Higher Education – All’s well that…

Importing Quizzes Into Canvas Without Respondus

After taking a break from Team-Based Learning for a few years, I’ve decided to use a TBL structure again for my spring class on the U.S. Judiciary. While I liked the looser structure of my classes in the last years, I suspect that regular iRATs and tRATs (aka reading quizzes), the persistent in-class groups, and the more explicit focus on structured activities will help prevent the widespread absenteeism of the post-COVID (well, make that “post”-COVID) years. (One exception: my honors class last semester. Their attendance was amazing!)

One of the problems, now that I am working fully on a Mac, is that there is no obvious way to import quizzes into Canvas, the LMS we use. At least the way that Canvas suggests to import quizzes — first, import a quiz into Respondus (not the browser but the exam-creation app), then export it as a QTI zip file, then import that file into Canvas — works only in a Windows environment. (I mean, really? In 2024?)

Luckily, there’s a Python app for that. It’s called text2qti and was created by Geoffrey Poore, a physics prof at Union University. You write your quiz in markdown (and if you don’t know markdown, you simply write it as a text file, using the format shown on the text2qti page), and text2qti turns it into a QTI files. You’ll have to install python, if you have not yet done so, and then text2qti (rant: my annoying autocorrect always turns “qti” into “qit” — WHY?), but the project web page has links to howto instructions that aren’t hard to follow. I was expecting LaTeX-style snags with formatting etc. etc., but everything worked like a charm, including quiz instructions that seamlessly imported into Canvas. Nice!

Busyness, blegh

A quick morning rant, unfiltered and unpolished:

One of the big problems in academia is the culture of overwork, which in fact is a culture of busyness. People get angry or annoyed at others who do not constantly work. And the problem is that this is not just busy work, it’s also stupid work. A well-run organization thinks hard about where to expend its energies instead of chasing the latest urgency or just churning out stuff.

Do we know whether academic overwork works? We know the downsides. But what are the successes? We measure them in students graduating FAST (again, by working many hours, supposedly), by publications and patents, grant dollars. We do not know how many social problems we’ve actually solved, how many people’s lives we have saved or at least have made easier, whether the world became more livable, kinder.

And I don’t know if what we are doing can be done better, or how we should actually measure whether what we do is successful. I do think that practices and rituals that are not optimized towards the right outcome are important and worthwhile, so practices that assess badly are not necessarily bad practices. But what we do in academia is that we optimize busyness, and that’s definitely not the right outcome and not a healthy ritual either. And our assessments do not measure impact but simply how busy we were and whether the products of our busyness were appreciated by the academic circle jerk.

ChatGPT and the value of authenticity

This last semester, I had a number of student essays that I suspected were written by ChatGPT or some other AI text machine, and one that was confirmed as such — it included hallucinated content. It’s hard to prove the use of ChatGPT or similar, so I let it go, except for the instance with fictive facts. AI checkers are notoriously spotty, and I don’t want to police student writing, and I definitely don’t want to accuse students of cheating on the basis of false positive AI checker results.

I am not satisfied by this state of affairs. I don’t mind if AI machines are used as tools, for example to correct student writing, or to provide references on a topic, or such. What worries me (and what let me to suspect AI use) is the production of generic but correct, bland text. Students don’t do the work that (I am convinced) would help them learn something, they forgo the opportunity to think about a topic, and they produce generic ticker-tape of an essay that is easy to read but that nobody really wants to read.

I believe that one of the tasks for us in this age of AI is to find ways for us humans to be authentic, and to be so in a way that cannot be imitated by a machine. For students, this means to be authentically imperfect and to accept those imperfections, until they have found their own voice that allows them to be authentically perfect if they choose so. (I don’t know if I want my writing to be perfect, authentically or not.) I suspect there has to be some punk in our writing.

Why?

This summer, I meant to update my professional portfolio. Obviously, as in all years, not much has come of it. But I am slowly getting some words on the, umh, page? Here is a draft of an updated introductory purpose argument (with some need of polishing and refinement): Why do I think my work is important? Why do we need educational development?

