The university-wide study also found 51 percent of students said they knew their concentration was being adversely affected by phone use and 52 percent said the phone affected the amount of information they receive during class.

Innovative thinking from Japan: Throw out all that crap.

Apparently people can be made to think for themselves.

… The result of these so-called budget pressures, as we try to educate increased numbers of students with ever-smaller budgets, is espousal by administrators of things like online education or larger class sizes or “distance” education despite evidence that these “changes” do not benefit students to the same extent as face-to-face education. For example, at one campus, administrators have encouraged faculty to teach yoked classrooms where the professor is only present in one but is broadcast to students in the other room — something tried and discarded in the ‘70s when TV teaching failed as an educational innovation.

I am regularly contacted by students at online universities seeking hands-on research experience in my lab, because it is not offered at their school and they cannot apply to graduate programs without it.

… This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.

But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality. Then when professors point out these things, we are accused of resisting fundamental change, as if we have a collective personality flaw that makes us too rigid to recognize good ideas or “inevitability.” …

I hear you, baby.

A professor at a public university in California prefers to go unnamed in an Inside Higher Education piece about the poor white trash of education, online classes. The writer points out that among the spectacular advantages of online is that graduation rates at some schools improve markedly with them. This is largely because students can get a friend or family member who knows the material to take the course for them; or because the overworked person running the show isn’t very rigorous.

… But I mean I hear you when you complain that distance devotees call people who say the obvious out loud – these courses are dreck – rigid, flawed, regressive… Oh yeah.

You forget to mention the other thing, though – the thing for-profit distance devotees say about you and me: Elitist slime! You’re slamming the door to self-improvement shut in the face of people who have no option but to take out enormous loans they can’t pay back in order to sit at home and talk to a screen! That’s the only form of higher education available to these people, and you’re denying it to them!

Yeah. UD‘s heard them all. All the beautiful claims made for the superiority of a total separation between two human beings as one of them tries to learn something.

You know what that person learns? She learns that legitimate schools won’t accept her expensive credits from for-profit online schools.

Let’s think about what might be in the mind of schools that consistently reject her credits. Let’s take our time…

Actually, we can do this fast. Reread this post’s headline.

… After members of the faculty voiced concerns regarding laptop use in their classrooms, [the Committee on Academic Technology] took the admirable first step of consulting with the student body before considering formal regulatory action.

… Professors should make clear where they stand on personal electronic device use in their classrooms. The syllabi that are given to each student at the beginning of the semester would be the ideal medium for professors to express their individual policies…

As students and faculty become increasingly frustrated by rude and destructive classroom laptop use, more and more universities are holding these discussions, debating the relative merits of across-the-board bans and case-by-case choice on the part of professors.

Longtime UD readers know what UD has predicted: In time, students will be allowed – nay, encouraged – to use laptops only in radically PowerPointed classrooms. If you’re a professor who wants to be left alone to read slides aloud for fifty minutes twice a week, what’s not to like about laptops? They’re your salvation.

There’s the Ryerson guys; and now

Laurence Thomas, a popular [Syracuse University] philosophy professor whose courses have waiting lists, walked out on his class of nearly 400 students last week when he caught a couple of students fiddling with their phones instead of paying attention to him.

It wasn’t the first time Thomas has cut a class short because a student broke his no-texting rule. To Thomas, texting saps the class of its intellectual energy.

Well, we know all of this, and the only contribution the Canadian professor I’m quoting makes is a literary one: He puts a nice Edgar Allan Poe twist on the sheer creepiness of teaching to a laptop.

Creepier still is the way, sufficiently massed and sufficiently angry (think five hundred laptoppers herded together for PowerPoints and clicker tests), these students begin to stage a Revenge of the Zombies. The professor, for instance, is commenting on an article about an engineering class at Ryerson University:

Paper airplanes thrown at professors, music and movies played aloud on laptops and chattering cell phone users are causing engineering instructors to pack up and leave.

In an announcement posted on BlackBoard Oct. 19, first-year engineering instructors Robert Gossage and Andrew McWilliams announced two measures to deal with the “constant disruptions” in General Chemistry lectures.

