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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/college-theres-an-app-for-that-how-usc-built-a-21st-century-classroom/239554/%20target=
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/college-theres-an-app-for-that-how-usc-built-a-21st-century-classroom/239554/%20target=
College? There's an App for That: How USC Built a 21st Century Classroom
By Derek Thompson
May 27 2011, 10:50 AM ET 18
“Everything about this program pushes definitions about what is a semester, what is the university, what is a classroom, and where do the faculty belong?”
usc5.png
In the spring of 2008, John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review, approached the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at at the University of Southern California with a revolutionary idea. USC could increase its graduates by a factor of ten without building another room.
Every year, California adds 10,000 new teachers. And every year until 2008, USC graduated about 100. The school felt “invisible.” How could it build influence without new buildings? Katzman said his new project, 2tor, Inc, an education technology company, promised a solution. Forget the brick and mortar, and go online, he said. USC was skeptical. Surely, no Web program could possibly deliver an in-classroom quality of instruction.
Katzman disagreed. I have something to show you, he said.
***
It's three years later, and 1,500 aspiring teachers are now earning master's degrees in teaching at the University of Southern California – more than the master's programs at Harvard (972) and Stanford (415) combined. Since USC and Katzman teamed up to create the country's first online course for a master's in teaching, called MAT@USC, the school that graduated only 100 students in 2007 is on pace to become the country's largest not-for-profit teacher prep program by 2013.
“Teachers and students uniformly love it,” said Melora Sundt, associate dean of academic programs at USC's Rossier School of Education. “We're bringing people from all over the world into the same classroom.” Now in 45 states and 25 countries, including Turkey, Japan and South Korea, USC's online education has gone global.
HOW THEY DID IT
uscvid.png
The centerpiece of MAT@USC is a virtual “classroom” accessible by laptop, smartphone or iPad. Live video feeds of the professor and a dozen students resemble the intro credits of The Brady Bunch (see above). Professors can post slides or discussion questions on the screen, students press a button to virtually “raise their hand,” and everybody can watch recordings of past sessions.
uscclass.pngEach student also has an online profile (see left), like a Facebook page, where they can message other students or create online groups (e.g. “MAT in Vegas” or “4th Grade Teachers”).
When the program first launched, the school allowed some professors to give a pass to online teaching. One year later, almost the entire faculty become “complete converts.” Students called it “life-changing.” Professors said it was the most fun they'd had at work in a long time.
“Putting the education online means you can see what issues are universal,” Sundt says. “It's wonderful to hear students say, ‘I have that issue in Kansas!’ and ‘I have the same issue in Massachusetts!’ Our class becomes the country.”
As much as Sundt rhapsodizes about how the program has changed, she's equally emphatic about what hasn't changed at USC. The school still accepts students selectively, still charges the same tuition and still requires 20 weeks of in-classroom practice. Students upload daily videos of their work in classrooms from their home city.
But there's the rub: an online education is only as good as its connection. “Our program is technology dependent, so sometimes things go wrong,” she says. “We have alternate sites we can move to. But that's probably the biggest drawback.”
MORE TEACHERS, OR FEWER?
In 2009, the same year MAT@USC debuted, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan blasted the teacher education system at Teachers College at Columbia University. “Many, if not most, of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom,” he said.
usc login.pngUSC has embraced the realities of the 21st-century classroom. But the success of online teaching raises some thorny questions. If we can digitize a good education, and replace a classroom with a WiFi connection, is the teacher expendable, too? Could simulation and recorded lectures inadvertently point to a future where we need fewer teachers instead of more?
The irony of MAT@USC is that rather than replace teachers with online technology, USC is now creating thousands more. Not only has enrollment at the teacher prep program increased by a factor of ten in three years, but also faculty hiring at the school has kept pace. In 2010, the school had added 25 new full-time faculty plus numerous adjuncts.
Futurists expect technology to dismantle the inefficiencies of a college education, which draws prestige from spending the most money on the most selective group of students. But USC is using technology primarily to expand its resources rather than reduce them. “We taught at a 15-1 ratio, and we still teach at a 15-1 ratio,” Sundt says. “We're not mass marketing this to become a course for 3,000. The cost of a USC education hasn't dropped.”