I think that academia has an important role to play in answering humanity’s existential questions: How can the world’s 7.8 billion people be fed? How can we prevent wars (at the very least those of genocidal proportions)? How can we prevent and cure illnesses that shorten our life spans and reduce our quality of life? How can humans build and maintain societies and polities that respect human rights and true self-determination? Also: What is a good life? What makes us human? Civilized? You get the idea.

COVID-19 has brought some of these questions to a head: Besides questions of how best to prevent and cure coronavirus infections, the pandemic forced us to ask what our duties of care are for our fellow human beings, whether individual liberty interests take precedence over the health of our neighbors, whether governments and media companies are allowed to spread, or have the duty to prevent, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and more. In sum, the question of societal and economic collapse raised it’s not-too-pretty head. (I argue here that our answers and solutions do not look good.) Climate change will raise a whole series of similar existential questions: What do we really need for a good life? How can we make sure everybody has the ability to lead a good life? How can and should we transform society in the face of major ecological transformations and disruptions? How should rich countries handle migration? How can migrants organize to survive and find a good life? And. So. On.

Academia has tools and experience to address many of these questions, such as careful, detail-oriented investigation, close reading, well-structured interviewing, but also big-picture data analyses, STEM research, professional applied work, and so on. Academia supports creative work that helps people develop their imagination and empathy, refreshes their humanity, helps them understand how they relate to each other. Sometimes, academic work seems so detail-oriented that we forget the real-life impact it may have—just read the titles of academic journal articles. But what we do, what many of us do, does make a difference and often addresses the existential questions humanity faces.

Educational developers play an important role in helping academics do this work. For one, teaching is an important part of how academics make a difference, and educational developers help academics be great teachers. As teachers, academics not only grow the next generation of researchers, scholars, professionals, etc., many of whom will employ what they learn in a range of contexts, but they also learn from their interactions with students—for example about how “lay” people think about their area of expertise, or what outsiders or novices to a discipline find important. In some instances, important disciplinary work is the result of student-faculty collaboration in (and outside) the classroom.

But educational development is not just teaching support. For example, many educational developers create programs that help faculty be productive scholars even with comparatively high teaching loads. It’s not just about helping faculty be great teachers, it’s about being great teachers AND productive scholars. In my own work, the “and” is central. One of my main goals is to help faculty integrate teaching, scholarship, service, and other professional activities into a career plan and work schedule that enable them to be successful and achieve professional milestones such as tenure and promotion. This is done in a range of ways, whether it’s in form of a yearlong academy for new faculty that focuses strongly on career planning, or in creating workshops to increase peer-mentoring skills among more senior faculty, or through workshops for mid-tenure packet writers, or in one-on-one mentoring meetings or consultations (don’t ask me what the difference between the two is!). We want faculty to be great teachers AND productive and creative scholars, and educational developers are central to making this combination happen.

Talking about my own professional situation for a moment, I find that my work is particularly important at the type of institution where I work: A regional, fairly large (about 20,000 students), comprehensive state institution that is putting an increasingly stronger emphasis on research and scholarship. It’s a reasonably selective but affordable institution for undergrads, who tend not to go into post-graduate academia but turn to fairly high-level professional positions where many make a difference. (Graduates have been executive directors of the Virginia Democratic and Republican parties, staffers for members of Congress, White House photographers, etc. The current mayor of Richmond is a JMU graduate.) In other words, teaching can have an impact. At the same time, research and scholarship is often more practice-focused than at R1 institutions, though foundational research is conducted as well. Among the top graduate programs at the institutions is a PhD program on assessment studies. There is applied research on physical education and exercise programs for children with disabilities, or on mentoring of young people from low-income families in the community, high-level scientific research by and with undergraduate students, and so on. A professor emerita has established a vibrant dance program for people with Parkinson’s. In such an institutional environment educational development is especially called for to helps faculty combine high-quality teaching and high levels of research productivity, and it can make a difference in an environment that very practically things about how academic work can make a difference in people’s lives (something that the institution frames under the umbrella term of “engagement”).

