I do think that higher education research and teaching, even with a  500+ year tradition of the small class college instruction, 150+ year tradition of the German research university model and the 100+ year mission of US land grant schools, is going to change radically whether we like it or not in the next 50 years, and we should be thinking about the 50-year horizon as much as we do about the 5 year, if we think there still will be a UW as we know it. So I caution anyone approaching innovation to think about the long road as we move forward in new experiments in higher education and making sure we articulate what we value in our existing models.

I’m not sure we should change a lot of what we value (direct instruction, campus culture, research excellent, faculty governance), but we do have to face the statistics. The majority of faculty in US are no longer tenure track and the majority of students are at community colleges, the bachelor’s degree is starting to be seen as essential as a high school diploma used to be, and tuition at brick and mortar schools will rise faster than inflation regardless of where we end up in state support (consider private university tuition) because we continue to be a labor intensive industry (like healthcare).

And oh, Sputnik is over; US federal investment in science R&D is never going to be what it was in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, there has been a lot of buzz lately over massively online open courses (MOOCs), which appear to be here to stay.

Whether online education is a panacea or snake oil is yet to be settled;  it is probably some of both. But for those not following the MOOCs, it’s worth figuring out what they’re all about.

Consider how Khan Academy is revolutionizing math education. Or last year, how a former Stanford professor and a Google executive teamed up to offer a free graduate-level course on Artificial Intelligence (AI), that led to 160,000 enrollees from all over the world – AI was used to handle grading and moderate discussion forums. Students created social tools and networks to work on problems and learn material from each other. 23,000 people finished the course – 23,000 more people who now know what Bayes’ theorem and B-tree searching are!  The team has now formed a company (with venture capital and Google resources) called Udacity to offer more courses in sciences and math. Others are working with Universities to offer “badges” instead of degrees to facilitate piecemeal credentials for these courses; other schools are jumping on.

I don’t know if this is the future or just another fad. I’m not into doomsday talk or denigrating the value of the knowledge, creativity, and economic engine that we are as UW. But it’s worth asking, in this arena, what do we have to offer? Imagine if we could reach 100,000 people in one year to think about a topic of importance to you! What would you do?

But you may argue, there is value in small classes, labs, in-depth discussion, the in-person live lecture, written feedback, experts who conduct research who also teach. We serve to create knowledge and transmit this. What do we lose? The counterargument is that these are temporary roadblocks and technology may catch up. I don’t know the answer.

But I do know that taking the long road shouldn’t limit us from experimentation.

Maybe MOOCs will turn out to be nothing and we’ll stop blabbering about “disruptive technologies” and other cute buzzwords, but Silicon Valley is going nuts about higher ed (maybe they all got tired of the languishing for-profit charter schools) and if we’re not there in some form, even as critics, we will lose out.

Ankur Desai

He was a professer at the elite private university Stanford.  But Sebastian Thrun, expert in artificial intelligence, had enough of the old university ways.  In this interview, he explains why he now only wants to teach via the Web and what universities have in common with ex-girlfriends

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Thrun, you have given up your professorship at Stanford and now want change higher education with the online university Udacity . How do you explain that to your colleagues?

Thrun: Many of my colleagues would also like to teach online, but would not necessarily want to leave the university.  To be a Stanford professor is nice. But it’s like being a mountain climber: The climbing is always more fun than standing on the summit.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You are opposed to education only for the elite, opposed to expensive tuition fees and consider grades to be a flaw in the education system. Why does someone like you go to an elite university like Stanford?

Thrun: Because I too came to this realization only recently. For me it was a learning process. After all, I have long participated in this system. My course this past year has changed me rather strongly.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You mean your world lecture, in which you, together with your colleagues, have conducted your Stanford lecture on artificial intelligence online, including testing. Anyone in the world could enroll free of charge. What have you learned?

Thrun: Through the Internet Instruction project I’ve realized what incredible power this medium has. When we got 160 000 applications, we were asked by Stanford to accept no more students. 23,000 students took an exam at the end and passed.   I literally got thousands of thank you e-mails. With this one lecture I have influenced more people than ever before in my entire academic career.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you miss about the real university?

