by Laurie Pickard | Oct 31, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
My most disappointing course this semester was International Organizations Management. I chose the course because I work in this field and was curious what the instructors would present. The course was taught by a group of professors from the University of Geneva, all of whom are on the faculty of that university’s international MBA program. As I’ve mentioned previously, most of the jobs in international development, and I would imagine in international organizations more generally, are management jobs. However, our training is mostly theoretical, so one must learn the practical skills of management while on the job. I was hoping that this class would cover some of these skills, especially since the recommended background for the course was “Graduate students of international relations/business management/international law and/or professionals with a few years of relevant work experience.”
I was sorely disappointed – yet another class longer on theory than practice.
I was hoping for best practices related to the work that I do, for example:
- Managing a project budget
- Conducting and participating in meetings
- Creating a work plan and project timeline
- Crafting a monitoring and evaluation plan, including setting targets and choosing indicators
- How to design a public private partnership (the course did touch on this, but didn’t get into specifics)
Alas, what I got instead was more an overview and history of the UN system than any practical tools for operating in the international arena (in which, incidentally, the UN is only one player, and not necessarily the most important player at that!).
Interestingly, the one module of the course that I really enjoyed was the one on marketing, not a topic in which I had any prior interest. What I liked about the module was that it spoke about particular techniques for making a marketing plan, including specific questions that an organization needs to answer in order to make a strong plan. The course also made me realize that I have had the wrong understanding of marketing, probably because most international organizations approach marketing as though it were of secondary importance – an afterthought.
The following graphic shows the place of marketing in most international organizations.
Marketing falls below communications, which itself is a third-tier category. Contrast that with the position of marketing in the private sector.
In a private sector company, marketing is directly under the CEO and is responsible not just for PR and promotion but is integrally involved with crafting the overall strategy for the company and in building its identity.
Even though I didn’t learn much in International Organizations Management that I can apply on the job, I did benefit from the course in that it piqued my interest in marketing - one of the topics for next semester. So in the end, I’m glad I stuck it out.
by Laurie Pickard | Oct 24, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
Operations Management is one of those classes that causes you to see your whole world differently. The class is more conceptual than mathematical – though there is some math involved – and we’ve covered such concepts as The 4 Dimensions of Performance, The Bottleneck in a Production Line, Inventory Turns, Throughput, and Capacity. Now I’m looking at every multi-step process in my life with new eyes. I even found The Seven Sources of Waste – and hence the opportunities for improved efficiency – in the Indian vegetable curry and garlic naan I made for dinner yesterday evening.
- Overproduction. There are only two of us, but my naan recipe produced 12 fluffy pieces of bread.
- Transportation. The spice packet I used to flavor my curry was produced in India. I purchased it in St. Louis, MO and packed it in my shipment to Rwanda, where my husband and I are stationed. Talk about transportation! If only I could find Indian spice packets locally.
- Re-work. My inexperienced hands took multiple attempts to form round naan. In the end, they were still uneven – but delicious.
- Over-processing. I budgeted too much time for the curry, and too little for the bread, so the curry ended up cooking longer than it needed to. No effect on the taste, but a small amount of wasted electricity.
- Unnecessary motion. Why are cutting boards always too small? Seems like I’m constantly going back and forth between the cutting board and the pot on the stove.
- Inventory. All those chopped veggies ready to go into the pot. In Operations Management, “inventory” is the item that is going through the process – in this case vegetables going through a process of becoming curry.
- Waiting– for the web page with the recipe to load. Could Rwanda’s internet be any slower?
by Laurie Pickard | Oct 17, 2013 | Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
Not everybody is happy about MOOCs. It remains to be seen how exactly online courses will change higher education overall, but many people - including the author of a recent Wall Street Journal article - have predicted that smaller universities will start using video lectures from high profile professors as a supplement to or in lieu of to their own teaching staff - and some people, especially professors, are pretty upset about it. I recently came across an article on Slate.com decrying this potential development as being disastrous for both students and professors. As the author, himself a university professor, says:
“How do you teach tens of thousands of people anything at once? You don’t. What you can do over the Internet this way is deliver information, but that’s not education. Education, as any real teacher will tell you, involves more than just transmitting facts. “
Of course education is more than just transmitting facts, but learning how to use information must be an active process, one in which the teacher can guide the students, but for which students must ultimately be responsible. It doesn’t matter how many people you’re trying to teach - you’re never teaching everyone at once because everyone ultimately has to teach themselves. It isn’t that I don’t value good teaching, but I am of the opinion that learning is never passive. You can never walk into the classroom and expect the teacher to do all of the work, whether the class has 5 students or 500.
This has gotten me thinking: how exactly do we learn? Perhaps as a result of the influence of my Operations Management course, I decided to break down my own experience of learning into various components, so as to assess how well each of these can be addressed in an online platform. Here is what I came up with:
Learning activities that can easily be done alone in front of a computer
- Listening to a professor lecture. This is the hallmark of an online course, and it can certainly be done solo, in front of a computer screen.
- Reading. Also easily done outside of the traditional class format.
- Practice problems and case studies. My “hard skills” classes - Corporate Finance, Accounting, and Operations Management - all make use of practice problems and case studies. I tend to spend just as much time with the problems as with the lectures, and this is where I really start to use what I’ve learned.
- Processing new material through writing. For me, writing is one of the most powerful ways to feel ownership of something I have learned. If I can integrate new knowledge with what I already know through writing, then I really own it. Hence, this blog.