THE NEXT, NEXT BIG THING
The MAT@USC program is still a closed platform. The next step would blast it open. Sundt wants to build an alumni wiki network that could co-write lesson plans and share best practices from around the world. The school is also experimenting with recorded or simulated lessons for topics they can't film as effectively on camera.
If MAT@USC is a revolution, it's a contained revolution. An island nation of innovation. Around the country, the integration of new technology and traditional teaching is happening slowly. Professor by professor, sometimes program by program, but not school by school. Yale has put its lectures online. MIT has built a template for other schools to do the same. But accredited online education at elite schools still hasn't gone viral.
USC's biggest critics are faculties at other universities. They say you have to be in the classroom to learn teaching. USC responds: You do have to be in the classroom, but you don't have to be in Los Angeles.
“Everything about this program pushes definitions about what is a semester, what is the university, what is a classroom, and where do the faculty belong?” Sundt says. “We presented our program to another large research university for their business, law and education school deans. They said they had an online course in committee for two years. Two years! They couldn't believe what we did. Their comment was: ‘How did you make this happen?’”
Sundt laughs and says, “This is the future, guys. I kept thinking, this train is going to run right over you.”
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william czander 1 week ago
Check out India. They are way ahead of the US. India will need to increase the numbers to be educated from 17 million 2008 to
57 million in 2017.
In addition India is attempting to achieve a university enrollment increase of
30 per cent by 2020. To meet these goals
the traditional way (brick and mortar) would require the addition of 700 universities
and 25,000 schools and junior colleges with an addition of more than a million
teachers, 15,000 faculty with Ph.D’s in
management and over 30,000 Ph.D’s in engineering (Pathak, 2011). They cannot
and will not build institutions or hire thousands of professors that they do
not have, instead they will use electronic means to deliver the needed
education.
Consider
one method they will use- NPTEL is a joint venture by Indian Institution of
Technology and Indian Institute of Science established to deliver education in
engineering throughout the country using curriculum based video and web
courses. This allows a single experienced professor to reach thousands of
students. Each course contains materials that can be covered in depth in 40 or
more lecture hours. In addition, 110 courses have been developed in video
format, with each course comprising approximately 40 or more one-hour lectures.
Students have access to 129 web courses in engineering/science and humanities
and these offerings will continue to grow.
India will also deliver distance
education courses through so-called study centers where students go to take
online and televised courses. If the student does not have access to television
or the internet at home they walk to the local study center. Many of these
centers are franchised operations owned by locals. The Indira Gandhi National
Open University has over 2.4 million students with 3,000 study centers. Other
players in distance education are: Punjab Technical University with 1,200 study
centers; Sikkim Manipal University with 750 study centers and Maharishi
Dayanand University with 759 centers. At present here are about 100 online
universities and the number will continue to grow. In addition these online
institutions stream educational content through the third generation (3G)
mobile telephony using the satellite-based Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT)
Technology and Broadband, and McGraw-Hill is developing a platform to teach
English and test preparation on cell phones and of course they use YouTube and
FaceBook. NPTEL has around 4400 videos on You Tube contained in 120 courses and
2.6 million viewers. Indian corporations are also participating in higher
education especially in the areas of pharmacy, engineering and medicine. This
is how India will educate its populations and do it inexpensively.
No 12 hours a week studying for these students
No bear blasts that go from Thursday night to Sunday
No 110,000 students and alums at the football game
And
No $200,000 diploma
Ingenjören 1 week ago in reply to william czander
but still only ~65% of adult indians are literate. The indian education system is getting a lot of things right, but they have a long way to go.
Dr. Horo 1 week ago
Online education is here with Lynda.com, Kelby Training, etc. It's the textbook companies that are holding everything back.
2 people liked this.
celeidth 1 week ago
I can't think of a worse area to do online teaching than teacher education if we actually want better teachers. Why? Because good teacher education preparation requires intensive coaching out in the real world with classroom teacher and university-level supervision. And blow it open? The result: less supervision, more disturbed and incompetent teachers.
Who wants this? Product developers, universities looking for a cash cow, people who are looking for the next magic answer, people who want to be classroom teachers but are afraid of interacting with people, a few people in rural areas where it's difficult to attend class and, unfortunately, those who have been asked to leave other programs for various reasons, including inappropriate behavior.