The first was a three-strike policy. After three warnings the professor would walk out and it would be up to students to learn the rest of the lecture material on their own. The second was to make test and exam questions harder, since “the class appeared to know the material well enough so as not to listen during lecture.”

“Chemistry has been the worst,” said Adam Rupani, a first-year engineering student. “I was sitting in the first row and couldn’t hear the professor.”

Oh, but there’s some good news!

Rupani said lectures have been better since the removal of clicker tests that were at the end of each lecture. Students got bonus marks just for taking the test, but without it, some of the rowdier students decided to skip class.

“People won’t come if there’s nothing going on,” said Rupani.

Truly the introduction of enormous classes, PowerPoint, laptops, and clickers has been a boon.

To journalism. And to YouTube.

So sad, when a high-ranking administrator takes to the local paper to try to calm the populace.

In the wake of the University of Central Florida cheating scandal – brought on by the exquisite synergy of a professor who couldn’t be bothered to write his own exam (“Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?”), and students who, sensing he couldn’t be bothered, found the online exam he used and copied it – the school’s provost natters about how much integrity the school has, how this was an isolated incident, and how they’re going to “add to and improve upon our existing safeguards.”

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

UCF must sense how unpleasant its transformation into a Vegas casino, bristling with security cameras, is, since the provost lists all sorts of behavior-improvement initiatives on campus, but doesn’t mention this one. And this is the one that’s gotten the most press.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

“… I have noticed permissible laptop use has dwindled over my past three years in undergraduate education.”

A Seton Hall student, in the school newspaper.

Watch the video. Before the professor explodes, note the conditions under which Ivy League students are learning. Lights low, an enormous lecture class, the professor – his back to the room – straining his neck to read off of a huge, ceiling-high PowerPoint slide about kilobytes.

When American students in classes like these finally realize how thoroughly they’re being ripped off, we’ll start to see massive, coordinated yawns. One hopes.

… quotes Wendy Brown saying what I’ve long been trying to say about online university education. As I sometimes do, I’ll interrupt her thoughts with some parenthetical responses:

As is well known, no matter how “high touch” it is, on-line education inherently isolates and insulates students, deprives instruction of personality, mood and spontaneity, sustained contact, and leaves undeveloped students’ oral skills and literacy. [Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic – and one of the most frequent – is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so introverted, that they will never open their mouths in class… Yes, with online we can make sure that no mean professor ever gets a chance to bring that introvert out of herself and incorporate her into a verbal as well as intellectual world! Bravo, online! …  Do you know how many students UD has had over her years of university teaching who said nothing in the first few weeks of her classes, and then, gradually, began to contribute, began to come up to her after class with ideas, etc? Do you know that these awakenings constitute perhaps UD‘s proudest teaching moments? But by all means nip this problem in the bud by leaving those students at home and putting them in front of screens! What a favor online is doing them!] Countless studies reveal that on-line courses necessarily dumb down and slow down curriculums. They reduce as well the critical, reflective and reflexive moments of learning, moments of developing thoughtfulness, navigating strangeness and newness, and of being transformed by what one learns. [This is the heart of my rejection of one of my readers’ claims that online allows professors to “share their insights” with students.  No it doesn’t, and Brown here explains why.] On-line education necessarily emphasizes … “content retention,” rather than what liberal arts education has long promised: the cultivation of thoughtful, worldly, discerning, perspicacious, and articulate civic-minded human beings. Thus to substitute on-line for on-campus education, especially in those first two years of college when students are initiated into university level inquiry, is to spurn the enduring Socratic notion of learning as a “turning of the soul.” It is also to privilege those courses that conform best to large-scale cyber teaching, those with the most information-based content. It would thus further orient students and the future of the university toward education conceived simply as job training and credentialing.

In her longer remarks, Brown mentions many other appalling aspects of online: Its sky-high drop-out rates, with the attendant debt … And why are the drop-out rates so much higher than on physical campuses, where they’re already pretty damn high? Because its such a blah, isolating, atemporal, nothing experience… like reading Waiting for Godot, very slowly, every day, over and over again… And of course because intellectually its also nothing; there’s none of what Brown calls turning; you’re a passive recipient of data, a memorization-machine, no human beings anywhere in sight, no professor to get you excited about ideas because she’s so excited about them. Who can get it up for that mindmush on a regular basis? No wonder so many onliners cheat! Anything rather than drag yourself through this soulless routine.

