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.

Nothing personal

For 12 months I’ve been working in a project team that’s been thrown together to support an institutional shift from one LMS to another, and I’ve learned a lot about what people think about academics. Listening to IT colleagues in particular it seems as though we either need monk-like protection from the realities of technology, or their technology needs protecting from us. That’s when we’re not huddled under our desks with our robes thrown over our heads, resisting change.

But the most interesting part of the experience has been meeting people who still refer normatively to academics as “he”.  As in, “this is what will happen when the lecturer updates his site.” I found this so startling that for a while I said nothing, because it seemed picky to point it out, like mentioning that someone who is saying something quite interesting has spinach in their teeth.

In the end, however, it had to be said.  And here’s the thing: the result was instant, thoughtful, and courteous. Our colleagues were surprised to discover that they did it, and immediately took to correcting each other in meetings, without any irony.

I was thinking back on this essentially good experience when I read the recent column by Female Science Professor in The Chronicle on the kinds of comments she has heard from male colleagues in the last 12 months:

• Regarding three female scientists listed as principal investigators on a grant proposal: “That’s too many women on one project.”
• Regarding three female scientists (and no men) as organizers of a conference session: “Don’t they like men?”
• Regarding three female scientists talking in a corridor of a science building on a campus: “Is this a Girl Scout meeting?”

Female and male academics, from STEM disciplines and others, are still slugging it out in the comments over whether or not these are symptoms of an unusually toxic departmental culture, or are the product of an over sensitive disposition (what do you call a feminist with no sense of humour? surely you’ve heard that one), or whether they’re just the kind of corridor banter that everyone runs into now and again.

The nerve that Female Science Professor has jangled seems to be the same one behind yesterday’s suggestion in The Atlantic, that men could pledge not to appear on or moderate all-male tech conference panels. Rebecca Rosen’s article picks up on a blog post by Matt Andrews from The Guardian, who challenged the organisers of an unusually packed schedule to explain why their selection process for discussion leaders had not managed to find a single woman.

And this apparently sparked off such a response that the organisers themselves have now posted this explanation on the conference website:

Why aren’t there more women on the panels?

We’re very much aware that our panels are male dominated, even more so than the broader tech industry. Underrepresentation of women in the industry is a problem we fully acknowledge and is something everyone in the community should be working hard to change, the organisers of this event included. There are many ways of doing this, and it can’t be as simple as saying that every event without exception must be representative to have any legitimacy. If small, niche events go unstaged for fear of unintentionally provoking arguments over diversity, then we’re the poorer for the lack of valuable knowledge sharing opportunities that those events would have provided.

Well, OK.  I want all of this to be true. I want to work in an achieved culture of non-discriminatory inclusion of all of us, regardless of what we look like, how we dress, what age we are, whether or not we have beards, or speak French, or need help up the stairs. I want all our children to be educated in that world, and I want our students to graduate into it.  I do also think that in that world, we will all enjoy the way that randomisation of opportunity and blind promotion of ability will be the twin guardians of “small, niche events” and “valuable knowledge sharing opportunities”. It all can’t come soon enough.

But we’re not there yet. The gender gap in graduate salaries is persistent. Career progress is much harder for some than others, regardless of ability. Vague ideas of “cultural fit” currently govern the recruitment process in many companies, which adds up to hiring more and more people who look like the boss.  And long-term unemployment is still hard to overcome for no better reason than that hip young recruiters think people over 45 will need naps after lunch.

So we all still work in a world hamstrung by stereotypes, and unless we’re as conscientious about challenging this as my two colleagues who keep remembering to say “when the academic updates her website”, then this world is going to go on reproducing itself, because it can.

And this is why it really is making me crazy that I work for an institution whose current student recruitment campaign, representing the relationship students can expect to enjoy with the academics they’ll meet here, hasn’t managed to come up with a single female academic.  Everywhere I traipse around my community, I’m confronted by billboards featuring my male colleagues, from talented ECRs to the professoriate.  Maybe there’s a billboard I haven’t seen, tucked in a stairwell somewhere, where one of our female professors gets a go, but I doubt it.

