But this might be Number One.

It makes it SO easy to cheat. And to charge other people money for helping them cheat.

Distance education makes it easy for students to learn nothing, while at the same time allowing people in the distance education office to supplement their salaries.

Best thing about it — Even when people get caught, the university can’t stop it from happening again!

Read and learn. But you probably already know.

A two-month UTB-TSC police investigation found school employees in 2008 had committed “gross academic fraud” after student employees and regular staff used their positions to steal test answers, according to a UTB police report obtained by The Brownsville Herald.

The wrongdoing occurred within the Blackboard Learning System, an online service commonly used at universities.

The system allows professors to post tests and course materials for students, teach entire courses online and keep online grade books. Blackboard generally serves to enrich the learning experience; however, former student employees of the school’s Office of Distance Education, the office that manages Blackboard, confessed to a police investigator that they had used the online system to access test answers to help themselves cheat, give the answers to other students, or even to sell.

… The police report shows that one student employee, who worked in the Office of Distance Education, sold test answers to another student through a student middleman for $60. The student employee got $30 and the middleman got $30. That same student employee agreed to take a test for another student in exchange for $40. A different student middleman was involved in this deal, but it’s unclear how much money that person was to receive. The student employee said he never received payment in this scam.

“The agreement was I would take the exam for a friend of (the middleman) and score no less than 96,” the student employee wrote in his confession. “The friend would then give (the middleman) $40, so that (the middleman) could give (the money) to me.”

That student goes on to give a detailed explanation of how he was able to obtain the other student’s Blackboard password, and take the test for the friend on one monitor, while pulling up the answers to the exam on a second computer screen.

“It was very easy to use this method,” he wrote. That student employee also said he stole answers for a friend to give to a girl his friend wanted to “get with.”…

— Brownsville Herald —

… as the Cowardly Lion sings…

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

Dream on, you fool!

… And yet…

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He’s not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. “The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

But…

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors…

Yes well. You know how irritable you become when you’ve been sleeping and people try to wake you up.

“[S]tudents … are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says [one observer]. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive.”

Duh! The professor’s been socialized to be passive too, sitting there like a pointless nothing watching a movie or staring at slides along with the kiddies. What a rip-off. You’re paying a lot in tuition for your professor to warm her ass on the seat next to you. To read bullet points aloud to you like a kindergarten teacher.

UD certainly sees the benefit of PowerPoint to professor and student. Nobody has to do anything, and the only negative is that everyone’s bored out of their gourd.

But, as this enlightened dean notes, college professors are supposed to do something. So are college students.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.

I’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN

… that technology is the solution to the campus budget crisis.

[L]et’s develop more online courses, because there’s no classroom limit. Instructors don’t have to lecture, so pre-prepared texts could be uploaded for students, and an expert scholar isn’t needed. Videos and Powerpoint slideshows will fill the time and can be used repeatedly, saving costs.

The profound teacher-student discussions in “chat rooms” may get unwieldy with hundreds of students logging in, but most will vanish soon enough when they realize that no one knows they are there. It’s not much of an education, but it’s cheap, and there [are] few enough jobs out there for “graduates” anyway.

From a comment thread at Inside Higher Ed.

… the state of Arizona now boasts the largest human-designed chasm in the world.

Gaze in wonder at the gap between the University of Arizona’s students and their professors in redesigned Centennial Hall:

Incoming UA freshmen — already paying the highest tuition in university history — could find themselves sitting in some of the largest classes in the country this fall.

After promising that state budget cuts in the past year would lead to larger class sizes, University of Arizona officials will offer three classes in Centennial Hall, the largest of which will seat 1,200 students.

Officials plan to spend roughly $300,000 to retrofit the 2,500-seat performance hall with Wi-Fi, computers and projection equipment that will have to be mobile to accommodate the hall’s primary purpose of hosting music, dance and other cultural performances.

… Those involved say the courses will be successful despite their large size because of the quality lecturers heading the classes and a new pilot program to help mentor and support students.

However, an administrator who’s helping organize the plan admitted that it’s not ideal.

Another administrator who recently was removed from the project and an outside teaching expert also cautioned there’s a lot that could go wrong.

Chief among their concerns: Centennial’s seats don’t have lap boards, meaning students won’t have a place to take notes. There also is the difficulty of holding the attention of hundreds of laptop-toting students in a large hall, said Joni Finney, a teaching expert and vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“The tendency is to reduce excess expenses and pack them in like a cattle car, and whoever makes it out, makes it,” she said. “That’s really not doing students any kind of service.”

… “My biggest concern [one professor remarked] is not keeping their attention on the lecture, but what they would be doing on their laptops,” she said. [Bit confusing there. If you’re worried about what they’re doing on their laptops, aren’t you worried that their attention is not on the lecture?  Or are you worried that while they’re listening intently they’re also pleasuring themselves?]

This sentence from Louis Menand’s review of The Program Era — its author, Mark McGurl, sent a copy to UD, and she’s just finished reading the introduction — made her stop and think about the wired classroom, distance learning, PowerPoint, the whole bit.

