Can you really educate or stimulate serious interest in economics with a music video?  I was dubious.  From 1984 to 1994, I wrote a column for Media and Methods analyzing music videos for their use in education (Joan Logue’s dream-like video for Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”).  Back then, the teacher popping in a rare videocassette of a music video was cool, hip, and sexy.

Eventually, however, I decided that in fact there was no educational value in music videos.  At one time, showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up a “Young Goodman Brown” discussion stimulated students but by 1994, videoland was where students already spent most of their time; no buzz.  So the Keynes vs. Hayek vids looked stale and artifactual to me.

However, since YouTube arrived in 2005, maybe lower production costs and vast accessibility have revived music video with a disruptive potential.  Just last week, The New Republic editor Jonathan (“I hate George W. Bush”) Chait penned a sniffy refutation of “Fear the Boom and Bust.”  Yes, a completely straight-faced fisking of . . . a rap music video.

Yo, J-Chay, it’s two old econ dudes acting like gangsta rappers.  Laffs, namean?  Your sermon to the TNR choir disses the vid but thanks for driving more page views!

So maybe Chait should fear the educative possibilities of YouTube, even if Neil Postman was right that electronic media turn everything into entertainment. Perhaps right now millions of entertained fanboys are reversing their course down the road to serfdom having been schooled up by “Hayek’s” rap

The question I ponder is who plans for whom?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.”

Mos def.

Two NAS professors who have taught online courses – and care about rigorous liberal education – wrote at NAS.org.

David Clemens argues that online education’s proper role is as a home for orphaned liberal arts and “boutique” courses for motivated students. In his view, online education is less than ideal, but as more and more institutions cut liberal arts programs, he seeks to ”expose students to classic texts about perennial questions” by any means possible.

Jason Fertig advocates the hybrid classroom model, and submits that a combination of online and in-class instruction can help restore academic rigor in college courses. “Why make this issue an all or nothing proposition?” he asks.

Then, in his latest Chronicle blog post, Peter Wood forecasts that online education, either rigorous or at “the level of a video game,” will become a standard feature of American college instruction.

A longer article in the Chronicle by Mark David Milliron urges academics to put away tired arguments for and against online education. “We need to end the family feud over learning strategies,” he writes. “Particularly for low-income students, the journey to and through our institutions is the pathway to possibility. We owe it to them to steer our conversations about online learning away from the tired ‘use it versus don’t use it’ arguments.”

The movement has moved ahead sluggishly with little financial support.

Enter two tech billionaires: the founders of Sun Microsystems–Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosia. They are devoting their philanthropy to replacing the $200 textbook with free alternatives AND getting these texts accredited by California and Texas, the two “gatekeepers” of the textbook publishing market (K-12).

Look for rapid movement at the K-12 level and some progress in the college textbook market. Whether the textbook oligopoly can block competition with political influence is another matter.

For more, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/technology/01ping.html?src=busln

and

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Conversely, online education does seem inevitable given our technological dependence, a Beltway “college-for-all” mindset, corporate customer service business models, and ruthless competition.  ”It’s the future,” gushed Regent Bonnie Reiss.

Despite teaching online for years and running an online program, I remain ambivalent about the marriage of technology and education.  Showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up “Young Goodman Brown” used to be stimulating; now it’s just disruptive.  Why jerk students back to the terrain they already inhabit, filled with insistent, continuous, cognitive shifts whose interruptions prevent learning?  Handling electronic information, Nicholas Carr says,

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

As one online student just posted, “During the time it took me to read for this assignment, I received 1 phone call, 6 emails, 4 text messages and 1 Skype message.”

At the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in June, the most instructive point about online education was made by Porsche, a young African-American college student, who said, “I don’t want to study organic chemistry on my computer.  My computer is where I go to have fun.”

The UC Regents would do well to heed her words because Porsche really is the future.

The method seems to work, but the viewer feels instinctively that this is even more demeaning than getting fired by a third party company. There’s something so impersonal and distant about talking to a screen. Later in the movie, the girl (Cornell grad) gets dumped by her boyfriend via text message, and once again, we see the medium itself as adding to her humiliation.

We’ve always had the sense that with any communication short of face-to-face conversation, there’s something vital missing. That’s been the abiding concern during the rise of online education. But an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed declares that online education will lose none of the elements that make traditional education what it is:

As we look to the future of liberal education, we seem unlikely to change the fundamentals of what has made that model successful. We will enhance the curriculum with interactive smart classrooms, course and lecture capture, ubiquitous wireless connecting smaller and more capable digital devices, and other technologies not yet invented, but close faculty-student and student-student interaction will remain the core. What seems more likely to change – and to offer transformative possibilities – is the medium.

But isn’t the medium the message? The author maintains, however, that “there is every reason to believe that whatever ‘liberal education’ is, ‘it’ can travel over a network.”

He offers some compelling reasons.

