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