Some student objections are more personal. They come from what students know of their own human natures, natures that I don’t believe should be recast as human frailties. They tell me they want company. They are afraid that they already spend too much time alone and online. They say they need structure. A senior in Connecticut says, “I am going to listen to the lecture anyway. I have to. I don’t want to do it all lonely and maybe sad. I’d rather go with my friends. I’m in college!” A junior in New Jersey says, “To motivate myself to sit alone and sit in front of the computer? No matter how motivated I am, to block out an hour, it would be so hard. I like the idea that I have to show up. You’re showing up to something alive.”
When this student talks about the value of “showing up to something alive,” he is not denying the value of what you can learn online or what can be measured online, but he is suggesting that there is another kind of learning not so easily measured. If you go to class, you might see something unexpected.
Why do we forget something as simple as this? Again, technology makes us forget what we know about life. We become enchanted by technology’s promises because we have so many problems we would like technology to solve. In the case of education, once MOOCs were declared a benign revolution that would solve many problems—from lack of student attention to our problems in measuring educational “productivity”—its imperatives had to be presented in a positive light. So, the imperative to learn from an online video had to be a good thing. It surely is, sometimes. In some courses. For some students. But not all the time. For all students. In all courses.
When we want technology to provide a simple fix for the problems of higher education, we necessarily idealize the online experience. So, for example, participating in an online forum is glamorized as always-available discussion. But in practice, thousands of people flow through such groups. Sometimes you make a comment that is noticed, but more often it is not picked up. Not by anyone. Professor Louis Bucciarelli of MIT wrote about his experiences participating as “Butch” in the Harvard Divinity School MOOC “The Letters of the Apostle Paul.” Bucciarelli says he was a diligent student and wrote faithfully on the MOOC discussion board but that as far as he can tell, nothing he wrote on the discussion board was read by anyone except himself.
Even in the Harvard flagship MOOC “Hero,” with its large, dedicated team—Nagy was able to recruit fifteen former teaching fellows and ninety-four former students to help moderate online discussions—satisfying exchanges can prove elusive. The “Hero” discussion board is sometimes thrilling but often chaotic and difficult to follow. Sometimes it calls forth personal material that seems too intense for the medium. Even the teaching fellows note that there were contributions to the discussion board that were so personal that they, when working together, “needed to look away.”
In face-to-face settings, faculty become experienced in handling difficult conversations. For example, they can gently stop students who begin to share too much. Or help students deal with emotionally charged material that may be hard to process but is nonetheless relevant to the central themes of the class. In an online discussion, this is harder to do.
Some say that better discussion board software will make a difference. Some say that over time, we will learn how to better relate in this medium. We will invent new mores, a new etiquette, new boundaries. Others look forward to artificial intelligences moderating discussion. Others want to bring in people—for small talk.
When Udacity was having trouble in its partnership with San Jose State University, with dropout rates over 90 percent, they tried to improve matters by giving students conversation partners: real people who would check up on them and be available for online chat. The provost of San Jose State described these real people as “mentors” but made it clear that the mentors had no knowledge of the subjects they were mentoring. Their job was simply to be encouraging. He said that the mentors were like “moms.” The idea was to use talk, but not talk on the topic, as a tactic to keep people in the game.
When gamblers begin to lose too much at a slot machine, they will sometimes get a visit from a casino “goodwill” ambassador, perhaps with a treat. MOOC designers have considered spicing up MOOC content with “real people” conversation just at the moments when students in online classes are most likely to tune out, as determined by AI programs monitoring their level of attention. As with the “moms” of Udacity, the idea is to use “real people talking” as incentive to keep people in their seats. Over time, revising online education to include conversation will need more than “mentor moms” or computer programs to monitor discussions. A student needs to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about.
“Showing Up to Something Alive”
The college junior who spoke about appreciating the in-person classroom as “showing up to something alive” brings me back to an earlier experience studying technology for educational innovation. Over twenty-five years ago MIT launched Project Athena, an educational initiative that used computer software to substitute for traditional classroom teaching. There, too, educational reformers had the lecture in their sights. But in the 1980s, the idea for reforming the lecture wasn’t an online course but computer simulations that would substitute for demonstrations in lectures. The world of natural sciences—as well as social sciences and the humanities—could come alive, it was argued, if students felt in control of these simulations. MIT faculty were challenged to write the software themselves. Much of what they came up with gave students an experience of being able to manipulate data in a more direct way than had ever been possible before.