Because the talking-head video from this same campaign that’s prominently featured on our website also doesn’t feature a single one of my internationally respected or locally appreciated women colleagues. In fact, as the student in the video says, “the best thing is that … my lecturers are the researchers, so I get to learn directly from the guys that are doing the research.”

OK, hands up who pictured a woman at that point? I really do get that “guys” can mean men or women in Australia, but it’s very context specific. I don’t think this student was referring to his female professors as “the guys”.  I just don’t.

So here we are, starting a new year with a marketing campaign that doesn’t practice the simple courtesy that my two tech colleagues have achieved—in fact, it confirms their first approach.  And no one involved at any stage in its creation thought this was a problem. So now I’m wondering what it would take for my male academic colleagues to take a pledge and not participate in our marketing without checking first that the result will do justice both to the institution that they work in, and the future we all want to see.

I think if asked, they would.

Related articles

• Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? (threechords.org)
• Female graduate pay gap doubles: report (abc.net.au)

The time we give each other

In the second week of the new summer course, we spent the day together in class. Because summer in Australia is already snapped in two by Christmas, a whole lot of other weirdness can go on while no one’s looking, so we’re flipping the normal timetable and going with two all-day workshops supported by online reflections and activities.

Thanks to Steve Wheeler, I’ve also discovered that we’re also haphazardly and instinctively following a primer on the 10 characteristics of authentic learning. I’ve always been irritated by advocates of authentic learning, because there’s such a moralising inference in the label. Nevertheless, the principles listed here make sense to most educators, especially in their valuing of collaboration and reflection. So why don’t we follow them? Is it because we’re wilfully refusing to recognise the world that students will work in? No: we work in this world ourselves. Is it because we’re intent on reproducing ourselves as discipline acolytes? Again, no.

It’s because the structural habits of a university system, encoded in resource management practices (seriously, people with clipboards checking that we’re using all the rooms all the time), are stacked against us achieving the kind of flexible, purposeful practices that characterise quite a bit of professional life, where we do mostly try to deploy time in a way that will achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

But when considering how best to teach, universities typically do it the other way around, designing goals to fit the time that’s been allocated to the task. In a neat move, we’ve also decided that “quality outcomes” (which sound so much nicer than standardised goals for everyone) are best guaranteed by allocating the same seat time in the same way to everything we do. It’s at the core of our standard contract with students, both domestically and internationally: we’re systemically inauthentic.

And this is why we treat the weekly class as an institutional fetish without which we can’t function, along with the term paper, the exam, and the mandatory course readings that no one reads.

So in the spirit of Vin Jones’ Business Practices that Refuse to Die anti email manifesto, I’m declaring my opposition to weekly classes. The weekly lecture is a particularly tired habit we need to rethink, even as MOOCs are busy turning them into bad television. And we need to put a stop to the cheerleading idea that we should fix this individually by becoming more entertaining. Newsflash: I don’t think we’re the problem. The issue is that we’re structurally discouraged from asking when and why a lecture is the best fit for purpose, and penalised if we reserve them for special occasions, or choose not to use them at all.

There is no other practice that we take seriously in universities where we say that getting large groups together for one hour a week is the best way to make significant progress on complex material. But we do this with teaching, and in the standard lecture-tutorial model, we do it in two separate bits on different days, each bit requiring a 150% markup in travel time cost. This is bad for learning, and in commuter universities, it’s bad for the planet.

For every student who attends class on two separate days each week, travelling an hour each way, we have created about 50 hours of travel time over the semester. Multiply this individual cost burden by the number of students in a large class, and you start to see a tiny little carbon footprint appear. Now multiply this by an entire university system behaving thoughtlessly because it has never had to calculate the environmental impact of this wearisome habit.

(American and European readers might be puzzled here, but the majority of Australian students continue to live at home, and even though they may attend a nominally local university, the reality of Australian geography is that a 60-90 minute commute each way is common. Astonishingly, we trundle on as though none of this matters environmentally, although we’re terrifically proud of our campus waste recycling initiatives. Go figure.)

So there are environmental reasons to jailbreak the weekly timetable, but there’s also a strong pedagogical case, to do with the time we’re asking students to give each other. What’s the message we send about the value of collaborative learning when we allocate it in these rushed servings of fast-food time? What part of professional life are we authentically preparing them for? Committee meetings?