Thrun: That’s like falling in love with a new woman and being asked, what do you miss about your ex? Basically, nothing. Although the work with my graduate students at Stanford was always very good. But for me it’s not about one or the other. My goal is to reach people who cannot be reached otherwise.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have taught 20 years at universities. How should students learn today?

Thrun: Students learn best when they have to solve a problem themselves. What really works are not the traditional lectures. For most people they are too fast or difficult to understand. I myself  remember a German professor who a few years ago held an introductory lecture on artificial intelligence – that is, in my own field – and I did not understand anything!

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why has virtual learning not been able to get more traction to date?

Thrun: I’m stumped. In spite of modern media, we still use teaching methods developed 1,000 years ago. Instruction should work like a good movie. It must be so exciting that you just can’t turn it off until it’s over. I think universities are often less innovative than they would like.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are the disadvantages of online teaching?

Thrun: Musicianship involves the hands; that can be taught online only to a limited degree. In addition, direct interaction with people is missing. If they are pursuing a Ph.D. or are research active, then meeting in person is very important.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With two other robotics researchers, you have now founded the company Udacity. What can one learn from you?

Thrun: You can participate in two lecture courses. My colleague teaches programming, and by the end of seven weeks, you can create your own search engine. I show my students how to program a self-propelled car. We explain these things not in the abstract; rather, as part of the training you have to build something yourself.  That has a very unique value.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Not everything is free. How has the response been?

Thrun: We have over 80,000 students, which I consider a very viable number.  But we have also learned from our experience so far, and we now use better recording equipment and have a good system for receiving feedback.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are these online students only Americans and Europeans?

Thrun: No, those account for two-thirds, but a third also comes from emerging and developing countries.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What about people who have no access to the necessary technology?

Thrun: There are those. But in today’s traditional colleges there are also those living in the wrong country, who are too old, too young or sick, and those living in the U.S who can’t pay $ 10,000 tuition. I think it’s about giving more people access to education, even if you cannot immediately reach all people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You also work for Google. What is the influence of that company on  Udacity?

Thrun: By day I work at Google, at night I record my video podcasts for Udacity. There are three founders and a company that joined more recently for financing. Google owns none of it and has no influence.

Interview by Jonas Leppin

Translation by G. Petty

Here’s the key passage:

… Mike Huebsch says he and Gov. Scott Walker remain hopeful that the guv’s proposed split of UW-Madison from the rest of the university system will pass.

Speaking in Brookfield Wednesday at a gathering of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, he told the group it would bring a free-market approach to the university system similar to that of a corporate business. [emphasis added]

I now have two burning questions for Chancellor Biddy Martin, for our Faculty Senate,  and for other prominent and enthusiastic supporters of the public authority plan:

1. Do you have any plausible basis whatsoever for doubting Huebsch’s characterization of the public authority plan as regards the actual intentions of those who inserted it into the budget bill?
2. Do you support this vision for UW-Madison?

If you answer “no” to both questions, then the most obvious interpretation is that your endorsement of Scott Walker’s public authority plan reflected a grave lapse in judgment and due diligence on your part.

I look forward to hearing the arguments for a more generous interpretation.

-GP

The chair put up an overhead transparency itemizing all of the major components of our current annual budget.  Our challenge was to assemble enough proposed cuts in specific areas to reach our target, and we were specifically asked to do this in a way that “wouldn’t hurt students.”  The presumption apparently being that there must be 8% somewhere in our budget that has nothing to do with teaching or mentoring our undergraduate or graduate students and could be jettisoned without students ever noticing.

To put this presumption into perspective, we have already had to make a variety of painful cuts over the past ten years, including a roughly 30% reduction in our faculty size as faculty retired or left faster than new searches were authorized.    And as a consequence of the reduced faculty size, we were already routinely leaving popular elective courses untaught that had previously drawn hundreds of undergraduate enrollees each year.  And it is well-known that undergraduates in L&S are already having serious trouble finding open lower-division electives that satisfy their general education requirements, let alone finding electives that they are actually interested in.

