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The value of bad ideas

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s. … Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Jon Bell, “McDonalds Theory“

Here’s my theory: the MOOCs we’ve got at the moment really are just a bad idea. This is awkward, because so much money has now been sunk into them, it feels defeating even to imagine their failure. But there’s a bright side: what if MOOCs are the icebreakingly bad idea, whose gift is to inspire us to come up with something better?

MOOCs wouldn’t be the first bad idea to be taken seriously and attract major capital investment, about which people later look back and wonder: what were we thinking?  I once met the man who co-designed the Sinclair C5, an infamous battery-powered vehicle that was expected to transform the way people got around in crowded British cities in the 1980s. The design had been feted on news programs and TV shows, and the project had a major backer with serious money. But then the prototype was tried out on an actual road, and people noticed that the battery didn’t work in the rain and it was disturbing to change lanes on wet roads at 15mph in a low lying tricycle that barely reached the wheel arch of your average road haulage vehicle. Cartoonists had a field day.

Last month, the Sinclair c5 was voted the biggest innovation disaster of all time, topping a list of mostly entertainment technology formats or communication devices that failed, and pizza scissors.

Some of these had enjoyed brief success before being overhauled by a competitor or successor, but the C5 was distinguished by being panned from the moment it showed up on the road, when all the ideas that had seemed so convincing in prototype collided with the realities of scale and use. As Rodney Dale, who has written a loving history of the C5, noted sadly, the “seductive exhilaration which won everyone over to the C5 on the test track quickly evaporated by the feeling of vulnerability among real traffic.”

But the principles and the concerns behind the C5 didn’t evaporate. The problems it was attempting to address—and the commercial opportunity it was attempting to exploit—were real. Since 1984 we’ve found out more and more about the impact of excessive oil consumption on our environment and our global economy, and we’ve continued to explore alternatives to the ways in which we use and fuel private cars. It was a visionary idea, just a really awful design.

And this is where we are with higher education. Different systems all around the world are facing different problems, but the problems are real, and the systems we’re using to address them are underpowered and unimaginative. More lectures, bigger lecture theatres, overcrowded tutorials, staffing flexibilities that are appalling euphemisms for sustained and harmful exploitation of the academic precariat, standardised curriculum and unvarying assessment practices, inflexible approaches to student creativity, timed exams, grades and escalating student debt: all of these are the bad ideas we live with and defend. So let’s not romanticise our current situation just because the alternative that’s getting all the attention is an even bigger bad idea.

Where I work we’re now seriously asking the MOOC question: should we? why? with what? for whom? And what are the risks involved in us adapting those that are being made elsewhere?  Wouldn’t it be good to have some Stanfordy things in our curriculum, especially when it comes to the foundational material in the disciplines that genuinely need their students to cover at least some of the same ground no matter where they study? Obviously, the situation’s trickier for the humanities, but don’t the world’s MOOCs give us access to new areas of curriculum that we can’t supply ourselves, in such a small educational economy?

Provided we put aside the daft and insulting conceit that we’re lucky to gain access to the world’s best professors all of whom naturally work at the world’s elite institutions, I think the answer to some of these questions has to be: well, yes. We all benefit when students access new and different curriculum, for the same reason that we gain when those who can afford it travel as part of their study program. And we all have something to share in return.

But first, we need to move beyond the bad bits of the idea: that massive enrolment is a cunning alternative to overcrowding; that volunteer tutoring is sustainable or just; that recorded lectures solve the problem of lectures; that institutional research brand is a guarantee of individual teaching excellence; that timed exams and peer-reviewed short answer papers are anything other than roll call; and that any of these services are going to remain philanthropic once the testing phase is over.

The good ideas trapped behind this wall of nonsense are starting to emerge. This week I had a lovely day sitting about with the people who design our rooms and choose our carpet tiles and light fittings, and make our award-winning outdoor spaces, which really are appreciated by everyone. Talking together we started to imagine how new kinds of campus spaces and educational technologies should work together to support international collaboration among students in ways we haven’t been able to offer before; about facilities where students could meet and create their own digital materials or remix ours; and about the need to reform our outdated business rules in relation to wireless access. It was exciting, and fun, and offered one of the best conversations I’ve listened to on the value of courage in institutional planning.