There is one more aspect of the work of educational developers that is important to me. Traditionally, and currently, faculty work has been the domain of individuals who achieve truly heroic achievements through the single-minded pursuit of academic (mostly research) excellence during long hours of work, often in competition with each other. Academics are known not to have “a life” and definitely no weekends. Those who can fit themselves into this work pattern tend to be men—single without children or with families where partners do much of the house and child-care work. Exceptions confirm the rule, so to speak, but the COVID pandemic has been especially hard on faculty who have withstood this pattern—predominantly though not exclusively women and single parents. This leads to the exclusion of smart, creative, and productive contributors to the academic project, in favor of people whose decisive characteristic is that they can spend the time at work that others can’t. The result is sub-optimal in terms of academia’s capacity to address the problems that need to be addressed. In my view, educational development has to play a role in enabling academic institutions to be open for true inclusive excellence, for the inclusion of the whole range of smart, creative, imaginative, productive scholars. And, as educational developers and academics, we also play a role in enabling our institutions to sharpen their understanding of academic excellence to include factors such as care for others, ethical behavior, ability to collaborate, and other qualifications that are often not viewed as part of what constitutes academic rigor.

Your friendly annual control exercise

Death, taxes, and annual reports: the three famous certainties in life. As it’s again the season for certainty number 3, it struck me how control-focused some of these processes are. Line 3 of the reporting document that I just completed today welcomes the reporting faculty with the words “Do NOT” (emphases in the original); the other pages are sprinkled with friendly admonishments such as “are required to” (in bold), “must” (also bold), “MUST” again (this time bold, capitalized, and underlined) when it’s about reporting grade distributions (better not too high!), and so jolly on as the document progresses. The tone is held to the friendly imperative of a Roman centurion, foreign legion. The impression one gets is that of a person really afraid that others are not doing their share of the work or—even worse!—not doing as much as whoever it is who wrote the reporting form.

So, who wrote the reporting form? Colleagues of mine on a committee, friendly people in a friendly department, some of whom I count as friends and who definitely don’t intend to play Roman centurion, foreign legion. And the form is actually a good one in the sense that it is clear, easy to complete, provides guidance on what should be reported, what shouldn’t be forgotten, etc. There are worse forms around! (Like the blank page form…)

What strikes me in this and other official processes is the apparent need to assert control, to police, to make sure people are not slacking. What’s the fear behind this need? Is it the pressure from above and outside? (I doubt even the accreditation authorities count the musts and requireds in the form.) Is it the fear to appear superficial or flaky if one’s department does not impose rigorous quality control? (Or is it a feeling of being flaky and irrelevant that’s soothed by being rrrreally strict?)

During the COVID crisis, a number of observers commented on the pervasive controls imposed on students by faculty and institutions, for example in the context of online proctoring. (I am particularly moved by the discourse on the Hybrid Pedagogy page as well as Jesse Stommel’s work on un-grading.) My sense is that the desire to impose control in academia goes beyond the control of students. At first, this seems paradoxical, considering the open-ended work beyond regular work hours in flat hierarchies that characterizes faculty work culture. But besides that comparative freedom enjoyed by faculty (at the cost of an expectation of overwork, I should add), academia is often obsessed with control not only of students but also of faculty (many of whom don’t have the freedom granted by tenure) and staff. Online teaching and working, it seems, may have heightened the institutional need to assert control, as more of out activities have moved away from spaces in which we are immediately visible.

Thoughts on Stommel and Burtis’s latest

Over the last year, as we’ve been collaborating more with our amazing instructional designers at JMU, I have learned more about the connections between, but also different emphases and origins of, educational development and instructional design. I am pretty new to educational development (though, 5-10 years in, depending on how I count, when am I supposed to stop saying this?), and this learning experience was very much welcome.

One of the instructional designers whose work I found particularly important over the last year, especially as we pushed back against overeager supporters of online proctoring, is Jesse Stommel. Today’s piece, written with Martha Burtis and titled “Counter-friction to stop the machine”, is a welcome “provocation” (as the authors call it) and good food for thought as we start processing what the heck happened over the last long year and consider what we need to do (and avoid doing) to have some justified hope in higher education.