Our TA allocation also suffered significant reductions over that time, which further limited our ability to offer courses with lab sections or with writing components that satisfied Comm B requirements for L&S majors.  It also reduced our ability to offer financial support in the form of TA positions to highly qualified new graduate students,  impacting our research and graduate education missions as well as undergraduate teaching.

Clearly, budget cuts we had already absorbed over the year were already hurting students.  And now we were being asked to find more potential cuts that would not compound the hurt?

As we perused the fairly short column of figures tabulated on the overhead slide, it was glaringly apparent that there was simply no way to achieve an 8% cut without considering faculty salaries and/or office staff salaries, TA positions,  and basic services like copy machine leasing and supplies, office telephones and voicemail.

We decided we couldn’t further reduce the faculty or TA portion without devastating our ability to teach much-needed courses while also conducting the research that, not incidentally, still brings in far more outside research dollars each year than we were being asked to cut from our departmental budget!

And we had already absorbed a reduction in our small office staff fairly recently.  Any further reductions would mean that faculty would have to start taking over some clerical tasks.  Is it cost-effective for a professor with a PhD, who makes 2-3 times as much as a secretary, and who brings in hundreds of thousands of research dollars a year, to start doing clerical work instead of research? Our answer, of course, was no.

Without going into details of our discussion, suffice it to say that the atmosphere in that meeting was funereal.   At one point, the proposal was finally floated that we could achieve a significant part of our required reductions by dispensing with the yearly budget for office telephones and voicemail.   Telephones!! Yes, it was argued, everyone had personal cell phones.  We could manage.

It is indicative of how few options we felt we had that this suggestion was not rejected out of hand.  We openly wondered how many businesses in Scott Walker’s much-vaunted private sector were contemplating the elimination of conventional landline telephones to reduce “fat” in their budgets.

At this point, it still isn’t clear what we’ll do to achieve our target budget reduction.  But dispensing with office telephones and voicemail remains one of the least unattractive possibilities.   Something that is still taken for granted at home and in the private sector has now been relegated to the status of luxury at Wisconsin’s flagship university.

This is what it has come to.  All because the ideologues who have gained influence and political power in recent years would sooner take a wrecking ball to the infrastructure that once made Wisconsin one of the most prosperous, educated, well-run, and, let’s face it, civilized states in the country than unapologetically raise the revenues needed to sustain that excellence.

The letter is long, but the message is simple:   textbook prices have been rising out of control only because we let them, and it is time to stop letting them.

Date:  18 August 2010

To:    Professor X, Instructor of ABC 1xx
Professor Y, Chair, Dept. of ______

CC:    Aaron Brower, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning
Members and associates of the Committee on Textbook Affordability

Dear Professors X and Y,

I am writing both as a parent of a UW-Madison student and as a fellow faculty member.  My reason for writing is the discovery this morning that my daughter, an entering freshman, has been assigned a textbook for ABC 1xx that costs about $190 new, roughly $150 used.  This, to my mind, is an outrageous price for any freshman textbook.  To be fair, I realize that outrageous textbook prices are the norm, not the exception, in 2010.

But unlike most students, parents and instructors who bemoan high textbook prices but don’t know what to do about them, I am fairly familiar with the inside workings of the textbook industry, and I have come to understand that $190 for a freshman textbook in a non-niche field like ____ is blatant price gouging, pure and simple, and needs to be called out and dealt with as such.  It goes on only because publishers can set the price to whatever they want, and students have no choice but to buy the books that are assigned for their courses.  Shopping around doesn’t help much, because publishers still have a worldwide monopoly on any particular title, and they control the wholesale price which drives everything else, including used prices.

My purpose in writing is to respectfully suggest that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that price gouging on textbooks is possible only if students, faculty, and university officials continue to assume, incorrectly, that high textbook costs reflect economic forces beyond our control.  They don’t.  I know this because I have a small side business as a publisher, and I know the wide latitude I have to set the retail price for my textbooks.  I choose to charge far less than the market would bear simply because I don’t wish to gouge students.  Large commercial publishing houses don’t have the same scruples.