But a caveat, before we throw open all the doors and windows to the winds of change blowing from the global north: bad ideas don’t always move aside like the Sinclair C5 to make room for the better ones that follow. Here in Australia there’s a lesson from the history of imported innovations that have had long term environmental consequence: the cane toad.  Cane toads were brought here in 1935 from Hawaii, in a well-intentioned effort to reduce crop damage without excessive use of pesticides, and we can recognise those principles as basically good.  The scientist who arranged their introduction to Queensland wasn’t blinded by greed or lacking in awareness. It’s just that, as the Australian Dictionary of Biography puts it with heartbreaking understatement, “the toad proved less useful than had been hoped, and itself became a pest.”

Let’s just keep this in mind: whatever problems we’re trying to solve, and whatever ideas we think are good, we are taking care of a complex and fairly fragile educational ecosystem here. And if a toad doesn’t prove as useful as you hoped, you can’t always get it to go home again.

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Own goal

It’s been a dramatic and painful week around the world, and a week for scepticism about the value of “breaking news”. Here’s Australia’s contribution to the world of redundant announcements, from our busy Minister for Everything*, Craig Emerson:

No one’s surprised at the news that if elected Tony Abbott will hang on to the cuts made to higher education without passing them on to schools. We’re a risk averse sector with a sharp eye for the unforeseen. And this risk was exceptionally easy to see: it’s the elephant that’s been sitting in our kitchen all week, helping itself to cake. When the Labor government announced cuts to Australian universities in order to save Australian schools without securing the support of the mostly conservative State governments, with all the polls and pundits predicting Tony Abbott as the PM of a new government, our lunch money was gone.

And although the government has spent the week downplaying the Efficiency Dividend as a modest speed bump of 2% followed by 1.25%, the detail written in small print is that this is cumulative: 2014 at 2% followed by 2015 at 3.25%; and its impact will extend beyond the two years in which it’s applied by pegging the indexation of our operating grants after that to the lowered rate. In other words, we’ll continue to feel the Efficiency Dividend like shadow limb pain for quite some time.

It’s hard not to see this as an own goal by the current government, a parting gift for their successors. We’re a really small and efficient sector. We’re on track to meet the targets we were given for increased participation overall. We’re a star exporter of services. We’re already floating on a cushion of volunteered time and work. There’s not that much more to cut without suffering pushback from students and industry partners, not to mention our actual partners and families, and Australia’s full-time university workers and managers have been fairly vocal about this. (Do read Tseen Khoo’s post, which is packed with helpful links.)

We’ve said a bit less about the likely impact of the reforms to the ways in which Australian university students are funded. There are two small but significant shifts to the current income-contingent loan system, and although one will hit middle class families harder, both have had to be managed by pretending that student debt is a virtuous and low-risk investment in a very sparkly future. Firstly, there will no longer be a discount rate for those who pay their fees upfront; and secondly, the existing scholarships that help some students meet the set-up costs of participation (especially in terms of textbooks) will now be added to their loans.

Expanding investment in student debt isn’t such a gift to the next government; really, it’s more like the prawn heads left in the curtain rods.  Not only does Australia already have a hefty unpaid bill from Australian graduates who have either left the country or died with their debt intact, but this week we also have compelling evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that young Americans with a history of student debt reacted very negatively to recession after 2008. They retreated from the sectors of the economy they had traditionally been expected to prop up, particularly home ownership. They became slightly less likely to buy cars that required loans. And the overall impact on the consumer economy of their inconfident spending and debt exhaustion is bluntly put:

Despite unprecedented growth in the student loan market, student borrowers appear to have participated fully in the recent consumer deleveraging. This was possible only through a collective retreat from other standard debt markets.

Student debt isn’t just bad for the economy, it’s also bad for students. It’s sold to the electorate with the image of doctors and lawyers who surely owe their fair share; less is said about the fact that those who owe most are those who are slower to reach the income threshholds at which they’re required to repay — those graduates who become parents and then spend a long time in the part-time workforce, for example, or those in remote and regional areas who remain underemployed relative to their qualifications. It’s also one of the only major debts that can be taken on in Australia without the obligation of the lender to counsel the borrower about their fitness to repay. Quite the opposite: universities market the benefit of participation on the promise of a graduate earnings premium, and keep the image of the lender and the future debt nicely vague.

Awkwardly for all concerned, the Grattan Institute has just pointed out that the graduate premium in Australia isn’t as high as it is elsewhere (p.40); and is off-trend in relation to other OECD countries. This is partly because the real growth in jobs and increases in wages has been in unskilled and construction work in the minerals and mining boom, and it might level out. But as the Grattan Institute also point out, it’s precisely by increasing the supply of graduates overall that we are playing our part in keeping the graduate premium low (p.39).