Students are evidently unconvinced that showing up to listen to something they could read online, or pause and replay in recorded form, is worth the rising cost of petrol, or the missed shift at work. But the generation that have grown up online are starting to express reservations about more time in front of computer screens. These are the most experienced online users we have ever taught, and they’re telling us that sometimes it feels as though time lost online is a practice of addiction. They do value presence and time together, providing that time is well spent and that they can actively engage with one another, not just listen.

We need to hear this, even as we get excited about MOOCs and the rest, and we need to listen carefully to our own doubts, buried under heaps of composting email.

By coming together this week, for a long and intensive day of thinking and sharing, students in this class gave their irreplaceable time to each other, and to me. I learned a lot, and I hope they did too. They’ve also helped me think about the way our systems are set up to take this astonishing gift for granted. As ever, there are good business reasons why we do bad things, and traditional habits that we’re clinging to, and we have hardwired policy standards for degrees (and visa restrictions for international students) that we can’t just throw in the bin.

But if we want to achieve change in universities, let’s not just talk about catapulting stuff online in sparkly ways: let’s also figure out how to use well the time that we give to each other when we do make the effort to be together in the same room.

And I’m not sure the weekly class is it.

Under pressure

It’s week one again, and I’m up late reading students’ introductory posts at the start of a mostly online course.  They don’t know each other, and in sharing photographs and writing publically about why they’re taking the course, they’re showing quite a bit of trust in strangers that they haven’t met in person, including me.

This care that they show each other is really why I still choose to work online, after a year immersed in the blither of techno-futurism, which does make you want stronger internet filtering just so that you don’t have to read any more crazy-making stuff.

Governor Brown of California attracted all sorts of comment last week, for example, for finding online education with the help of Google (“I went to my iPhone and I went to Google and I typed in ‘university education online’ and there’s a lot there”). But wait, there’s more:

We can build the most fabulous buildings, we can have the teachers, professors, all this kind of stuff.  But if other people come along and offer the same, or better, when they want it, you’re going to find there’s pressure out there.

I’m not sure Governor Brown’s talking about the fabulous buildings I work in, but the rest rings true. We’re all playing meeting bingo with these ideas, as we’re stuck in a speculator’s market. We’ve had twelve months of the virtues of student-centredness, epic scalability and reputation gain in massive online experiments of all kinds, and so far a lot less about how complicated it is to keep these things in productive balance.

But what Governor Brown is really making clear is that we’re now expected to adopt without criticism the logic that this speculator’s market, that’s so full of rumour and road map, is a trustworthy instrument to discipline the future of what we do. We’re not given any evidence that markets by themselves will create ethical, inclusive or even particularly interesting educational environments; all we’re told is that more and more competition is inevitable—which is precisely how the freedom of the market gets to govern the agency of its creators.  Neat.

And we don’t notice this as discordant with values we hold as educators, because our own singing along is drowning out the choir. At any university at the moment, you’ll get the strong impression that the market is our chiefest, sole delight; competition is the force that sharpens our pencils. The market enables us to show governments and students (and their parents) that we’re accountable, simply by showing how we’re doing better than the place up the road. It keeps us striving to improve our position; isn’t that the very definition of educational purpose?

Rustichello’s Folly has a terrific post (“the market ate my homework“) about what’s wrong with any situation in which we let the idea of the market become so overwhelming it’s impossible to imagine anything existing before or beyond it. It becomes a kind of superclimate for our thinking, that regulates and enables every action, every decision. We believe we can’t step outside of it, as we can’t step outside of language. Even though every day we act out of courage, curiosity, and kindness, in our market-saturation we don’t know how to count these gestures, let alone convert them to a KPI, so we hardly recall them; they’re nowhere in our end of year reporting. We forget that we know how to act for any reason other than competitive self-interest.

We all enable it. We all go with the market flow, seek employment and remuneration, consumption and disposal, debt and asset. Incoming and outgoing, we all try to catch a market wave that will take us toward some naturalised place of safety and autonomy from which we might be able to thrive and flourish. We don’t though, not enough of us and not in the right ways.

