What is it about Americans and sentence case?

So President Obama has taken the time off not closing Guantanamo Bay, authorising the use of drone strikes and allowing the NSA to read our emails to put together a Plan to Make College More Affordable. And, with crushing inevitability there exists a whole section on MOOCs.

“A rising tide of innovation has the potential to shake up the higher education landscape.” is the kind of talk that gets Martin Weller on Tumblr, but the section that it led into was what I was most interested in.

There is nothing about the actuality of MOOC delivery and learning. Nothing.

Award Credits Based on Learning, not Seat Time

This is a recommendation aimed at traditional online and campus-based learning, and seems primarily based on the idea of reducing contact hours. Which may be fine for some learners, but from a British perspective we are already seeing students demand more contact with academics for their fees. I suspect this may not be a British thing.

Use Technology to Redesign Courses

We see “blended learning” touted here, you know that well known “MOOC-like” idea that has nothing at all to do with the almost complete global market penetration of the LMS/VLE/MLE/whatever over the past 10 years.  Top marks for citing Carnegie Mellon OLI (which should be seen as a model for far more xMOOC type stuff), but alas the study they cited refers to OLI plus traditional instruction which is not reflected in the text of the plan. The figures on the average 40% savings that online learning can offer institutions come from the NCAT course redesign programme. It’s actually an average of 37% (but what’s 3% between friends eh?) and the research was conducted in 2003, nearly 10 years ago. This is in 40 institutions, and one would think that more research should probably have done by now. Certainly my understanding of the received wisdom is that online or tech-enhanced delivery can raise costs – at least in the short term.

Use Technology for Student Services

Online forums. Specifically some Coursera stats that suggest a student will receive an answer to a posted query in 22minutes (from another student, mind you.)

I can’t find the stats cited, but it does appear that only 4% of students will generally use a Coursera MOOC forum . Which suggests that all is not rosy in this particular (walled) garden.

The Austin Peay Degree Compass (I can only find press releases, not the actual compass so it is difficult to know whether it is any good) has just been bought up by Desire 2 Learn. Which suggests it is profitable, at least. I really can’t find any way of telling what students and staff make of it, so I’m going to leave aside my customary “Database solves complex socio-educational problem.” snarking for now.

Recognize Prior Learning and Promote Dual Enrollment

This is another request of traditional institutions, who I am sure will see a rise in state and federal funding to compensate the further loss of income that these ideas will cause. Or maybe the idea is to do away with the idea of students ever coming into contact with a tenured professor. I’m not sure.

Empower Students with Information

Biiiiig data. Of dubious efficacy. Aside from noting that whoever came up with the name “Datapalooza” should be beaten repeatedly with a stout stick, one has to query the absence of student (and prospective student) perspective here. What do students actually want to know about institutions and courses? What can we tell them with any degree of confidence? These are surely interesting questions that anyone (public or private funded) would want to investigate.

Empowering students with information is not the same thing as throwing made-up numbers at them.

Seed Innovation and Measure What Works

Grants to try new stuff. Evaluation of these ideas. I approve. Much better than everyone trying to replicate a business model that even the people who invented it are moving away from. But let’s ensure that these pilots are done ethically and without risk to students or the misuse of public funds for private gain…

Reduce Regulatory Barriers

or, Removing Safeguards To Allow Student and Public Funding to be Exploited by untested methods. So efficient are these innovative new models of education that we have to chuck all kinds of money at them with absolutely no safeguards whatsoever.

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I’m leaving aside the fact that most of this doesn’t work and we know it doesn’t work. That’s taken as read. University has become so expensive for students because it has become so cheap for taxpayers. Real costs have not risen – if they had we could just pass laws forbidding the purchase of solid gold desks for vice-provosts or whatever.

What interests me is that, despite the gloss of MOOCs and innovation, none of this is based on actual observable evidence from existing “innovations”. It is not a recommendation to empower Udacity, Coursera and the rest to wreak disruption on a moribund sector. It is still nonsense, of course, but it is a more hopeful form of nonsense.