Read the thing, and the follow-up pieces that are promised. Here I’d like to comment on two points by adding something that I think is compatible and worth the consideration. Stommel and Burtis note the paradox that faculty are assumed to be at least competent in-classroom teachers coming out of grad school, even though most of them have no formal instruction in teaching whatsoever, while online teachers are assumed to be clueless as to teaching and need close control by instructional designers and other “support staff” (who in turn should have the respect and status of faculty). (I appreciate that at my institution instructional designers HAVE faculty status.) Why are classroom teachers assumed to be competent? Stommel and Burtis write:

The answer likely lies in a number of assumptions about teaching that have been baked into our institutions:
1. Good college teaching derives from emulation; faculty can become good teachers because they can (and will) emulate how they were taught. We assume college faculty were taught “well” because they ended up with the terminal degree in their field.
2. Good college teaching derives from good college learning; faculty can become good teachers (again by osmosis) because they understand what it means to be a “good learner.” They can translate their own experiences into courses that turn students into “good learners.”
3. Since faculty were, by and large, taught mostly in traditional face-to-face contexts, we assume they can only emulate and translate within that modality.
4. Online and hybrid learning are “other” and unfamiliar because they’re not how most faculty learned; its presumed faculty need to learn a new language of teaching or have it translated for them.
https://hybridpedagogy.org/the-endgame-for-instructional-design/

The teacher-by-osmosis theory. And now I forgot what point I wanted to make. Oh, here it is: I think an additional paradox produced by this kind of reactionary “I am a doctor I know how to teach thank you very much” view is that scholarship is considered a public matter: we publish it, we problematize it, we ask puzzling questions, we expect criticism to which we can respond, etc. etc. Teaching, on the other hand, is considered to be almost private, part of our employment record. It is bad manners to speak of it in anything but positive terms, we don’t disclose where we get stuck, we definitely don’t want others to criticize what we are doing. As a result, while we have robust (though far from perfect, see reviewer 2) discourse in our scholarship, our scholarly discourse about teaching and learning has ways to go. Of course, I’m not being new or original here (see e.g. Huber and Hutchings call for a “teaching commons” in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), and I’m also not completely correct: I do appreciate the willingness of many of my colleagues to openly engage in conversation about their good and bad teaching experiences, though this happens typically in faculty-only conversations, not in public. And, again, while in-classroom teaching is such a kind-of-private matter, this is not so in the online environment, where, as Stommel and Burtis note, institutions and accreditors expect much more intrusive control of what faculty do.

Neither of this is a good state of affairs, obviously: Controlling-meddling does not foster good teaching, nor does lack of scholarly discourse on teaching. Which gets me to my second point: As someone who has done some observing and thinking about the roles of instructional designers and educational developers, I think part of what we need IS more collaboration and overlap between designers and developers. We need expert scholars on designing learning systems, structures, experiences, practices. And we need people whose work is focused on supporting (not sure “developing” is the right word here) faculty as educators: as professionals who combine disciplinary deep work with teaching, with leadership, with making their expertise useful to their various communities, with with with. We need people who combine these qualities and qualifications, but most of all we need authentic collaboration between the two disciplines to create the needed kind of applied educational discourse that encourages experimentation, offers room for failure, gives critical feedback, helps faculty (and staff) avoid burnout, advocates for institutions that are good for humans—the whole community of practice packet that we’ll need.

(I am writing this as part of the #100DaysToOffload project because I don’t want to give a shit about whether this is polished or not.)

The paradox of value neutrality in our teaching

At least in political science (I suspect also in other disciplines), there is a common ethic of political neutrality, at least in teaching. This makes overall sense: we don’t want to indoctrinate students but help them learn about politics and form their own opinions and political identities. In mainstream political science, at least, such a neutral stance is also taken: We just study what happens, we’re descriptive, not prescriptive. Of course, critical theorists have debunked such pretend-neutrality as a particular status-quo oriented value bias.

I suspect that other disciplines have similar written or unwritten neutrality norms. A few years ago, my institution adopted a (very laudable) program in ethics education that offered a range of approaches (they were called "key questions") and engaged students in using these questions whenever they encountered ethical decisions. The questions did not favor any particular ethical outcome; in fact, any decision could usually be justified by at least one of the key questions. Value neutrality! (This is partly justified with a reference to ethical dilemmas, in which no outcome is clearly good or evil. I should add, though, that the perception of a dilemma seems, at least occasionally, to be contingent on our highly individualistic "Western" value system, which is more accepting of openly amoral choices as long as someone comes up with a forcefully presented defense of them.)

