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Reinventing the Wheel in Academia

Why is it that in academia we do not routinely adopt “best practices” created by other institutions? Why is it that we prefer to reinvent the wheel?

Maybe it’s the fact that to earn a doctorate one had to research and write an innovative, new, previously un-researched aspect of one’s discipline. The mindset that permits one to succeed in that environment may also be a mindset that prevents one from merely adopting another’s practices. Maybe it’s also the fact that each institution believes that its students and environment are so unique that what works for one institution will not necessarily work for another.

It is the latter belief in each institution’s uniqueness, that is the topic discussed in Beating the ‘Not Invented Here’ article by Josh Fischman in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus. In the article, the author summarizes a panel presentation by stating “There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses.”

One example of that on our campus is student evaluations. At the end of each semester, students complete evaluation forms for every course taught by adjunct and tenure track faculty. Each college in the University has a different evaluation form and many of the forms were developed by a group of faculty within each school. There are commercial instruments available composed of validated, reliable questions-yet faculty choose not to use them because, in part, our campus is so unique.

Student course evaluations can have an inordinate impact on faculty retention and promotion. This is true whether the course evaluations are composed of rigorously tested questions or not. And, this is true even though students may not be entirely honest about their answers to the questions. In my post Another A Word-Course Evaluations, I talk about a study in which one of its findings was that students lie in course evaluations. Even though that is probably true, and it is also true that faculty can (and may have an incentive to) manipulate course evaluations, faculty committees and administrators continue to place inordinate weight on those evaluations when making hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. The point here is that if course evaluations are to be used to make such decisions, those evaluations should be based on reliable, validated questions created by experts.

The point of the example is that universities should embrace best practices that have been successful and universities should focus upgrading the wheel rather than reinventing it. That would be more efficient, more effective and permit faculty to focus on improving teaching and learning.

Innovation in Academia

One of the pleasant benefits of my current position-working with faculty using technology-is that I have the opportunity to meet faculty from many academic disciplines and to discuss what they teach and how they teach it. It reinvigorates me and I learn different approaches to teaching my own subject. In addition, through this work I met a group of faculty who have worked together to write a manuscript on using videos to engage students and encourage critical thinking. The manuscript is under revision now.

I have frequently lamented universities’ lack of substantive support for cross-disciplinary collaboration and teaching. Perhaps that is because my area of expertise is legal studies-and legal studies are multi-discipinary. So, it was with interest that I read the article Communicating Across the Academic Divide in a January 2, 2011 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In that post, the author discussed one critical issue that is a barrier to such cross-disciplinary collaboration: inability to easily communicate. The author stated, “Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting “truth”—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.”

Interesting and provocative. I had always thought that significant innovation could occur through cross-disciplinary conversations and had been frustrated by the lack of consistent, sustainable University encouragement of such efforts. But the author’s point is well taken.

While writing the article on using videos, it was evident that we each had different habits of mind and approaches to what would be required for the article. We reached a rough compromise and I hope that that compromise will result in a published article (the first submission was rejected), but my experience confirmed what this author learned: the challenge may be in convincing our colleagues that each of our approaches is genuinely valuable. My experience in coordinating and co-writing the article was positive, yet there were differences in approaches that had to be resolved. And we each had an interest in engaging students and encouraging critical thinking, so our different approaches did not prevent us from reaching a mutually beneficial compromise.

Downsides of Curricular Innovation

Does innovation mean dumbing down?

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) urges institutions to develop low cost, effective methods to deliver course content and improve learning. Efficient uses of technology are integral to that process.

But what if the technology is a substitute for professors? That is one of the greatest fears of academics-that faculty will be replaced with professors in a box who do not “teach” and that instead serve as reviewers similar to instructors in correspondence courses.

In the article A Curricular Innovation, Reexamined, an Inside Higher Education special report on a for-credit set of courses organized by StraighterLine, the organization raised questions about the use of technology in teaching. According to the article, the courses are cheap (unlimited for $99 per month, $399/course, or 10 for $999) and are accepted for credit at some institutions. The report highlighted some positives-individual tutoring and the ability to self-test for improvement and some negatives–older course materials and significant numbers of errors.

