Some thoughts on recent developments in online education

Posted on by

In the past couple weeks I was referred to  this video regarding online education and I met a couple publisher representatives about a new online eBook.  “We must meet students where they are and they are on the internet looking at Facebook,” was told to me by the publisher representative.    Those representatives were pushing for me to adopt their new online eBook in my classes for the Fall.

While the eBook is nice, with multiple videos and examples embedded in the text, I felt “my goodness, we sure are spoon feeding students these days.”  I told that to the publishers.  I also mentioned the equivalent of their eBook is available right now in print form.  On reserve at the library I have placed three textbooks and four Schaum’s outline series books with thousands of worked out example problems.  What’s the difference between looking at examples on a computer screen or going to the library to look at them?  We probably could go on and on about the pros and cons of both.  For now, let’s move on to dialectic reasoning about online vs. traditional learning.

  • Thesis: Today’s students are fine.  Today’s instruction needs adjustment.  You must adjust instruction methods to meet the new students of today.
  • Anti-thesis: Instruction is fine.  Today’s students need  to adjust.  Students need to get off of Facebook and get in the library with books from a diverse author base.
  • Synthesis: Students and instruction both need to adjust.

I must admit, I am in-between the “anti-thesis” and “synthesis” positions.  All this talk of “new students of today” reminds me of the “New Economy.”  I remember telling my boss after our startup was acquired in 2000  “our P/E ratio is 400, shouldn’t we sell our stock?”  His reply?  “Your MBA doesn’t apply anymore, this is a New Economy.”  We all know what happened after that.  The fundamentals returned. The stock market plummeted.

I see the same thing here with education.  Replace “New Economy” with “New Students” or “New instructional methods.” Fundamentals will return.  Students will have to spend time and study.

Let me throw one more dart at Facebook as I close.  Economic growth results from productivity enhancing technological innovation.   This is a Schumpetarian view on economic growth.  I ask, how has technological innovation such as Facebook enhanced anyone’s productivity?  Is there a connection between the productivity reducing technological progress called “social media” and lower economic growth?

ASU seeks to end staff contracts

Posted on by

As usual, my two or three cents before you jump into the article (20130116_ASU_Contracts):

The president of Arizona State University along with the administration are proposing ending one-year contracts for roughly 1/3 of benefits eligible employees.  Make no mistake, this means less job security combined with the already below-market wages for those employees.  Allow me to draw a parallel to corporate America:

Corporate America: Executives including presidents, CEOs, board members, etc. all look out for one another.  They take actions to maximize their compensation (big stock packages) and job security (expensive golden parachutes) while also taking actions to minimize pay of the labor force (anti-competitive agreements) and reduce their job security (little to no contracts).  Executive job security and high compensation come at the expense of the broader labor force.

ASU’s recent push: same thing.  Replace executives with “higher level university administration” and labor force with everyone else.

I hope everyone is beginning to see the trend in our current state of capitalism.  The few (1%) extract wealth from the many (99%) be it in a public-good taxpayer funded university (ASU), or a private industry company like HP (see recent post on Meg Whitman’s $30M+ in compensation while losing money for HP).  In both cases the 1% are able to maintain their high compensation and job security while suppressing the pay of the 99%.

The ASU president thinks it is a great idea to go performance-based and eliminate contracts.  Fine, why doesn’t he lead by tearing up his own contract and going performance based?    There is one problem: who evaluates the 1%?  In corporate america it is other 1%ers.  Will we see the same environment that we do in corporate america where “performance” is defined by those who are being evaluated?

Wall St.’s Next Profit Scheme — Buying Up Every Piece of Your Home Town

Posted on by

This is a long read that I have not finished on Wall St and privatization.  From the big picture perspective allow me to use dialectical reasoning:

  1. Thesis: public workers and governments are broken and bloated.  We need to cut pensions, pay, services, and useless government jobs.
  2. Anti-thesis: the private sector free-market system is destroying the public sector (e.g., education) and taking every opportunity to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.
  3. Synthesis: Both the public sector and private sector need fixing.  Government employees and systems need to see some cuts.  Private bondholders need to see some losses and face more prudent regulation going forward.

