I’m trying that thing again where I post a few Downes-style¹ takes on random education articles I come across to Tumblr. This will likely be followed by that thing where I stop posting Downes-style takes on random articles. But the sad twitter-centric state of the artist formerly know as the edublogosphere has compelled me to try once again. I really shudder to think what would happen to the space if Downes stopped the OLDaily project, especially now that people have fallen out of Google Readerdom.

For those unfamiliar with linklogs, click on the title to read the original article, and realize I write the summary in the space of about three to five minutes, so don’t expect the Critique of Pure Reason.

Anyway, go check it out. Subscribe to the RSS. And if you find it useful, let me know, it might help me figure out whether to slog through the dip.

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¹Yes, Downes-style. Quality and consistency, I don’t kid myself.

I’m re-reading my Course Signals post, and realizing how difficult it is to follow the numbers. So here’s an example that might make it clearer.

From this desk here, without a stitch of research, I can show that people who have had more car accidents live, on average, longer then people that have had very few car accidents.

Why? Because each year you live you have a chance of racking up another car accident. In general, the older you live, the more car accidents you are likely to have had.

If you want to know whether people who have more accidents are more likely to live longer because of the car accidents, you have to do something like take 40 year-olds and compare the number of 40 year-olds that make it to 41 in your high and low accident groups (simple check), or use any one of a number of more sophisticated methods to filter out the age-car accident relation.

The Purdue example is somewhat more contained, because the event of taking a Course Signals class or set of classes happens once per semester.  But what I am asking is whether

1. the number of classes a student took is controlled, for, and more importantly,
2. whether first to second year retention is calculated as
   1.  the number of students that started year two / the number of students who started year one (our car accident problem), or
   2.  the number of students who started year two / the number of students who finished year one (our better measure in this case).

I think it is the “car accident problem” statistic that is being quoted in the press. If it is, then it’s possible the causality is reversed: students are taking more Course Signals courses because they persist, rather than persisting because they are taking more Signals courses.

I see that there’s a new Course Signals press release out that claims Course Signals boosts graduation rate 21%. Or, more exactly, it claims taking *two* classes using Course Signals boosts graduation rates by 21%.

Why does it claim that? Well, I haven’t looked at the new data, but I did look at it last year, and assuming the trends didn’t change it’s because taking *one* CS course correlates with a *lower* retention rate than the non-CS population.

(Note that Purdue has since moved this study off their site). UPDATE: Found a version of this study, moved here.

The press release then contains this maddening quote:

“For some reason, two courses is the magic number. Taking just one course with Course Signals is beneficial for students, but we’ve seen significant improvement when students are enrolled in at least two courses using the system,” Pistilli says.

“We need to continue to do more research on why this is significant,” Pistilli continues. “We think it is because if a student gets feedback from two different instructors, they can make better links between their performance and their behaviors. For example, a student may be taking a course in biology and and another in communications, which are very different courses, but if they get the same feedback in both courses about study habits and needing to spend more time on task – and they hear suggestions on how to improve from two different professors – they appear to make the change. What’s notable is that this improvement stays with them in their other courses and for the rest of their academic careers.”

Ok, that’s a great theory about the “magic number”. But I actually have another one.

Only a portion of Purdue’s classes are Course Signals classes, so the chance any course a freshman takes is a Course Signals course can be expressed as a percentage, say 25%. In an overly dramatic simplification of this model, a freshman who takes four classes the first semester and drops out has a has about a 16% chance of having taken two Course Signals courses (as always, beware my math here, but I think I’m right). Meanwhile they have a 74% chance of having taken 1 or fewer, and a 42% chance of having taken exactly one.

What about about a student who does *not* drop out first semester, and takes a full load of five courses each semester? Well, the chance of that student having two or more Course Signals courses is 75%. That’s right — just by taking a full load of classes and not dropping out first semester you’re likely to be tagged as a CS 2+ student.

In other words, each class you take is like an additional coin flip. A lot of what Course Signals “analysis” is measuring is how many classes students are taking.

