June 20th, 2010
University 2.0
This entry expands and elucidates on the preceding entry, which you should read first.
University undergraduate programs are expensive and, therefore, exclusive. Their mandatory courses of prescribed readings, tightly structured assignments, and firm due dates do nothing to nurture independent lifelong learners. They will be supplanted, therefore, by something free, online, collaborative, and open source. What shall we call this something? Hopefully not “University 2.0”, but that is a good enough name to serve as a placeholder throughout this entry.
Many of the constituent parts of University 2.0 are already in place. The 2.0 response to $100 hardcover textbooks are Wikibooks and, until copyright law follows us into the future, public libraries with electronic collections and/or Books-By-Mail service. Seminar-style courses at conventional universities are answered by Wikiversity, and lecture-style courses by video lectures from TED, Fora, and MIT’s fabulous OpenCourseWare Consortium. Where conventional universities require students to write formulaic five-part essays, 2.0 learners voluntarily create written works of every variety, as well as audio, video, and interactive content.
There are, however, two essentials aspects of conventional university education for which there are no existing 2.0 analogues. These are, therefore, the two legs on which the established system stands. As soon as the missing analogues are created, the system will be knocked off its feet, no longer to trample the potential of the poor.
The first leg is Wade and Craig, the teaching assistants of my Intro. Lit. course at Queen’s. Their constructive critiques of my essays transformed not only how I write, but also how I read and reason. 2.0 learners who place their creative products on Youtube suffer destructive criticism; as the bowdlerized meme predicts, “normal person + anonymity + audience = total jerkwad.” Wade and Craig were not jerkwads. They were expert literary craftsmen who revelled in providing apprenticeship. People will continue to pay for university, and it will continue to be worth every penny, as long as it is the sole fount of thorough, specific, accurate feedback.
The second leg is the calligraphed certificate provided at the end of a Bachelor’s degree and, more specifically, its hypnotic effect on prospective employers and the admissions departments of graduate schools and professional programs. I have certainly enjoyed at least 150 hours of rich, self-directed learning experiences on the Internet, but I have no record of them that compares to my transcript from my 150 credit hour bachelor’s degree. Once a system is created that does provide a record of 2.0 learning, I am confident that the aforementioned employers and admissions departments will recognize it. The proof of this is the experience of homeschooled students applying to university (1.0). Those who can provide thorough records of their learning, including good scores on standardized tests, are often admitted with special enthusiasm.
I propose that the 2.0 lead pipe to knock out these legs is an free, online, open source entity with the following features:
1. Usernames and passwords, of course. · This allows you to do all the nasty, private, and banal things you like to do on your computer while logged off of University 2.0 so it doesn’t appear on your transcript.
2. Transcript · When you are logged on, your digital activity will be recorded in an online database. It will gather a high level of detail, not only how long you were on the New York Times website but which articles you clicked to and how long you were on each one. You will be able to manually add offline educational activities to your transcript.
3. Resume · A dynamic summary of the data in your transcript will be generated digitally. I gave the example of, “Joan Andrews reads an average of six news articles per day, usually connected to Middle Eastern conflict, the environment, or Aboriginal issues. She has listened to twelve full audiobooks listed below…” but the profiles will ultimately become a lot more graphical and interactive. This is an open source initiative, remember; users will develop and share groovy displays. The important thing is that every resume page provide a fair, holistic picture of the user’s academic activity that will truly inform prospective employers and other interested parties. A medical school admissions committee has to be able to look at it and know instantly if the candidate is as or more qualified than someone with a pre-med degree from Loyola.
4. Discussion pages · The first time an educational unit (a newspaper article, a Youtube video, a set of PDF lecture notes from MIT Opencourseware, etc.) is accessed by a University 2.0 scholar, a discussion thread about it will be automatically generated. All subsequent scholars who happen upon the same unit, will have the discussion thread automatically opened in a separate tab. Unlike the jerkwad-crowded comment pages of the educational units’ host websites, these threads are for insightful analysis not knee-jerk reactions. Accordingly, rather than having the maximum number of characters per comment as on Youtube, there will be a 35 word minimum. As on Facebook, every comment will link to the Resume page of the scholar who posted it.
