L
ike so many other universities
around the world, the University
of Michigan relied on its existing
technological resources to design a dis-
tanced education for the COVID-19 era.
The pandemic certainly came as a sur-
prise, though ultimately a widespread
familiarity with the basic tools of email,
course websites and video conferencing
helped students and teachers adapt to a
new normal.
Online education in general, how-
ever, is not a new phenomenon, nor is
it likely to disappear with the return of
in-person instruction.
In fact, the prevailing narrative is
that the pandemic has catalyzed an in-
evitable shift to online learning. The
World Economic Forum called the pan-
demic a “paradigm shift” for colleges
and universities that has “accelerated
the transformation of higher educa-
tion.” Similarly, Byeongwoo Kang of
the Institute of Innovation Research,
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, wrote
in an article published by the National
Center for Biotechnology Innovation
that, although the expansion of distance
learning was advancing steadily in Ja-
pan, “COVID-19 has accelerated digital
transformation in the education sector.”
Lots of people are saying that chang-
es to higher education are accelerating,
but what is higher education accelerat-
ing towards?
Online education is the present re-
ality for most residential students, but
for many others, it has represented and
continues to represent a viable avenue
for expanding access to higher educa-
tion. While thinking ahead about the
future of education in general, I began
to wonder: How will the University
contribute to the expansion of opportu-
nities to learn and seek a degree in the
post-pandemic era?
***
B
ehind the hype around online
education are the researchers,
designers and engineers who
are making it happen. Here at the Uni-
versity, the Center for Academic Inno-
vation is one organization dedicated to
the design of educational technologies
and to supporting faculty who want to
integrate digital components into their
classrooms.
Recently, Sarah Dysart, the center’s
director of hybrid and online programs,
and Lauren Atkins Budde, director of
open learning initiatives, filled me in on
the workings of the center and how it
has been pursuing its mission of design-
ing the education of the future.
During our Zoom conversation, Dys-
art explained how the initiative to found
a dedicated office for academic innova-
tion formed in response to popular de-
mand for online learning opportunities.
In 2012, the online learning platform
Coursera began to offer its first batch
of massive online open courses, avail-
able to anyone with a browser and an
internet connection. The University
was one of Coursera’s first partner in-
stitutions and helped co-create some of
its first MOOCs, including “Python for
Everybody,” which is consistently one
of the most popular courses on the plat-
form. This collaboration served as the
impetus for the creation of the Office
of Digital Education and Innovation in
2014, the institutional ancestor of what
is now CAI.
Today, the center has the dual role of
supporting the University’s non-credit
and credit-bearing online programs.
Some of the not-for-credit learning pro-
grams include MOOCs, specializations,
Teach-outs, podcasts and other forms
of widely available educational content.
“We have, I think, almost 15 million en-
rollments from learners of over 200 dif-
ferent countries that engage with our
learning experiences,”’ Budde said.
Dysart, on the other hand, manages
the programs that are eligible for U-M
credits or have a pathway to earning
them. This includes several online mas-
ter’s degrees programs, as well as pro-
grams that learners can begin as open
experiences and then convert to credit
later on. “Anytime somebody is convert-
ing an open learning experience into a
for-credit initiative,” Dysart explained.
“Like taking content from a MOOC
course and then applying it to a residen-
tial course, that’s often a time when I’d
be pulled in.”
Along with an array of software de-
veloped for U-M students, the center
has been instrumental in helping dif-
ferent schools at the University develop
online courses and master’s programs
that can reach a broader audience of
worldwide learners.
The School of Information, for ex-
ample, offers a “Master of Applied Data
Science” online on Coursera. The on-
line curriculum is designed to be flex-
ible and accommodate learners who
have to balance school with other major
responsibilities. While the residential
Master of Science in Information pro-
gram requires students enroll in a mini-
mum of nine credits to be a full-time
student, the courses in the MADS pro-
gram are one-credit each, and students
take an average of one asynchronous
credit per month. The workload, there-
fore, is more spread out over time, even
though students can still expect to finish
the degree in an average of two years.
One of the major challenges of on-
line programs is fostering a sense of
community. For MOOCs, online discus-
sion forums provide the bulk of interac-
tions between learners and U-M faculty.
