k a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my
kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses?”
You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver
in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend
Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course
at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the
M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I
saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.
“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained,
he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been
translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a
popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial
first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to
boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in
Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral
dilemmas.
Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater
to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures,
with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese
Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of
popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A.
players.”
O.K., not every professor will develop a global following,
but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and
is real. These were my key take-aways from the conference:
¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian
Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff
learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know.
Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you
can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry,
just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing
to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based
world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in
an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class —
and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.
¶Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of
information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students
taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students
are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace,
and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can
be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There
seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online
lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San
Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s
introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the
M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the
first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose
State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and
discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from
nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And since this course was the first step
to a degree in science and technology, it meant that many more students
potentially moved on toward a degree and career in that field.
¶We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be
certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college
professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a
competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or
face an online competitor.
¶Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential
college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it
facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of
those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education
outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on what
works, but standing still is not an option.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor
and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much
today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s,
just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and
topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach
entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham
Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard
students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average
is over.
Posted on March 5, 2013 NY Times
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