Football Stadium

Depending where you live, you might be aware that Temple's football team is having a pretty good year, and the powers that be are capitalizing on the momentum to put together a deal to build a stadium on campus. Currently, Temple's football games are played at Lincoln Financial Field, which is where the Eagles play, on the other side of Philadelphia.

I don't really see the wisdom in building a stadium on campus. For starters, there's no great place to put it. More pressingly, there's zero (literally) space for parking. And finally, there's no great way for 35,000 fans to get to Temple's campus all at once. It's a logistical mystery.

More importantly are the financial question marks. The administrators claim that tuition dollars won't be used to fund any of the operation, but its hard to see how any future losses would otherwise be absorbed.

Happily, someone did the research into how these things usually turn out. This article is fantastic. I think everyone at Temple should read it:

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/colleges/temple/20151029_Questioning_Temple_s_proposed_football_stadium.html

MOOCs

So I recently completed my first ever MOOC, a course on Machine Learning offered by Coursera, which is a startup launched by Andrew Ng at Stanford University. I was excited to take this course because (a) I really want to know a lot more about machine learning and (b) I want to see how a MOOC works and to get a sense for its strengths and weaknesses. Are MOOCs really going to be a disruptive technology? Are they going to render brick-and-mortar universities redundant relics? Are MOOCs going to do to universities what craigslist did to newspapers?!

Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

1. It was a very good course. I learned a lot of useful information in a format that was much easier to digest than if I'd just read a textbook. 
2. There were ten weeks and each week had a series of lecture videos ranging in length from 5-10 minutes. There were in-lecture quizzes (which didn't count for anything) as well as comprehension quizzes to be taken online after the quizzes. Finally there were homework assignments that required writing code in Matlab or Octave. Solutions were uploaded and graded automatically through a nice seamless interface.
3. I  loved that the lectures could be watched online at variable speeds. I also loved that I could download the videos and watch them on my phone during my subway commute to and from work. Being able to pause, skip, and review video is a huge advantage. If you zone out for a moment and miss some important point, you can just re-watch it instead of being confused for the remainder of the lecture. Win. I also loved that I was able to download all the slides.
4. The quizzes were often pretty challenging. Mostly they were multiple choice but sometimes I had to do numerical computations.
5. The homework assignments were often interesting but in order to make them tractable for large numbers of students of many different backgrounds and strengths, the instructors provided an awful lot of pre-written code. This made many of the assignments feel a little plug-and-chug, even though they were tackling pretty complex real-world issues (e.g. spam detection).

I think that last issue is the real sticking point for MOOCs. For a class like this one to really be excellent, students must be challenged with big open-ended design problems that can be solved with many approaches. The student has to figure out for example, what are the best feature vectors, how to code them, how to tune the parameters, etc. Those design problems must be tough and force the student to really struggle. That in turn requires instructors or teaching assistants that can work hand in hand with the students, answering questions, making suggestions, and so on. While the course had an online message board that was supposed to play this role to some extent, I don't think its the same has having face time with an experienced instructor.

None of this is said to knock Coursera or Dr. Ng. Quite the contrary, I feel like I got a great bargain on  my investment of zero dollars (although I put a good deal of time into it). However I'm just thinking about the bigger picture of how a MOOC would have to look to be truly a replacement for brick and mortar universities.

I think another big problem MOOCs will face is that a whole lot of students need advising - what courses to take in what sequence, how to study, how to do problem sets, etc. While many individuals can sort this for themselves, a lot of folks can't, and thats a big part of the value that a university provides. Right now I think MOOCs are probably a great resource for people who already know how to study or already have some higher ed under their belts. This article from Inside Higher Ed has some interesting demographic information on who takes MOOCs.

Anyways, it was a fun course and as far as the instructor is concerned, I am now an "expert" (his words!) on Machine Learning!

The Future of Higher Ed

I think I'm going to start a new series of blog posts relating to a subject that's important to me - the future of higher education. We spend a lot of time at work talking about the state of higher education and how it is changing as we enter the 21st century. There are tons of people online giving their two cents - I figure I'll start keeping track of people whose opinions I like or don't like.

Its worth noting that a number of people are worried that higher education is at risk of becoming a bursting bubble, like real estate or internet stocks. The rationale is that students are vastly overpaying for degrees that don't guarantee them middle class wages, and that sooner or later these people are going to start defaulting on their loans or stop coming to college or start looking for alternatives to college education. The other fear is that universities are the next newspaper industry in that they are not adapting fast enough to the changing realities of the world. Sooner or later some disrupting technology will revolutionize how students become educated and many traditional universities will become obsolete basically overnight.

My personal opinion fluctuates, often depending on what kind of a day I have at work. Universities are full of bright engaged faculty who have students best wishes in mind and who work hard to provide a quality education. On the flip side, universities are also giant bureaucracies which often react slowly or poorly to change. Tenured faculty often act in their self interest to protect the status quo, and there is very little means to realistically incentivize bad or ineffective tenured instructors to adapt. Then there's the problem of leadership... its hard to get effective leaders, particularly at mid-level universities where administrators often come to burnish their credentials in the hopes of landing a bigger job in a few years.

Well, there are a host of other issues - I guess I can talk about them in due course.

Here is a brief list of some links I've been enjoying recently on this topic.

• David Brooks at the NYTimes (paywalled content) thinks that universities should let MOOCs and other internet-based sources provide technical content, while the university itself should focus on practical content. Practical content is things like solving problems, critiquing designs, discussing ideas, etc. I think he's right on the money.
• Minerva University is a new for-profit university being started by Snapfish founder Ben Nelson. Instead of trying to get existing universities to adapt, Minerva is building the university of the future from the ground up. I like a lot of what I see on the website, including a focus on using the internet to deliver lectures, followed by practical hands-on training in class. Instead of tenure they are offering renewable three year contracts. This is almost certainly going to be the wave of the future in many universities, whether faculty like it or not. One important point: Minerva is trying to be as good as an Ivy League school. To some extent, you can expect an enterprise like this to succeed because to a large extent its easy to teach excellent students. I think a much more relevant and challenging problem is how the university of the future will educate the mid-tier students.
• Mark Cuban advises students to pick a university based on whether it'll still be in business before you graduate. It's a bit hyperbolic but his point is well taken. He relates universities to the newspaper industry and wonders what the business model will be like in a few years time.

What would the ideal university of the future look like? How much would it cost? Who would teach? Who would attend? What would be the role of research? of faculty scholarship? of tenure? The only thing I'm sure about is that whatever it is, it won't resemble much of what you see today in higher ed.