What I find paradoxical about value neutrality in our teaching is that we take this stance in order to help students develop their own values, political views, identities; but by pretending that we are value neutral, we privilege NOT having values. In other words, we want students to make well-reasoned, carefully considered value choices while performing the roles of those who eschew value choices.

Obviously, who are we shitting? Not our students: they know that we hold values, and they imagine what they might be. I don’t think we are helping them become good, moral human beings by pretending we are moral and political blank slates.

Some thoughts on innovation

The time between years and semesters is often a good time to take stock, reflect, and plan ahead. This year, the idea of innovation has come up again and again in my thoughts, for a number of obvious reasons, not least the clown show that was 2020 (and that continues into 2021, with COVID-19 cases rising, the federal government being AWOL, and fascist assholes trying to overturn the election). While the situation has required (and continues to require) lots of sudden innovation, I also work for a educational development center that has the word “innovation” in its name: I better make sense of what this means to me, and what it means in the current situation.

To me, the main take-away is that when people talk about innovation, they usually mean new technologies and use of new technologies, but that’s not where most of the innovation has happened and where most innovation is currently needed. Innovation often comes across as chasing the next shiny new thing (and throwing money into shiny new black holes), instead of thoughtfully exploring where we have to make new things—or make things new. (And by “things,” I mean not just things but also practices, ideas, institutions, and so on.) My point here is that innovation should be broader than tech, and the innovation that is currently needed is definitely mostly non-tech! In fact, I find that most innovation is needed in the support of the people who make academia happen, in the processes, norms, and habits of our work, and in the mindsets that support that work.

We are so screwed!

Apologies for my German here, but I am verdammt scared and verflucht angry. We could have spent the summer ramping up our online teaching skills (and some of us have), and institutions could have spent extra resources to support professional development (and professional developers) for that purpose. And now, as it is still not safe to open classrooms to dozens of students at a time, we could do what’s best for the health of all and learn online. Instead, institutions have spent money on plexiglass shields and cameras for classrooms that will host ~~shitty~~ not-so-ideal masked and face-shielded “teaching” behind plexiglass, with students sitting at appropriate distance from each other, in the flow of aerosolized air that’s hopefully well filtered by whatever air conditioning system the institution can afford. Some institutions have already bitten the bullet and are making the emergency shift to online 2.0, others are holding out.

And I am not sure it didn’t have to be like this, given the current political and economic environment. I actually do think that administrators, as well as faculty, are trying to do the best they can. They’ve probably all had the hardest summer of their career, hands down. They’re good people, trying to do the right thing. And many will likely get people killed.

What got us into this mess? I do think it has something to do with what our institutions of higher education try to achieve, their purposes. And these purposes clash. Now, I am going a bit out on a limb here, honestly. I am not a scholar of higher education, and I am sure that my thoughts would be more sophisticated and less naive after an immersion in the relevant literature, though I’ve read a bit—Cathy Davidson’s The New Education comes to mind. Apologies to all scholars who find me awfully uninformed. But it’s my blog, and I can cry if I want to.

So, in my not-to-deeply-read naïveté (thanks, autocorrect, for the fancy spelling!), the contradictory purposes of colleges: Why not call them learning, assisted living, and elite formation? And in the current crisis they’re clashing. The phantasy of assisted living and the reality of elite formation are winning over learning at many institutions right now.

What I personally found attractive when I got involved in academia was the intense focus and depth of intellectual exploration: the long days in the library, the debates over the operationalization of variables, the close reading of texts, that sort of thing. In this sense, universities are biotopes for scholars. But also for less advanced learners: Universities offer the opportunity for young (and older) people to encounter different disciplines, ways of thinking, and—going beyond mere thinking towards affect and auto-motor work—different approaches to live, the universe, and everything. You may get trained as a dietician, but you’ll also have the honor of taking my introduction to US government, or a physics lab, and you may take an exercise class and become part of a club that organizes facilitated discussions…

This gets me to the second aspect of university life, as a residential institution for undergraduates. True, not all students are in their late teens and early twenties, but many are, and not all undergrads live on campus, but even those who do not live in dorms are usually pulled into structures and processes that regulate their lives. In an extreme case, many universities and colleges become half-way houses or assisted living facilities for adolescents: They leave home, usually for good, but receive assistance as they learn how to live on their own, how to make friends, handle conflicts, and so on.

