Tegrity: BandAid for a broken format?

I've been checking out Tegrity (or rather, its website), the 'lecture capture web service' I mentioned in an earlier post and have come away with mixed feelings. Tegrity captures audio and video lectures and presentations and stores them on a server. Lectures are delivered in a fairly ingenious way to students and there is some capability to search and drill down to specific bits of information. So far, so good.

Assuming the lecture format to be the Gold Standard for imparting knowledge, technologies like Tegrity and iTunes U serve primarily to fix deficiencies in it. The lecture format worked in an era of low mobility, small classes, few distractions. An instructor had all the time in the world to lecture, elaborate, explain, and answer all the questions of a small number of students who did not have to rush off to work, attend to families, deal with huge course load and indulge in entertainment and other distractions. A lot of things have changed since the lecture format was invented and refined. The nature and pace of life has changed dramatically, and so has the quantum of knowledge available and required to be ingested and digested. The lecture format does not work any more. Yes, the world cannot be changed in a hurry. Yes, the paradigm shift required is so huge that academic institutions and their associated structures as we know them may need to crumble and an entirely new way to educate developed. Are we ready for this? And if not, and if the existing format is so badly broken that it does little good, how long should we remain in a state of voluntary delusion?

Until we call it as we see it, repeatedly, at every forum, and through varied voices, the best we can hope for is series of BandAids of ever increasing complexity. And which will, in fact, lock us into a broken paradigm, eventually leaving us worse off than we already are.

I shudder to think of what is yet to come.

This is your education on iPods ...

“Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” says Brian Brooks, Associate Dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

So there you have it. He adds,

“There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”

With the goal of enabling students to hear that lecture as often as possible (and thereby shaking up the Billboard Hot 100, one presumes), aspiring journalists at the school will carry iPods or iPhones.

This is an experiment, following that of Stanford and other campuses, and lectures will be made available as podcasts from university servers using Tegrity, a lecture capture web service, and also via Apple's iTunes University. Students also have the alternative of downloading the podcasts to their PCs or laptops although the mobile option would be more convenient. The theory is,

“There’s a lot of theory out there that says what you want to do is engage students in realms where they are already comfortable, and we know a lot of students are already familiar with iPods and iTunes so we want to get into that space and take advantage of that,” he said.

So there's the meat of it. Many students these days seem to be quite disengaged from education. On the other hand, they are very engaged, but to matters other than education, and more often than not to popular culture. So why not try to reach them through the channels they are most wont to utilise: a behaviour-centred approach?

The great shapers of opinion and/or behaviour today -- at least among the young or the undereducated -- are no longer individuals with commanding personalities, or their surrogates in the form of religions and cults. The modern corporation has been very successful in its project of employing science and scholarship to unravel the secrets of influencing opinion and behaviour and developing systematic means of exploiting this knowledge. This is a force that can be used for good, but is not infrequently employed primarily to empty consumer pockets fill corporate coffers. Universities and other institutions with a social conscience, rather than (or in addition to) tilting at these forces, might do well to co-opt them for more benign purposes, as in this case.

Then again, this is an experiment in augmenting the existing format of large institution higher education with ubiquitously available and popular technology. Will it work?

Much depends on what metrics are to be used for determining success. Students are likely to be thrilled to have the iPods legitimised as an academic accessory. With that imprimatur in place, they might be persuaded to check in on some lecture, in between periods of soaking in the latest pop or rock sensations. But I don't know how many young people would have the patience to sit through just listening to a 50-minute long lecture, even assuming the sound is of acceptable quality. Further, there are few subjects taught in a modern university for which the format of a pure lecture, devoid of any visual aids or visual and spatial references and props, will work very well. Perhaps for poetry and literature. Even there, it's not just the information content of a lecture alone, but also other paralinguistic cues such as facial expressions, body posture, etc. which imbue a lecture with additional, often critical meaning.

Furthermore there is a certain irony in the Associate Dean declaring lectures to be the worst possible learning format, and then enabling students to learn in that format as many times as possible. Why would you want to inflict the worst format on someone repeatedly? Is the repetition of a bad format better than just doing it once?

Looking for positives, only on rare occasions -- perhaps one had to miss out on an entire lecture of scintillating quality -- would students choose to listen to a lecture in its entirety. More likely, one might wish to home in on specific snippets that had not been clear when heard the first time. To make this experiment really successful, the University ought to develop or find some technology that allows a student to quickly locate a specific segment of a lecture by searching for content, without having to listen to the lecture from start to finish. This lecture podcast service requires a voice-recognition and transcription engine for the purpose.

Here, folks, is an opportunity to advance the cause of education with more than just blindly flinging technology at it. What more can we add to this mix of iPod/iTunes/Tegrity?