School-leaver students are unlikely to be experienced in risk calculation. This is the first big debt for many, especially those who have never had an car loan or a credit card. Meanwhile academics, who do know about the impact of personal and household debt, are so testy about the suggestion that students are consumers that we turn a blind eye to the fact that they’re actually borrowers. It’s something we rarely discuss, and we certainly don’t encourage them to let debt shape their decisions, just in case this results in attrition.

There’s a lot being said at the moment about how we should innovate and what we should do to achieve efficiency. I agree completely with Richard Hall that these calculations are framed within a far bigger crisis, and that the enclosure of academic labour and hedging of student debt are complexly linked with the deeply scarring patterns of social exclusion upon which capitalism increasingly depends. But while we’re here and making decisions, I think that whatever curriculum we draw up, whatever resourcing or delivery decisions we make, whatever cost savings we attempt and whatever justification we give ourselves, we need to keep in mind throughout it all that university students’ debt is also our debt to them for showing up.

Because with both sides of government now treating us all with equal contempt, we’re really in this together.

* The longer version: Minister for Trade & Competitiveness, Minister Assisting PM on Asian Century Policy, Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science & Research.

(Thanks to Andrew Vann for much explaining of the sums.)

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More or less

From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings.

Max Weber, weirdly enough, in the Australian Government “Report of the Review of the Measures of Agency Efficiency“, March 2011

Whether it was efficient or inefficient, I’ll leave it to you to decide, but I think you’ll agree that only death is truly efficient. Life is very inefficient and not cost-effective at all, from a health-care efficiency point of view.

Victoria Sweet, God’s Hotel

Higher education’s in the headlights in Australia this weekend, as the Federal government has announced plans to fund its schools upgrade by applying significant savings measures to universities, university students and their families.

Cunningly, the proposition was announced in a note slipped to the media on a Saturday when, as one television commentator put it this morning, “everyone’s watching the football.” (Which just goes to show that neither government nor media have any idea how higher education workers spend their weekends.)

People have commented on the logic of cutting support to one part of the educational ecosystem in order to fund another, especially in a village economy like ours. And it’s proving a first rate opportunity to watch apparently progressive, socially-aware policy being communicated awkwardly.

I’m an Australian higher education worker and I have three children in three different public schools. I understand conflict of interest, and I also get that this strategy is an important play for a left-facing government taking a very long run up to an election. There are more votes in the education of my children than there are in the wellbeing and fair treatment of my colleagues.

Still, I’m not convinced by a communications strategy based on the message that higher education has been enjoying government largesse to such an extent that this tiny setback shouldn’t disturb us at all. This is patronising. It underestimates the pragmatism, social conviction and resilience of the higher education sector, and obscures the details of the proposal that deserve careful, constructive thought.

Here’s the part that interests me. $900m of savings will come from the application of a two-year Efficiency Dividend to universities. The Efficiency Dividend has been operating in Australian government for over 20 years, and from certain angles it does come across as a standover tactic, particularly when applied to agencies irrespective of size–indifferent to whether or not they can actually tighten their belts further without passing out. It derives from the belief that public sector organisations in general lack incentive to achieve savings because they’re not profit driven, unlike businesses who offer performance-based dividends back to their investors. Public sector organisations, the thinking goes, plough any savings they make from efficiency back into improving the quality of their outputs.

The problem is that we can’t readily measure the Efficiency Dividend this way as it’s almost as hard to measure quality as it is to measure efficiency. How do we account for the transformation of individuals from one state of capability to another as a direct result of their educational participation? Typically we turn to outputs measured quantitatively (numbers of graduates employed, measurable salary benefit of being a graduate etc.), and inputs measured in terms of standards and risk minimisation (numbers of staff employed per student, level of staff qualification, fiscal and operating sustainability). Then we further apply proxies of reported satisfaction to the complexity of experience (student exit surveys), and finally we submit the whole fruit cake of institutional data to the show judge in the hope of ranking well.

And this is why we end up with plan B: efficiency troped as cost cutting. Like Mark Dapin, I grew up in Britain under Thatcherism, and I remember how strongly the case was made for improving public sector efficiency on the basis of accusations and assumptions about what other people would do if left to their own devices. What we got was socially bad policy ineptly disguised in political euphemism. The long-term result was Billy Bragg, and significant harm to the capacity of government, media and citizens in the UK to work together on more or less any topic.

