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I’m finding a lot interesting to think about in this discussion of the Guided Pathways to Success conference and it’s investigation of the benefit to students of guidance/constraints in their educational paths: “Schwartz emphasized that even though it may seem counterintuitive and even paternalistic, students are actually much more empowered by choosing among fewer and more carefully constructed options.”

My first thoughts are about the curriculum we just instituted, which I have thought of as giving students more flexibility and choice about how they put together sets of courses to complete a major or minor. We try to make clear to students that they do not need to start with completing our list of “core” courses – that the electives are just as central to the major, many of them can also be at the introductory/no-prerequisite level, and may even be more interesting or compelling to them than the core, depending on their interests. Thinking about the core, though, as a delineated path that counteracts the excess of choice when looking at the entire catalog, makes this behavior both make sense, and makes me more comfortable with that choice of how to approach the major somehow. I think I’ve been able to mentally shift how I see our curriculum to being one that gives those students who want to have lots of freedom and choice that option, but does spell out some clear paths for students who prefer that as well.

Thinking more broadly, this also relates to some thoughts I’ve been having about MOOCs and initiatives to try to allow studdents to assemble degrees piecemeal out of courses from many institutions of many different types. The implicit question behind those initiatives is, with free or near-free education available on-line, what is gained by a more traditional school. One answer seems to be exactly this structure and advising, particularly highly personalized advising, which is essentially a collaborative narrowing of choices with the student.

Digressing a bit from the original point, I also worry a bit about what is missing from a student’s overall education when education is constructed in such a piecemeal fashion. For my own program, I think about how we teach ethics. It’s not unusual to tackle this by spreading ethics instruction out amongst several courses, teaching it alongside more technical content, as compared to having a single, designated ethics course – this is the approach we take. Obviously, I think it is a good choice – students see ethics from many perspectives and throughout their time in the program, and they see it integrated with their other activities in the field. If a student is assembling a degree, though, from a set of courses at many different institutions, I have a hard time seeing how content can be spread throughout a curriculum in this way. In theory, if every course labeled every piece of learning content with the number of hours allocated to it in the course, a system could be constructed to ensure that all boxes were checked to a sufficient degree. But this feels unwieldy, and I suspect the more tractable approach would be to fall back on mandating courses covering any required content areas (perhaps permitting for half/quarter courses to make up the slack).

A recent article about how MOOCs might, in fact, increase and not decrease costs on college campuses has been getting a fair bit of attention for its argument that the large lecture classes that it replaces were already the cost-saving venues of higher education and many of the proposals for integrating MOOCs well involve replacing these cost-efficient large classes with free MOOCs and then expensive associated mentoring. Additionally, it observes that even if a college doesn’t choose to incorporate MOOCs, the fact that they exist may make students less tolerant of paying tuition for large lecture courses.

The quote that jumped out at me, though, came in the middle of this argument:

The large lecture class is efficient, with a low per-student cost as the expense of the instructor resource is spread across so many students. Every institution of higher learning would love to only have small classes, but the economics simply don’t work. Faculty are too expensive. The large lecture class subsidizes everything else.

Except, unless I’m interpreting the definition of “large” and “small” incorrectly here, I’m pretty sure that I went to a college with only small classes, and currently teach at a college with only small classes. The article’s assertion that MOOCs will lead to a shift where undergraduate education must be personal and interactive is at the same time a suggestion that there will be a strong and possibly growing market for the small, liberal arts college experience.

Of course, that requires a lot of education about what that experience really is, and how much it differs from what many people assume a college experience must be. And, as the article notes, it isn’t cheap – certainly not as cheap as MOOCs can be. But it seems that perhaps the national discussion about MOOCs can be a real opportunity to communicate those differences.

A colleague sent me an article about a U.S. university accepting transfer credit for a Udacity course – something described in the headline and the first few paragraphs as being a breakthrough in a school accepting a free, online course for full transfer credit.

The article gets interested when you dig into it though. The course in question is a intro level “Introduction to Computer Science” course. And, in order to get the transfer credit, students have to not only get a certificate of completion from Udacity showing that they completed the course, but also pass an exam administered at a testing center, for a cost of $89. Which, happens to be the exact same price as taking the AP CS exam, which you can take, by the way, even if you aren’t signed up for an AP class (with, I think, some hoops to jump through). And, I’m going to bet that the transfer credit received is the same transfer credit students would get if they took the AP exam and did well on it.

So, the more accurate portrayal of the story is, I think, that there is a university that has decided that they will now allows students to get transfer credit either for taking an AP exam or for taking one of these tests run by Pearson VUE (which, when you look into it, is a massive testing operation already). And, the university accepting the transfer credit is applying it only for their fully online program, not their programs with physical campuses.

Moving into the realm of wild speculation now, even if this practice becomes widespread, it seems like it will turn into more of a threat for the AP/CollegeBoard than for colleges which already allow students to get transfer credit for some introductory courses. With there still being fees and the need to show up at a testing center, I can see this broadening access to college-level placement tests. But (again, wild guessing), it seems like colleges will have less to lose with some number of freshmen who would not otherwise come in with transfer credits now having a handful. Whereas, as a high school student highly focused on your GPA, you have an interesting choice between whether you take an AP course which may get counted as more important on your transcript but may also result in a lower grade, or do you take an easier course, get a better grade, and then take an online course to supplement and then take an Udacity exam for college credit? Factor in that the AP is a one-shot deal, and it looks like you can retake the Udacity courses (more like the SATs) and there’s an interesting question of which is more appealing.