MOOCS and SMOCs and moldy Socks – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about Teaching and Learning

What a nice break from this cold, cold winter to head south to San Antonio, Texas for a conference that Chairs of Psychology Departments throw to keep each other posted on what is going on in the field.  And one of the things that is going on is the change in the teaching that we are doing.  We are teaching more and more in online classrooms.  This was, at first, not as big a threat to teaching as we normally do it as we feared – in part because the limits on class size have been about the same as for teaching in the classroom, so the biggest expense in delivering material continues to be the faculty members.  OK, we don’t have to heat the classroom and turn on the lights, but the parameters were about the same.  Then along came Massive Open Online Classrooms – or MOOCs.  These involve master teachers being filmed doing what they do best – teaching – and then posting their classes online for all to participate free of charge.  The hitch has been that there is no college credit granted because there is no way to monitor if the particular person who signed up for the course is in the chair – or taking the exam – so it could be anyone.  So lots of people sign up, but by the end of the class, very few are participating; still no real threat.  But at the conference, in addition to the Riverwalk, I saw the future of a certain kind of teaching and it is scary.

James Pennebaker, a very smart social psychologist who is simultaneously a bit of a geek – he reminds me of a classic engineer type – and very funny, has teamed up with Sam Gosling, another social psychologist, who is a little looser – not quite zany, but with a touch of maybe an Australian accent he nicely complements Pennebaker’s drier, Midwestern style.  They are working on a new concept, Synchronous Massive Online Classes (SMOCs).  The idea here is that students take these classes at the same time, like a traditional class.  They log on with their computers and their “presence” is recorded as they use a unique password.  The classes are streamed live and currently 1,000 to 1,500 students take the class simultaneously all over campus, but the intent is to have students taking the class simultaneously all over the world.  Students are registered in an actual class and receive a grade, and, the data suggests, they learn better – not just in the course, but in subsequent courses.  How is this possible?

At first Pennebaker and Gosling teamed up to co-teach a class in a typical classroom with 100 or so students and a number of cameras and streamed the class on campus.  But then they decided that it made more sense, since most of the students were using laptops to participate, to create something more like a TV show, and they did that in the TV studio, producing a show modelled on The Daly Show, with regular features like interviewing the expert and Psychology in the News along with lots of demonstrations that are eye catching and entertaining.  You can see a promo for their class by clicking here. They don’t have a text book for the class, but instead have a medley of materials – from YouTube videos to current articles in psychology journals to current news media links online that students are encouraged to access.  As engaging as this style is (some students are picked at random to be in-studio participants for each class, and the out of class materials are varied and pitched to appeal to the students), it is not the format of the class itself that seems to have the impact on learning.  Instead, this seems most tied to the testing of the students.

Instead of having a traditional midterm or two with a final at the end, students are tested at the beginning of each class over the material that was presented for the previous class and the online materials that supported it.  They are given immediate feedback about how they did and they are retested later in the semester on items that they fail.  The items are mixed and matched so that no two students have the same items and Pennebaker and Gosling are convinced that cheating is all but impossible the way the system is currently constructed.  This continuous testing, they maintain, teaches the students how to learn and they have some pretty impressive data to support it.

At the beginning of the class, they compare first generation students (students whose parents did not go to college) with those whose parents attended college and they find something pretty typical.  The first generation students do not do as well.  By the end of the class, the difference between the two groups is negligible.  What happens in between?  Well, when students don’t do well on the first three or four exams, they email the instructors and say, “Why am I not doing so well?”  The instructors refer them to a video that demonstrates how to move from memorizing material (which is the dominant study strategy of people who do not do so well) to a more conceptually based approach to studying the material, so that the students are prepared to take tests that include items that are more applied and that require conceptual thinking.  Students are then able to practice this multiple times across the course of the semester until they get good at it – as opposed to the traditional testing approach where they only get a couple of shots at being examined, never try a new approach, and simply go on to the next class trying to study harder – to memorize more – without learning how to study smarter.

Because they have so many students, Pennebaker and Gosling have tons of data.  They can show a very clear cut relationship between the number of times that students click on the recommended links and the grades they receive.  They can show the improvement in the scores of the first generation students across the course of the semester.  And they can get together with the registrar and look at the performance of students who look like the students who take their class in subsequent classes and show that their students perform better in these later classes than those who look like them but did not take their class.  The students in Pennebaker and Gosling’s class have learned how to study – have learned how to take tests – and may even have learned something about how to think – something that we claim is at the heart of what we are trying to teach.   They may have learned not just the content of a course, but something about the process of thinking itself.

Now, is this course the be all and end all?  Of course not.  Students still need to learn how to speak, how to form their own ideas and how to write.  All of this requires, at least at this point, more individualized attention.  Is this a course that anyone can put together?  No.  It requires the massive resources of an institution like the University of Texas.  But with those resources, this course can be offered to all – so that I can take this course when I am registered at the University of Oklahoma, or the University of Tubingen in Lithuania.  That distal University pays Texas a chunk of what they charge in tuition, but that frees up their faculty to teach the smaller classes that need more one on one attention. 

What is the down side?  One of the fears expressed at the meeting is that Pennebaker and Gosling’s vision of what the field of psychology is about could become the dominant US vision and there would not be an appreciable difference in experience of students at very different institutions.  This would be a paradoxical outcome of the web – which generally has led to much more individualized viewing patterns – there will never again be a must see Thursday where half of the population (is that possible – did half of the US population used to watch Friends on Thursday nights – look it up) is watching one thing.  Pennebaker and Gosling maintained that this would be functionally what is going on now where there is a dominant textbook – Myers – which is dictating what students learn in intro psych.  While I agree that there is a dominant text, I think that I, as a psychoanalyst, interpret that text differently than my brethren and sisters who are not.  I think that the physiological psychologists interpret parts of it very differently as well.  That said, there are certainly efficiencies in bringing in an analyst to talk about Freud to the masses, and there are problems that only my few random students get this radically different experience.  But what if Pennebaker and Gosling think that psychoanalysis is hooey (the dominant view of psychologists teaching in Universities today)? 

I think, though, the real difference in this class is an exciting one.  As much as there is an emphasis on the delivery differences, the truly impressive difference is that the focus is actually not primarily on what is being taught – though this requires a great deal of attention – but the focus is actually on what is being learned – what is happening in the minds of the students.  And this is a true revolution in teaching – and the scale of the class, ironically, allows this to take place – or at least promotes it.  It is a big enough class that it makes sense to make up particular questions every week based on what happened the previous week.  It is a big enough class that these two professors can devote the bulk of their time to preparing for it – along with an army of Teaching Assistants – not to mention students in the TV lab who do the filming and producing of the class itself.  I think my concern is real – how is it that we as a culture that values individuality as much as we do keep erasing individual differences in the ways that we do (this was pointed out recently by a Norwegian novelist)?  Why does the McDonald’s in Santa Fe taste just like the one in Portland, Maine?  And are we going to all believe that the field of psychology is defined by the particular perspective of two professors in Texas?  Isn’t it ironic that our field in particular – one that explores the similarities, but even more the differences between individuals – could become yet another brand name?  Yet another way to help the masses homogenize…


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