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  • Hulu and Higher Ed

    By Joshua Kim December 6, 2009 5:31 pm EST

    Spent a few hours this week in the San Diego airport waiting for my red-eye flight back East. Had a backpack full of articles and reports that need to get read. A bunch of writing that needed to get written. Yet ... I found myself whiling away the hours happily watching "Glee" on Hulu. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to not break into song while watching that show? (I'm sure the TSA frowns on terminal singing).

    We used to live in a world with fewer choices. Watching video (the kind of stimulation that our brains love) required conforming to a network schedule and access to a TV. Movies meant going to a theater. Now we can watch what we want, where we want, when we want, on the device we want. In the past, long waits in airports offered little choice for entertainment, so getting some work done was appealing. Nowadays, can even the best educational technology article compete with "Glee"?

    Our curriculum, and the way we deliver it, has changed little. But the world has changed lots. We are in a new reality in the struggle for our students attention. Our students constantly and ubiquitously have great options for entertaining their brains. Is it any wonder that students will complete the minimally assigned curricular readings (or attend the minimal number of lectures) in order to receive the minimum grade that they desire? Competing against the course reading and lecture is the entertainment industrial complex. This includes everything from TV to movies to games to social networking. And all this entertainment goodness is available on their laptops (and increasingly their mobile devices), which means that it is all available to them wherever they go and whenever they want it.

    Entertainment, once scarce, is now abundant.

    What is to be done? In a world of Hulu, YouTube, iTunes, etc. etc. etc. I see have two basic choices in higher education:

    A) Don't Compete: Don't even try to compete with the quality anytime/anywhere/anyplace media world. We are learning. They are entertainment. We are not them and they are not us. We can set clear learning outcomes and develop measurable competencies. We can give our tests and assign our papers. We can stop worrying about how students go about preparing to demonstrate the competencies we require. We can focus on outcomes, and let out students determine their own processes. Just as some companies have moved to performance based management we can work towards performance based learning. For some students this may mean that they don't read everything we assign, attend every lecture, or participate in every discussion. But students are an inventive group. They will utilize the information abundance that they live amongst to get the materials that they need. Under this model we give up the idea that learning will ever be as captivating as entertainment, freeing us up to demand high levels of measured competencies.

    Learning technology can help us move to competency based learning models. The formative and summative assessment tools built into the LMS make the process of measuring learning immeasurably easier to scale. Simulations, learning objects, and academic databases radically increase the easy and quality of learning content and tools our students can access to prepare for the assessments we provide. Captured presentations and lectures can be shifted and viewed where, when and how our students most need these materials. By leveraging available technologies and networks, and focussing on clear learning objectives and measurable learning outcomes, we provide relevant, scaleable, affordable, and flexible educational experiences for our students.

    or....

    B) Create Creators: We decide that while consuming learning can never compete with consuming entertainment that creating learning is far superior. Creating always trumps consuming. So we make our students creators. They create learning modules to explain the curricular concepts in our courses. Students can create media projects that require fluency in the main concepts, methods, and facts covered in the course. We make our students into the authors. We allow our students to find opportunities to participate in the larger discussions and debates in our disciplines, jumping in at the points that resonate with their own lives and interests. Under this model the outcome is less important then the process. Becoming an expert in anything takes 10,000 hours - we are using our courses to start our students down that road. We don't expect that they will teach our disciplines as well as us (we have our 10,000 hours), but we realize the only way we ever really learning anything is to teach it.

    Learning technologies can help us move towards a creator based model of education. Students can create original curricular mashups around the course content, and post their work on public platforms such as YouTube/EDU. Wikis and blogs, both in the course management and in public spaces, can become stages for students to collaborate, share ideas, and publish their ideas. Students can utilize out-of-classroom time to watch our lectures, reserving precious in-class hours to work on team creative projects with the guidance of faculty. The learning management system can become a hub for collaboration, a destination to collect and share student work, and a guide to assist students in navigating the material they need to become effective creators.

    Which vision makes more sense? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if these two models are really in opposition. We could probably do both. But one thing we can't do is to keep operating, keep educating, as if the world around us has not changed.

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Comments on Hulu and Higher Ed

  • The creative urge
  • Posted by Gary Fitsimmons , Director of Library Services at Bryan College on December 7, 2009 at 9:00am EST

  • "Creating always trumps consuming."

    Your second view depends heavily on this assumption, which I think is generally true among younger people with a lot of energy (which I was once). But I have found recently that it is often easier and unfortunately more appealing to put off my creative urge (writing) by watching something or playing a video game, or getting some "real work" done. There is that whole "putting off homework" until the last minute thing that resembles this writer's block, but is that the same, and if it is, what is to keep creative assignments from becuming a drudge?

    The question is, I have experienced the power of the creative urge before, so what makes it so powerful and how do we consistently harness it's power in every learning situation.

  • Both Can Be Done
  • Posted by AndreaGenevieve , Semester in Washington at George Washington University on December 7, 2009 at 7:45pm EST

  • But the question is, how do we go about changing curriculum that has been around for years and years? It seems as if both of the options would be great and a much better way for students to learn effectively. My fear is that "That's the way its always been done, so that's the way were going to do it, " will live forever in higher education. How do we start convincing higher-ups that technology isn't going anywhere anytime soon?

  • Having students create learning modules
  • Posted by Senior Prof , Prof. of MIS at public teaching institution on December 8, 2009 at 8:45am EST

  • Students exploring the material themselves and instructors adopting experiential learning techniques can both be very effective. The problem is that the students often don't know enough to create learning modules and most won't go to the effort to learn enough to do so (sidetracking entertainment is more fun). They have often dodged learning material in foundation classes and have used study techniques focused on short-term memory only. The approach of having students create learning modules also tends to be spotty, depending on how it's implemented. Students learn more deeply about some topics but miss other important topics altogether.

    I agree with the notion that if you really want to learn something, teach it. However, that idea depends on having a solid understanding of prerequisite knowledge. I do object to a class largely consisting of students teaching the material. They are not the experts. In my experience, they generally do a shallow job (but maybe it's just the students in the various institutions in which I've taught). It's not fair to substitute their work for what is rightfully the instructor's job.

    The problem I see with all the entertainment, interruptions, and 'multitasking' is that students seem to have trouble sticking with an extended logic train of thought very far. They seldom imagine the implications of the concepts. As soon as the material becomes complex, students often become 'bored' and check out rather than accepting the challenge of difficult mental work.

  • Creative...challenge
  • Posted by Anthony , Director, AHRC at Dartmouth College on December 10, 2009 at 11:00am EST

  • All good points. I especially recognize the problems raised by Garry, in effect, how to reawaken or act upon the creative urge, when passive entertainment is so much easier. Recently, the need to create has been manifesting in my dreams, shouting at me to do it, but fear and time management choices are holding me back.

    As to Senior Prof's comments, I would echo some of your experiences. However, the vision that I believe Josh is pursuing is one in which we accept the reality that many students have figured out ways to "cover" the content presented by faculty, but in ways that are just as shallow or, more distressingly, short-term. One alternative he proposes, is to be less concerned with coverage and to place greater value on understanding and involvement with the materials through content creation. Challenges remain however. Josh writes, "... the outcome is less important then the process." Unfortunately, too often the technical aspects of the process can overwhelm the content-oriented goals, which is what I believe is the leading cause of "shallowness" on media projects.

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