Weapons of Class Instruction

My first opportunity to teach came in the fall of 1988 at the University of Texas at Austin. My students were almost entirely undergraduate business majors and I was assigned to teach them an introductory course in Management Information. I was excited to be given this opportunity although this was part and parcel of my Assistantship responsibilities. I had previously spent five years in industry as an MIS professional and was also involved with a software startup, and so I believed I knew a lot about the field. I took it as my responsibility to tell the students everything I knew and interpret for them all the information that was contained in the hefty (and colourful and expensive) textbook prescribed. I was proud that I understood pretty much everything between the covers of the book and a whole lot else too. I was a one-stop teaching shop, at least for the course. Or so I believed.

But I had never taught before in my life. How was I to get through all the material? Well, technology made the task easier. This was a time before Microsoft Powerpoint became the de facto standard for beating massed audiences over the head with information. There was another product out at the time, if I recall, Aldus (later, Adobe) Persuasion which ran on the Mac, my favorite computer. But those machines were not available in our classrooms. In fact, we had no computers in our classrooms then, only in the computer lab. There were whiteboards and we could use overhead transparencies. So I spent days and nights vomiting all my knowledge on to transparencies; I made scores, perhaps hundreds of them, with bullet points, drawings and all, and in color. My students were very pleased, or so I trusted.

When computers began to be available in the classroom, I switched over to using Powerpoint slides and spent long hours building them up. Well, a couple of decades have passed, and I don't rely on overheads or slides very much anymore. I apologize to all my early students for inflicting information on them. I was so utterly mistaken about the goals of education. I understand very well now that education is not about shoving information into people's heads. Unfortunately, academic institutions continue to believe that that is indeed what they are supposed to do. And with each passing year, they increasing quantity of information they seek to funnel into the heads of students, employing the latest technologies to increase -- in their warped perception -- the efficiencies of such transfer. I wonder when the singularity (also here) will occur in education. At that point, students would have reached their limit and technology wouldn't be effective any more in the achievement of this narrow objective.

I have now learned to carefully pick occasions where I believe props such as Powerpoint slides might add something useful to the process. I avoid slides of bulleted lists of points wherever I can.

More often than not technologies and other props are used as crutches by those who cannot teach. Learning certainly involves the transfer of information, but that's like saying life involves the beating of a heart -- yeah, sure, but there's a whole lot more going on, and the beating heart is but only a start.

Latin diplomas: Form over Function

If there were any doubt that prestige and appearance are as much the currency of formal institutional education as the quality of knowledge they dispense to their students, this New York Times article will likely dispel it. The author, a professor of classical studies at a small American liberal arts college, rails against the use of Latin in college diplomas, stating:

Latin is a beautiful language and a relief from the incessant novelty and informality of the modern age. But when it’s used on diplomas, the effect is to obfuscate, not edify; its function is to overawe, not delight. The goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge — not the creation and transmission of prestige. Why, then, celebrate that education with a document that prizes grandiosity over communication?

Much time, money and effort has been invested in infusing prestige into the public image of elite academic institutions. The idea, perhaps, is that if it looks prestigious, then it must be prestigious. Thus universities knock on the doors of wealthy potential donors to pay for the construction of swank, impressive buildings and expensive infrastructure. All this is very good as long as it contributes significantly to the institution's primary goal of 'creation and transmission of knowledge'. But we all know that the greatest of ideas -- even scientific ones -- can emerge from amidst the most humble and even chaotic of physical environments, for it is the great minds and their ideas that matter far more than awe-inspiring campuses. Latin diplomas and fancy campuses are designed to persuade graduates, their parents and the rest of the world that the degrees granted were actually worth the money and time spent, and thus the graduates deserve not only respect but also lofty and well-paying positions in business, government and elsewhere. Purpose is often sacrificed for form, because it is so much easier to overwhelm people with visible form than with invisible, if substantial, content.

This is not an argument for creating dingy, cramped and underprovided educational campuses -- that would be an atrocity worse than the one described above. This is a plea for devoting the most attention to the purpose for which academic institutions exist in the first place.

