TITLE: Minor Events in the Revolution at Universities
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 10, 2013 4:03 PM
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This morning I ran across several articles that had me thinking
yet again about
the revolution
I see happening in the universities
(*).
First, there was
this recent piece in the New York Times
about software that grades essays. Such software is probably
essential for MOOCs in many disciplines, but it would also be
useful in large lecture sections of traditional courses at
many universities. The software isn't perfect, and skeptics
abound. But the creator of the EdX software discussed in the
article says:
This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but
it's good enough and the upside is huge.
It's good enough, and the upside is huge. Entrenched players
scoff. Classic disruption at work.
Then there was
this piece from the Nieman Journalism Lab
about an online Dutch news company that wants readers to
subscribe to individual journalists. Is this really news in
2013? I read a lot of technical and non-technical material
these days via RSS feeds from individual journalists and bloggers.
Of course, that's not the model yet for traditional newspapers
and magazines.
... but that's the news business. What about the revolution
in universities? The Nieman Lab piece reminded me of
an old article in Vanity Fair
about Politico, a news site founded by a small group of
well-known political journalists who left their traditional
employers to start the company. They all had strong "personal
brands" and journalistic credentials. Their readers followed
them to their new medium. Which got me to thinking...
What would happen if the top 10% of the teachers at Stanford
or Harvard or Williams College just walked out to start their
own university?
Of course, in the time since that article was published, we
have seen something akin to this, with the spin-off of
companies like Coursera and Udacity. However, these new
education companies are partnering with traditional universities
and building off the brands of their partners. At this point in
time, the brand of a great school still trumps the individual
brands of most all its faculty. But one can imagine a bolder
break from tradition.
What happens when technology gives a platform to a new kind of
teacher who bypasses the academic mainstream to create and grow
a personal brand? What happens when this new kind of teacher
bands together with a few like-minded renegades to use the same
technology to scale up to the size of a traditional university,
or more?
That will never happen, or so many of us in the academy are
saying. This sort of thinking is what makes the Dutch news
company mentioned above seem like such a novelty in the world of
journalism. Many journalists and media companies, though, now
recognize the change that has happened around them.
Which leads to a final piece I read this morning,
a short blog entry by Dave Winer
about Ezra Klein's epiphany on how blogging and journalism are
now part of a single fabric. Winer says:
It's tragic that it took a smart guy like Klein so long to
understand such a basic structural truth about how news, his
own profession, has been working for the last 15 years.
I hope we aren't saying the same thing about the majority of
university professors fifteen or twenty years from now. As
we see in computers that grade essays, sometimes a new idea
is good enough, and the upside is huge. More and more people
will experiment with good-enough ideas, and even ideas that
aren't good enough yet, and as they do the chance of someone
riding the upside of the wave to something really different
increases. I don't think MOOCs are a long-term answer to any
particular educational problem now or in the future, but they
are one of the laboratories in which these experiments can be
played out.
I also hope that fifteen or twenty years from now someone isn't
saying about skeptical university professors what Winer says so
colorfully about journalists skeptical of the revolution that
has redefined their discipline while they worked in it:
The arrogance is impressive, but they're still wrong.
~~~~
(*). Nearly four years later,
Revolution Out There -- and Maybe In Here
remains one of my most visited blog entries, and one that elicits
more reader comments than most. I think it struck a chord.
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