Why is “synthesis” left out of most discussions?  As the linked article points out, California municipalities had to borrow as a result of Proposition 13.  When you slash real estate taxes in half across the board where does the revenue come from to support existing government operations?  Also, bear in mind who benefitted the most from those real estate tax cuts: the wealthy and in particular commercial real estate owners.

So, with a shortfall in revenue municipalities faced a choice: cut services or borrow money.  It turns out they borrowed money from already-wealthy private entities.   That could last only so long.  Now, municipalities are facing another choice: cut services to continue to pay interest to the already wealthy private entities or keep the services, restore taxes, and default on those existing municipal bonds.

The Economist had an article on Prop 13 in April 2011.  The same arguments were made in that article.  The tax cut proposed to “help your grandmother keep her home” was really a tax cut that saved the wealthy commercial property owners millions (perhaps billions) while eviscerating school systems and public services.  The Alternet article points out the subtle point that this lead to borrowing, and borrowing from already wealthy Wall Street types.  They must get their tax-exempt interest you know!

This reminds me of when the Federal Government debated extending the debt ceiling last year.  The notion that we must raise the debt ceiling or our veterans may not receive benefits did not sit well with me.  I thought “Why don’t we keep funding the military and veterans, stop paying interest to overseas lenders (China), and then enter renegotiations with those lenders?  The notion of not paying veterans to ensure China receives their interest payment seems ludicrous.”

Shared sacrifice will lead to shared prosperity. We need to see both.  We will see both. I hope.  🙂

Learn the material

Posted on by

What does “Learn the material” mean to you?  Does it mean simply attending class?  Does it mean scanning through the textbook?  Or, does it mean doing whatever you need to do to learn the material?

As exams approach I occasionally receive emails of the nature “I am just not grasping the information.”  Well, this may be a surprise to some, but odds are you will not learn 100% of the material by just attending a lecture.  In fact, in my 11 years of college education, after three degrees, at three schools, in three different states, only once can I remember learning all the material by simply attending the lecture.  Even then, I had to rehearse what I learned by doing assigned homework.  For the 99.9% of the other classes I had to obtain different books, work with study groups on occasion, stop by the professor’s office hours, email the professor, and stay in the library until it closed most days of the week.  Are you doing that?

A student taking one of my classes is fortunate.  I have made a wealth of resources available.  Allow me to summarize what is available to you:

  1. efficientminds.com: Entire lecture notes
  2. efficientminds.com: Eight Learning Modules such as this one on Risk and Return.
  3. efficientminds.com: Extra credit explanations
  4. efficientminds.com: Homework helpers
  5. efficientminds.com: Additional finance-related posts such as this one
  6. efficientminds.com:: Microsoft Excel examples
  7. A wealth of supplemental articles and links to video organized by topic on my Google Drive.
  8. The end of chapter problems in your textbook.
  9. Alternate textbooks on library reserve:
    • Ross, Westerfield, and Jaffe. Corporate Finance, ninth edition
    • Parrino and Kidwell. Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, University of Memphis edition.
    • Brigham and Daves. Intermediate Financial Management, ninth edition.
  10. Thousands of worked out example problems organized by topic (use the table of contents and index), also on library reserve:
    • Schaum’s Outline of Mathematics of Finance
    • Schaum’s Outline of Financial Management
    • Schaum’s Outline of Basic Business Mathematics
  11. BlackBoard
    • Homework with feedback
    • Discussion forums
  12. Business student services Business Tutoring Program
  13. The internet: Google searches, Investopedia, Khan Academy, YouTube, etc.
  14. My office hours (and I make appointments if the regularly scheduled time does not work for you).
  15. My email

So, whenever a student tells me “I am not grasping the material” I must question if that student has utilized the long list of available resources.  If, and that is a big if, after going through the whole list and spending 7 hours/week outside of the class studying you are not grasping the material then we need to talk.