5. Messaging · As on Facebook, scholars will be able to send an email to anyone through a link on his or her resume page. The system will recommend, based on overlapping academic interests, scholars whose resume pages you might want to view. It will have a special function for recommending those in your local area. This will allow for the face-to-face Socratic street discussions imagined by the anonymous commenter on my last entry (who are you???). Ultimately, some people will get to know each other very well through University 2.0 and will be able to write peer reference letters for each other that will also appear on their resume pages.
6. Submissions · Scholars can submit any of their academic efforts (essays, fiction, videos, artwork, etc.) for peer review either by having it hosted on a Google Docs based digital cupboard of the University 2.0 website, or by submitting to University 2.0 a link to a website where it is already hosted. Either way, they will be required to fill out a two-part form. First, they must guarantee that it is their own work and cite any sources. Second, they must specify the kind of evaluation they are currently seeking. Minimally, this means ticking or unticking a series of tick boxes. If an author ticks the box that says “please edit my work for the structure and order of paragraphs” and does not tick the box that says, “please proofread my work for spelling and grammar”, it is absolutely forbidden for reviewers to currect hur speeling. Alternately, they can pick an assessment rubric from a large shared collection or build their own.
7. Peer Review · When a work is submitted for peer review a page is generated to accompany it. It is somewhat similar to the Discussion Page that accompanies every educational unit not created by a University 2.0 student, but bright pink and infinitely sacrosanct. Reviewers who disregard the code of conduct by offering anything other than than the specific kind of evaluation requested by the submitter will face consequences. As I noted in a comment on my previous entry, this process will be patterned on the success of Wikipedia. Wikipedia's standards (neutral POV, no original research, reliable sources...) are stated broadly enough to be generalized to all situations. They are enforced by a system of citizen policing where excellent contributions are recognized and substandard contributions are corrected. As with Wikipedia, it will be our policy to assume good faith. Also as with Wikipedia, proven contributors will be awarded the power to temporarily freeze the accounts of truly malicious users.
8. Tests · I love WildRote’s suggestion of open source online tests that anyone can write, anyone can edit, and anyone can take. The system would send scholars alerts like, “You have been doing a lot of research on Indo-Aryan phonology. Would you like to try user kitkat5252’s test on that subject? It is rated Advanced and will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.” Scholars can take the same or similar tests many times over and have their progress charted on their resume page. In all cases, the emphasis is on assessment for learning as opposed to assessment of learning. Incorrect answers will link to articles and lectures that cover the missing information.
9. Assessment Institute · It is crucial to remember that the online entity I’m describing is not University 2.0. University 2.0 is every website on the Internet where learning happens and research is shared. This online entity is merely the assessment hub of University 2.0. It will not have an article about giraffe courtship; it will have many peer reviews of articles about giraffe courtship. There is only one topic about which the entity will actively conduct its own original research, and that is assessment itself. We will have a library of articles and videos on topics like “What makes good writing?”, “How do you assess for high-level mathematical thinking?”, and “How do we create tests without cultural bias?” Since it started in 2001, Wikipedia's quality has improved dramatically as Wikipedia users have been inculcated with its value system and trained in its specific style. The Assessment Institute will education University 2.0 user on the best practices of evaluation.
10. Recommendations · The most common criticism lobbied against self-directed learning is that students miss out on whole fields that would interest them because they “don’t know what they don’t know.” A teacher, it is argued, can recognize a student who would be interested in hydrothermal vents but has never heard of them and give her a book on that subject. Making recommendations, though, is a skill at which computers are naturally expert. Scholars will rate their interest level after every educational unit they use and StumbleUpon algorithms will do the rest.