There are many universities with a wide range programs for adults wanting to teach; unless you live in a remote area, it's not difficult to find a regular program. The people who cannot do any classroom teacher preparation in the daytime also can't do the extensive field and student teacher experiences that good teacher preparation requires. I speak from experience in both the online and the classroom end of this spectrum and one thing is absolutely clear. You need the degree granting university's boots on the ground to do good teacher education. There are a lot of people who want to become teachers who shouldn't be teachers and it's a lot easier for those folks to hide in online programs than it is in a university classroom or a K-12 classroom.
4 people liked this.
MeloraSundt 1 week ago in reply to celeidth
The “hiding” part and the quality issues depend on which program and which technology you mean when we say “online.” I know more, see more of these online students and their work in classrooms(and as a result we are turning around and doing more with our on campus students, too) through this platform. They have “master” teachers in the classroom with them all the time. They video their work and post it almost daily. Very few face to face programs have that level of oversight – faculty seeing student teachers in the classroom daily. What I'm saying is that we can no longer generalize that online is “worse” than face-to-face. It depends.
4 people liked this.
celeidth 1 week ago in reply to MeloraSundt
The kind of problems that my school encountered (with many years of experience in distance learning including online versions) included choosing master teachers and appropriate schools from a distance, having students evaluated by K-12 classroom teachers (who generally are afraid of giving negative feedback to university students), having students actually perform the required classroom observation and field experience hours, and screening out teachers to be who are a serious misfit for teaching.
In addition, and very seriously, online teaching is even more likely to be pressured to be the university's cash cow. The tuition, if at all lower, is only marginally so. Services for online students are basically nonexistent compared to on-campus students and online teachers are usually paid a miserable wage making it pretty much free money for the school. The pressure to keep growing beyond the ability of the university to provide appropriate supervision is inexorable. And having a daily online conversation with a student does not help you evaluate their K-12 classroom performance if that is delegated out to another person in another state.
And, finally, I hate to mention this but in most universities, teacher education is a low status stepchild and much less likely to receive the resources allocated to higher status departments.
1 person liked this.
MeloraSundt 1 week ago in reply to celeidth
Got it. Generally we agree that there are a lot of weak, even bad, teacher prep programs out there, both online and face to face. However, not all online programs are as you describe, so I'm suggesting that we not over-generalize. And just so the comment above doesn't give the wrong impression, yes, talking daily may not substitute for observation, but in our case, we're not just talking - it's reviewing, together, using a platform where we can see and hear each other, video footage of the classroom and the student teacher teaching and the kids interacting, often with the master teacher as part of that conversation. It's not perfect, but it's really helpful.
So I'm not saying all online is good or bad, just that it's changing, and what I've seen and used recently has really upped the possibilities for nurturing truly well prepared teachers.
celeidth 1 week ago in reply to MeloraSundt
It sounds like you are using the technology in a good way. And, by the way, I was teaching at a respectable if not top of the line university as a regular faculty member when I saw some of the issues I described.
Cassandra Anarchy 1 week ago
Fight On! V
1 person liked this.
MeloraSundt 1 week ago
Just some context for my last comment – I've been there. The leading universities got where they are in part by being thoughtful and thorough. We still need that. But over time we (IHEs) have created processes and bureaucracies that go beyond insuring thoughtfulness and can, at times, impede important innovations. The successful institutions will be those that can balance deliberateness with nimbleness, and it can be done. That's what I was referring to with the “train” comment. We can't hold on to our traditional models for deliberating and vetting ideas and expect to stay useful.
celeidth 1 week ago in reply to MeloraSundt
I agree wholeheartedly and that's why I liked teaching where I did. Where I got very discouraged was when we jumped into deep water without considering where we were planning to go and where the rip tide would lead us.
celeidth 1 week ago in reply to MeloraSundt
Here are some questions I didn't raise earlier. Are the teachers in your program on a career track or are they hired course by course? How much are they paid? Is it a living wage? Do they have benefits? Do the faculty have career growth opportunities? Do they develop the coursework or do they buy packaged curriculum or is it developed by other faculty at your university? How much do the students pay in tuition? What kind of support services do students get? Does a substantial part of their tuition go back into the teaching program or does most of it support other programs or a highly paid administrative staff?
