Open Course Repositories Online or The Best Things in Life Are Free

Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

Examples

I) MIT’s Open Course Ware (OCW), established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, currently offers over 1,800 online courses that are enriched with multimedia content and teach thirty-five subject areas within the arts, sciences, and humanities. Being created exclusively by MIT, OCW is backed by MIT’s commitment for permanent updates but is not open to user contributions. It is essentially an electronic and multimedia-enriched version of almost all of MIT’s academic curriculum, including lecture notes, video lectures, exams, etc., offered for free, offering no certification or credit, requiring no registration, and, as indicated on the site, providing access to “materials that may not reflect the entire content of a [given] course.”

II) In a slightly different approach, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative currently offers an eclectic list of only about a dozen courses, which, however, are fully and exclusively developed for online students and are supported by ongoing educational research addressing course design and outcomes. Faculty from all over the world can create a free account and use the repository’s tools to create online courses that can be offered for free or at a nominal fee if credit is required. An educational initiative of a much larger scope than MIT’s OCW, the Open Learning Initiative organizes symposia, maintains pedagogical and education-technology blogs, and offers workshops on using and customizing existing-courses and on developing new, effective online courses.

III) Connexions is a collaborative, free, scholarly content archive that seems to share useful features from both resources discussed above, so I will be spending some more time on it.

The Connexions project started at Rice University in 1999, with the first non-Rice Connexions course contributed by the University of Illinois in 2002. Similarly to MIT’s OCW, Connexions has grown extensively and currently holds over 4,500 course modules, covering most typical disciplines and topics addressed in higher education. Similarly to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, new content is welcome and can easily be created by faculty from around the world, following a simple registration process.

The resource offers full courses (called ‘collections’), individual course modules, or stand-alone learning activities. Materials and learning activities are very well aligned, while remaining modular for flexibility in course customization. Based on my use of the resource, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness instructors are best off mixing and matching modules and activities from multiple collections and possibly supplementing them with additional (especially multimedia) materials. Connexions holdings are often linked to relevant course Web sites within the authors’ academic institutions, providing additional resources and context for understanding the materials.

The numerous items related to music (my area of expertise) are listed under “Arts,” with thirteen of the seventeen “collections” and approximately a third of the over four-hundred modules within Arts addressing music or sound-related topics. Items related to acoustics can also be found under “Science and Technology,” and, following a recent partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Connexions will also be developing a set of signal-processing educational modules and courses.

In its vast majority, the content is accurate, well presented, supported by references to relevant literature, and occasionally enhanced through multimedia resources. Depending on subject area, special plug-ins may be required, all of which are downloadable from within the relevant learning object’s page. Usability features may change slightly with each course and contributor, but all courses/modules checked are clearly organized and very easy to use. The repository itself is also well organized and visually appealing, and it has clear instructions for use when necessary. Although not formally peer-reviewed, the collections are monitored by an editorial team and an oversight board, helping maintain high content standards.

The quality and learning impact of the resource was recently recognized by Harvard University’s Berkman Award (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), presented to Connexions founder and Rice University professor R. Baraniuk for his role in creating the repository. The learning impact and sustainability of this and other open educational resource repositories was addressed in a recent article from the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects.

We are all usually wary of anything offered for free, and for good reason. When it comes to free education, however, there are serious reasons (e.g. motivation of those offering it) and evidence (see above) that support rehashing the cliché: “the best things in life are free!” I have personally found the free resources discussed very useful and plan to become a contributor in the near future.

Avatar photo

Do You Like Me? Check Yes or No.

My mother is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in retail for many years. She often says that the toughest thing about her line of work is the demand to always be “on”—to be perky, pleasant, enthusiastic, and accommodating at all times. Now that the new quarter is under way and I find myself teaching again, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similar pressure for instructors to be “on” when interacting with students.

The last time I taught, multiple students noted in their evaluations that I seemed annoyed and impatient when answering their questions. It came as a bit of a shock, particularly since my previous round of evaluations had turned out so well. After a healthy dose of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, I traced my steps and recalled a few instances in class when I was visibly frustrated with students who weren’t keeping up with a tutorial. I also knew I’d been particularly bad about reminding students if I’d already answered the same question multiple times, and I had probably mentioned more than once that certain mistakes on the assignments could have been avoided by reading the assignment instructions more carefully.