So as we look at the mess Thatcherism made of the efficiency project, maybe this is a moment for those of us who work in Australian universities to try to tackle efficiency doctrine more purposefully, especially where we have the expertise to know that a blunt instrument approach will not produce good results. In fairness to everyone who will have to make this work, we need to generate both evidence and constructive suggestions, so that we can avoid the almost magnetic lure of false economy that Efficiency Dividend planning represents.

In terms of the bit I know, I believe we should treat both online education and casualisation as efficiency bait that we’d be wise to circle around for a while. Online education in particular isn’t in its infancy, but massively open courses are quite new. They’re soup du jour in efficiency circles because they suggest that content developed and delivered entirely on someone else’s dollar could help us lower the cost of teaching our own students. But we haven’t yet figured out how this would shape the way we develop locally relevant curriculum, or maintain capacity in our own sector; we haven’t confronted the long-term risk they represent to Australia in terms of import dependency. I’ve heard a number of people over the last week say that we’ll always have higher education because we’ll always have cinemas; it seems to me that if this is your view, you need to look much more closely at the economics of cinema in Australia.

So at the end of this odd weekend of TV celebrity for Australian higher education, we need not to panic or simply complain. We have been asked to step back in favour of another part of the education system. Done. But that being the case, we now need to speak up in precise and evidence-based ways about the opportunity cost of applying the Efficiency Dividend to something as complex and socially diverse as Australian higher education. The risks are serious, and can’t be addressed indirectly by fixing the separate, upstream problems of our school system.

For weeks, I’ve been reading Victoria Sweet’s account of her 20 years working as a doctor in the last almshouse in San Francisco, in her book God’s Hotel. The Lagunda Honda hospital was repeatedly subjected to efficiency audit during her time there, and repeatedly found to be in breach of the standards applied. But somehow, doctors and nursing staff working together had achieved extraordinary results in terms of patient care, restoring individuals to life who really had no business living. This continued until the application of measures applied by highly paid consultants to reduce staffing and increase compliance, that had the additional impact of increasing dependency on forms and reporting. Laguna Honda’s auditors lacked the experience to judge the value of the procedures they observed, and misread many.

Care diminished, workers were harmed, and patients lost out. But efficiency increased.

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Circus skills

What gets you into it is a love of books and idealising wisdom. What keeps you there is exhaustion and rank fear. … The academy has become the circus.

“annamac”, comment,  There Are No Academic Jobs and Getting a PhD Will Make You Into a Horrible Person, Slate magazine

I’ve been thinking about what it feels like to be working in a university at the moment, particularly one that’s focused on change. Change is an easy project to pursue, and it always feels good to be proposing to achieve it.

But there’s another conversation about change within universities, that has everything to do with Rebecca Schuman’s sad, important, strategically naive article in Slate on the US job market in the humanities. This is where I found “annamac”, generously sharing the journey she took from believing in university work as “a life devoted to finding the truth” to “the reality – petty rivalries, forced writing about nothing, unreasonable expectations, and the disregard of you as a thinker.”

How well do we support people to weather the changes that are occurring in universities, as well as the changes in their own hopes and expectations? Universities are filled with people who have good ideas about achieving small-scale change to their everyday work practices, that together really would make a difference, but who have no confidence that their ideas will be appreciated or encouraged. This leaves them with few options for changing the situation that they’re in, other than by leaving, and for this reason it discourages even self-reflection as a form of waste. Why reflect, when you aren’t entitled or empowered to act?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m off to a professional development opportunity that has come at an awkward time, given my own ambivalence. Professional development is an expensive exercise for which the return on investment is an employee who has been developed to become a more useful part of the system in which they work, rather than someone who is more unconvinced.

Step one in this case has been to answer a survey on the values that I practice when I’m leading a team, which has generated a fancy visualisation. I’m happy to answer these generic psychometric questions, and I’m sure they’re based on compelling research, but they’re not the questions I’m asking myself. These have much more to do with the way my job fits into my overall values as a person, the way I live in my family and my community, and in particular the way that the irregular and unregulated nature of academic work means continually failing to be present with my children, who will be leaving home by the time I get to inbox zero.