Are there predictions this model makes that we can test? Absolutely. As we saw in the above example, at a 25% CS adoption rate, the median dropout has a 42% chance of having taken exactly one CS course. So it’s quite normal for a dropout to have had a CS course. But early on in the program the adoption rate would have much lower. What are the odds of a first semester dropout having a CS course in those early pilots? For the sake of argument let’s say adoption at that point was 5%. In that case, the chance our 4-course semester drop out would have exactly one CS course drops from 42% to 17%. In other words, as adoption grows having had one course in CS will cease to be a useful predictor of first to second-year persistence.

Is that what we see? Assuming adoption grew between 2007 and 2009, that’s *exactly* what we see. Here’s the early pilot days of Course Signals:

As you can see, in what were likely the lower adoption days taking one Course Signals course is a huge predictor of persistence. The one year retention rate is 97% for the one-CS course student, compared to just 83% for the no-CS student. As adoption expands, changing the median experience of the drop out, that difference disappears, just like the model predicts:

Two years later, that retention effect has disappeared entirely, with the same percentage of one-CS students dropping out as non-CS students. Why? Without access to dropout data, I can’t say for sure. But I submit a large part of the shift of one-CS as predictor of retention to one-CS as non-predictor is that having one-CS class is now the average experience of both low course-load students and first semester dropouts. The effect disappears because the confounding variable is no longer correlated with the dependent variable.

So, do I believe that Course Signals works? Maybe, it’s possible. There are other measures with grades and such that look a bit more promising. But the problem is that until they control for this issue, the percentage increases they cite might as well be random numbers. It would be trivially easy to account for these things — for example, by removing first semester dropouts from the equation, and only looking at students under full course load. When I looked at the (now removed) 2012 report, I saw nothing to indicate they had done these things. Now, in 2013, I still see nothing to indicate they have taken these factors into account.

I could be wrong. I’m a Literature and Linguistics M.A. who works in educational technology, not a statistician. But if I am right, this is sloppy, sloppy work.

Bryan Alexander has a good post up on the idea of peak higher ed, a trend/theory that encompasses peak demographics, declining public support, ballooning debt, and the increasingly conventional public opinion that college is no longer as sure a route to a good job.

I’d point out that a lot of what Bryan looks at can be seen as “Peak United States” as much as Peak H.E. The phrase that always pops to mind when looking at such things is Paul Krugman’s 1990s book title “The Age of Diminished Expectations.” For all of the light and heat generated in the current edtech buzz, what lies beneath it all is more a resignation than a positive vision of the future. Just as we’ve accepted that we can do nothing to reduce unemployment, or avert global warming, the grand rhetorical play of current edtech is that we can’t really do more or better, but we can make doing it inexpensively suck less.  That’s just the price of entry into public discourse in 2013; you have to start by embracing the myth that there’s no free lunch, that anything done to improve one sector comes at a cost to another. Even the idea that MOOCs could lead to better learning outcomes is only made plausible to the public when paired with the Greek drama of higher education’s implosion. To make progress believable you must invoke suffering.

So we suffer more from a limiting perspective than real constraints. And reflecting that, when I look at the figures that Bryan cites, I see in them more malaise than fundamentals.

• Those skyrocketing tuitions? Due in part to the fact the economics of going to college have never been stronger. Colleges charge a lot because they can charge a lot, because investment in a college degree outperforms the stock market 3-to-1.
• Declining demographics? They could (in a rational world) be seen as an opportunity to spend more resources per capita on students.
• The lack of jobs for recent graduates? It actually decreases the opportunity cost of education for them, making further post-secondary study more palatable. (Heck, that’s why I went to grad school in 1994).
• Adjunctification? If recent research is to be believed, adjunctification might not be wholly bad, as professionals that primarily teach for a living become better teachers (yes, insert 1000 caveats on ed research here). Given that teachers cost less than researchers, this is hardly a bad thing.
• The increasing “irrelevance” of a degree in the marketplace is also the result of huge gains in degree attainment. As we educate more people we’re going to find that a degree makes you stand out from the crowd less. Assuming the degree makes you a better worker (and everything seems to indicate it does), who cares? Are we supposed to be sad about the decline of white male privilege? Or can we celebrate that more students than ever before are graduating college? Does anyone despair that a high school degree doesn’t give them a leg up anymore? (Besides Richard Vedder, of course…).

