Spanish at Chapel Hill

According to Inside Higher Ed, UNC-Chapel Hill will be doing away with all face-to-face Spanish 101 classes in favor of online courses. It is partially basing its decision on the success of the Sunoikisis program, which allows small colleges to offer Classics.

I've been thinking a bit about the possibility of online delivery of a course of late, as I am considering offering to teach one -- one that would be a "learn at your own pace" model. You could complete the work of a semester as slowly or as quickly as you wanted. Part of this grew out of a need that we are trying to address at JCSU -- how do you offer required core courses for the General Education portion of a degree to non-traditional students entering our Metropolitan College program?

I had been thinking about it when I stumbled across an online offering for Old English at the University of Calgary while I was considering how I should approach my personal "faculty development" initiative. It offered everything you would ever need for an autodidactic approach to learning the language.

(I'm still playing with the idea of trying to pick up either Old English or Icelandic/Old Norse. I think it may be the result of reading a lot of Tolkien of late.).

So, having thought a bit and having read some of the reactions to the Chapel Hill decision, I have come to some tentative conclusions.

1) There is nothing inherently superior or inferior to online or in-person delivery.

If this instinctively rubs you the wrong way, as it still does at some level for me, I would ask you to consider two points?

How much have you learned from reading books? I have learned a lot. While I learn a lot more from discussing them, that does not stop me from reading them to learn.

How much have you learned from large lecture sections or courses? This will, of course, be somewhat dictated by where you went to school. I went to Boston University, which has large lecture courses (with discussion sections run by TAs, of course). I learned in them -- although I admit some of that comes from a willingness to invest in the course content. As such, the course was a slightly more organized form of autodidactic learning.

Given these two propositions, we move on to two different paths of concerns: The need for discussion to cement learning and the need for structure to provide motivation.

2) There needs to be interaction -- preferably guided by someone knowledgeable about the subject -- to help cement knowledge.

There is a lot of talk, and a lot of ink being spilled, on the subject of "learning communities" these days. Quite frankly, I find some of it a little silly. It's not a new idea. After all, what was Plato writing about in The Symposium? Yes, his topic may have been the nature of love and knowledge but he was describing what contemporary theorists are repackaging as a learning community.

While I will leave others to follow Shakespeare's path of bewailing that there is nothing new under the sun on this topic, I do want to highlight two things here. Having a group of learners talk together is a great way for them to increase their understanding by encountering multiple perspectives. It is also a great way for a skilled sophist to lead people down an erroneous path. As such, any learning community needs a guide who knows more than the rest of the group. Will they be perfect and know everything? Of course not. Even Plato was willing to show that Socrates could be distracted by a pretty face and lose perspective. That did not, however, remove him from the role of the master thinker.

So, we need some form of guidance to aid in interpretation and understanding. We'll come back to that.

3) There needs to be structured deadlines.

Back to my considerations of Old English and Old Norse/Icelandic for a moment. I have had an irrational and untraceable interest in Iceland for as long as I can remember. I love reading Beowulf and think I would enjoy it even more in the original.

It's been weeks and I haven't started any kind of autodidactic program of learning either.

There is something motivating in accountability. I am part of a writing group right now. Knowing someone might be reading my work keeps me writing. It isn't that I didn't want to write before. I did. I just needed a little extra push.

There is, currently, no little extra push for me to work on my Italian, my Irish, Old English, or Icelandic.

So, part of what keeps things going, I would argue, is a sense that someone will be expecting you to get to a certain point at some time -- even if, as in the writing group, there is no sense of "I will finish the novel by November 15. This kind of self-motivation is what drives many, many people to crank out a (probably bad) novel in the month of November each year.

I intentionally point out the probably bad part -- partially because the National Novel Writing Month people do as well. It isn't about getting it perfect. It's about getting it done. Without that first step, it can never be perfect. There's nothing magic about November. It's just the time chosen for this structure of self-imposed accountability to be instituted.

3) Accountability is self-imposed.

And let's face it: Accountability comes from within. As I have told many people, there is nothing I can do to stop a student from failing a class if they are set on doing it.

Nothing.