Introductory textbooks in required large-lecture subjects like ___ and ___  are an especially lucrative industry with huge potential profit margins precisely because demand is large and rigid and normal market controls on prices are broken.  That’s why there is such a glut of glossy new textbooks (and never-ending revisions) for large courses — every publisher is fighting to get even a small but still lucrative slice of a very, very large pie by persuading professors to assign their books.

I don’t know how many students take ABC 1xx and other freshman ABC courses each semester, but I would guess that it’s a number in the many hundreds, if not more.  Multiply that number, whatever it is, by an estimated publisher profit margin of maybe $80-$100 on a $140 wholesale price, and you’ll see how publishers are fattening their bottom lines on the backs of our students (and their parents).

The only way to restore sanity to textbook prices is to push back.  I’m doing it with this message, and I have urged my daughter to push back when she is assigned expensive textbooks and to encourage her friends to do so as well.  I respectfully invite the _____ department and, for that matter, the entire University to join us all in pushing back against publisher gouging.

Here’s the most important point: it IS possible to negotiate prices significantly downward.  I had a publisher sales rep in my office a couple years ago trying to get me to adopt their textbook for my single 300-student freshman course.  I asked her whether she could arrange a 20% discount off the retail price for books sold through our bookstore.  She said yes without even hesitating, because she knew that my decision to adopt would still be worth somewhere approaching $10,000 in net profit for her company for just that semester, even at the discounted price.  Next time I will ask for 50%.

If I can do that as a single professor with just one 300-student lecture, think how much more negotiating power we would have if entire departments or, better, the University, took the same hardnosed position.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Z

PS:  Because the issues I have raised go beyond just one department’s textbook policies, I am cc’ing Vice Provost Aaron Brower and several individuals associated with a new campus committee on textbook affordability.

The survey examines “engagement” in significant facets of university life: time spent in preparing for class, extracurricular activity and for purposes here “quality of relationship with faculty” (helpfulness and availability).

My analysis of the data indicates that the only institutions to score as low as UW Madison in the “quality of relationship with faculty” category were Cal State Poly, Howard Univ and NJ Inst. of Technology. Others in the low quintile were largely state university flagships: Univ. Minnesota, Twin Cities, Ann Arbor, UF Gainesville, U Mass, Amherst. All pretty bad but not quite as low as our score.

The second issue — which deserves more analysis than I have time for –  are the scores for students response as to whether would they enroll in the school again – definitely or probably. This is where it gets interesting.

It appears from just eyeballing the data that there is a negative correlation between quality of faculty contact and their perspective that they would “definitely” enroll again (would the customer buy the product or recommend it to a friend). Not only were “we” in the highest quintile of student satisfaction but we were again joined by our large state campuses: Florida, Ann Arbor, U Va, Minnesota- Twin Cities had scores as high or higher than UW. A few exceptions to be sure, but the association of low “quality of relationship” and high satisfaction was pretty stark.

I’m sure there are additional factors in the National Survey but the data given in the NYT on line was pretty amazing if for no other reason than as an example of a spurious association.

-DA

DISCLAIMER:  The letter from L&S (and therefore this post) is intended strictly as a convenient guide to the contract changes and presumably has no binding authority.  Please refer to the actual collective bargaining agreement for authoritative information. Sifting and Winnowing is not responsible for any inaccuracies or omissions either in the original letter from L&S or in our reproduction of that letter.

Summary of Changes in the 2007-09 to TA Contract

Wages, Benefits and other Cost Items

Article X, Section 1:    Wage Adjustments

• General Wage Adjustments:
  • Year 1:      2%
  • Year 2:     1% effective Semester I; 2% effective nearest pay period to 6/7/09

Paid as lump sum (minus the amount of increased health insurance premiums owed by employees) to all bargaining unit members (except hourly PAs and Reader/Graders) in pay status on April, 2009 payroll. The amount is $623.62 Note: the amount will be reduced by the amount of

• $95 lump sum to all TAs and PAs (including hourly PAs, excluding Readers/Graders) in pay status on the April 2009 payroll. This represents the 08-09 cost to the university if we had eliminated the lowest TA level beginning Semester I of 08-09.

• This is not in the Wage Adjustments document, but has been agreed to by OSER, UW and the TAA.