“You’ve probably experienced for
large classes on campus how hard it is
for a professor to really connect with,
say, the 500 students they might have in
their CHEM 125 section,” Budde said.
“Imagine if that instructor had 10,000
students every semester: That’s the
scale that you’re looking at for those
sorts of online courses.”
To support online learners, an in-
ternal team at CAI helps out with the
Coursera courses. Additionally, though,
some faculty members have made spe-
cial efforts to connect with their stu-
dents; Budde even told me about a few
professors who in pre-COVID-19 times
held pop-up office hours in local coffee
shops while they were traveling around
the world.
While online learning at-first-glance
seems to be all about the technology,
there is clearly a human component
that is crucial to the success of any on-
line venture, whether it’s a course or a
full degree.
***
D
esigning the future, then, is
not about designing the per-
fect tools, but about ensuring
that lots of different aspects of the learn-
ing experience are taken into account.
So, along with engineers, it is the job of
educational researchers to think about
how these digital tools can be applied to
academic contexts.
To learn more about the work of an
academic researcher, I talked with Juan
D. Pinto, an alum of the center’s Learn-
ing Experience and Design Graduate
Certificate program.
Pinto earned his master’s in educa-
tion studies from the School of Educa-
tion in 2020 and completed the cer-
tificate program as part of his degree.
He is currently pursuing a doctorate in
the Digital Environments for Learning,
Teaching & Agency program at the Uni-
versity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
and is especially interested in the appli-
cations of artificial intelligence to edu-
cational technologies.
As one might expect, Pinto is no pes-
simist about the possibility for technol-
ogy to make a positive impact in the
lives of learners. However, he admitted
to me during our conversation that his
field had lost its way when it comes to
the successful integration of education-
al technology.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Pinto said
during our phone call. “I think educa-
tional technology as a whole has failed.
The more I learn about it, the more I
study it, the more I feel like we are fail-
ing.”
Part of the reason for this failure,
Pinto explained, has to do with the
overhype and profit motive of the tech-
nology industry. However, he also made
clear that his own field of educational
research needs to make more concerted
efforts to reach out to the communities
they are trying to support with their
work.
“It’s much more than just, ‘I study
how people learn in a lab, and then I
design a technology that I think will
be beneficial,” Pinto clarified about the
goal of his research. “There has to be so
much more that goes into it and actu-
ally implementing it in context, so that
it makes sense for a specific school, spe-
cific classrooms, and specific students
to use. And we have to make sure that
we’re not leaving people behind because
right now we are, we definitely are.”
Pinto pointed out, for example, that the
accelerated adoption of technologies
during the pandemic has reinforced ex-
isting structural inequalities in access to
education. While technological innova-
tion is often framed in terms of broad-
ening access, digital technology just
won’t have this effect as long as there
are significant deficits in reliable access
to the Internet and computers.
Because of the ambiguous relation-
ship between technologies and educa-
tional outcomes, Pinto advocates the
fostering of a critical approach toward
the design and implementation of new
educational technologies.
One component of this critical ap-
proach is the examination of algorithms
and their relationships with human
subjects. Most technology companies,
however, do not disclose information
related to proprietary algorithms, con-
stituting a major obstacle to an open and
equitable digital future.
“The problem with proprietary soft-
ware or proprietary algorithms is that
essentially they can do anything,” Pinto
said on the issue of algorithmic trans-
parency. “And because the technology
has developed so quickly over recent
years, the government, legislators, and
policymakers just can’t keep up.”
The algorithms used in AI, for ex-
ample — are susceptible to reproduc-
ing biases due to their design or the
data on which the algorithms train.
For example, a report from The Brook-
ings Institution showed how the use of
AI in schools threatens to reproduce
racial discrimination associated with
standardized testing. Thus, if schools
contract with companies that protect
their algorithms as trade secrets, then
it might be costly to hold these compa-
nies accountable in the event that their
products cause harm.
The future of online education, then,
is ideally rooted in accountability, trans-
parency and active engagement with
local communities. However, in the ab-
sence of close regulatory scrutiny, it is
up to public and private institutions to
exercise proper care when considering
the introduction of a new dimension of
their online educational infrastructure.