I know, it’s tempting to leave it at a few snarky comments about institutions’ emphasis on dorms and cafeterias and landscaping. But, honestly, there’s much potential for learning going on. Students may spend 15-20 hours in the classroom per week, but many are on campus 24/7, and residence assistants, club advisors, psychological counselors, writing center faculty, and other student affairs professionals become their teachers. Plus, you learn a whole lot simply by interacting with others who have different backgrounds than you, come from different places, take different classes, and the like—especially if you live in the same dorm. (Of course, on-campus living comes with a list of side effects, such as the risk of alcohol abuse and sexual assault that many institutions struggle with.)

I am not sure that learning is the rationale (or only rationale) of on-campus living, though. For many middle-to-upper class families, college has become a way to shush the kids out of the house once they turn 18ish: They don’t really have to live on their own yet, they are taken care of, but they’re out of the house and placed on a class-appropriate trajectory. And they may learn something along the way. On-campus living has become a major source of income for universities, particularly with government support drying up. For many schools, beautiful campuses and fun activities are more important to attract students than academic quality.

Third, institutions of higher learning are places that form and reproduce elites, through selection but also through network formation and acculturation. The type of institution from which you get your degree shapes your social and professional success. Just getting into an Ivy or Oxbridge signals that you are either really smart or really upper-class. And the institutions reproduce elites, as they create a social environment of mostly elite adolescents. Going to college with the “right” crowd helps you form life-long relationships and networks with people of the “right” class. It’s not surprising that the most influential type of affirmative action in college admission is the preference for the children of alumni. That’s how status is reproduced.

Elite formation, or at least status maintenance, is not only pursued by elite institutions. Different institutions cater to different social groups, strata. There are upper middle class institutions, predominantly white institutions, etc. etc. Preference for “legacy admissions” maintains the social identity. And many institutions are divided over this goal (or maybe it’s only a practice): The demographic future of the country is not white-upper-middle-class; members of social elites are not necessarily as intellectually promising and academically dynamic as students from social backgrounds that are not traditional to an institution. And, of course, many faculty and higher-education professionals care deeply about social change: They want to provide opportunity to people who do not belong to the upper and upper-middle classes, to members of minoritized and oppressed groups. They enjoy the intellectual richness of a truly diverse student (and faculty) community. But the elites pay the bills.

I’d like institutions of higher learning to focus on learning, intellectual pursuits, deep investigation, important problem solving, formation of whole persons, etc. etc. But often these goals clash with the need to fill dorm rooms and to cater to “legacies.” Why? Higher education has been essentially privatized with declining state support. On-campus living and dining has become a major expense that needs to be paid; the school spirit that legacy parents teach their children helps fill the dorms and cafeterias. And this, in turn, provides jobs for a whole range of white and blue color workers: janitors, cooks, groundskeepers, and so on.

And now we’re stuck. If we do the educationally (and medically) right thing and go online, we lose the income that’s needed to maintain the physical university spaces. And the government won’t provide the finances to hold us over for the year as higher education is viewed as a private interest, not the public good* that it in fact is. If we do the educationally (and medically) right thing, scores of workers will lose their jobs and health insurance as dorms and cafeterias are closed. And the government does not provide the welfare and health care support that would be needed to help those workers survive another year until campus can be opened again.

It has become a truism to say that the current crisis has brought a number of social problems to a head. Like all truisms, there is some truth in this one. The current crisis shows how unsustainable our social system has become, how inept our political system has become, but also how unsustainable the current business model of many institutions of higher education has become. Higher education has to be recognized for the public benefits it provides: an innovative, civically engaged public, a dynamic economy, employment for local communities, spaces for people to come together and learn from each other, and more. If we want to maintain those benefits, we’ll have to change the business model.

*Yeah, yeah, public choice folks: Technically, universities aren’t public goods because people can be excluded from them. So, club goods for most. But they also produce tons of positive externalities, and those can be truly public goods (ever heard of the internet?).