Since few undergraduate students know what they aspire to be, almost all of their teachers are potential models.   And their teachers may not be professional models (Menand’s talking in particular about students who want to be writers); they may be ethical models, or models of scholarly practice, or whatever.

The larger point is that, as Menand’s comment suggests, teachers are intense figures in students’ lives.  Or they should be.  Students READ them, says Menand.  Closely.

Which UD, after twenty-five years of teaching, can confirm.  There are always several students who look at you with particular intensity.  That look is not merely about their intellectual alertness, their fascination with what you’re presenting by way of ideas; it’s also about a naked appraisal of you, the professor, as an entire human package.  What the hell are you?  What do you stand for?  How did you get where you are?  Why do you care so much about your subject?  Why should the student care?

Any professor who takes the time to look at students looking at her knows what I’m talking about.  Especially if you’re teaching literature, you’re exposed.  No getting around it.  Your subject is intense human experience intensely rendered.  Sometimes, reading a poem aloud, you surprise yourself with tears.  The students look.  They see your tears, or they see your struggle to suppress them.  Students see a lot of things.  Root around in Rate My Professors for awhile, and you’ll see remarkably lucid and perceptive takes on professors as human beings.  There’s a maturity and depth to these descriptions that you only get after a semester’s worth of staring fixedly at another human being, listening to her talk to you, reflecting on the subtle connections between her primal human experience and the advanced academic subject to which she has been drawn.

Menand’s comment tells us what we all know — The most valuable, the most profound education, emerges out of the complex, evolved human encounter of the classroom.  Because for all that you’re looking at me, I’m looking at you, kid.  My speculative heart’s going out to you.  Especially when you’re writing your in-class final and I can stop talking and start looking, you’d better believe I’m scanning for all I’m worth.  It goes both ways.  What are you?  Where do you come from?  Do your parents love you?  When you responded to that short story with such vehemence, some of it directed at me — Do you know that I loved that?  That I’ll never forget that?  Do you know that above all I want you to be passionate?

Well.  I could go on.  I only wanted to say that if you want to gut this experience entirely, if you want to carve out the heart of it, you hide the pages of your teacher-book behind PowerPoints; you hide the pages of your student-book — a book I find very moving — behind your computer screen.

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In his review of McGurl’s book, Menand describes the nature of minimalist and maximalist fiction writing:

The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver (he was from Oregon, where his father was a sawmill worker), deal with the highbrow world of the academy.  … McGurl thinks that maximalism, too, is “a way of shielding oneself with words.”

This plain affectless style carries over easily into the classroom, where we’re all ever so defended and hard.  (Of course, when they’re not being strong and affectless, Carver’s characters are drinking themselves to death.)  And the preference for non-expressivity — a preference all the wired additions to the classroom play to beautifully — is not class-based.  The same self-shielding (for different reasons maybe) happens among upper-class students.  Read Walter Kirn’s descriptions of Princeton University classrooms.

So now the book the student used to try so hard to read slams itself shut.  The book the teacher tried so hard to read withdraws behind a screen.

… but another solid contribution to UD‘s library of student laments about worthless wired classrooms.

Why aren’t professors and administrators reading the same material, and doing something about it? UD, for instance, would love to read a professor’s description of what it’s like to teach hundreds of people totally ignoring you.

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie [I’d drop ‘three-fourths of the movie’] “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.  [Nice touch – Even the neighbor’s wired.]

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.”  [Nice conclusion to sentence, but drop the many modifiers: fairly, good, various.]   It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. [Just make the sentence ‘Intellectualism was dead.’  See how, as is often the case, SOS is largely making your writing snappier by editing out verbiage?]  But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way.  [Fuck prioritize.  Ugly bogus word.  Corporate jargon.  Save it for your career as a motivational speaker.  And drop ‘highly.‘]

No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention. [This responds to cynical laptop-defending professors who insist that using a laptop during class is just another form of doodling.  No it ain’t.]

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. [Drop often and only.] More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts. [De-prioritized!  I’m pukingized.]

This approach may allow for the best economization of time  [Oy.  What are we, a business major?  This is basically a nice, conversational essay, but the writer needs to deal with her ize problem.]—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.  [Again, this writing could use some sex appeal, but it’s okay.]

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore?   [Crucial point.  Well said.]  Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? [The whole throw in a joke thing is important too.  Since the laptops, er, dehumanize the classroom, the professor will understandably decide that there’s no point in bothering to have a personality for the purpose of teaching.  If students want her to be another screen, fine.]  Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat. [I love the phrase ‘lecturing to 200 metallic screens’.  The word metallic is wonderful.]

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. [Instead of that lame final phrase, just write ‘pull the plug on most wireless internet in class’.] This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction [Students would be upset, but this would only...]  would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time  [Drop ‘in the way we spend our class time’.]. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Cafe, without the lattes.  [Drop ‘After all’.]

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Bonus extra: The old days at Harvard. James Agee describes one of his English professors:

It’s perfectly impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he taught but it was a matter of getting frequent and infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, greatness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extravagant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.

… why not just ban the stuff? Everybody’s doing it.