Richard Hall is making the same point when he says that under the spell of a new kind of market for knowledge accreditation, we have finally become bewildered about even the idea of a University. What can it be now, in the mad imperial scramble for rank and reputation? Is it a business that’s really in it for the money, relentlessly banging on about the virtue of brand personality, or is it a public good that’s masquerading in corporate wear simply to network with other similarly sized entities in the local economy? (This week I became momentarily confused in a Twitter conversation about edtech as to whether VC stands for venture capitalist or Vice Chancellor. Awkward, really.)

These two writers together have helped me understand why I’ve been worrying about notices that have popped at work up encouraging our students to “compete, succeed and excel”, by entering a competition. It’s not the activity of the competition itself that I mind, or the existence of the “real world” business-like opportunity that we’re offering students.

Nope, it’s the headache-inducing banality of the idea that competitive behaviour naturally produces excellence, and that so long as excellence is our goal, then we never need to imagine the experience of the losers who have to be in place for the winners to win. Winners in competitive systems don’t learn that they’re accountable to the rest for their place, just as anyone striving to be at the top of a ranking system isn’t expected to feel grateful to those who prop up their legitimacy by coming second.

This is what Richard Hall is on about when he says that the market is producing a failure of care:

We are witnessing a recalibration and enclosure of the idea of the student, not as a co-operative, associational subject, but as a neoliberal agent, whose future has become indentured. This subject is individuated, enclosed and disciplined through her debts and is enmeshed inside a pedagogy of debt, in order that s/he becomes entrepreneurial in her endeavours and outlook.

And we’re not doing a much better job of caring for those who work in universities. When we claim that the quality of our competitive recruitment practices is the reason why some academics get to earn salaries and make future plans, while others do the hourly paid work on which the enterprise depends, we are revealing the real cruelty of the market as a ruse: see, our processes are all open and above reproach, it’s just that you don’t make the grade. Please use the back entrance next time you come.

This all seems so inevitable that our imaginations are caged by it. But what if we pushed ourselves to think beyond the market as our governing authority, to remember what lies outside? What practical gestures of rank-blind respect and care in our university workplaces would we then choose to value, and how would we express our appreciation of those who make them every day—without creating yet another system of competitive reward?

I’m really asking.

The view from here

Here come the planes
They’re American planes.  Made in America.

(Laurie Anderson, O Superman)

Being a terrifically slow learner, I’ve signed up for another MOOC.  In my defense, I enrolled a while back and forgot, and now it’s come around just as I’ve been forced to admit that there are only so many chocolates you can eat or stuff down your cleavage before it all falls over.

So now I’m in with x thousand others, trying a constructivist MOOC focused on the current and future state of higher education.

But this time, something’s different.  I’ve scanned the assigned readings, and I’ve even printed one. (Although as ever, being a MOOC student is causing my sympathy for all students to double by the minute, as I realise how much of an obstacle to engagement these practical steps prove to be, and how misleading the sense of achievement when the staple finally goes in. That’s it!  My work is done. The reading is on my desk. OK, back to email.)

Now I’m looking at achieving a personal best by completing the first task, which is why I’ve slumped into a deckchair to reflect on the pressures causing change in higher education, and their possible consequences.

This is a whole skip bin of questions, so I just want to grab a bit I can reach: why isn’t higher education a powerhouse of change, given the innovation talent pool a university typically represents? I have a feeling the devil’s in the small print on this one.  We can change big things, but in the banal and everyday routines we’re not seeing anywhere near the rate of change that most commentators predict. A significant cause of this is that most higher education institutions—whatever the impression created by international rankings—are at heart really parochial. We compare internationally, but we compete locally, and we’re governed by local cultural habits as much as by our locally enabling legislation.

I’ve been thinking about how parochialism operates as a brake on change since reading Ferdinand von Pronzynski’s discussion of the introduction of a Higher Education Achievement Report for British students. To Australians, the idea of a transcript that looks at what students have actually done while at university isn’t revolutionary, but the view from the British system is this:

The expectation that students, employers and others will abandon grades [degree classifications] in favour of a general report is probably naive. Grades are too much part of the culture of higher education and recruitment for employment, to mention nothing else, for that to happen.