I think that quality can be incorporated into online courses. The report reminds me that we need to be vigilant to be sure that online materials must be checked for rigor. The report also reminds me that face-to-face courses are seldom rigorously evaluated and should be subject to the similar oversight for quality.

Have you ever presented materials (PowerPoint slides, handouts, exams), that had errors? Have you ever said something in class that was wrong and later had to correct it? In a face-to-face class, the only people who know you made those errors are the students who saw the materials. Seldom do our peers review all our materials and note errors. In an online class, those items are memoralized electronically in the course and thus errors can be more easily identified. Since many faculty want to check online course materials more carefully, the errors become a basis for arguing that online education and materials are inferior.

So what does that mean for innovation? We must innovate and as faculty we should be integrally involved in oversight of face to face and online courses. We have to figure out the balance between academic freedom and evaluating quality, but some of the problems discovered in online courses are also equally evident upon review of face to face courses.

Let’s treat both with equal rigor.

Another “A” word-Course Evaluations

In a summary of a future to-be-published article, the Chronicle noted in an article titled “Students Lie on Course Evaluations” that students admitted lying in a way that harms faculty in student course evaluations. That’s the “A” word that relates to faculty promotion and evaluation-assessments students make of faculty.

Faculty who study the field know that course evaluations should be only one of many items that are considered when evaluating faculty performance for retention, tenure or promotion. Our University’s policy is that there are many factors that should be factored in to a decision about how well faculty encourage student learning. Yet, many who are on faculty committees will spend an inordinate about of time developing and applying complex formulas to incorporate the results of course evaluations in a way that makes those course evaluations the pre-eminent determinant of faculty performance.

Why is it that we are so comfortable with using course evaluation numbers as the primary factor to determine whether someone is a good teacher? Those numbers can be so easily manipulated. I know of some faculty who give students treats before the evaluations are administered. That has an impact on perception.

A couple of times I’ve returned exam results immediately before evaluations were administered. Since everyone was not happy with those results, my course evaluations declined. Although my overall course evaluation numbers have been good, I know that I have done things that have an impact on the evaluations and that those things are not directly related to teaching.

Perhaps the study referenced in the article will help us agree on the appropriate weight for student evaluations so that faculty can work on creating a learning environment instead of pleasing students.

Accessibility and Innovation

In the article Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online, Marc Parry describes the one-man odyssey of Darrell Shandrow, a self-described blind journalism student who has embarked on a campaign to demand that universities across the United States incorporate acccessibility into their design of websites, textbooks and all other college experiences. Mr. Shandrow joined the lawsuit filed by the National Federal for the Blind against Arizona State University for its use of Kindle eReaders for etextbooks. According to Parry, Kindle eReaders’ menus are not accessible, although the Kindle does include text to speech software.

In a previous post, I talked about Universal Design for Learning and some of the legal requirements for accessibility. As I noted in that post, one of the key tenants of UDL is that instructional materials should incorporate as many approaches as possible so that many different learners can understand the material. That approach makes sense from a philosophical point of view. However, practically speaking, it is difficult to develop a non time-intensive way for faculty to implement it. I am part of a Faculty Learning Community at Fresno State that is working on helping faculty implement those principles in teaching. We are a group of approximately 20 faculty who are using the book Universal Design in Higher Education by Burgstahler and Cory to prepare instruction and/or materials that incorporate UDL principles. I have learned a great deal from that experience and look forward to the opportunity to incorporate UDL into my courses.

Parry’s article highlights a tension that exists between accessibility and innovation. Creating materials and delivering instruction using UDL principles automatically results in increasing the amount of content that is accessible on many dimensions. However, it takes time and it can sometimes stifle innovation when that approach is adopted for all new things. I wholeheartedly agree with UDL and accessibility principles, yet as someone who likes to push the envelope, I sometimes find that that approach creates barriers to immediately trying a new approach. Conducting pilots help to provide balance but that can create obstacles to more comprehensive implementation.

