EduPunk and the Matthew Effect

Inside Higher Ed today has a piece on "The Rise of Edupunk." I didn't find much new in the article, except that perhaps mainstream institutions are beginning to pay attention, but this struck a chord: Quoting Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia,

In a bow to the “Edupunks,” Sullivan explained that Virginia is incorporating student habits into its pedagogy.

In "Edupunk and the New Ecology" I proposed three elements necessary to student success outside the academic walls:

• Access to quality learning materials
• A learning community
• Motivation to succeed

I find it interesting that the conversation is moving beyond technology and specifically focusing (at least in this instance) on non-cognitives. As a case study, we might consider Matthew Peterson, whose story is summed up in MITnews from Nov. 3:

In his junior year at Klein Oak High School in Spring, Texas, Mat Peterson — now an MIT freshman — was struggling with the his physics course. A friend of his recommended that he look at MIT OpenCourseWare, where Peterson turned to Walter Lewin's videos and found the help he needed.

Matthew was motivated enough to use MIT's Open Course Ware. Here's the branding from the website:

No registration required. I would suggest that young people today (rightly or wrongly) expect intellectual property to be public property: songs and movies are free to download, information on any topic is at your fingertips, and there is impatience with any barrier that gets in the way. And in fact, the actual knowledge that professors design to deliver in curricula falls into that category. Think about how archaic the idea is of lugging around a Biology textbook. And paying $150 for it when everything you need to know is already free online seems ridiculous. A week ago I wrote about the Fat Middle, and textbook publishers are a good example of one ripe for revolution. But it's not just textbooks. Lectures too. The whole traditional delivery of static classroom experience is already freely available for many subjects. The effect on MIT itself has been significant. In a "MIT OpenCourseWare: A Decade of Global Benefit", Shigeru Miyagawa writes:

Over the past 10 years, OCW has moved from a bold experiment to an integral part of MIT. Currently, more than 93% of undergraduates and 82% of graduate students say they use the site as a supplement to their course material or to study beyond their formal coursework. Eighty-four percent of faculty members use the site for advising, course materials creation, and personal learning. More than half of MIT alumni report using the site as well, keeping up with developments in their field, revisiting the materials of favorite professors, and exploring new topics. Open publication of course materials has become an ordinary element of scholarly activity for MIT faculty, and the ubiquitous availability of that curriculum to our own community has become the everyday reality of teaching and learning at MIT. 

So how does this play out over the next decade?

The Matthew Effect wasn't named for Mr. Peterson--that's just a happy coincidence. Some time ago, in assessing our general education goals (not my current institution), I found indications that "higher ability" students learn faster. The graph below is taken from Assessing the Elephant. It shows assessed writing ability for a cohort over six semesters, controlled for survivorship. The cohort is split into high and low GPA groups. It's not surprising that the high GPA group was judged on average to have better writing skills, but it was surprising to see that the amount of change was so different.

This jibes with my own classroom experience, however, and I would venture to guess that (as Gladwell poses in Outliers) talent and motivation go hand in hand. In fact, we have evidence for that. In a recent post, "Assessing Writing," I showed that if we can just get the low GPA students into the writing lab for help, we can significantly improve their writing over four years. If this is true, then their ability is constrained by activity and engagement and not solely by innate talent.

I had not seen the Wikipedia article on the Matthew Effect before, but it's interesting:

[E]arly success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of life-long problems in learning new skills. This is because children who fall behind in reading, read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read) their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.

If we apply this same idea to the Edupunk model, what we might expect is that self-starters, confident students, and those with enough knowledge and skill to begin self-education, will flourish like Matthew Peterson.  On the other hand, a student who struggles in school and as a result doesn't like it much, seems unlikely to be in a position to benefit from the OCW or other free resources. This is a recipe for an increasing divergence between intellectual haves and have-nots.

A Modest Proposal is to begin early to teach students how to access and use self-serve education. Honestly, this has to start in the home--the teachers can't do it all. The article "Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage" from Miller-McCune points to research linking home libraries to educational achievement.

Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

(Here's Science Daily on the same topic.) How might it work? Math instruction would be very different from the traditional approach. Instead of telling students that the equation for a line is y = mx +b, they'd be tasked to go out and find it. Or figure out that the formula is needed at all. There are many "meta" levels of questioning. If we built this kind of inquiry into the curriculum from the start, we'd avoid the "catch-up" information literacy training we try to do in college.

Note that I don't propose this as a panacea or some great new idea that could revolutionize education. There is enough snake oil on sale already. But complex problems require evolutionary solutions, and this seems like something that ought to be tried out. The proof is in the actual success or failure of the attempt.

Mass culture in the United States works against us. The irony of the information age is that although deep veins of accumulated knowledge are there to be mined, most informational interactions are expected to be brief and shallow. Television is an extreme example, but it seems pervasive to the point of oppressiveness. And so we come back to non-cognitives. It's like the problem of building self-discipline: a chicken and egg dependency.  (If you procrastinate on learning how to not procrastinate...) It isn't really about learning. It's about wanting to learn. So I leave you with the problem at the heart of the edupunk Matthew Effect:

How do people learn to want to learn if they don't want to?

Edupunk and the New Ecology

On July 17, 1969, the New York Times printed a retraction to a 1920 editorial that read in part:

That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

Apparently the moon landing changed their minds about the way rockets work.