When I was at the University of Texas at Austin I knew of at least one professor -- very popular among students for his commitment to teaching and his excellence at his work -- who was fired for not having a stellar research and publication record. I have observed a similar occurrence first hand at another American university. Research is the benchmark used for the selection and retention of faculty at top institutions in the US and there is no reason to fault such a criterion by itself. But for a public institution which came into existence (and continues to exist) principally to educate students, it is a travesty that it rids itself of an individual who excels at this task. In the United States, a university's prestige is linked to the research record of its faculty far more than the effectiveness with which it educates its students.

Prestige is important for the varied benefits it brings; but it is important not to lose sight of purpose.

Attendance

Here's a public confession I have been waiting for years to make, with a view to cleansing myself: During my final year of undergraduate engineering education, more than three decades ago, I attended less than a week of class. Well, it's worse than that: I attended a sum total of three days of class, and even worse, I was proud of it. Used to be that one wore such feats like a badge of honor to be shown off in the company of one's peers. This is akin to potential gang members committing violent acts in order to be admitted into one's favorite gang.

I am no longer proud of what I did; indeed, I am rather ashamed: I wasted my parents' hard-earned savings for which they made innumerable personal sacrifices. And I wasted the opportunity to improve myself in significant ways. As one who has committed his life to education, I feel personally slighted when students skip my classes -- so I offer my sincerest apologies to all of my undergraduate professors whose faces I never saw that entire year. Perhaps I have atoned for my sins by returning to the scene of the crime so to speak and working to make amends.

That having been said, I had become terribly bored with class. It couldn't be the material itself, since it continues to fascinate me decades after I graduated. It probably is the context and manner in which the putative educational process occurred -- the How, the Where, and the When. For the person I was then, the process held no charm at all; and I wasn't the only one thus disaffected. Except for a few doggedly determined students, the majority had significantly slacked off by the final year. It was not only the backbenchers who stayed away from class -- there were many bright, even brilliant ones who didn't. Some, of course, were not suited for that particular program of education -- engineering -- but went through the motions anyway since the culture and economy offered few options in that era for personal advancement. But many of those who showed little interest in attending classes went on to become successful practicing engineers, even pursuing graduate studies in the subject, with a few obtaining doctorates and becoming distinguished researchers and professors.

The pedagogical process in place then (which is pretty much intact even now) involved placing rows upon rows of students in an enclosed space and inflicting structured information on them, mostly verbally but often with the accompaniment of visuals. Attendance (spotty) was taken, and used as a surrogate for Attention (which frequently drifted); and Attention was treated as a surrogate for Retention of knowledge (which decayed exponentially); and Retention in turn was considered as the key measure of Learning (which was marginal at best). This was further evaluated through examinations, which were mostly founded on Retention and some degree of Application -- although methods of Application were also learned by rote, and so the learning didn't go very deep. The fact that I -- and most other students -- graduated with a first division despite a Lack of Attendance suggests to me that the pedagogical and evaluative process is seriously broken. And most students who got away in this fashion have done fairly well for themselves in life. My conclusion is that their success is far more a consequence of the selection and admission process into the institution which admits students who were going to be quite successful regardless of their circumstances. The educational system itself -- apart from affixing on the graduate the label of a reputed institution -- contributed precious little. Now, it can, and should do better than this. And I believe that the entire existing pedagogical framework needs to be thrown away and entirely new ones constructed.

From Dozens of Millions to Millions of Dozens

I chanced upon this musty, old article (by internet standards) from the BBC about Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite, a once promising internet search engine that peaked before Google even got going and later founded JotSpot, an application wiki company acquired in 2006 by Google and relaunched as Google Sites.

The key takeaway for me from the news story was this reflection by Joe Kraus on Google (and how it stole the market from the likes of Excite) and Amazon (and how it beat traditional brick-and-mortar book retailers Borders and Barnes and Noble). I quote from the article:

Only 40% of Amazon's revenue comes from the 125,000 books stocked in an average Barnes and Noble shopping mall store.

The other 60% of cashflow comes from the now famous "long tail" - hundreds of thousands more books that Amazon has found a way of distributing economically to customers who seek not the best sellers but a very precise title probably very obscure to most people and most shops.

And the second example:

Both Excite and Google are free to use; both business plans needed the support of advertisers.