The reasons I mention these things is that we are in a world where fewer and fewer employees have the salaries and the benefits that used to be the norm for the middle class. We also need to ensure that students get the benefit of the money they pay because right now at many universities part-time and adult students and those using online courses are subsidizing the traditional-aged students and the administration.
MeloraSundt 1 week ago in reply to celeidth
We went from 7 to 27 full time faculty, with pay/benefits like all other faculty. We spent a lot of time designing student support. There is 24/7 contact (triage) that can field basic questions or refer to people like me for the more complex issues. We do a lot of student-related programming (webinars, for example) on a variety of topics from finding a job to talking with Steve Barr from Teach for America, to talking to the two LA Times writers who did the stories on using value-added teacher assessments. An interesting thing about an online program (at least it's true for ours) is that students' expectations for response time shrinks dramatically – because they can comment any time, there's an unspoken assumption that faculty are available and will respons immediately, so we've had to do some norm setting.
About curriculum development – it was important to us that the program be coherent and consistent (i.e., if you and I are teaching the same course, we're going to help our students get to the same place by the end, rather than you cover a completely different agenda than I do). So to get there, we created the “course coordinator” role, that is an additional stipend, and almost all the full time faculty does this role for a course. This person coordinates the faculty teaching a given course – they meet weekly (online) to talk about upcoming work, student issues, etc. And this is the team that works on any revisions to the course. The Course Coordinators meet regularly to look at the program as a whole, and discuss where the next set of revisions may need to happen. So yes, the program was designed by the faculty teaching it. And about “where does the money go?”– the vast bulk of it goes back into the program, for faculty (people, prof development – we have a number of faculty doing research and presentations now on their work in the program, events around the country to bring faculty and students together face to face, etc). These are all great points/questions - thanks.
3 people liked this.
celeidth 1 week ago in reply to MeloraSundt
That sounds like online teaching like it should be done.
nedaari 1 week ago in reply to celeidth
It's a good program. Still has some issues that need to be worked out, but the program has allowed me to adopt and continually develop a framework for effective teaching. From the data that have been released, the gpa and accomplishments of students online is comparable to that of students on campus. While in the program, I have received ample critique in pedagogy from master teachers which has allowed me to increase my teaching skills and ability. Long story -short, my students have shown a 300% increase in proficiency and advanced categories of science portions of the CST through my matriculation in the MAT@USC. My students are happy and inspired learners, who feel safe, academically challenged and liberated in the classroom of a Title 1 school. An extremely large part of this success can be attributed to this online (yet, in-class) program.
annprof1 1 week ago
But teachers are bad, right? Are these teachers going to be able to get jobs in teaching?
And now, how do you assess this? Because assessment is everything.
Ok, cynical moment over. This is really interesting.
TrojanTeacher11 1 week ago in reply to annprof1
I graduated this May from the MAT@USC program and have had two fantastic job offers thus far: one at the Harlem Success Academy in New York and the other from the DC public school where I did my student teaching. From what I've heard from my classmates across the nation, most have had great offers as well.
The Rossier School of Education jumped to #14 in the rankings for Best Education School this year and I have no doubt that the MAT@USC program was a contributing factor. My professors were some of the most inspiring people I've ever known – all of whom are leaders in their fields and are passionate about recruiting and training the best and the brightest to reform our schools.
2 people liked this.
TrojanTeacher11 1 week ago in reply to annprof1
I graduated from the MAT@USC program this May and have 2 great offers thus far: one from the Harlem Success Academy in New York, and the other from the DC public school where I did my student teaching. Many of my classmates have had similar success with their job searches.
The Rossier School of Education jumped to #14 in the rankings for Best Education Schools this year, and there is no doubt my mind that the MAT@USC had something to do with this leap. My professors were some of the most brilliant and inspiring people I've ever had the privilege of knowing – all of whom have made substantial contributions in the field before beginning their work of USC. It never hurts to have someone like Michael Genzuk or Julie Slayton writing your letter of recommendations….
1 person liked this.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/college-theres-an-app-for-that-how-usc-built-a-21st-century-classroom/239554/%20target=
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/college-theres-an-app-for-that-how-usc-built-a-21st-century-classroom/239554/%20target=