I have, perhaps, been overly detailed in describing the rivets and curves of the lead pipe that will whack University 2.0 into existence. What I really want to explore is its consequences. On the socio-economic front, I think University 2.0 is an infinitely more sustainable stimulus than the billions of dollars that governments injected into corporations. Currently, it is the norm for a student to go off to university for a Bachelor of Arts degree, work part time at a coffee shop as much as his schedule allows, still accrue $30 000 in debt, graduate, move back home with his parents, realize that his Bachelor of Arts degree does not qualify him for any better paying or more interesting work than he has at the coffee shop, work there, work there, work there, until he can afford some form of post-baccalaureate training qualifying him for better work, then paying off the debt from that for a few more years, until he can finally afford to move out of Mom and Dad’s at age 35.
With University 2.0, his story is a little different. He stays at home for a few months after high school, starting his online studies and working at the coffee shop, getting more hours than he could in the other story because he has no scheduled classes. Since all of his pay is now disposable instead of being instantly sucked up by school, he can quickly afford to move out on his own. This makes him happy and leaves his parents in a financially better situation. They can buy stuff, helping the economy, or retire. Retirements on the rise, he soon finds a job for which he has really tailored himself, because University 2.0 allowed him the freedom to do so. He takes the job. It is entry level, but he’s not stuck there for long because a University 2.0 education never stops. He’s always learning more and making himself qualified for more and more interesting work. And if ever he decides to try a post-baccalaureate degree, he has the transcript to secure admission and the money to pay for it. In general, young people in a University 2.0 world will feel like they start their “real lives” earlier. The greatest beneficiaries, though, will not be the young. University 2.0 is at its best when middle-aged single mothers who’ve worked dead end job all their lives and could never afford the bourgeois habit of “going back to school”, get upwardly mobile.
I am an educator and, for me, the most interesting consequences of University 2.0 are the effects on the wider educational landscape. In an attempt to give this article the persuasive power of polemic, I demonized 1.0 universities as enemies of equity, which they are. But the truth is, I love them, passionately, and I could never want them to die. Fortunately, I think University 2.0 will, in fact, infuse them new life by returning their focus to collegial research. For centuries, universities were the lone bastions of intellectual curiosity in an unthinking society. For decades, they have been the lone purveyors of a pseudo-intellectual commodity in a still unthinking society. Now, for the first time ever, universities will see the world outside themselves filled with citizens who love to learn and do so independently. Universities will be able to read the papers that those citizens publish online and invite the authors of the most interesting projects to join their graduate programmes. All prospective graduate students will be better prepared for academia than their 1.0 predecessors because of their extensive experience with independent research and peer review.
1.0 universities will also offer pay-as-you-go educational experiences for University 2.0 students. These will include special lecture series, short courses and workshops, and, most profitably, lab time. No amount of online reading can eliminate the appeal of the physical stuff that universities have, polarizing microscopes and particle accelerators. Many students may even choose to live in university residences to be close to the kit and the academic action and, in my case, to have a meal plan. In short, people will still go to universities, but just for the parts that they want.
The public school system, too, will evolve because of University 2.0. Because high schools will have to prepare their students for that task, the high school program will come to operate on that model. I envision highschoolers studying from home, their friend’s homes, the mall, and the skate park, wherever the can take their laptops. I imagine high school teachers operating like social workers, with a caseload of students to whom they make house calls and provide academic guidance. The teacher’s role would be to direct students toward new areas of study, supplement the peer reviews they receive with professional evaluations, possibly prepare tests, and coordinate experiential collaborative learning experiences that involve multiple students. Very likely, high schools will impose mandatory summative assessments not present in University 2.0 like year-end projects or standardized tests.
I have a hunch that elementary schools will continue to operate much as they do today except for a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary units. By far the most interesting role in the public education system, then, would be that of the middle school, which would have the onus of transitioning students between the radically different environments of elementary and Independence High. Moreover, because all learning at the high school level would be elective and personal, middle school would be the time to ensure that students attain the minimum knowledge base essential to citizenship. I envision middle school classrooms characterized by project base collaborative learning and a strong maths focus.
So, what to you think? Is my vision for University 2.0 and the world to go with it mad fantasy or a future worth working toward? If the latter, how do we do it?