I usually find that I’m in a great mood for the first few weeks of the quarter. I answer repetitive questions with glee. Students who don’t follow directions don’t keep me up at night. Nothing can dampen the feeling that I’m living my dream of being a professor and that I’m single-handedly changing the world. But the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. Like a Starbucks barista at the end of an eight-hour shift or a J. Crew salesperson who has just been asked to fold the same twenty pairs of pants he just folded two hours ago, the normal wear and tear of the job begins to drain my reservoir of patience. Eventually, it gets harder to answer the same question five times with a smile. It gets more painful to grade assignments in which students disregard the rubric I so meticulously and lovingly constructed. By the end of the quarter, it can be difficult not to take things personally that have little or nothing to do with my abilities as a teacher.

When I reflected more on what went wrong during my last term in the classroom, I realized I wasn’t just in a bad mood. I had also brushed off a critical task that I had performed the quarter before: asking my students for feedback before the middle of the term. The first time I tried it, I worried that surveying my students would draw attention to my lack of experience. I didn’t want to seem needy, but I was even more afraid of waiting until the end of the quarter to find out what my students really thought of me. So, I gave them an incredibly simple survey with only two questions:

  1. How challenging is the course so far? (This was a multiple-choice question.)
  2. Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the course? (This was an open-ended question with a comment box.)

This survey was helpful in two ways. First, I learned that I was flying through my software demonstrations and needed to slow down. Second, I showed my students that I genuinely cared about them and wanted to make the course the best it could be. While I can’t say that my little survey made all the difference in my evaluation results that quarter, I feel certain that it played a significant role. When I taught again, I was a bit overconfident, having passed the last quarter with flying colors. I meant to ask my students for feedback but never got around to it. I told myself the students wouldn’t complete it, that I should have done it the week before, or that I should wait until next week. It was always the wrong time to ask for feedback, and before I knew it, the opportunity had slipped through my fingers.

This quarter I’m determined not to make the same mistake. I’ve already asked my students a few simple questions and their responses have helped me correct a few small problems that would have magnified over time. I made sure to include a question about my attitude and patience level, and I plan to offer the survey again to help me snap out of any funk that might set in as the quarter progresses. Asking for feedback early on also goes a long way to foster goodwill. Because I teach in a creative discipline, I have to offer a lot of criticism to help students improve. I can tell them all day long that they shouldn’t take this criticism personally, but giving them the opportunity to critique my teaching helps me lead by example. It also gives the students a chance to blow off some steam before the final evaluations, and I’d much rather get the worst over with early and in a survey that no one has to see but me.

Surveys can be conducted through Blackboard, but it can be difficult to convince students that they are truly anonymous. DePaul employees have the option to use QuickData, our home-grown tool that allows faculty to create surveys by completing a few simple forms. Because these surveys can be taken from any computer and don’t require students to log in, faculty might find they get more frank and honest feedback. For instructors outside DePaul, Web-based survey tools like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo offer a similar promise of anonymity. Of course, giving students the freedom to say whatever they like about their instructors has its downsides. However, I find it’s better to embrace this early in the quarter when there’s still time to do something about it. Hopefully, the result is a better learning experience for everyone and fewer disgruntled students venting several weeks’ worth of frustration in a course evaluation that will be read by department heads.

My students aren’t really my customers and I don’t like to think that I’m obligated to put on a happy face at all times and serve them like a Ritz-Carlton concierge. However, I do think student feedback is essential if I’m going to become a better teacher. When this feedback comes only once at the end of the quarter, it’s easy to feel defensive and powerless. That’s why it’s so important to ask students for regular feedback. It might make me seem a bit needy, but that’s an adjective I can live with, and I know my mom would agree. But just to be sure, I think I’ll send her a survey.

Textbooks 2.0

Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.

The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.

While similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which was launched last year, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is made from plastic instead of glass. That makes it lighter, thinner, and more durable. But what really sets it apart from the Kindle is that it’s open. The Kindle is a closed system. The only content I can read on a Kindle is content that Amazon makes available. That stinks. I want to determine what I read on my e-reader. I want to read my documents, my reports, my PowerPoint presentations. If I have a digital copy of a book, magazine, or textbook, I should be able to upload it to the e-reader. Plastic Logic lets me do that.