As one of my readers, a math professor, writes in a recent comment:

Learning mathematics can be done easily online. Provided a student is motivated. That’s the rub with online education in mathematics. It’s hard to be motivated. There is something about coming to class – even a boring lecture class – that keeps more students on track. In online classes they tend to fall by the wayside.

(You know one thing UD thinks is funny? UD has always found the way-popular motivational speaker phenomenon in the United States embarrassing and absurd. You can’t run a convention without hiring some clown to whomp everybody up first? Yet in its tacky clownish way the motivation industry tells us some baseline truths about organizing people and focusing their energies.)

(Oh and here’s a business tip from old UD: Start a company that hires actors, motivational speakers, students, to precede online classes with motivational speeches! Like that lady who talks to Winston Smith through the telescreen:

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

Maybe a little nicer than that.)

Online is a boon in one way. Since it so dramatically represents the opposite of a liberal arts education, it helps us clarify the nature of authentic higher learning, helps understand exactly what we’re defending, and why we defend it so fiercely.

A hacker has broadcast a message to wired classrooms across Washington State University. Here is some of what he said:

[Why have you come to this university] merely to eat, drink, and breathe? [Unserious people have] infiltrated our once-astute university. [They] run wild in a state of perpetual inebriation [and have] no outward enthusiasm for the fantastic academic culture this university used to have.

The entire video is here. Scroll down.

Très pomo.

And definitely creepy.

Here we are. Flashlights on!

Point them at the front of the room.

There’s the prince of darkness, ruler of this domain. He strides from side to side, declaiming many things in front of six hundred followers.

Point your flashlight at the followers.

Note that instead of six hundred, there are two hundred in attendance. The entire course is taught out of a textbook; the prince merely copies, from the same textbook’s test bank, the test on which class grades are based.

He is after all a prince — not the sort to write his own tests.

Since there is no point in attending lectures, many students do not. This angers the prince.

What angers him even more is that a third of the students cheated on this semester’s midterm. Even though the New York Times recently featured his university’s expensive, pervasive, student surveillance cameras as a model for the nation, his business class still cheated.

Humiliated and enraged, he storms. The video of his storming is – like the test he takes out of the textbook – online for anyone to see.

********************************

Here’s what seems to have happened.

[S]tudents [found] a version of the test and the grade key on line. Where is the security system for test banks, and how was it so easily obtained? Locally, they are saying that no security breaches happened and the answer key was simply found on line. Shame on the professor and the university. [Scroll down to comments at the link.]

Oy oy oy. Security systems again! First you gotta buy zillions of cameras and train them on the students while they take their exams so the classroom looks like a Vegas casino. THEN you gotta lock security into the exams your princes pick out of textbooks. It’s incredibly expensive, and you’re a public university in Florida, where expenditures for universities are in the cellar.

What to do?

The vast University of Central Florida is essentially an online university. It should drop its physical campus pretense.

Yes, a large percentage of online students cheat. But no one finds out.

Students at the University of South Dakota protest a stupid course – loudly. Bravo.

Look at this photo of the course in inaction. See the photo? Enlarge it and take a good look. Professor Phil Donahue doesn’t teach; he wanders hither and yon with a vague smile on his face asking if he can be of service. He tries not to notice that everyone’s dead or staring at their BlackBerry.

One student notes that the course “doesn’t have a purpose that students can appreciate. The university’s goal of instilling group work and critical thinking skills should already be achieved through general course work.”

Administrators’ defenses of the course are profoundly lost and confused.

“It takes all the best elements of a liberal arts education and helps show students that it has a real-world application.” One of them says this.

The best elements of a liberal arts education are sitting in a room with one hundred students staring at screens while a friendly ghost flitters among you?

****************************************

The real business world students are about to enter may indeed feature butt-numbing torpor in front of screens, and the constant need to tolerate unpleasant people; but is the purpose of a university to simulate these effects by way of preparing students for them?