As a thought experiment, imagine that we followed the advice of many and made community college free for all, apart from some small fees to build commitment. Imagine that we saw it as as much an educational right as high school. What do these indicators of decline look like then?

• As mentioned above, declining demographics are good — it costs us less, which means we can spend more per capita on students.
• Debt disappears, and in a surprising “free lunch” scenario, it costs less to run the community colleges than we spent on our current byzantine system of federal higher education funding.
• Questions of whether “College is worth it”, at the community college level become almost as senseless as asking whether high school is worth it — if you aren’t doing anything else, and it gets you closer to your career goals, yes it’s worth it.  (And if it’s not, it’s not — do something else!)
• Adjunctification becomes just the messy lead-in to the professionalization of the discipline of teaching in higher education.  Adjuncts become full-time employees, and education costs less.

So maybe we are seeing peak higher ed. But maybe we’re also witnessing a transitional state. Maybe the problem is that we see “higher ed” as higher. Maybe the end of higher ed is the expansion of lower ed or the evolution of lifelong ed.

Or maybe something else is happening entirely. Matt Reed, who I respect quite a bit, sees the free community college idea as a trap. Sherman Dorn embraces a middle ground. (And frankly, I believe in the long run the real question will be about how to divvy up the GDP produced by our robot overlords, but that’s another post).

The point is not that this solution is *the* solution. Rather, it’s how different the fundamentals look if you assume universal education is an expectation we shouldn’t diminish. The same markers that spell decline point a path to ubiquity, if we want it. Do we?

Tanya Joosten was asking today about password managers, and it being 4:30 p.m. it seemed as good a time as ever to talk about password mental algorithms, and how they can make your life easier. Here’s how they work (keep in mind this is not *my* algorithm, just an example).

First pick a good root password. You’re just going to have to remember one root, so you can afford to make it good.

4tYPoG!U

Now come up with your algorithm. It should be based on some system you know with enough of a twist to obfuscate it. What the system is will depend on what you know — the periodic table, release dates of Beatles records, the stops on the Boston Red Line.

Here’s an example — take the first three letters of the domain name, express them as the NATO phonetic alphabet, and intersperse the second letter of each of those words in slots 1,3, and 5 of the password. E.g.

Google = Golf Oscar Oscar = oss = o4stYsPoG!U

Outlook = Oscar Uniform Tango = sna = s4ntYaPoG!U

This sounds incredibly hard, but in reality since you type in passwords a lot you practice the system a lot and it becomes second nature.

You want to see the Beatles example? Sure. Google has six letters, the sixth Beatles album was Rubber Soul, so maybe:

R4utbYPoG!U

That system will give you the same password for Outlook and Twitter, but you’ll live.

Once you know the system, it’s easy to see what letters have been replaced. But a person that learns one of your passwords can’t possibly intuit the other passwords without the system. If you want to change your passwords after six or twelve months, then alter the system slightly — now it will be the third letter of the word, or slots 3,4,6. Whatever.

Again, it sounds crazy complex, but it is so much more simple than remembering 40 separate passwords, and much less nerve-wracking than putting all your passwords into a piece of software that can become a single point of failure.

Via Audrey Watters, there’s a great article out today about how startup culture, with its preference for “failing fast” instead of doing research, is killing innovation. It’s worse than that, though, in MOOC world, where startup culture is wasting the time and good intentions of millions.

Here’s an example of an actual question that my boss found in a MOOC she was taking:

This diagram illustrates the important ideas behind the Malthusian model of population. The green curve represents the total population, and the beige line represents the total amount of food available.