But Excite took the conventional view that the ads would come from the top 100 companies in the USA, the people who buy huge amount of TV time and blanket the newspapers and the magazines.

Google did not go for the big spenders. Google's squads of PhDs wrote algorithms that would make it viable for the company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.

Then he concludes:

"The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people."

I think we can apply this same insight to Technology Augmented Learning in the Age of the Internet (and beyond). Prior to the 20th century, formal knowledge- (vs. skill-) based education was typically imparted by wise and experienced scholars and teachers to a tiny group of pupils through intense and personal interaction. Education was inherently an elitist, cerebral pursuit demanding great sacrifices on the part of both teacher and student and only a few very highly gifted and talented individuals made it through the process. The industrial era provided a new metaphor for education (and just about any kind of human pursuit) and the principles of mass manufacturing were extended to education. Massive schools and universities were constructed. Knowledge was standardized and codified and disseminated by methodically-trained teachers employing seemingly efficient methods of instruction in large classrooms filled with dozens, scores, and even hundreds of students. For a while, things seemed to work. The experience was not very satisfying as hordes of students and thousands of teachers and professors will testify, but the process was seen as being good enough, under the circumstances.

In reality, excepting for the most elite institutions, most students graduated with not much more than barely functional skills which they then proceeded to acquire on the job, where the worked at the expense of their employers, or on their own, outside the walls of academia. What worked for automobiles, pencil sharpeners and bottle openers doesn't work quite as well for processes that are inherently cognitive, intellectual and knowledge-intensive. People have different knowledge acquisition styles, interests, cognitive abilities and need for knowledge. Perhaps what we need are the equivalent of a million academic institutions each serving mere dozens of students. Now that looks a lot like the traditional guru-shishya framework.

We cannot resurrect the ancient guru-shishya instruction process to meet the ongoing learning needs of a billion learners. But we may very well be able to exploit available to technologies to provide a learning structure that can approximate it in its effectiveness. The goal is not imitation of the process but investigating what made it work, and combine that with modern educational research and new technologies to achieve the same end result.

Whether good enough is all that is achievable with education is a subject meant for another discussion -- I will simply state here that I don't buy that argument. What I will assert is that Google and Amazon provide hope that with modern technology, we can develop a system that is NOT one size fits all (and hence fits none). We could fashion the technology and methods available to build systems to meet the needs of the Long Tail -- education to suit every learning style and every specific type of knowledge. Education is the most important structure for the creation and maintenance of vibrant democracies. We can make this democracy work only if we create an education system that actually does its job and isn't merely good enough.

Harvard wants to fix business education

In the wake of the numerous financial scandals that have beset the United States -- and Wall Street, in particular (as well as the world as large) -- the heads of Harvard and other business schools have been scrambling into damage control mode as well attempting to engage in a process of genuine introspection. Business schools have a lot at stake. Prominent among those being held responsible for the meltdown are graduates of elite business schools such as Harvard and there is a danger of public anger being directed at these schools for having ostensibly nurtured criminal tendencies among its students. While financial scandals are an ongoing sideshow in all nations and economies, this is the first time that such scandals have been explicitly linked to significant personal financial losses experienced by millions of ordinary people. If financial and other improprieties become permanently associated with very well-endowed institutions, then many powerful individuals in high places may have the reputations (unfairly) smeared and the institutions might begin to go downhill as a result.

Actually, there is a lot more at state than merely the fate of a few mighty institutions. An entire paradigm 0f education on which entire economies have been nurtured for over half a century is being questioned: Are we on the right track? Do we need to reboot? Should we scrap much of what we have taught all these decades and start from scratch?