Learning activities that are more difficult to do in an online course but are still possible
- Processing course material with other students. Virtual discussion forums are definitely much more awkward than classroom discussion, but I still see some value in them. If there were a way to form small study groups - no more than 4 people - then they would really be useful.
- Processing course material with the professor. Some professors host “virtual office hours.” Not the same as regular office hours, but this format still does provide a way for students to ask questions that weren’t answered in the lectures
Learning activities that are impossible outside of the classroom
- Answering questions posed by the professor. I am a big believer in the Socratic method, in which a teacher asks questions of a student in order to make him or her think. This requires a face-to-face interaction that can’t really happen in an online course. However, it doesn’t happen easily in a large lecture course either.
- Getting individualized professor feedback. In a class of 120,000 there is no way a professor can even begin to give individualized feedback for the work students do. This to me is the biggest drawback to online courses, mostly because professor feedback is highly motivating, whether it comes in the form of comments on an essay, encouragement to keep grappling with the material, or a reaction to a student’s comments in class.
My conclusion: although online learning is not a perfect substitute for classroom learning, it is always up to the student to do the heavy lifting, and a highly motivated student can find most of what he or she needs, even in an online course.
by Laurie Pickard | Oct 15, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, MOOC MBA Design
I recently finished my first Coursera course and received a Statement of Accomplishment. The Statement of Accomplishment is Coursera’s answer to my question in a previous post. For some of my courses students are invited to pay for a “Verified Statement of Accomplishment” by joining a “signature track” for the course. The coursework is the same, but only the paying students get the verified statement at the end. I respect Coursera’s efforts at bringing legitimacy to free coursework, but I don’t place a lot of value on the Statement of Accomplishment, primarily because the level of difficulty is highly variable from course to course. The class for which I received my first Statement of Accomplishment was interesting, but incredibly easy. I listened to the lectures each week, but I could have answered each week’s five-question quiz correctly without having done so. In contrast, last week I spent a couple of hours on the homework for my Intro to Operations Management course and had to re-watch a couple of the video lectures.
Of course, some of my college classes were pretty easy too. I once took a class called “Geology of the National Parks,” which I and the entire football team were using for our science requirement. I also got credit for an elective swimming class. But my overall degree program is what ended up counting - no employer has ever asked to see the titles (or my grades, for that matter) of individual courses.
The Statement of Accomplishment is a good start, but I would like to see Coursera (and others) offer something closer to a degree - a Statement of Accomplishment that covers multiple courses and recognizes the totality of study. If such a thing were available I might even be willing to spend a few bucks to get one.
by Laurie Pickard | Oct 9, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
My Intro to Accounting professor recently posted some demographic information from the course pre-enrollment survey. I find this data very interesting, so I’m sharing the highlights here.
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Students enrolled:
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127,569
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Active students:
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91,865
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Number of students submitting homework:
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28,951
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Total discussion forum posts:
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5,694
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Number of students posting:
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2,876
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First, check out the number of students enrolled. Wow! Over 120,000 students. This course is really putting the MASSIVE into Massive Online Open Course. And of those, almost 92,000 are active – meaning that they are participating in the course in some form. Those roughly 29,000 submitting the homework are the ones I consider to be taking the course seriously – as previously mentioned, most people who sign up for MOOCs don’t finish them, or don’t participate fully.
Notice how many students are posting on the discussion boards. Around 3,000, with roughly two posts per person. My main frustration with online courses so far is how overwhelming the discussion boards are. I registered for emails from the International Study Group board, and my inbox was flooded. In this class, only a small fraction of the students are participating in the discussions, and it’s still totally swamped with comments.
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Male:
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54%
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First MOOC:
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53%
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Roughly evenly divided male/female. And about half having previously enrolled in a MOOC.
Ages of students:
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21 and under:
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7%
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22 – 30:
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39%
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31 – 40:
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27%
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41 – 50:
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16%
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51 – 60:
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9%
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61 and over:
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4% (including 8 students over 90!)
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I’m not sure I believe that there are 8 students over age 90 – that seems like a joke to me – but hey, it’s possible. Besides those 90-year-olds, it’s no surprise that the people taking these courses are generally post-college age. Since this method of education doesn’t have the same legitimacy as traditional university studies (yet), it makes sense that most people in the college age bracket who want to take college classes would be doing it at a regular college. The table below paints a similar picture.
Highest level of education
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High school or below:
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6%
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College up to Bachelors’ Degree:
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13%
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Bachelors’ Degree:
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44%
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Masters’ or Professional Degree:
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35%
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PhD:
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3%
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I wonder if these numbers reflect the type of course; since accounting has such obvious real-world applications, it may be that more people who have already gone to college or graduate school are interested in picking up these skills, versus – I don’t know – Intro to English Literature.
Now here’s where it really gets interesting.
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Number of Countries Represented:
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188
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Holy smokes! There are only about 190 countries in the world! (Plus or minus a few depending on how you count.) That means that almost every country in the world has a representative in this class. I wonder if there are others besides me who are taking the course from Rwanda.
Top Ten Countries
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United States:
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38%
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India:
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8%
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Canada:
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4%
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Philippines:
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2%
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Spain :
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2%
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Australia:
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2%
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Russia:
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2%
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United Kingdom:
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2%
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Brazil:
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2%
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China:
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2%
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Yes, the plurality of students in the class are from the US, but it isn’t a majority. These stats on the international composition of the class highlight for me how useful MOOCs can be for students who don’t have access to an American university education.