There’s no other way to say it: just keeping up with an academic job means that I habitually shortchange the people that I really love, and I’ve made very little contribution to the community where I live, even on things that are important to me. Half a kilometre from my house is a community garden; right under my nose is a mountain of email, grading, a wildly overdue book contract and administration. Take a guess.

I’m not an exception in this. Looking around me I see colleagues figuring out how much work they can secretly do while their kids are watching TV, how many emails they can answer or papers they can grade at the soccer game, how many family occasions they can miss or somehow multitask, whether or not they really have time to go to the gym. Then there are quieter conversations about alcohol, fatigue, shame and depression.

I also hear colleagues celebrating the way that technology has made it easier for them to work “when it suits”, arranging with each other to “do this over the weekend on email”, without looking at the personal, health or community impact of “when it suits” meaning “all the time”. And community impact is one of the most insidious: how many university workers, trained at public cost, make good neighbours to the elderly, or give up whole weekends to volunteering?

It’s not just academic staff. The sense that something really needs to change about the way we work is increasingly shared by many administrative and professional colleagues who are getting stuck in rigidly defined career silos, hemmed in by performance planning, reporting obligations and timekeeping systems that actively prohibit their capacity to create change, except for the changes that were proposed as actions in the last strategic plan.

Students are also trudging through their enrolment without hope of being able to ask for change, other than by filling out the zillionth survey or feedback form. A while back I ran a workshop for first year students to reflect on the choice they had made to come to university, and the choice they were continuing to make by staying. As I expected, most had thought about quitting. What surprised me was that so many had actively prepared to leave, but had then stalled because they were more afraid of not graduating than they were of boredom, for which high school had prepared them exceptionally well. So instead of figuring out either how to change their lives by leaving, or change the university by staying, they were readying themselves to buckle down, converting curiosity and optimism into minimum-effort pragmatism.

These students were facing a dilemma I recognise. There’s a sustainable familiar situation that will persist if you do nothing, and there’s the potential to take risks and strike out for some kind of unknown. The familiarity of the sustainable situation weighs heavily, especially if others depend on you, but the devil-you-know calculation includes a hidden risk that the gradient you’re on will continue its subtle decline: the unhappy relationship becomes unbearable; the job that bores you starts to make you sick; disappointment hardens into bitterness and anger.

So where there was a simple problem that was external, now you’ve entered into a contractual relationship with the problem, and your decisions—even decisions to do nothing but plod on—are feeding it.

Universities that are serious about creating change and not just reacting to it could listen with a more open mind to the stories and experiences of their own employees and students who have ideas for changing the way we work. We so love to measure things; let’s measure how effectively we support those who come up with ideas for working differently—rather than just filtering them through preset beliefs about successful types and failures, or generic assumptions about the right remedies, offsets, or incentives to improve their performance.

(for C.B.)

Related articles

And the best piece I’ve read on the original Slate article:

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Clinical strength solutions

How do you gain consumers’ trust? By listening to them and knowing exactly what they want. And by turning this knowledge into innovative and compelling products.

(Beiersdorf, brands overview)

The thing about jetlag in America is that it leaves you stranded in the middle of the night with nothing to do but watch middle-of-the-night American TV. And so last night I learned about “stress sweat”, which is apparently a much worse kind of sweat than the regular kind. To protect yourself (and others, as it turns out) you need a very special deodorant. Keen to know more, I hopped on line and found that research shows it’s also called “emotional sweat” and women are 30 times more prone to producing this when we’re upset or doing mental arithmetic. But happily, research also shows that clinical strength deodorant has got us covered, to the tune of being exactly 4 x more effective than regular deodorant at saving us from ourselves.

So, you know, that’s all right then.

By now crazy with jet-lag and not a little sweat anxiety, I wanted to know who had done the research that showed all the things. And of course, the answer is what you’d expect: research in this exciting new field is done by the companies who make the products that fix the problems that their research discovers. Neat.

Cheeringly, there are quite a few sceptics out there. Take a look at Creativity Online’s “Stress Sweat and Other Problems You Never Knew Existed“, for example, for a trawl through claims made about products that will solve the problems of aging hair, ugly armpits and invisible laundry stains that hadn’t really troubled us until we were told about them. Yup, read that carefully again: there’s a laundry detergent that will remove the stains you cannot see—which surely means they fall below the commonsense standard for a stain.