It's unlikely, though, that graduate business education will be dramatically transformed in the short run. First, it's tough to turn a big ship going at full-tilt. Further, many fundamental concepts taught at business schools are based on solid evidence and impervious to scandal. More importantly, the current scandal is largely focused on ethics -- or a lack, thereof -- as practiced by captains of industry. But unethical behavior is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps unethical behavior was just one downstream link in chain of behaviors whose source was actions founded on flawed business principles. People sometimes do unethical things in order to compensate for failures that were the result of bad business decisions which founded on defective business principles. Perhaps the world has changed very significantly since the time the business ideas were first enunciated and tested and they are no longer applicable. The world of human beings, after all, is far more fluid than the inanimate universe that surrounds us, and is governed by laws that are much more complex and plastic.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto seems to be making a similar point. He says the typical MBA education is shallow, narrow and static, where it should be deep, broad and dynamic. He elaborates, stating that MBA students should not only acquire models and principles, but their underlying logic so that they can tear them apart to inspect them or to construct their own from scratch; they ought to appreciate that the world is a complex, messy place where business cannot be run merely on the back of rational-actor economics; and that innovation and design are key to moulding MBA graduates capable of dealing with change and variety. Martin does have an agenda here: the MBA program he runs at Rotman's differentiates itself from the rest on those very principles he presents as essential. Clearly, though, he believes that those ideas are significant enough that they can form the cornerstone of a whole new approach to business education. To be sure, the Rotman MBA is not radically different in every way from the Standard Model, if you well, developed by Harvard and imitated by thousands of others around the world. Martin himself was a Harvard MBA and the fruit is unlikely to travel too far from the might tree that is Harvard Business School. It is difficult both radically change an MBA program and gain credibility for a different paradigm in competitive market where the current way is well-entrenched.

But perhaps, this presents an opportunity for a disruptive model to emerge that initially does not serve the mainstream (or threaten the market leaders such a Harvard, Sloan and Northwestern) but eventually attains a strong enough position to threaten to topple the status quo.

We live in exciting times.

Stanford launches Open Office Hours on Facebook

Stanford U - like much of California - is known to push the envelope when it comes to technology (and culture). After all, Stanford was the pot in which Yahoo and Google - and a whole lot of other wonders of modern living - were stewed and brewed. Understanding that the traditional educational model isn't really working well (or perhaps just in a fit of whimsy), Stanford now has leading professorial lights holding office hours on Facebook -- not only for its own students, but for anyone in the world so inclined. If there are any more holdouts out there who have thus far resisted the inexorable forces that push us all into the vast Facebook ocean -- and who think that Facebook is meant only for kids sharing pictures of their drunken revelries -- there's goes their final excuse. I mean, who wouldn't delight in engaging in a conversation with, oh, I don't know, Donald Knuth, the living patron saint of all computer scientists? Or Phil Lombardo, infamous for conducting the famous prison experiment? I'm getting goosebumps already, just thinking about it.

Like all social experiments, this Facebook Open Office Hours (FOOH?) initiative is likely to have consequences way beyond and quite different from those that led to its lauching. People are going to pick it up and run with it. I am very excited to see how this might transform education and learning. FOOH not only breaks downs the walls of the classroom, it also removes the larger wall around the institution itself. Previously inaccessible and remote scholars of repute will now be seen as real human beings, inspiring a wider swath of young people to take to scholarship, now that they know that great people are fashioned out of ordinary - but enthusiastic - little people like themselves.

Facebook wasn't originally meant for such an application at all. It was meant for Harvard students to extend their exhibitionistic and voyeuristic proclivities into the virtual world -- and it has succeeded in this project well-beyond its creators wildest dreams. It's delightful to know that there are curious adult minds that have begun to experiment with applying the technology to other domains. Persons beyond a certain age tend to feel threatened by what feels like an uwelcome intrusion into their private spaces and time. But that is true only if one is still grounded in a way of life that is rapidly vanishing before our eyes. Members of the younger generation are able to seamlessly blend their real and virtual lives and thereby extend the relationships, influence and sources of knowledge into dimensions that didn't exist even one decade ago. This is the new reality that the world of education must come to terms with employ as the basis for the complete redesign of architectures of education.