***
S
o, as the University continues to
hurtle into the future, its admin-
istrators, researchers and faculty
must also continue to think critically
about the relationship between tech-
nological change and equal access to
higher education. The future is not set
in stone, and what we do now, in large
part, forms the kind of people and the
kind of university we will be.
The stakes are high, too, because the
university is still dealing with an iden-
tity crisis that technology alone cannot
solve, but in which technology will in-
deed play an outsized role. This identity
crisis stems from the tension between
the University’s contemporary self-pre-
sentation as an elite university on the
international stage, and roots as a public
university, for which a major goal is to
serve the people of the state that bears
its name.
The 17th Edition of the Michigan
Almanac, published in March 2021, re-
ports that, based on data from Fall 2018,
53% of incoming first-years were from
in-state, 43% were from out-of-state
and 4% were international students.
The University enrolls a lower percent-
age of in-state students than most other
public schools, but the University pro-
vides an explanation: “In large part this
is because U-M’s primary competitors
for these students are selective private
universities.”
To be sure, the University’s interna-
tional reputation helps attract young
professionals and growing businesses to
the state. The expansion of U-M-spon-
sored online education can therefore
continue to play a role in brightening
the University’s brand in an increasingly
competitive landscape.
As an out-of-state student, though,
the above statistic and its subsequent
justification have never sat well with
me. In my view, their combined im-
plication does not reflect well on the
University as an institution of public
service, even if at-first-blush it seems
like a badge of honor to declare yourself
a “competitor” of Harvard University,
Stanford University, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the University
of Chicago and the other universities
that tend to follow.
At least from a fiscal perspective,
the public character of the University
has decreased dramatically since the
1960s: in 1960, state funding accounted
for 78% of the U-M Ann Arbor General
Fund budget, whereas in 2020 state
funding accounted for only 14% of the
General Fund. (In FY 2020, the General
Fund accounted for around 24% of the
total budget). All in all, state funding,
therefore, accounts for around 3-4% of
the total budget.
The trend of declining state fund-
ing has been associated with increas-
ing tuition, as well as efforts to find
alternative revenue streams such as on-
line learning. Nevertheless, even if the
University does not have strong finan-
cial ties to the state, it does have strong
cultural and historical ones. These are
written into the word-order of the Uni-
versity’s mission“to serve the people of
Michigan and the world through pre-
eminence in creating, communicating,
preserving and applying knowledge,
art, and academic values, and in de-
veloping leaders and citizens who will
challenge the present and enrich the
future.”
I think a good example of this public-
spiritedness is encoded in “Python for
Everybody,” the Coursera course taught
by Information professor Dr. Charles
Severance.
One of Severance’s goals in develop-
ing the course has been to make sure
the course materials are accessible to
the widest range of learners possible.
When he says, “Python for Everybody,”
he means it. His courses are accessible
to people with vision problems, for
example, because he takes care to in-
tegrate storytelling as a part of his lec-
tures, turning visual aids such as graphs,
charts and diagrams into rich verbal
descriptions. His most basic Python
course, too, does not have a calculus or
trigonometry prerequisite, a common
requirement to pursue a computer sci-
ence education that he says filters out
a lot of potential students who would
have otherwise learned a valuable skill.
“If you’ve taken calculus and you’ve
taken programming, it will be very clear
to you, very rapidly, that programming
has nothing to do with calculus,” Sever-
ance explained. The computer science
programs at the University have these
requirements, he argued, as a harsh fil-
tering mechanism.
Students in “Python for Everybody,”
by contrast, can stop taking a course,
leave it alone for a while, and come back
with their previous progress saved. The
rapid pace of semester-based educa-
tion in college teaches students how to
learn quickly and efficiently, though, in
Severance’s experience, the best learn-
ing takes place in a nonlinear fashion
across long stretches of time. In his
view, this is a more forgiving method
of learning and actually ends up mak-
ing knowledge stick a little better than
if one were learning the same material
while cramming for an exam or burn-
ing through a coding project within the
span of a few days or less.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
The University and
the digital transformation:
past, present and future
BY ALEXANDER SATOLA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 9
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com