The manipulation of anxiety about intangible problems is a sign of hard times in the cosmetics industry. With consumers turning more and more to supermarket cosmetics or bulk online ordering of everyday items, companies have to work harder to find new niche problems that new niche brands can fix. As beauty-industry consultant Suzanne Grayson spells it out in the article: “”Everyone is looking to consumer research for ideas. It’s desperation time. Even companies that never were heavy into research like the upscale department-store brands, are using it, looking for kernels of disappointment [they] can latch onto.”

It’s marketing that escalates this disappointment into panic. The social crisis caused by stress sweating can’t be avoided, so there’s only one solution: the product that research has shown is four times more likely to save you from being sluiced right off the bus (or out of the boardroom, or wherever you are when disaster strikes) in a torrent of your own emotional sweat.

Nuts as this sounds, it’s not a world away from the overheated language in recent higher education reports. In Australia we had the Ernst & Young report that promised to outline our prospects as a “thousand year industry on the cusp of profound change” despite the fact that most of us in Australian higher education work in buildings that were thrown up in the 1970s. This week a UK think tank with uncomfortably close ties to Pearson suggested that we’re up for an avalanche and a revolution, all in one terrorising (if confusing) title: An Avalanche is Coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski points out calmly that the report advocates very little real change, and its recommendations effectively endorse many of higher education’s standing inequities in resourcing and rank.  David Kernohan describes it more bluntly as paid advertorial for Pearson. Michael Barber, lead author and Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor, certainly takes a starring role in the report itself, popping up throughout in the third person, a bit like Shane Warne talking about himself:

One evening recently, Michael and his wife were trying to recall the names of the three Karamazov brothers. Needless to say, within minutes they had resorted to Google – much easier than getting the book itself from the next-door room.

It’s all very chatty, and in the end comes across as op-ed based on the narrow personal experience of the three authors: “Whenever Katelyn inserted an example from Duke, Saad responded with one from Yale. ”  Hooray!  But does anyone really think this amounts to coverage of the diversity and volatility of higher education’s global business activity, let alone its core functions in teaching, research and community engagement?

Very little in the rest of the report contradicts the awful impression this comment creates. The report’s main function seems to be to alarm elite institutions who haven’t cottoned on to stress sweat (“Yale, at any rate, does not appear to see an avalanche coming. Or if it does, it does not feel threatened by it”) and then console them with the promise that in the unbundled future, the signal strength of globally strong brands will still be important. So they’ll be OK, because in the end their “best professors” will be safely broadcasting MOOC TV from the ski lodge while the rest of us are swept away.

What kind of opportunity would such a purging of higher education represent to companies like Pearson, or any of the other edtech vendors and venture capitalists who have already invested heavily in the education market? The IPPR’s report recommends that after avalanche has reshaped the mountain, we will have reorganised ourselves into four university types—elite, the mass, the local, and the niche—and something called the “lifelong learning mechanism”.

At the heart of this two-tier system of elite university providers and mass university markets will be unbundled digital delivery of content, online platforms, locally supported tutoring and proctored testing.  And Pearson are standing by with the clinical strength solutions to all the problems. So at the very least, this report is a strong case for higher ethical standards in research and analysis of educational markets by vendor stakeholders. Pearson have an extraordinary conflict of interest here, which is a very weak basis on which to try to gain our trust.

And it’s not a radical proposition: it’s a reheat of every argument being had everywhere about MOOCs, college tuition, university branding, ranking and funding, graduate employability, the emerging Asian markets (which is truly an awful way to think about individual students), young people and technology, the campus experience, the global superstars. The whole minestrone.

What’s missing is a vision for change that any of us would be proud to be part of.

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Visions always belong to someone

The awkwardly titled Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in a Digital Age that was released this week has generated a ton of coverage, which is interesting given its niche provenance. An apostolic group of North American educational stakeholders, including some very high profile names, got together and co-authored a fairly wordy document about the values and entitlements that we might protect in the name of online learners.

What I’ve found useful is that most of the people involved in it have been very open about how it happened. Here’s Sean Michael Morris, for example, quoting the email from Sebastian Thrun that got the group together:

Just had a crazy idea. What if we got the 8-10 most interesting people
together for – say – 3 days, to dive into online pedagogy. The goal
would be to brainstorm about this, and exchange experiences. Perhaps
develop a master plan? No NDAs, no proprietary information – just for
the goods of humanity.