“There will come a day of reckoning, when projects are due and exams are taken, and I will have virtually no sympathy for a student who I know is (not paying attention to lecture), who performs poorly. It’s his own fault,” [University of Florida professor Carl] Barfield said.

A nursing student at UF gets points for honesty.

“I’d rather be on my phone than listening to the professor.”

… in a BBC interview. He’s talking about the attack on the internet as an avenue of illiteracy amid the decline of the novel.

I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel – about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead.

The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel – and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it – again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.

And we hear the cry again.

The novel is indeed a rather disreputable form. Many of the novels UD teaches were banned, or in some way suppressed, or subjected to serious legal trouble, when their publishers attempted to release them.

Whole syllabi of hers constitute once-criminal elements: Lolita, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer… Some of the poetry she assigns had run-ins with the law, too — Ginsberg’s Howl had to lie low for a year before being ruled non-obscene.

And, as Fry suggests, the content of novels, involving the murk of personal relationships rather than loftier spiritual or classical meditations, seemed to many people degraded.

I mean, plenty of communities in the United States continue to attempt to suppress various novels.

… beginning to write themselves.

… by Columbia News Service, “which distributes content to more than 400 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, and is operated by the New York Times News Service,” about Google Chat. The reporter wanted to know how she uses it, whether she gchats with her students, etc.

UD does indeed gchat with some of her students, and enjoys it. She went into great detail about this, and other online forms of communication. In a week or so, the article will be available, and I’ll link to it.

From the Daily Cal.

… I actually dropped a class at the beginning of the semester because the professor wouldn’t allow laptops in lecture.

But I do admit that the professor had a point. Most of the time, Microsoft Word is minimized with Facebook or Gmail taking its place. The problem is that this is distracting for everyone who can see the screen. For some inexplicable reason, indirectly Facebook-stalking a random stranger is much more intriguing than the atomic mass of uranium…

A couple of comments from a Volokh Conspiracy thread. Commenters are responding to Eugene Volokh’s laptop ban experiment.

This semester, all three of my professors banned laptops in class. One of the professors did this via a two week trial period, and then administered a survey. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the ban in effect. Is it “paternalistic”? That definitely may be a fair charge to levy. However, as my one professor explained it (and I think that, 2 months into the semester, this is a very accurate explanation), the point isn’t to be protecting you and making sure you pay attention. Rather, it is to keep the class as a whole engaged, which is to everyone’s benefit.

Even if you’re on your laptop “properly”, you may still get distracted by other people’s screens, whether they are typing, checking e-mail, etc. People’s faces are also obscured by their laptop screens, and they create an artificial barrier in the classroom. Absent laptops, the class seems much more engaged in the discussion, making the classes much more interesting. Even if you turn off the internet, you will still have the second problem above. People staring into their computer screens blankly, pecking away at the keyboard for two hours, is hardly conducive to a good learning environment.

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If the arguments for laptops were true, the most efficient way to run a course would be to distribute full outlines at the beginning of the class, along with the course material and class transcripts, all in electronic form so the student could go through it all efficiently, and wouldn’t have to sit through classes over several weeks, taking notes and making outlines. But we don’t do that because students are not computers that you can just fill with information. To get things into your brain, you must engage with them. Brief the cases while you read them (info goes into eyes, through brain, out hands). Take notes by hand (into ears, through brain, out hands). Participate in class (in ears, through brain, out mouth). Make your outline from notes (into eyes, through brain, out fingers). The more your brain is involved when doing law school tasks, the better you will learn the material.

As Mary Lee Barton, professor of management, spoke to her students, she couldn’t help but notice a couple of her students laughing and pointing at another student’s open laptop in front of them. The laughing and pointing continued, so she told the student to put it away and went on with the lecture.

Curious as to what was so funny, she pulled the giggling students aside once class ended, she said.

“I asked some of these fellas afterward, ‘What was so funny on his laptop?'” Barton said. “And they said he was looking at pornography.”…

The Orion, California State University, Chico newspaper.

… titled DEATH OF THE DOTCOM DEGREE.

Despite many commentators such as US management guru Peter Drucker saying that “bricks and mortar” universities would disappear within 30 years, there’s no sign they are vanishing.

… But the virtual universities that were set up during the dotcom boom have almost all disappeared.

… All along, [Clifford] Stoll has maintained that students want social interaction. “There’s the interaction with other students. It isn’t just memorable; it’s really the purpose of living. The reason we go to college or even elementary school is to be closer to others, to develop friendships. I’m sure I’m like you. I went to college thinking, ‘Hey, this is going to be a weird experience’,” Stoll says.

“I’m not going to get that from an online university, no matter if all the web units are taught by Nobel laureates, which they are not.”

… “(From) working in the area for a while [says one professor] you realise that the principles of good teaching and learning change very slowly if they change at all and the technology changes very quickly,” he says.

“The danger is to see that the new technology is the thing that we should be focusing on (but) really we should be focusing on what it is that makes a quality teaching and learning experience…”

… Stoll also is wary of new online technologies in the classroom. “My feeling is that the hard lesson that every generation has learned is that there’s no cheap way to get an education,” he says. “There’s no short cut to a quality education.”