Failures of imagination are obvious in retrospect, and it particularly interesting to observe one's own shortcomings in creativity. The virtual ink is hardly dry on my post "Unplanned Obsolescence," where I described an idea for an eBay-like system of matching educational providers and consumers. Now I read that there's an even simpler system, and it already exists!

I remember reading sometime back about an eBay precursor, or mutant variation, perhaps--an evolutionary design that had no chance of surviving the Great Dot Com Crash. The business model for this extinct mercantile species was: buy the nation's junk, store it in great warehouses, mark it up and sell it online. This is like eBay, except that eBay only provides a place to bid. Buyers and sellers exchange money and items sold with no direct intervention from the online auction house. The idea of actually shelling out cash for all that stuff, holding it, and arranging for it to be shipped is obviously inferior. It's a case of simplifying down to the bare necessities.

The article "How Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education" raises the question of what is this minimum delivery system in higher ed. Rather than my auction house idea, the article presents the idea of completely open education, where the resources are freely available. In order to have something concrete to talk about, let me assume the best case--that we want to deliver a computer science curriculum online. The students probably have access to the Internet and computers, and are probably comfortable with the technology. This subject, as opposed to something like learning glass-blowing, is very suitable for an open delivery system.

I see the following as the essential ingredients to effective open education. Probably in a month I'll realize how dumb I was and write another post decrying this analysis in favor of even simpler requirements. As Gauss said, to err and err but less and less...

Access to high quality learning resources. By this I mean automated or static materials: books, websites, interactive tutorials, compilers (since we're talking about computer science), editors, debuggers, and other software. This category does not include human resources, which we'll come to in a minute. Information becoming stale is always a problem, so we probably require an altruistic organizer of "best source" learning materials. Something like Wikipedia, perhaps.

A learning community. Even with do-it-yourself materials, there will be difficult patches requiring custom explanation and verification that you are on the right track. This could be provided by other students who are more advanced. If it's to be free, participation in the learning community has to be voluntary, with perhaps "soft" rewards like social networking karma. Here, status is formalized through official kudos of some sort.

Motivation to succeed. We might call this "grit" (see this post). This is the only part that cannot be provided externally, at least until pharmacology catches up. When a traditional college student is packed off to the dorms of his new ivy-bedecked home, there are social pressures that undoubtedly help motivate him to succeed. More so, at least, than if he were sitting at home and had to choose between YouTube and I-Learn, guess which one will win for most. (Take a guess where i-learn.com takes you...it's surprising, and reveals something, perhaps...click here. Is this big web retailer getting into the ed market???).

Motivation is the weak link. I think it might be possible with the right social network apparatus to overcome the inertial tendencies of lone students at their computers. Perhaps something like (shudder) Second Life is the answer.

The new movement for open education is wildly optimistic. Self-described "edupunks" see the Internet transforming higher education for good. From the article:

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Some of the Ed 2.0 innovations available right now, cited in the article are (all quotes from the article):

Flat World Knowledge. Advertises itself as "Remixable textbooks by expert authors, free online, and affordable off." Affordable means $30 for hard copy, but downloads are free. This addresses access.

Academic Earth focuses exclusively on scholarly video lectures, and as such also addresses the content access area. Creator Richard Ludow has ambitious plans for the site: "My idea was to first, aggregate this huge critical mass of content disconnected over various sites; second, apply best practices in user interface design and Web standards to do for educational content what Hulu has done [for TV]; and third, build an educational ecosystem around the content."

Peer2Peer University. This social networking site provides an online place where "Would-be students can use the Web site to convene and schedule classes, meet online, and tutor one another; a volunteer facilitator for each course helps the process along." The home page encourages you to think of it as a sort of book club for motivated autodidacts. The seven courses currently on offer are eclectic, ranging from Neuroethics to Cyberpunk Literature.

University of the People. Describes itself as "the world’s first tuition-free, online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education." There are two complete programs on offer, in Business Administration and Computer Science. You can see the recommended course sequence for the latter here. I haven't tried to compare it the the ACM standard, but it looks pretty solid to me. Note, however, that UoPeople is not yet accredited and does not confer degrees.

Western Governors University isn't free, but it's cheap: under $3000 for a six-month term, all online. The most interesting attribute to me is that grades and credits are gone. In President Mendenhall's words:

We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree.

And it's accredited by the Northwest Commission. I find this amazing, and will write more about how this works once I've had a chance to research it.

WGU tries to address the motivation problem:

For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. "Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that's their whole job," Mendenhall says.

Teaching, assessment, and motivation are separate functions:

What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the "sage on the stage" conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator.

An expanding ecology of evolutionary solutions to the problem of higher education is evident in the list above. This can only grow as more innovations are tried, the successful ones surviving to create new models. Meanwhile, the traditional bricks and ivy institutions lumber along like edusaurus, oblivious to the changing climate. But that criticism is too easy, and perhaps unfair. There is value in the intense social environment of a face-to-face college experience. Moreover, there is the comfort of standardization: despite technological changes, the academy functions pretty much the same way it has for 1000 years. Ultimately the marketplace will sort out what value to place on these bonuses. For the motivated self-learners, for the lifelong learners, there will certainly be lots of options. As the WGU administration would probably agree, it's not what the diploma says that's ultimately important: it's what you can do.