But there were also objections, and back then, most of them came from faculty who insisted that the lecture and live demonstration was a sacred space. Faculty talked about the importance of debating with students, responding to questions, and presenting a model for how to argue a point and respect differences. They talked about the sanctity of live demonstrations—the importance of doing science in real time. They wanted students to watch live, imperfect lectures and demonstrations and feel part of an in-person community. They saw the classroom as a place where you learned to love the “as-is” of nature as much as you love the “as-if” of the virtual. They fought hard for their lectures and live demonstrations and kept giving them. Now, a new generation, tutored in simulation, is moving toward putting those lectures and demonstrations on MOOCs.
More than years stand between us and those defenders of the live lecture and the flawed real. These are the decades in which most of our dreams have been centered on what the Internet might bring us. It is not surprising that when MOOCs arrived, we were so willing to imagine an educational revolution that looked to the perfection of virtual possibilities.
The professors who objected to Athena’s incursions into the lecture hall were also defending what Thoreau might have called a “one-chair conversation.” As teachers, they saw themselves thinking aloud, declaring openly. They wanted to lecture because they wanted their students to learn that there is not only something to know but that there are ways, and more ways, to know it and tell it. And questions after the lecture, for them, made the lecture hall also a place of friendship, collaboration, and community. For them, it was at the lecture that one-, two-, and three-chair conversations all came together.
The lecture is the easiest form of in-person pedagogy to criticize. It is the oldest form of instruction. It is the one most likely to have a passive student and an active teacher. It is the one most easily caricatured as having a teacher who might be passive as well, perhaps reading notes that were written many years ago. Daphne Koller saw the lecture and thought technology could make it right. But when I think back to the Athena story, I am reminded that for all its flaws, the lecture has a lot going for it.
It is a place where students come together, on good days and bad, and form a relatively small community. As in any live performance, anything can happen. An audience is present; the room is engaged. It
nourishes a certain kind of inspiration. You see a professor several times a week. What makes the greatest impression in a college education is learning how to think like someone else, appreciating an intellectual personality, and thinking about what it might mean to have one of your own. When we hear someone speak, we imagine things about them that we wish for ourselves.
Students watch a professor thinking on his or her feet, thinking aloud, and in the best cases the student can say, “Someday, I could do that. Someday, I could be that.” So, what the young man meant by showing up to “something alive” was really showing up to someone alive, to a teacher, present and thinking in front of him.
There are some lectures you never forget. In spring 1971, I heard Bruno Bettelheim ask a simple question during his large lecture course at the University of Chicago: “What is the best reason for a mother to breast-feed a child?” We were in the early days of the women’s movement. Bettelheim went around the room and the answers came back with that era’s version of political correctness: “Breast-feeding is natural.” “The nutrition in milk is better for the child.” “Breast-feeding takes corporations out of the intimate connections of the family.”
Bettelheim, sitting on a chair placed at center stage, seemed almost impassive. He barely moved as he shook his head “no” to these answers. And from up and down the aisles, it was these answers that came forth, in different variations. Finally, Bettelheim said softly, “It feels good.” And then loudly, emphatically: “It feels good.” He elaborated. The mother when she offers her breast does something that is pleasurable, satisfying. The child has a bodily sensation that he or she is satisfying the mother, giving pleasure by receiving pleasure, because the breast feels good to the child as well. And from this template, argued Bettelheim, all successful relationships are built. You give pleasure to another through something that gives you pleasure.
When Bettelheim offered this interpretation, the class exploded with talk. Not everyone agreed, but everyone agreed that we had not allowed ourselves to say this, to think this. It was a simple answer, but it referred to the body. Did that stop us? When the class ended, it reconvened informally outside the lecture hall. Bettelheim had created a space for a kind of talking we had not done before.
At the time, someone said that in other classes we brought only a part of ourselves. We presented what we had read in books. We did not try to include what we knew from our everyday experience. We saw all of that as something apart from what we should bring to our academic life. Bettelheim is a controversial figure, accused of fabricating academic degrees and plagiarizing other people’s work. But on that day, in that lecture course, he did something remarkable. Bettelheim gave us permission to bring all of the resources at our disposal to our work in the academy. Common sense should not be devalued nor should simplicity be discarded. We need to build our answers up from our very human ground. And the experience of being there left a lifelong impression.
Being There
And even these days, when students talk about large, introductory lecture classes, they mention the importance of being there. A college junior: “I took an introduction to psychology class; it was big and I could see it might have been a MOOC, but there was something about being there with all those people. You are part of a group. That’s where you make your friends. You talk about the class.” And of course, you are there with the professor.
The lecture has other virtues. It disciplines a teacher to integrate content and its critique. It teaches students that no information should be partitioned from an opportunity to discuss and challenge it “live.” When good faculty lecture many times a week, they improvise some new parts every time. They write new sections the week or night or month before. They make lectures relevant to what is in the news. Once you have written the script for an online class, filmed it, edited it, and put it online, such changes can happen but they are harder to envisage. It is natural to have the feeling that your “best performance” has been captured on video.