• • TAs and PAs on the October, 2009 payroll will receive retroactive pay as if the new rates were in effect on July 1, 2009 for PAs (all of whom are A-basis) and on August 24, 2009 for TAs (all of whom are C-basis).  This pay is though the October payroll month. The difference in the monthly employee health insurance premiums will be deducted from the pay for that period.

• • TAs and PAs will be paid the new rates on the regular payroll cycles beginning with the November payroll month.

This table shows the anticipated pay dates for all of the wage adjustments.

Article X, Section 2:  Experience/Training Levels

• Allows K-8 teaching experience to count as experience.

• Eliminates language requiring diversity issues training to qualify for the experienced rate.  Instead requires completion of the diversity issues training in order to be reappointed for more than one semester.

• Eliminates the “Regular TA” level beginning 09-10; changes the name of the “Experienced TA” to “Standard TA.”  There are now only two levels of TA.

2008-09 Titles and Rates – to be used until the 2009-10 contract is negotiated

Article XI, Section 1:            Health Insurance

• Increases TA/PA health insurance monthly premiums for Tier 1 plans by $2 for Single and $5 for family coverage beginning January, 2009

Negotiating Note #3:            Child Care

• Increases the Employer’s 2007-09 set aside for TA/PA child care expense assistance from $150,000 to $157,500.

LANGUAGE

Article II, Section 11:            Union Orientation

• We agreed on include TAA membership card with “Membership information” already provided to new TAs and PAs.
• We added language stating that departments may agree to allow the TAA at least 15 minutes to make a presentation at orientation sessions.

Article V, Section 6:            Appointments

• We agreed on requiring open PA appointments to be posted on the web (Student Job Center) unless the position is reserved for guarantees of support or recruiting offers, reappointments or those that have to be filled within 7 days for emergency purposes.

Article V, Section 9:            Work Surroundings

• We agreed on providing an internet accessible computer with printing capability when it is determined by the employer to be necessary for performing assigned duties.

Article VI, Section 1:            Orientation and Training

• We changed EDRC to OED
• We agreed to add language that allows OED to approve alternative diversity workshops to the standards workshops.

Article VII, Section 1:                        Discrimination

• We agreed on adding language to cover gender identification and expression as a protected status.
• We agreed on adding language stating that employees should not be subjected to “discriminatory behavior that precludes, distracts or otherwise encumbers the employee from performing the duties of his or her job.”

Article VIII, Section 13:            Lactation Rooms

• We agreed on language requiring the employer to have at least three lactation rooms on campus; the employer needs to consult with the Campus Childcare Committee on the location of and specifications for such rooms.

NOTE: UW-Madison currently has 7 lactation rooms on campus.

• We agreed on minimum standards for at least three of the lactation rooms:
  • is at least 70 sq ft
  • cannot be a bathroom
  • has a curtain or door for privacy
  • has accessible electrical outlets
  • has a couch or chair
  • has a trash can
  • has a table or counter space
  • is on the same floor as a bathroom
  • has two pro-lactation posters, and
  • has a means of indicating that the room is occupied or vacant.

NOTE: UW-Madison currently has three rooms that need only the posters to meet these standards.

Article XI, Section 5:            Sick Leave Credit Bank

• Allows sick leave to be used in increments of ½ days instead of the previous one full day.  This will increase the effective amount of sick leave available.

Memo from UW to TAA re:             Catastrophic Leave

• We agreed on this memo to document options available to a TA or PA with a catastrophic illness during the semester.  It does not create any new benefits or practices.  It covers three areas of concern.

• • Impact on employee’s stipend
  • Impact on tuition remission
  • Impact on health insurance coverage

Negotiating Note #9:            PA Academic Basis Appointments

• Creates a C-basis PA appointment in addition to A-basis appointments; requested by UW.

Note:  Current PAs should not be converted to C basis until July 1, 2010 or later.  New PA appointments may be made on a C-basis immediately.