I think for me this crystallises the discomfort I feel when I read the document (and I’ve read it over and over). International online pedagogy is neither radical, disruptive, nor new. Neither is learner-centred pedagogy.  We do this all day long, where I’m from.  Sometimes we fail, and when we do, students let us know. So we don’t need a master plan for all this because we didn’t just invent it.  When we work online from an institutional base, we’re already accountable to a whole library of strategic plans, standards, instruments for measuring standards.

Over the past 8 years I have been closely involved in writing both elearning strategic plans, and strategic plans for teaching and learning in general, and I can report with grim conviction that all of these are focused on ensuring the quality of the learner experience. They’re typically a bit less exciting than this document because they’re also institutionally obliged to be structured in terms of goals, targets, actions and measures. The main difference is that while institutional strategic planning tends to kick off with motherhood statements, most get written out again, because planning is inseparable from accountable reporting.

There’s a great deal to be critiqued about the fetish for accountability in higher education, and Rustichello’s post on this is the best thing I’ve ever read on the ruse of it all. But without some nod in the direction of accountability, all you have is vision, and no plan at all — let alone a master plan.

And in higher education, vision without a plan is exactly what you think it is: brand personality.

So it would be easy to walk past this moment, muttering.  It’s really too obvious to point out the cultural provenance of the plan, and Audrey Watters (who was in the room) has done a great job mapping out what and who was missing. Richard Hall has provided a powerful critique of the failure to acknowledge the power in play here. Everyone’s noticed the lack of a student voice. Advocates for adjuncts have questioned the lack of presence from feet-on-the-ground educators; and Jonathan Rees has pointed out the huge risk of advocating for disruption while losing sight of academic labour issues.

For me, there are two gaps. The first is a failure to understand or include what it takes for public education institutions to operate within the legislative constraints that are the ultimate protection for student rights, including student diversity. These can’t just be upturned because we want to, and to be honest, I don’t want to. There’s a whole lot wrong with higher education, but at some point we have to say that the work of making it possible is serious, complicated and driven by people who really mind about equity. (OK, I reserve judgment on marketing, but having sat in the room for hours and hours and hours with higher education policy makers, and listened to the way that they champion learners’ rights, I think we have to be very careful arguing that their diligence is entirely wrong-headed.)

The second is a failure to recognise that it’s going to take a whole lot more than a motherhood statement to deal with the emerging problem of missionary zeal in North American higher education circles. I am really so tired of hearing that MOOCs will parachute in global superstar professors to save the world’s unserved populations.

Here for example is Coursera’s Andrew Ng explaining to the Times Higher Ed how it will still be possible for the unserved to get access to paid certification that in the very same interview he is selling on the basis of its second rate status (because Coursera also have to protect the degree-awarding reputation of their elite partners):

“So if you’re a poor kid in Africa, and don’t have a credit card, we want you in the signature track anyway.

“This is about education, it is not about making money, and so if you can’t afford it we still want you to benefit from it. This is not the sort of decision that a normal company would make. But we are here to educate everyone.”

This is just so awful it makes my head spin.

So a master plan to save us from this, that didn’t include voices from Africa, China, India, Brazil from the outset, let alone from the indigenous cultures or speakers of the world’s fragile languages who are presently being crushed by the clear-felling juggernaut of digital English, can’t be what it claims on the tin.

It’s a small symposium of really interesting North American-based educators with relevant experience, values I mostly share, and good ideas. I’d have been entirely happy to read their account of how we might develop some modest, achievable pledges that online educators could make, just as many academics are quietly signing up to make their scholarly work open access on principle. But I wish they’d left it at that, because the idea that they’re planning for the rest of us isn’t just hubris, it’s exactly what’s currently causing cultural harm around the world.

Reading the coverage that this has been given, here’s what I keep coming back to: the inestimable Henry Giroux (just to show that I don’t have a problem with Americans), in his Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and The Politics of Education:

Visions always belong to someone, and to the degree that they translate into curricula and pedagogical practices, they not only denote a struggle over forms of political authority and orders of representation, but also weigh heavily in regulating the moral identities, collective voices and the futures of others.

And that’s why I can’t join a cheer squad for the idea that the fragile relationship between online educational opportunity and global cultural diversity is best served by a master plan from California.

Update: an earlier version of this post attributed entirely the wrong Henry. Apologies to both, and warm thanks to Tim McCormick for pointing this out so nicely.

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In the grupetto

No-one sat on and everyone drove as hard as they could.

Matt Stephens, Life in the Grupetto

Here’s the thing about professional cycling. It’s not the lycra, it’s not the drugs, and it’s not the spectacle of Lance talking about himself in the third person as that flawed guy who did the bad things.