What are some benefits of FOOH? To be sure, this is not just about Facebook, but any means of direct engagement between teacher and student by employing video, audio, rich media in general and conversational structure. Harrison Owen, the inventor of a now wildly successful and widely employed group process called Open Space Technology came up with the idea for his process at an academic conference. He found that the most interesting discussions and explorations occurred not during the scheduled sessions themselves but during the brief coffee and lunch breaks when attendees from various sessions jostled and mingled in a disorderly fashion. Why not, he thought, organize a conference which in its entirety was like a coffee break, where discussion groups self-organized and important issues emerged out of this social process, thus turning the concept of a conference on its head? The relevance of Owen's observation here is that the most significant components of the educational process occur not merely during the scheduled classes but in the breaks in between them, as students and teachers wander about and mingle, on and off campus. FOOH provides a framework for structuring, capturing and preserving those interactions for later review not only by the original participants, but by later visitors. Imagine what it would be like if one could eavesdrop on all sorts of conversations going on across a campus, and hang out in the presence of great scholars whenever they choose to emerge? FOOH then becomes a Knowledge Bank.

No doubt naysayers will abound, and disadvantages of FOOH will be discussed in depth across the internet. But all tools and technologies have their downside, it is how you choose to use them that brings benefits. Me, I'm all for extending this experiment around the world.

Of Lectures, Lamps and LEDs

This blog post began as a response to VS Baskar's comment/query in response to my previous post (Tegrity: BandAid for a broken format?). He asked:

The format which you are discussing as outdated, is it being followed in India ?

If not what format is followed in India and how many years we are lagging in keeping pace with the world standards. Can the western format be followed if the number of students are huge as in India?

The basic format of a classroom with rows of seated students, a black/white/chalk-board out front and other optional accessories such as a flipchart, overhead or LCD projector and a computer, perhaps hooked up to the internet is pretty much standard all over the world. Indeed, this is the Gold Standard, and has been in use (without the modern accessories, of course), for hundreds of years. The problem is that this format is familiar, looks good, but is rather inefficient. To draw an engineering analogy, its "knowledge transmission efficiency" is poor.

The incandescent lamp -- that thing we call a light bulb, immortalized as the symbol of bright ideas -- has been around since 1802: that's 80 years before Edison's mythic, Eureka-tinged invention of it. Edison got the credit because he made the whole system of illumination of which the bulb was but a part, work effectively. Effectively doesn't mean efficiently, of course -- over 90% of the electrical energy supplied to the lamp is wasted as heat. Now, that is pretty darned inefficient, if you would ask me. VS, a chemical engineer, would be horrified to hear this; even chemical engineers can do better than this. On the other hand, the up-front cost of light bulb is quite low, the result of over a century of refinement and increasing manufacturing efficiency. And consequently, the light bulb -- and its associated fittings -- are ubiquitous. And so we are stuck with it, much like with the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.

The parallels with the Gold Standard Lecture Format are quite interesting. The lecture format has been around for centuries, both teachers and students all over the world are familiar with it, and it is easy to find teachers who can do it. But what if there were alternatives?

The global energy crisis with demand outstripping supply as well as environmental concerns has provided impetus and urgency to the search for more efficient alternatives. The current candidate is the Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) and an emerging, even better alternative is the LED lamp. Both are more expensive than the light bulb, and an infrastructure is yet to emerge to take advantage of network effects. Check out the following links:

CFL and LED lights: a comparison

LED vs. Incandescent lamp vs. CFL

Today's educational institutional framework is still stuck in the equivalent of the incandescent lamp age -- the world over, not just in India. All the technology that is increasingly used in the lecture hall is equivalent to paving the cowpaths -- an expression popularized by Business Process Reengineering guru Michael Hammer which means unthinkingly automating a process which is inherently inefficient rather than redesigning it entirely, from ground up. While we're at it, let me also fling the term putting lipstick on a pig into the mix.

We use the Gold Standard format because we don't know of any other -- well enough, anyway --and the pace of educational institutional growth over the past few decades has been so rapid that human society has been caught with its pants down. We are stuck with an obsolete paradigm. Winston Churchill once remarked that "... democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Perhaps something similar is to be said about the Gold Standard.

Except, we now have the opportunity to innovate and develop one or more entirely new paradigms using the prodigious amount of knowledge about cognition and learning we have gathered over the past century as well as the variety of existing and emerging information and communication technologies. We must not tarry any further because the demands placed on the current paradigm are rapidly escalating and the paradigm itself does not have in it to survive the onslaught. We are facing a complete breakdown of the educational paradigm as it stands and need to quickly put our heads together and find a variety of alternatives to fit the varied needs of the diversity of cultures and requirements that abound in this modern world.