The architecture of learning

I arrived on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in late August, 1986 and was stunned by what I saw -- this was larger than anything I could have imagined. My baggage consisting of a couple of battered Indian suitcases had been misrouted by the airlines -- TWA, I think; they were still in existence then. And all I had was the clothes I wore and a small complimentary bag containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and some other stuff which I received by way of an apology from the airlines (after I had harangued them about my condition for a while). Still a thrifty Indian at heart, I took a bus to the university campus from the airport -- fortunately, Austin airport was not too far from downtown (they've moved it since, I believe, just like they have done in Bangalore).

Yes, the campus of UT Austin is massive, and chock-a-block with structures. It's practically an entire city unto itself. Back in the mid-1980's there were about 65,000 students on one single campus. Now that's huge. My own undergraduate institution, REC (now NIT) Tiruchirapalli had only about a thousand students in the 1970's (plus a lot of barren land). UT Austin and U-Michigan Ann Arbor are perhaps the two largest (in terms of student population) single campuses in the US (and possibly, the world). Scale, baby, scale.

So how did they manage to schedule classes for those vast hordes of students? Of course, the majority were undergraduates. So here's what they did -- they built huge, I mean huge, lecture theatres. Used to be, you -- and perhaps a dozen other select acolytes -- sat under a tree at the feet of your Master. He -- they're typically portrayed as a 'he', right? -- would speak, and you would listen, and on occasion, ask questions. Perhaps he had a lesson plan. He had no chalkboard, no slide presentations, and few props, if any. No Exhibit A, Exhibit B. In cold places like Europe, they built classrooms, mostly occupied by monks, and later, students of a more secular sort. They had chalkboards, and seats and lectures. Students mostly listened, and took notes. They worked on problems and assignments, quietly, mostly individually.

Then came the industrial age, Max Weber, and the birth of the modern bureaucracy. A new class of employees called 'white-collar workers' was invented. Their primary purpose was to work with information. This called for an educated workforce to serve which purpose many new universities were built and expanded. The number and variety of programs grew. Many new corporations were created and thrived. The economy exploded. There was a rapidly increasing demand for information workers. It was getting expensive to build new universities and there weren't enough teachers to go around. It was far more efficient to grow the size of existing universities and expand the number of students enrolled in each individual class. At UT Austin, a freshman Chemistry class (a required course) would have as many as 800 students. In a single section. Held in a massive lecture theatre the size of a concert hall. Now play with that image in your head. Me, my mind boggles.

What have we done to the Architecture of Learning: from under the Banyan Tree to the Monster Sized Lecture? As the number of learners grew, we just scaled up, using technology. We figured that the learning process is pretty much the same regardless of numbers -- all that's really needed is to accommodate those numbers, provide comfort and shield them from the elements, amplify the information generated at the front by the teacher so that it physically reaches everyone, and we're home free!

Guess that didn't work, but who cares -- we still 'graduate' so many students, don't we?

No, we have a big, big, problem here that those running modern institutions don't wish to address -- when you scale up the numbers, you simply cannot use the same process (even on steroids) any more. You have to develop entirely new processes. The system is broken, and very, very badly. Razing all the institutions to the ground and starting afresh would be a fine way to go. But that ain't gonna happen. Yet. So we'll need to innovate in other ways. We'll begin exploring some ways from the next post on.

Navashiksha - the future of education

But for a brief period of six years -- from 1980-1986 -- I've been completely immersed in academia: either as a student or teacher (or both). I guess I must like the world of education a lot, else why willingly spend nearly one's entire life in it? I present this as a question to myself, because I had all along thought that the main interests in my life were design, innovation and technology (as well as culture, cognition, collaboration and so on). Which they are. But as they say, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Education undergirds all my interests. Or perhaps education is where all my interests find expression.

Kind of odd, or ironic, since my parents' first attempt to send me to school (I was around 4 years old) was quite unsuccesful; after about ten days of being denied permission to look out the window and watch squirrels darting about playfully, I refused to go back to school.

I guess I finally saw the writing on the wall, for after about a year of hanging around at home, I bit the bullet and started school. Maybe it was the fun (and stinky) ride to school and back in a horse buggy. Perhaps it was the other kids. Maybe it was kindly old Miss Webb, the Anglo-Indian lady who ran the school. Just possibly, but I'm not too sure of this, I was actually learning something interesting and useful at school. Iffy. I'll never know for sure, but I've been in or around school ever since, except for that short break in the 1980's.

So yes, education interests me as a subject. But education, as it is practised, leaves me with a strong sense of dissatisfaction, or worse. Anger. Frustration. Despair. Loathing. And I want to be able to do something about it. And I do that, in my own teaching. But I would like to influence the philosophy and practice of education in the larger society. And do that from my own idiosyncratic perspective, borne of my varied life experiences.

Which brings me to this blog, where I intend to record my thoughts on past, current and emerging events and methods relating to education, and my opinions on how we can transform education. So that's it: I would like to help TRANSFORM education, and I hope this blog called NAVASHIKSHA -- "new education" in Sanskrit, that oldest of formally encoded languages -- can play some small role in the process. I invite you to please read and engage in a discussion on the subject.