As such, what a student will get out of my classes depends far more on the student than on me. I can do things to help him but he will decide how much my class is worth to him and, based on that, how much work he will do. Will he do the bare minimum to pass? Will he get excited and delve deeply into the knowledge? Even if they actively participate in the discussions and the class, the reading that is supposed to serve as the foundation will or will not be done carefully based on their particular needs and desires.

4) We sometimes make it boring.

While a topic for another time, I think educators do a lot to take the potential for passion out of their classes because they deal too much in what should be done rather than in what they and their students want to get done.

Therefore....

If one were to design an online class, you would need a discussion area -- either a forum or a chat -- that is free enough for all discussion (to maintain the passion) but structured in terms of producing interaction. There needs to be mile posts/assignments to keep things moving.

Most importantly, though -- and I haven't touched on this yet -- the media must be appropriate to the material. I would consider learning Old English, Latin, and Ancient Greek online because they are not languages spoken on a daily basis. They are read more than heard.

OK, I admit that learning Old English for the joy of Beowulf should be linked to hearing the poem that the scop spoke. Still, I am unlikely to bump into a speaker of Old English on the street, shout "Hwaet" as they approach, and announce my worth.

I might bump into someone on the street who speaks Spanish, though.

With this, we get to the last issue -- the Elephant in the room. How do you assess the learning.

The claims put forward by Chapel Hill that Spanish 101 is just as effective online as in a classroom, as some have pointed out, is probably based on an assessment that is based on a written instrument and not one that heavily involves conversation.

Whatever instrument is used to assess the course must not drive the course. The course must drive the means of assessment.

Based on this, we could begin to make arguments that some content-heavy courses could be moved to an online model. Skill courses -- even writing heavy ones -- need a community (compare the English Comp section to a writing group -- which may be a better model for structuring the course) and more face-to-face encounters.

As such, I suspect Chapel Hill is making a mistake in a way that Calgary did not.

Now, I face the problem with this blog -- conclusions. I should draw one here. That would, however, imply I was ready to make a pitch to the Dean of MET about the course. I'm not there yet. The writer in me, however, feels the need for a conclusion here.

There is none yet. Perhaps I should be happy with that.

The Reason for the Title

The story is told that, long, long, ago, the Egyptian god Thoth told the Egyptian Pantheon that he had revolutionized knowledge with a new invention. He called it writing.

Although he expected excited responses and, perhaps, some praise, the other gods reacted with dismay. "You have destroyed memory," they told him. "Now, man will not try to remember things. He will simply write them down."

Now, in the fuzzy area between history and myth, there was probably a Thoth figure -- the man who invented hieroglyphics. He probably worked for King Scorpion.

Whether you are willing to accept that there is a historical core to the story or not, there is no getting around the possibility that the debate on how education should be conducted goes at least as far back as the invention of writing.

I suspect the fiercest these debates are triggered not so much by pedagogy but by new tools -- writing, the scroll, the book, the library, the symposium, the university, the standardized test.

I may live to regret the pun that is the basis for this blog's title. We'll see if it was a pun worth making. I could have equally gone with "The Age of Caxton," which sounds more dignified. The reason for it, though, it that I suspect we are now living in a time when such a transformation is beginning to take place. I suspect that the possibilities offered by the computer and tagging and other forms of metadata -- coupled with the power of the internet -- will transform the current (essentially Medieval model that had been modified by the Renaissance) of higher education. That model bloomed with the availability of less expensive books and expanded as books -- the primary transmitters and recorders of knowledge -- became more ubiquitous.

What will happen, I wonder, when the next technological revolution makes it possible to access entire libraries of print, audio, and video content on a hand held device that will not crash or be destroyed when you drop it from shoulder height. How will the university change?

More pressingly, how must the university change if it intends to remain a relevant source of learning and not become the equivalent of today's monasteries.

What I think I need to sort my own thoughts out on this process is a place to gather them, tag them, and see what happens.

I suspect these thoughts -- assuming I continue this project -- will owe a lot to myth, to James Burke's idea of the knowledge web, and to tech. That being said, I have no idea where this will go beyond knowing that my thoughts will likely ramble a good deal.