Sometimes, I just want to dive in when I find something new. That new thing could be a new technology, a new teaching approach, implementation of information from an article about a new theory with which I was not familiar or just something different. I dive in and sometimes I learn what others already knew, but which, for some reason, I needed to learn for myself. I dive in and sometimes I learn something new that I can use and that others also find useful. When I incorporate UDL and accessibility as a habit of mind, though, I must exercise more caution and that can sometimes stifle creativity. So, although I strongly support UDL principles and support implementation of them in my classes, I realize that I must also more carefully consider the options before jumping in. Thus the implementation of UDL has a cost of reducing innovation. Maybe that’s a cost that’s an acceptable one in light of the benefits of UDL. That’s something to consider.

Fair Use, Videos, UCLA and Educational Filmmakers

The Association for Information and Media Equipment has announced that it has sued UCLA because it allows students access to streaming video that UCLA has made available to its students. This lawsuit is the result of an ongoing battle between UCLA and this organization of whether UCLA’s decision to permit student access via streaming video is consistent with the fair use exception to the U.S. Copyright law.

It is ironic that this lawsuit was filed the week after I lead a discussion of Web 2.0 and Plagiarism at the DET/CHE conference last week. One of the discussants mentioned the dispute between UCLA and AIME and noted that AIME’s purpose (creating educational video for sale and use) was negated if educational institutions would be permitted to stream the video. Pricing models for video were traditionally based on how many copies of the video were purchased and if only one was purchased, then would not be profitable to make (and sell) the video.

This dispute is reminiscent of the issue faced by music manufacturers after digital music was available. After peer-to-peer sharing networks were created, music manufacturers could not longer force customers to purchase an entire album of music to obtain a song or two that they liked. iTunes and others recognized that there was a market in selling songs individually and as albums. Although the iTunes model did not solve all the problems of illegal downloads, it was certainly a practical alternative for those customers who wanted to obtain the music legally and did not want to purchase an entire album.

So perhaps the pricing model should change. In the article Who’s Right on Video Copyright, the author suggested that videos should be sold by the use (e.g. so that students pay each time they watch the streaming video). Another model might be to encourage institutions to collaborate to help pay for the video (through mini-grants, for example) and those institutions would have access to the streaming video. Another might be to commission institutions who have media majors to create professional videos and compensate students and others to create those videos. A combination of these and other approaches might result in educator access to videos and profits for the video producers. Reliance on the traditional pricing model when technology has changed the way institutions and individuals gain access to videos seems misplaced.

Making Videos Accessible

Collaboration can be used in multiple ways to help increase accessibility of educational resources. This fits with concepts of Universal Design for Learning that make educational information as accessible as possible for others.

In the article Making Videos Accessible with Universal Subtitles, George Williams explains how the website Universal Subtitles is encouraging people to collaborate to write subtitles through posting and editing transcripts of posted videos. You can upload a video to ask for subtitling and you can volunteer to subtitle.

I’m going to try something similar in my classes (although students will not be volunteers, but will probably get some sort of credit for it). I’m going to ask students to develop transcripts of narrated PowerPoints and videos that I develop or use for the class. I’ll let you know in a future post how (or whether) that works when I implement it in the Spring 2011 semester.

Disruptive, Transformational Change

In the Chronicle article College Grad Rates Stay Exactly the Same, Kevin Carey concludes: “Most of the growth in higher education has come from older, first-generation, immigrant, and lower-income students. It’s easy enough for skeptics to assert that these students aren’t graduating because they’re not college material. I think this massively discounts the likelihood that institutions whose basic structures and cultures were established decades or even centuries ago, for a particular kind of student, have done a poor job of adapting to the needs of different students going to college in a different time.”

It is a significant challenge for those of us who learned and now teach in educational institutions to restructure education to improve learning for all. I have talked in earlier posts about embracing disruptive, transformational change in teaching and learning. Efforts such as the Red Balloon project, spearheaded by George Mehaffy, Vice President of AACSU, grant programs such as the NextGen learning program and others attempt to initiate discussion and action designed to improve education and access to education for all who are interested.

I’m action oriented, though, so although discussion is a necessary precursor, I really just want to try approaches. And that’s where it can be difficult-where are the resources to create an assessment scheme, pilot new approaches, and determine their effectiveness in the short and long term? If I/we/our institution had the resources, I’d encourage others and myself to jump in and try new approaches. I know I’d probably stub my toes, run into walls, trample on some things that work well and muddle through a great deal, but would hope that in that process I’d have some success with encouraging more learning and improved access to education.