It’s the grupetto: the paradoxical collaboration that breaks out among rivals who are struggling at the back of the race, once the whole thing starts climbing uphill. The riders who end up in the grupetto are mostly specialist sprinters. Sprinters are the ones who burst from the pack and ride crazily fast for about ten seconds at the end, but to do this they have to hang on over the whole day with everyone else. Once the bloated caravan of the Tour starts to climb a mountain, the formidably weird biomechanics of the specialist climbers kick in, the peleton swings after them—and the sprinters fall off the back. Watch these super athletes closely and they look as though they’re riding backwards.

The loneliness and stress of their predicament is extraordinary. If each tries to get over the mountain on their own, they’ll struggle to avoid time-based elimination, because the physics of road racing decisively favours a pack riding together over an individual struggling alone into a headwind. But it’s as individuals that they stand to lose.

Why don’t professional cyclists panic when they fall behind on these savage gradients? Why don’t they quit? It’s because they have a plan. They’re waiting. They know that in the tradition of their discipline, a grupetto will form and pick them up, and an experienced leader will emerge and take charge of the group. The grupetto will form afresh every time, taking in those who show up on the day, and sharing out the work of riding as they have to, so that they can all stay in touch with the action at the front. They have to trust each other, and work together.

Here’s a bit more from Matt Stephens’ reflection on the meaning of the grupetto:

In the Grupetto team tactics and rivalries are put to one side and a unique camaraderie flourishes with the theme of one common aim; to arrive at the finish safely and inside the time limit.

This cameraderie is a model of contingent solidarity, also called “l’autobus” for obvious reasons: when you can’t keep up by yourself, you ride the bus. All you have in common is a willingness to respect the skills and struggles of the person you find beside you, and to recognise that if they’re not having the best day, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be there at all. The essence of the grupetto is that it’s a form of hospitality, a relief from the nagging squabble in your head between where you are and where you’d like to be. The grupetto works because it creates a logic in which you can recognise yourself in the other person’s situation, and you can accept that their strength and stamina is your own.

I’ve been thinking about all this as I’ve been advising students who’ve fallen behind in an online class. Why do students panic or quit when they fall behind in online classes? Why do I? I think it happens like this: learners working online rule themselves out of succeeding because they’re staring at a syllabus crafted around milestones and deadlines, in which we have written the time-based elimination rules in bold as though these are the most important framing conditions for their learning: it’s all got to be done in time.

This has been my experience in every MOOC so far: before I’ve got my feet in the stirrups, a deadline has hit me like a headwind, and I’m down. I’ve missed the quiz, or the catch-up quiz, or the discussion of the poem, or the live chat. All I’ve got left to me is that last refuge of the time-challenged: the forums. And with thousands enrolled, these are the Grand Pacific Garbage Patch of messages in bottles, so there’s nothing to do there except add to the problem, while waiting not to get my certificate because I’ve failed to keep up.

So even if friendly constructivist MOOCs encourage me to hang around and chat anyway, the plain fact is that I’m missing their deadlines. (And in my most recent experience of this, I found that I was missing the daily deadline simply by sleeping through the North American working day. Go figure.)

When I look at the policy-crafted syllabus I gave the students in this class, I’m ashamed of how much of it is written in the same chastising language of failure and penalty. Failure to do this, that and the other thing, but especially failure to keep up, will result in … failure. Moreover, all sorts of collaboration and sharing except the group work we assign is treated as some kind of collusion among the work-shy, even a form of cheating, and this will result in failure.  All your own work, we chant, because the entire structure of our system is that grades are won—or lost—by individuals. Degrees are earned, and paid for, by individuals, not by teams.

How could students guess from this penalty-driven document that I will help them if they fall behind? More importantly, how do they know that I would recommend that they work together to rescue each other—that those who fall behind catch up by riding on the tailwind work that the leaders have done, and that the leaders have nothing to lose if this happens.

The cultural and institutional pressures against students working together in this way are really formidable. To overcome this, we need to review the assumptions embedded in our policies and documents about the individualist heroics of student success. Instead of focusing on training students how to succeed on their own, we need to introduce them to both the practice and the philosophy of the grupetto—how to feel no shame at all at needing help, and no embarrassment at being in a position to give it.

If we could get this right, we’d really be making an important contribution to their being able to flourish in their professional futures, perhaps as useful as anything else we ever teach.