"What I would have had to do to access original sources 15 years ago!" Prof. Jeff McClurken, associate professor and head of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington, told Ars. "Now I can get the entire text of Lewis and Clark's journals online, or most books from the nineteenth century or an archive of tweets related to the Arab Spring."
"Education is in the process of changing," agreed Jonathan Rees, professor of History at Colorado State University at Pueblo. "Technology has given us opportunities the people who taught me didn't have."
Technology has made the job of the professor, both teaching and research, easier and more exciting. At the same time, it has introduced stresses and worries that were not present before.
"As an historian," said McClurken, "I see it as a shift from scarcity to abundance, in information. It is one of the most transformative things I've seen in teaching and research, and we're only beginning to address what that means for academics."
The need for information fluency
The immediate access that students have to millions of results for every question or keyword has created a real challenge for teaching. Before the advent of search engines, the academy created a self-defining class of legitimate sources. They were published. To wildly overstate it, if it was published, you considered it. If it wasn't, you didn't.
McClurken believes it is more a matter of quantity than quality. Back in the days of more paper than not, you still had to evaluate research papers, books, and other resources in terms of potential biases: how the material fit in with that of the larger discipline and authorial reputation. What professors must now teach students is an "amped up version of what we were doing before."
Sifting the wheat from the chaff has become more important as the sources have proliferated.
"Quantity has a quality all its own," as the murderous dictator quipped.
This issue is not merely a pedagogical one. It can change the way the rest of us see things; it can and will produce "common wisdom." That is because access to information on a topic deforms, on a structural level, the investigation of that topic.
"We have to be careful about the digitization of ‘everything,’" McClurken warned. "There is a myth that everything has been digitized. Things online are going to shape research going forward. If one archive is online and another is not, odds are most of the people working in that subject will favor the one online."
How to survive a robot uprising
"As an historian, and a sometime historian of technology, I know we sometimes stink at reading the future," said McClurken. "But some trends are noticeable."
One of the trends that professors seem concerned about is online courses, in specific, MOOCs, or "massive open online courses." Some are offered by universities directly, and others are offered by companies.
The ideal behind these courses, according to Audrey Watters of Hack Education, is "the promise of scaling a university education to everyone… well everyone with an Internet connection, that is. And, um, everyone who’s ready for a fairly advanced computer science course."
"These courses replicate the worst part of the lecture bottle," said McClurken. And schools' diminishing budgets create "the pressure of money to go in this direction."
Education is getting squeezed as much as, if not more than, any other sector, and this has produced what Rees called "governance issues" in an "age of austerity."
The administration of a university is charged with making hard decisions with too little money. Rees' fear is that they may choose the ostensibly less demanding and more economical route of automated education. "What’s the prerogative of the professor in the classroom and what is the administration's? These clash more often than most people are willing to admit."
"The ability to follow-up directly" is lost in online education, said Rees. "It is easier to ask a question than type it. Also, when you look in someone's eyes, you can tell, 'Oh, you really get this.'" He fears that will be lost, should online education become dominant.
But Andrew Ng doesn't believe that the academy is facing an either/or choice. Ng, associate professor of Computer Science and director of Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University, is the co-founder of MMOC company, Coursera.
Ng believes a "flipped classroom" frees up the professor to engage in the very direct follow-up and face-to-face dialogue Rees worries about losing. A flipped classroom is one in which the lecture portion of the course is provided online and class time is used to facilitate discussion and interaction. Ng's goal with Coursera is to "make professors even better at teaching and teaching more fun."
He does not believe online coursework will replace professors, but augment them. In a flipped university, it will make professors freer and more engaged. Those who could otherwise never afford to attend a high-end university, or perhaps any university at all, can use companies like Coursera to garner an education they would otherwise have to do without.
"We can see a place like Princeton," one of Coursera's educational partners, "not teaching thousands of students but teaching millions of students."
But the core technology question for Rees remains simple. Can I control it?
"What happens if the tech doesn’t work?" he asked. "We had a nine-day all-tech black-out during finals of last year. The servers went down and we found out we had no backup," something that happened to two other Colorado universities in the last two years, though not to this degree. "Some professors were devastated. All of their materials were on Blackboard, all their email was via the university domain. What happens if your tech fails and you don’t remember what came before?"
The case for relevancy
"Tech is in the process of transforming education," said Ng, "and there is a change coming—whether we like it or not." Most professors don't seem to dislike the reality of that change.
Risks notwithstanding, technology has given the professorial class a great "opportunity for creative works," McClurken said, "new ways of approaching and analyzing and presenting the results. If we can continue with a sense of scholarly rigor but with a sense of openness as well, that would be ideal."
Technology, directed by those on the front line of education and research, can help us create what Rees called a "much more varied form of education."
Still, those professors must make a bid for relevancy. Opening the university outward, while still protecting the ability of students and professors to make mistakes and learn from them, a route McClurken counsels, might do this.
"We can and should challenge the notion of the university as an isolated place," he said, "by reaching out and sharing the life of the mind."