NAS President Peter Wood appeared on New Jersey’s My9 News on Wednesday along with Todd Zipper, co-founder of Test Drive College Online, in a segment on the pros and cons of online education. Dr. Wood said, “I’m regretful that we can’t have everybody go to college in a form of traditional education, but that isn’t going to happen; we have to learn how to make this new medium really work.” Click here to watch the 3-minute video.

As for Core courses online, I myself would be sceptical about the feasibility of such a step, at least from a Columbia perspective: so much here depends on the seminar format of voices heard around the table, and I feel that that format would be very hard indeed to reproduce in anything like its ‘real-life’ vitality if we tried it online.

I confess to similar doubts, admit that synchronous live dialogue is not reproducible, and acknowledge that the online courses are a marketing tool.  Still, in 2010, perhaps discussion takes a back seat to getting students exposed to challenging texts at all.  I started my program basically to keep frequently-cancelled literature courses alive in my institution (administrative pluses:  lower cost and a draw for disenfranchised literature students across the country).  Yet Professor Williams’s reply started me thinking about other virtues of online courses (I have taken at least a dozen and taught even more).  My defense of the online mode was bolstered by an experience of “voices around the table” while reporting to an informal group of students about the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference where I heard Dr. Williams.  I could hardly get a word in edgewise with all the interruptions and crosstalk.  Everyone wanted to speak at once; everyone had an opinion; no one had a question; no one cared to listen.  I finally gave up.

Neil Postman preached that

for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.

For now, the cost of electronically embracing what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “vanquished civilization of readers” may be the loss of “voices around the table.”  The advantage of online discussions, however, is the opportunity to complete one’s thought.   Students can also take time to frame their words, reflect rather than react, revise, expand, cross reference,  corroborate, and fact-check.

My online classes often turn into one-on-one tutorials, epistolary, more time-consuming than the classroom but with a balance of distance and intimacy.  The shy can “speak” as loudly as the bold.  Discipline is limited to enforcing the flaming policy.  No one is watching the clock or tweeting, and students are no longer packed in a box (by the end of the day, my 1940s era classroom is redolent of a high school locker room).  Martin Pawley used to argue that all technology acts as insulation against human contact.  Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

While direct appropriations to state universities have foundered, the state and federal money spent on students increased. This follows public choice theory: politicians spend money to gain the greatest number of votes. There are far more students (and their parents) who vote than there are institutions who want government money.

This is good for those students who use the money wisely and it is good for “school choice”: unlike K-12, students can choose their state college or university. Universities with declining enrollments moan and groan when students head to their competitors. To wit: my own university consists of two campuses: one with skyrocketing enrollment, the other in perpetual decline.

No doubt the news for those wedded to the status quo is bad. Nevertheless, recent trends in nontraditional education have taken off during this crisis. Even before the fiscal bust, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others noted that colleges had gotten flabby–not with money but with their way of delivering education in the 21st century.

Campuses facing fiscal difficulty need to get aggressive with educational innovation. Online learning is up (again). Philanthropist Bill Gates is expressing interest in putting his money into improving online education. For the first time, I am using a free online textbook funded by the federal government and distinguished foundations.

Institutions with enrollment and/or funding shortfalls are turning to for-profit alliances. One of the biggest surprises: the National Labor College has formed a for-profit joint venture that retains faculty unionization (NLC is dedicated to promoting unionism). “Bread-and-butter” union faculty ought to take notice: Change or die.

Here’s to a new year hoping that my own institution (Southern Illinois University) starts lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.

How did this mess happen? First, our 110 open-door community colleges have an impossible triple mandate to deliver quality transfer curriculum but also to provide career and technical education (CTE) but in addition to remediate basic skills for nearly 3,000,000 students. Meanwhile, the CSU system is swamped with students, many of whom (up to 80% at some campuses) are unprepared for college level work. Many are unprepared for high school work meaning six years to a BA.

Other students survey the unemployment figures and decide to hunker down. Euphemistically called “super seniors,” they conclude that between college dorms, college health services, cafeteria, library, gym and pool, hey, life is good! Why graduate? The big losers are first-time college students who find their seats filled by superslackers. The CSU solution is to “redirect” them back to community colleges that are already choked with students who can’t transfer. Add to this toxic brew the fact that money is just going to get tighter because Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer are fed up with paying college professor salaries to teachers of yoga and spelling.

According to Patrick Perry, CCCO Vice Chancellor of Technology, Research and Information Systems, California far and away has the greatest access to higher education, but it has a mediocre success rate (defined as granting degrees and certificates). Perry says states with both high access and high success have:

• Strong Statewide Articulation/Transfer Agreements

• Common Core Curriculum

• Common Course Numbering

• AA transfer guarantee or Statewide General Ed guarantee

• CTE pathways

• Strong online student academic planners and support

• Common assessment tools

• Statewide Transfer scholarships

California comes up short in virtually all these areas, and community college students, sick of plodding through the maze, are transferring instead to for-profit and online schools such as The University of Phoenix. So far, it’s just a small leak in a big boat but the number has grown five-fold since 1995, and change is in the wind.