And this is how change doesn’t come about: because people look at the way things have always been done in the system of which they’re a part, and they can’t imagine how it could be otherwise, no matter how much evidence there is that this change has already happened somewhere else and everyone is going about their business without fuss.

Taken-for-grantedness is buried deep in our capacity to evaluate the properness of any higher education innovation within our own culture, but it’s also highly exportable if you have enough cultural muscle. This is why education systems in many younger, smaller economies stick with taken-for-granted habits borrowed from somewhere else, from the Oxbridge-esque sandstone quadrangles of Australia’s Big Eight, to the ceremonial language and even the canned music of our graduation ceremonies. And don’t get me started on hats with tassels.

It’s also how the whole world got used to “Facebook”, even though a facebook was a distinctly north American campus phenomenon before it was a social network.

At one level, it does look as though MOOCs have driven a truck through this, by being so big, so free floating, so global. But what’s actually happening is that MOOCs are still mostly made in north America, and the rest of us have an interesting opportunity to experience first hand how they do it, watching their classes, seeing into their lecture theatres, learning about the culturally particular interaction between professors and TAs, figuring out what typical assessments they use. And in this case, we’re also using resources that are for the time being predominantly drawn from north American media commentary on changes to the north American systems, even though there’s a clear mission by the (Canadian) team involved to challenge this somehow.

And there are global taken-for-granteds in play, the hardest ones to unthink—despite our mission as researchers (and teachers) to make change thinkable in many other spheres. Here’s one: even an open, constructivist course that’s not delivering itself as a form of potted TV can’t do without a selection of weekly readings. George Siemens refers to these preselected readings as a “starting point that people want — a contract“, and this expectation certainly matches my experience of removing assigned readings from my own teaching, at which point people looked as though I’d told them I was planning to teach in my underwear.

The capacity to assign the right sort of readings turns out to be a habitual signal of academic expertise, one that we don’t even notice ourselves reinforcing. I know there’s a risk of disingenuous countersignalling in choosing to avoid this when I teach. But for me the alternative is riskier: that we focus our entire teaching strategy on replicating our own expertise in the minds of others, and we close off the possibility that learners may engage more effectively by finding their own resources to share and then seeing how others respond. That’s what keeps Twitter ticking over for many academics, after all.

We were asked in week one what CFHE12 could do better, and after a bit of brooding, this is my practical answer, as a way of thinking about how higher education could change one of its most unexamined habits, and in the same move MOOCs could really make good on their global promise.

Instead of asking participants to introduce themselves “to the class” (awkward, given the constituency) in the first forum, and then respond to the assigned readings in the next, what if participants had all introduced themselves by linking to a locally relevant reading that speaks to the way in which higher education is changing (or not) right where they are?  Curating these in a wiki or social bookmarking system would have created an instant bibliography of the most up to date higher education research and commentary sorted on a country-by-country basis.

It’s a concrete example of something the constructivist MOOCS—who seem to me to treat their mass enrolment as a capable resource, not just an audience—have the capacity to create, that your local university can’t.

With friends like these

Here’s a little grenade-with-the-pin-out that was rolled towards Australia’s university lecturers today by the Minister for Communications, Broadband, and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.  Under the alarmist heading that Australian Universities Must Adapt, Senator Conroy popped this question:

“What is a lecture worth if the best lecturer in the world at MIT is online for free for all to access?”

Really—that’s it? After all we’ve heard about MOOCs revolutionising higher education, it comes down to this crude bit of cost-benefit analysis: why pay for the inferior local product when we can have the best in the world for nothing?  And why wouldn’t the best lecturer in the world be at MIT? Why would you think of slumming here in Australia, if you were the best lecturer in the world?

OK, call me a crank, but I have some questions. First of all, what’s the practical cost of a lecture to the consumer? Universities don’t just make this stuff up. Whether students pay up front or simply rack up loan debt, university teaching is funded and audited on measures that have installed seat time as the key unit in the value for money proposition. The credit value of a unit of study correlates directly and accountably to the amount of time we allocate to “contact”.

So the normal measure of a lecture’s worth isn’t the content or the teaching, but the simple tick of the clock. Typically a lecture is worth about an hour of contact, and it counts exactly the same for students who sit up the back on Facebook or listen to a lecture recording or are in the front row taking notes and asking questions at the end. It also costs the same whether the student earns an A or a C in the class: there are no cheap seats.