That’s the gist of efforts to improve graduation rates. Regardless of how those rates are measured, it is clear that the rates can be improved. And that improvement should involve all students who are interested in a college education, not only those who have traditionally had success in the current education system.

Information Overload and Innovation

In the article Information Overload, Then and Now, Ann Blair explains that complaints of information overload began two thousand years ago, when people began preserving information through writing . She explains the joy and frustrations created in earlier times in this way: “Writing on durable surfaces (like parchment or paper), with a high level of redundancy (when multiple copies were produced, whether manuscript or printed), also made it possible to recover texts after they had fallen into oblivion, so that being in continuous active use was no longer essential to a text’s transmission, as is the case in an oral culture.”

Information overload in older times included the complication of searching for and finding relevant information. Blair notes the range of history from note-taking, informally collecting information through note-taking and formally storing information alphabetically and using indexing, organization methods within books to make the information more accessible and use of bibliographies. The article ends with a caution to build on what we’ve learned about storing and collecting information as we continue to store, collect and access information in electronic formats.

The issues raised in the article are magnified now that individuals can search using search engines such as Google, can store that information on their own and other computers, can add to that information through online mechanisms such as wikipedia and can create mashups that take data (regardless of its format) and manipulate it quickly to create new materials.

As we adopt methods to implement disruptive transformational change in teaching and learning, we must remain mindful of the tension between the traditions of knowledge that have served us well and the need to help learners filter through massive amounts of information available at their fingertips. In teaching, that involves, in part, helping students manage information literacy, or the ability to review information to determine its credibility. At the same time, change often occurs through innovation and mashups and using other web 2.0 tools can help create that change. Educators continue to struggle to figure out the best way to accomplish that balance.

Integrity in Professional Sports

[Integrity in other contexts:] This post does not directly relate to online teaching or how people learn. However, I’m a sports fan and I teach a sports marketing law course, so I’m going to create a connection here (whether one exists or not!)

The Denver Broncos were fined for illegally videotaping a portion of the 49ers October 30 practice, before the two teams were to meet. Why is that noteworthy? It’s noteworthy because Josh McDaniels, the Broncos’ coach, was the offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots during the years that Belichick, coach of the Patriots, regularly videotaped others teams. In addition, shortly after Belichick’s fine and loss of draft picks, Bob Kraft, owner of the team, signed Belichick to a long term contract deal.

How does this relate to integrity? Rules violations are normally interpreted to violate ethical principles relating to fairness and the duty to follow the law (depending on which ethical approach you take). If the NFL rules prohibit videotaping other teams’ practices and prohibit videotaping coaching signals during the game, those who do not play by the rules can gain a competitive advantage by their breach of those rules. (See this rules’ summary in Mayer v. Belichick) This also means that the owner’s support of the conduct can help create an environment that rules violations are acceptable as long as the team wins [and the violations are not caught for a long time].

How does this relate to how people learn? People learn, in part, by following the examples that their leaders set. The NFL’s policy has teeth only to the extent that those who violate those rules are subject to punishment that are sufficient to deter the conduct. In addition, the NFL’s policy has teeth only to the extent that the NFL can negate the lesson taught to assistants (e.g. McDaniels) who learn from coaches (e.g. Belichick) and owners (e.g. Kraft) that ethics violations do not matter as long as the team wins.

In this instance, the videotaping was done by a member of the Bronco’s staff who, apparently, told McDaniels and McDaniels refused to watch the videotape. However, the NFL rules require reporting of such conduct and McDaniels did not. If you assume that McDaniels did not watch the videotape, at the very least he did violate the NFL rules. However, the lessons he learned from the leadership of his prior team did not demonstrate integrity for that particular rule and thus McDaniels seemed to follow that similar rule-ignoring approach.

[Relationship to this blog and its topics: ]If we’re trying to encourage learners to act with integrity, it’s difficult and frustrating when those in the public eye do not also do so. And that’s this post’s connection to integrity and how people learn.