If the Malthusian theory is accurate, why do the curves in the figure not follow the paths shown?

1. All of the other choices are correct
2. After the point of intersection, the curved line should not exceed the straight line.
3. The curved path will actually become a constant
4. The flat path will increase exponentially
5. Before the point of intersection, the curved line actually matches the straight line

No matter what your friends may tell you, a well-constructed multiple choice question can be a wonderful learning opportunity. That’s not the case here. This question is a hot mess. The question, as phrased, asks why the curves on the graph do not follow the paths of the curves on the graph.

So, if you’re like most people, you sit and parse this out. I’m a former Literature and Linguistics major who eats complex constructions for breakfast, but it took me two minutes just to parse out what the question means. None of that effort, by the way, increased my knowledge of either the English language or Malthusian economics. After parsing it, it takes another minute or two to walk through the options, which are oddly structured.

There are dozens of ways in which this question is wrong.

• Its “All of the other choices are correct” option is bad.. Experts in multiple choice testing will tell you to avoid this option at all costs, as it causes processing issues and tends to reduce the validity of the test.
• Its answers should be parallel in structure.  They’re not.
• It includes incomprehensible and meaningless distractors to get the answer count up to five, when best practice in these constructions suggests three plausible distractors is a better route than putting nonsense up.
• It references “curves”, but most students will only see one curve and one straight line – seeing these both as curves requires a vocabulary the student doesn’t necessarily have.
• Its question is not comprehensible without the answers. The answer any intelligent person would formulate reading just the question “Why do the curves not follow the paths shown?” is “Because we run out of food.” But that is not actually the question the answers answer.

The larger issue here is it is unclear what this question actually tests. I suppose it is supposed to see if students understand the fundamental insight of Malthus, but if it is, it feels a bit sloppy. It looks like an application question, but it really is just a confusingly worded recall question.

I didn’t come up with these critiques on my own. A group of people at Brigham Young University has spent decades researching how to create effective multiple choice questions. They’ve boiled their research down to a four page checklist you can find here.

You can use that to reformulate the question this way:

This diagram illustrates projected trends in population and food production. The green curve represents projected total population, and the beige line represents projected food production.

Malthusian theory says this graph is an incorrect prediction of the future. If Malthusian theory is accurate, what will actually happen at point T?

1. The population line will change, staying under the food line.
2. The food production line will change, bending upward to keep up with population.
3. Both lines will change, the food production line bending up, and the population line bending down.

I’m not sure my version completely captures the objective or disciplinary understanding here (I’m not an economist).  But that’s a five minute rewrite based on the BYU checklist that will increase the question’s effectiveness both as a learning tool and an assessment.

Now Coursera or others might tell you the beauty of Big Data is that questions like these will be pegged by algorithms and improved over time. This is part of being proud of “failing fast”.

But let’s do the math on this. Say this course has 10,000 students that spent four minutes each on a question that has no validity as an assessment and teaches them nothing but how to read absolutely tortured English. That’s 667 total student-hours wasted on a question because the producers of this course couldn’t be bothered to do a five minute rewrite. That’s 667 hours that students who want desperately to learn are spending not learning. It’s 667 hours they could be spending with another product, or with their family, or volunteering with their community. Or just sitting out on the back patio enjoying the weather.

Multiply that by the number of questions like this in a typical MOOC product. Then take that number and multiply it by the number of MOOCs. You start to see what “failing fast” and “solving problems through Big Data” means in human cost. It’s about cavalierly taking millions of hours away from customers because someone (either Coursera or the university partner) can’t be bothered to pay for an instructional designer.

I get why I see questions like this in local university classes. We don’t have the scale to put an instructional designer in every class. But if the large-scale production of course materials is supposed to solve anything, it’s exactly this problem. The whole point of producing course materials at scale is that we can finally afford to do this right, and tap into the research and professional knowledge that can make these things better. “Fail fast”, when used as an excuse for shoddy work, makes a mockery of the benefits of scale, and treats student time as worthless. And all the Big Data in the world is not going to make that better.