To this extent, lectures are like movies. Their ticket price is the same, but their production values vary in proportion to the budgets invested in them. Give your local lecturer an hour between meetings, grading, and administration to prepare a lecture, and you’re quite likely to get last year’s slides reheated. Give the same person time, resources and encouragement, and you’ll get a different outcome. (I really can’t believe we still have to explain this. I can’t think of any other industry that has such a magical sense of how stuff actually gets made, in real time, by real people.)

But give the MIT lecturer a serious production budget, lead-in time, a technical team, and even a specialist MOOC production designer, and you’ll get a high concept lecture that would make anyone look like the best in the world.

The thing is, though, that the “best lecturers in the world” don’t get that way by chance, talent or even personal charisma. They lecture well because they’re working in institutions that invest systematically in teaching. They’re using theatre technology that works, and they’re not running a simultaneous out-of-body conversation with themselves about the ninety two other things they have to get done that day. The work of preparing and giving lectures is treated as serious intellectual labour by their colleagues and their managers, and if they want to put aside time to read recent journal articles on the topic to make sure that their material is right up to date, this isn’t a practice that’s treated as a drain on their career progress.

So now they can make the world’s lectures, and we’ll download them and get our students to watch them because they’re at MIT, and we’re … not.

This isn’t the future at all, it’s absolutely business as usual in Australia. We accept at face value the proposition that the best is likely to be from somewhere else, and we adopt our typical strategy of content import and remixing. Visiting American students are often shocked to discover that Australians aren’t just adept at media piracy, but we’re pretty blithe about it. And it makes sense when you look at it: Australians downloading TV and movies from global torrents really are just creatively reworking the cultural logic of our entire television and cinema market, and now apparently our education system.

(In case anyone wonders how the story turns out, the next step is that we come to believe that we can’t produce anything as good as the imported material, ever, and so we stop funding it properly because we can’t fund it competitively, and after a while when Australians do insist on trying to make their own, we sidle away from them awkwardly.)

But wait, there’s more.  Stephen Conroy thinks giving away lecturing to MIT will free us up to do much more engaging things like “facilitating collaborative learning and discussion amongst students”. That does sound like tremendous fun, and I’m so glad someone’s thought to suggest it again, but before we all start chanting “Flip it! Flip it!”, let’s not forget that there’s a second brute calculation holding us back. We can’t easily convert the lecturing effort into tutorial time, which is where collaborative learning and discussion actually happens, because most of our tutorials are taught by casual academics, who are paid by the hour.  Freeing up a salaried lecturer who would otherwise be lecturing to 300 students for an hour typically creates the capacity to run a single tutorial, at best, for 20-30 of them. What happens to the rest?

So it’s not that we don’t want to facilitate collaborative learning and discussion, it’s just that we’re continually banging up against constraints imposed by the architecture of lecture theatres, the iron limits of casual teaching budgets, and workload management policies that will immediately and directly penalise anyone who develops content to be used by students as preparation for their collaborative learning opportunity (which doesn’t count as seat time), rather than given as a lecture (which does).

And yet Australian universities have plenty of the best lecturers in the world, who achieve miracles of lecturing grace every day. Because there are times that the best lecturer in the world is the one standing in front of you, who knows your name and asks how you’re doing, who listened to the same radio news as you on the way to work, who also got rained on walking in from the car park, who stays back to talk with you afterwards, and whose lecture helps you to see a bit more clearly how the world’s ideas and questions make sense in the context of where you are.

I’m not yet sure that MOOCs can do this for us.

It’s not you, it’s me

So, I signed up for a Coursera MOOC, and almost immediately the experience turned into Lucy and the Chocolate Factory.

Lucy enrols in a MOOC

It’s a scene that suckers itself onto almost any stressful situation.  Lucy and Ethel take a job putting chocolates into wrappers.  It’s a conveyor belt scenario, and the task itself is simple; the challenge is to keep pace. Lucy’s enjoying herself, messing about.  But one stumble leads to a recovery problem, and before they know it Lucy is eating chocolates or stuffing them into her cleavage in an effort to keep up. Eventually she crashes in shame, covered in chocolate.