When the CEO of MIT’s online educational initiative floated the idea that good actors might make good teachers, the idea was not dismissed out of hand but set the Internet buzzing. Students complain of boredom. Why not have presentations by professional presenters? Matt Damon, perhaps? If you want compelling delivery of content, actors can do that. Actors could not lead a conversation on the topic, but in online learning, conversations are deferred to another time and place. The actor could be the filmed “talking head” for the content before students are tested on it. Since the online classroom is not a place for conversation, why not an actor indeed?
Recently, a member of a university panel on online tools, fresh from developing a new MOOC, owned up to the temptation to “freeze” her elegant online presentations and use them in place of lecturing “live.” The way things are now, she said, “fear” makes her go over her class readings the evening before every in-person class. “My children ask me, ‘Mommy, haven’t you read that already?’” Hers was an honest admission that anxiety helps to keep her materials fresh.
Students, too, get anxious about speaking in class. Some supporters of online education see as one of its virtues that it gives “voice” to students who are shy and don’t participate in discussion when it is held in physical classrooms. Shy students, they argue, gladly participate in online forums, particularly if they can be anonymous. And even in “live” classrooms, professors can use digital tools to get feedback from shy students, using clickers, for example. Clickers attach to software that allows students to express an opinion without revealing a name. Student opinion shows up as “poll” projections on a screen. Similarly, “comment” software for classroom discussion masks identity, another boon for the shy.
The virtues of anonymous classroom polling were presented at MIT’s 2013 MacVicar Day—an annual gathering set aside for reflections on teaching. In 2013, the focus was technology and education. From the audience came an objection. The speaker was Daniel Jackson, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. He argued that wearing a mask—what he thinks anonymous polling accomplishes—may free people up to express themselves, but face-to-face encounters encourage civility and a sense of accountability. When people know who you are, you take responsibility for what you say. For Jackson, the classroom is a place to learn how to participate in the conversations that make democracy work. Anonymous polling and comments don’t teach you to stand up for your beliefs. Neither does anonymous posting on the online discussion board of a MOOC.
As Jackson spoke, I thought of old traditions: standing on Hyde Park’s speaker’s corner and being unafraid to say whatever you wished; the signed article in the newspaper that was protected speech. Where would students learn that they had the right to express their opinions if class opinions were registered through anonymous clicks?
Jackson acknowledged that the use of clickers in class to get anonymous feedback provides “useful information.” You learn what the group is thinking, but there is a cost:
It seems to be reinforcing exactly the habits I’m trying to undo in class. I’m trying to get my students to engage more; I’m trying to get them to overcome their need to be anonymous. So everything I do to allow them to be more anonymous, to get more immediate feedback, to reduce their length of attention . . . in the long run is not good for the culture.
In this debate, professors worry that students are too embarrassed to talk. But in a classroom, one should “walk” toward embarrassment. Students should feel safe enough to take the risk of saying something that might not be worked through or popular. Students will get over feeling embarrassed. It may be easier to contribute anonymously, but it is better for all of us to learn how to take responsibility for what we believe.
At the MIT panel, no one wanted to discuss Jackson’s critique of online materials as pandering to rather than challenging students’ short attention spans. And no one wanted to discuss the idea that anonymous polling mig
ht reinforce bad habits learned on the Internet. These are difficult issues. Talking about them doesn’t rule out the idea that technology solves certain educational problems. But they frame a conversation that assumes that technology won’t solve all educational problems and might cause some of its own.
Real Time
During a panel discussion about the ethics of pedagogy, English professor and literary theorist Lee Edelman said that his biggest challenge as a professor “is not teaching his students to think intelligently, but getting them to actually respond to each other thoughtfully in the classroom.” Like so many others, he finds that students are having a hard time with the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.
Human resources officers tell me that their new hires have a hard time talking in business meetings. College graduates say the same thing about themselves. One graduate student in European history talks about his struggles with conversation in “real time.” He has just returned, dejected, from his first academic conference. He is very happy with the paper he read (his department had been so happy with the paper that it paid his expenses to go to the conference), but he says, “I was rambling and scatterbrained in the question-and-answer session. While I thrive at writing, my conversation falls flat.”
Why would we want to put at the center of our educational agenda a kind of learning in which we don’t teach the skill of raising hands and entering a conversation? If doing this makes our students nervous, our job as educators should be to help them get over it.
In the best of cases, the college classroom has been a place where students stand up and defend their ideas in real time. They learn from speaking and they learn from listening to each other. “I’ve learned things from how people make mistakes when they ask questions in lectures,” says a college junior. “Some kids will just ramble on and you shouldn’t do that. You watch people. You learn not to say, ‘I’ve read every book.’” None of this learning happens if you take your class alone in your room.
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