OHR         11/4/09

When it comes to both the availability and the pricing of a product, the Law of Supply and Demand works best (from the customer’s perspective) when (a) those creating the demand are also the ones paying the price, (b) when the demand is elastic — that is, when an unreasonable increase in price leads to a sharp drop in demand and thus in the supplier’s profits, and (c) the profit potential is sufficient to motivate a supplier to provide, or continue providing, an essential product or service even when the market is small.

With textbooks, the demand is created by instructors who assign the reading for a class of anywhere between 10 and 400 students. But it is the students who pay. The demand is rigid – most instructors don’t assign the textbook based on price but rather based on pedagogical suitability for their course, and students have to buy it. And for many advanced courses, there may be only one suitable textbook on the market. So that textbook, within its particular narrow niche, enjoys no less of a de facto monopoly than Microsoft enjoys in the computer world.

To illustrate my point, let’s take J.D. Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics. It has been around for 45 years (it is now in its third edition). It is one of the most widely used advanced physics textbooks ever and has undoubtedly sold many tens of thousands of copies, if not more.

The list price for Jackson is $96, and the current discounted price from Amazon is $76. Even used copies are selling for upwards of $56, and this despite an ample supply, as there are currently 75 used copies available via Amazon!

Now compare Classical Electrodynamics, with its 808 pages and current rank of around #13,000 in Amazon sales, with W.L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with its 1,264 pages and sales rank of around #15,000. Jackson was first published in 1962; Shirer in 1960. In short, comparable age, comparable sales in recent years, and Shirer has 50% more pages to boot.

The list price of Rise and Fall is $25.00; the Amazon discount price is $16.50.

How do we explain the fact that Jackson is four times as expensive as Shirer?

It’s not marketing cost. Every physics professor in the world already knows Jackson. I’m not a physics professor and even I know about it! Presumably, just about every physics professor has already made up their mind whether Jackson is the textbook of choice for their course.

Even if Jackson were still being actively marketed today (which I doubt), instructors are vastly less expensive to identify and reach than the general public. All you have to do is send them a free examination copy. If an instructor likes it and adopts it for their course, voila! You’ve got dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of guaranteed sales over the next few years.

It’s not distribution cost, which should be about the same regardless of the subject matter. And it’s not author royalties — in neither case, in fact, is it likely that the author royalties account for more than 10-20% of gross receipts. It’s not layout, design, and typesetting costs — these are one-time expenses that were probably recouped within the first year of printing.

What about paper, printing, and binding cost? Contrary to common perception, retail prices for books have almost nothing to do with their manufacturing cost. When many thousands of copies per year are being sold, the printing/binding cost of even the fanciest color textbook with accompanying CD is almost certainly well under $10 per copy. For a simpler, text-only paperback of the type frequently used in language and literature courses, the manufacturing cost is probably closer to $2 per copy. Hardcover binding is perhaps a dollar more — that’s right, a dollar!

Most likely, there are two factors at work here: (a) perceived value — a hardcover book with lots of complicated equations looks more expensive than a softcover with just text and a few photos; and (b) the fact that Jackson is usually purchased by students who have no choice.

My point is this: the prices for many, if not most, textbooks are artificially inflated relative to other books, sometimes by ridiculous amounts. Publishers charge a lot simply because they can. Most instructors either don’t consider price when assigning a textbook or else don’t feel they have acceptable lower-cost alternatives to choose from.

In order to control textbook costs, which are now a major factor in the rising cost of a college education, the academic community needs to figure out the following:

1) How to give instructors a reasonable incentive to factor cost into their textbook decisions without penalizing them for sound pedagogical choices; and

2) How to effectively exert pressure on publishers to hold down prices despite the shortcircuiting of traditional market forces.

I don’t claim to have the solution. But awareness of the problem may be an important first step.

It is worth mentioning in passing, however, that instructors may have more leverage with publishers than they realize. One publisher sales rep once worked hard to persuade me to adopt a popular $60 textbook for a freshman course with a projected enrollment of 350. I said I would consider it if she would make it available through the University Bookstore at 20% off the retail price. To my surprise, she agreed! (To her surprise, I still didn’t adopt the book.)

Incidentally, an analogous distortion of market forces is at work with library journal subscriptions, whose cost has far outstripped inflation in recent decades. But that is a topic is for another day.

-G