Minus the chocolate and cleavage elements, that’s my experience of a Coursera MOOC.

I chose the course because it was on a topic I wanted to know a bit more about, and I was curious about the professor, who has significant influence in the world of education technology. To those of us outside the US, there are few opportunities to see US edtech innovators in action. As their cultural assumptions about the nature of higher education and the student experience are rapidly becoming critical to us, I think it makes sense to try to figure them out.

But really, I signed up because I wanted to know how it might feel to be part of a course whose enrolment was larger than the population of the town where I grew up.

So I watched the first few videos, and despite being mildly irritated by the pop-up quizzes designed to check that I was really paying attention, I sat up a bit straighter, and I stopped checking my emails while listening. Game-based learning 1, multitasking 0.  I also spent time reading the forums when I signed up, and I could see the process of small learning communities pooling effectively.

But already the first chocolate had fallen off the conveyor belt, for work-related reasons.  I couldn’t justify taking the time to watch a longer video because I had other more urgent stuff to do. And things went quickly to pieces: the content kept coming down the chute, and within a week it was unimaginable that I could find double, then treble the time to catch up.

So as it turns out, I’m not only a college drop-out from way back, I’m now also a freshly minted Coursera drop-out. And so I’d like Dr. Chuck to know that it’s not him, it’s me, because I really do think that there’s an unacknowledged professional risk being taken here by the professors Coursera have recruited to help get this thing off the ground. A significant number of their first cohort students are their colleagues, dropping in like me to have a look around—this is a jury of their peers in a grand way. And it takes a certain amount of courage to load-test a new platform and pilot a new way of teaching, all in public.

So thanks to you, Dr. Chuck.

But the real value for me is that in watching myself fall behind so early and so catastrophically, I learned two things about how to design better online courses. First of all, I’ve figured out it’s time to let go of the pastiche of seat time that we affect by structuring online courses around weekly participation, just because face to face classes have weekly meetings. We make each individual week of an online class far too complicated—too much to prepare, too many tasks, too many new ideas and insufficient time simply to think about the material and perhaps chat about it with a few other people in the course—and this removes all prospect of rescue from people who miss a step along the way.

This isn’t learning, it’s Tetris.

Secondly, if students are depending on a grade, rather than just hanging out for a personally signed certificate from a celebrity academic, then we need to understand much more about the psychology of panic and its impact on how people communicate. Even the most badly prepared student who maintains an attendance record in a face to face class will be hearing something, thinking about something, each week, that might help make sense of the eventual assessment challenges.  The student who fails to connect online is missing out much more substantially, and is struggling alone with the burden of guilt. They’re avoiding communication, and after a while avoiding any environment that even reminds them of the course they’re failing to keep up with. Even the fanciest analytics or progress tracking plug-in that sprays out automated emails reminding students to call home isn’t going to work for someone who’s singing la-la-la, can’t hear you.

So communication in large classes needs to be authentic, multi-channel, persistent and friendly, and course design needs to back up the forgiving tone with practical options for recovery. In plain terms, we need to keep open opportunities for students who fall away to rejoin wherever they can, and to backfill later. This is the best way to tackle the tyranny of compounding time debt, but it’s confronting for us because we’re trained to think of learning as sequenced and cumulative—a virtuous progression of dependent ideas building to an assessable position of competence.

The good news is that our students are absolutely ready for a more intricate and flexible approach to course design. They’ve been learning since high school how to follow unpredictable and often circuitous routes through the realm of information and ideas, exactly as we do. So as the world’s most conservative institutions stampede towards MOOC partnerships, the rest of us have an opportunity to make a few practical and significant adjustments, right here at home.

This isn’t just about flipping the classroom: it’s about flipping the calendar, the curriculum and the whole conveyor belt approach to learning that has shackled content delivery to credentialising to this point. And this is where things will come unstuck, because no one currently running a higher education institution can responsibly hope that this shackle will snap. So even if institutions who fear missing out are currently prepared to loan some of their surplus resources to pro bono work in the MOOC economy, and even if many innovative and exciting teachers are involved, at the moment this is still just missionary outreach.

It’s not yet the real change we need.