Another administrator says: “Employers look for college graduates who can communicate, analyze and collaborate, which are all things the course is intended to teach.”

Look at the photo again.

And then the confusion comes in. Does the University of South Dakota create a curriculum based upon what educated people have always known and should continue to know? No. It makes two mistakes.

First it looks at the local accounting firm and says Hey what are they doing over there? Let’s do that over here.

Second, as another administrator says of the course:

“We’re still working on students’ needs.”

Not: What is the content of the liberal arts tradition in universities? But: What are our students’ needs?

********************************

Let’s review. The university has (1) looked outside for what it’s supposed to do, and then (2) has looked at its students for what it’s supposed to do. Like Phil Donahue up there: How can I be of service?

The University of South Dakota — assuming it is not aiming to be the University of Phoenix — is looking for a curriculum in all the wrong places; and in so doing it is insulting its students. Its students point out to the university that the foundation of a liberal arts education is to be found in general course work, not in Let’s make friends while playing together on our computers bull sessions.

——————————————————————-

UPDATE: Cool. UD’s gotten a comment from a student currently taking this course. Here it is:

As I am writing this, I am sitting in XDIS210: Success and Happiness aka, pain and suffering. I searched the course and found this blog. Kudos for the post!

Let me first say I am not an apathetic student.

The problem with the course is not the information, it’s the structure. I have done more work and spent more time on this course than any other class I have taken at this university. Keep in mind, I graduate next semester. The syllabus is 22 pages long. The standardization of the class has allowed for no wiggle room. Our class is behind but due dates aren’t moved because it “wouldn’t be fair” to the other classes.

I come to this class three times a week and all I can think about is what I will write when my professor hands me the class evaluation sheet. I have learned absolutely nothing in this class. My writing of this DURING the class is proof of that.

Its sad to think that I spent $700 to take a class because someone was “awestruck” about the technology used at another university. Can they not incorporate this technology in other courses? Is it necessary to require it?

Moreover, title is Success and Happiness?! Its a slap in the face and the university needs to hear our concerns, instead of being so defensive. I have yet to speak to ONE student in this or any XDIS class that has any interest in the course.

Again, what I’m picking up on here is a combination of too much technology and insufficient intellectual justification.

—————————————————

ANOTHER UPDATE: PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS.

Another student heard from. This one took an earlier version of the course.

I sat in a large lecture hall with at least 80 other students and learned nothing. In all honesty, I barely went to the class.

What did I walk away with? The knowledge that in the real world, I’m probably going to have to do things that I don’t enjoy doing and working with people I don’t like or don’t know. At least then, I’ll actually get paid to do it.

I didn’t go to college to learn how to work well with others. I was taught that in elementary school. I came to learn about a specialized career field of my choosing. If I wanted to take class in the realm of job preparation (which is what I think the university is trying to get at with IdEA and XDIS) then I feel like I, as an adult and a senior about to graduate, should hold the right to choose to do so. Or not.

“If I see a laptop opened, [that student is] considered absent for the day,” said William Cohen, a [Temple University] professor of community and regional planning who requests no laptops be used in his class.

From The Temple News.

… newspaper.

[W]hen a professor simply stands in front of the room, reads the PowerPoint word-for-word and tells us what we already learned from nightly readings, students will mentally check out.

… Students will go to class if professors consistently teach material that students did not already learn while reading the textbook.

… If professors give us something valuable during lecture, we’ll be there to take it.

The opinion piece is in response to a new national trend: mandatory attendance. How did mandatory attendance come about?

Professors who teach nothing teach no one. Students don’t attend their classes.

Empty classrooms (No one’s here to watch me read my slides!) make professors look bad, so these professors eventually make attendance mandatory.

It’s a variation on the old communist-era saying, We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Here it’s I pretend to teach and you pretend to learn.

But while professors seem to have a high threshold for futility, students have a low one. After all, students are paying to play pretend; professors get paid.

If students won’t play along, if they won’t be good sports, some of these professors will suddenly drop the whole it’s all a game thing and force them into the room. Students will respond by playing on their laptops.

The wired classroom student: Casper The Unfriendly Ghost.