Finally, and I must admit frustration here, is the comment “the exams don’t match the homework” or “the homework is totally different from the lecture” or “the lecture is totally different from the book.”  I believe all such statements are bogus.

To begin, the homework problems are selected from the CD that came with the instructor’s edition of the textbook.  I base my exams off the same CD. So the book-homework-exam connection is irrefutable.  Now, as of Fall 2012 I must give a final exam prepared by committee.  The wording of that exam will vary from the wording of my textbook.  However, we are all supposed to understand English and the material leading up to the final.  Also, I asked one student in the Fall 2012 semester “what did you think of that final?”  His reply?  “It was a gimmie compared to your exams.”  Moral of the story: if you understand English and understand the material you will do well on the final.

Now, regarding my lecture notes.  Guess what I based them on?  You got it. The same textbook.  So the book-lecture-lecture note-homework-exam connection is also solid.  I interpret any comments suggesting that connection is weak as “I really haven’t spent the necessary time.” or “I am lazy and I am asking you to work out the same problem in class that is on the homework that is on the exam.  Do not give me any problems worded in different ways.  I just want to pass the exams.”  This is related to the spoon-feeding I spoke about in this post (be sure to read the comments to that post also).

Let me end with a quote from my very first calculus class at Purdue University back in 1990:

Do not study for the test.  Study to learn the material and the test will be easy.

I sure hope you heed that timeless advice not only in my class, but all of your classes.

Cheating, parenting, and Generation “me”

Posted on by

I just read an interesting New York Times article entitled “Studies find more students cheating, with high achievers no exception.”  The article is available here: 20120907-Cheating.  Allow me to comment on the article a bit…

Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends…and works to plagiarize. …a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is.

… the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.

Although the Internet is a productivity-enhancing technological innovation it is also a cheating-enhancing innovation.

An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role.

It is my opinion that the article is unclear how group projects relate to cheating.  Any thoughts?  I suspect that the point was sense of ownership diminishes with the pervasiveness of free information.  With no perceived ownership there can not be any perceived cheating.   That lack of ownership sense may be present in a group where no individual feels that they “own” the project.    I don’t know.  I do not quite get the group projects lead to cheating connection.

…frequently reinforcing standards, to both students and teachers, can lessen cheating.

Sutdents in my classes: please revisit the Academic Dishonesty section of my syllabi. 🙂

When you start giving take-home exams and telling kids not to talk about it, or you let them carry smartphones into tests, it’s an invitation to cheating.

Agreed.  But do not worry.  I don’t do take home tests nor allow smartphones!

…since the 1960s, parenting has shifted away from emphasizing obedience, honor and respect for authority to promoting children’s happiness while stoking their ambitions for material success.

There has been a time or two I have seen students, even at the MBA level, demonstrate a lack of respect for authority.  However, I do not recall that being a problem with any students who served in the military.  Radical thought of this post: Perhaps compulsory military service should be law in this country.

We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else.  Thirty, 40 years ago, the parent would come in and grab the kid by the ear, yell at him and drag him home.

My parents were definitely in my corner.  But they also disciplined me.  In the “it wasn’t funny then, but it is funny now” category, I remember an incident where I was being mischievous at school.  The teacher took me to the principal’s office and called my mother.  She told me in a very calm sweet voice “don’t worry son, I will be right there.”  Upon her arrival I noticed the  copper core cloth-braided cord from an old iron (mom’s “discipline rod” of choice).  Something bad was about to happen… to me! She wore me out in front of class.  Unlike the article suggests, she did not drag me home after the yelling.  She made me sit back in my seat, remain silent, and do what I was told.  Thank you momma, I needed that!  You did it because you loved me.

If you received more of the “my child does nothing wrong” treatment growing up rather than the “grabbing by the ear,” do not worry. It is not too late to get the latter treatment.  I won’t use a copper cord, I’ll just give challenging exams and remind you that you are responsible for your grade.  Love you too!