The second story that helped seal the fate of the textbook industry comes from WNYC’s On the Media. It’s an interview with Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the Californina Institute of Technology. Dr. McAfee was unsatisfied with the intro-to-economics textbooks on the market, so he wrote his own, and then he did something really cool. He licensed his textbook under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use the book for noncommercial use. Dr. McAfee hopes that other economists will add to the book, improving it, and thus create an open-source textbook. If it works for software, why not textbooks?

You can listen to the whole interview here:

I see the combination of these two ideas really changing the textbook industry. The e-reader eliminates the need for a physical object, and the Creative Commons open-source textbook eliminates the expense of the content. In addition, it allows faculty to create a textbook that is unique and tailored specifically for each individual class and that can actually be updated and revised during the quarter. It makes me want to go back to school.

Avatar photo

Transformational Learning: a Substantial Change in a Subtle and Intuitive Way

“Change,” a slogan of the Obama campaign, is undoubtedly winning its own presidential bid in the buzzword competition. The word “change,” probably of Celtic origin, is defined as an action to make different or to shift from one to another (Merriam-Webster OnLine). It can mean anything from a slight alteration to a radical transformation. When it comes to education, I think that change is, in fact, the ultimate goal of teaching and learning: change from unknown to known, from viewing things from one level to viewing them from another, and from systematic knowledge acquisition to an individualized, conscious battle of lucidity (Morin, 1999; George Siemens 2008). And that ultimate form of change as a result of learning is called “transformational learning.”

About a month ago, I attended a session on language learning and VoIP at the Wisconsin Distance Learning Conference. The presenter, Kerrin Barret, shared the findings of her dissertation studying a cross-cultural language-learning community supported by synchronous VoIP. Although her focus was on the role of VoIP in improving cultural and linguistic competencies, she found (with pleasant surprise, I am sure) that transformational learning occurred across participant groups in the online English-language-learning program, which involved teachers from the United States and students from Taiwan and mainland China. One of the themes that emerged from her study was that by participating in this online program, either as teachers or students, her study population became interculturally competent, which made them view the world as well as themselves differently. This perspective change echoes Merizow’s definition of “transformational learning”: a “disorienting dilemma” occurs in an adult learner’s life to cause her or him to reflect critically, with the end result that the individual’s conception of him/herself and worldview is inexorably changed.

During the presentation, I asked Kerrin, the session participants, and especially myself a question: should transformational learning be made a specific goal of our programs? The follow-up question in my mind was: will making it a goal of the programs give them a better chance to achieve the result, since curriculum design is becoming more and more goal-driven? At that moment, two examples came to my mind: my Chinese language class and DOTS, our faculty development program. For the former, I always wanted to make the class go beyond just the words and grammars; and for the latter, we have been striving to make an impact on faculty’s view and practice of teaching instead of just developing a couple online courses.

In seeking an answer to my own question, I thought about why transformational learning has not been made a goal of either my class or our program. I saw two reasons: 1) the goal seems to be so far above the ground for any teacher and student to achieve over the course of a class or a program; and 2) desirable as it is, making a class or a program a transformational learning experience to anyone doesn’t seem to be a demandable task, nor can it be measured easily with any form of standards. And when it comes to faculty development, a third reason is that faculty are put off by being preached to, which they see as humiliating.

This debate of “to be or not to be” is actually well documented in the literature of transformational learning, where two seemingly different views of transformational learning are presented: one view, represented by Mezirow, emphasizes rationality or rational, critical reflection; and the other, led by Boyd and Meyer, stresses the intuitive and emotional nature of the transformational process.

As a big follower of Etienne Wenger, I tend to agree with Boyd and Meyer because, as Wenger pointed out, “learning cannot be designed.” (Note: he didn’t say instruction cannot be designed, so that’s no job-security threat to instructional designers.) “Ultimately, it (learning) belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.” (Wenger, 1998)

If the result of transformational learning is so personal and hence uncontrollable, what can we, the educators, do to help one achieve this ultimate form of learning? Despite their different views on the process of transformational learning, all researchers and theorists seem to agree that educators play a significant role in the student’s perspective transformation, and “fostering transformative learning in the classroom depends to a large extent on establishing meaningful, genuine relationships with students” (Cranton, 2006, cited by Karrin 2008).

“Relationship” is the key word that I picked from this passage. As factual information becomes more and more accessible to everyone in its various forms of presentation, the role of educators is changing from knowledge carriers to relationship builders, trust agents, mentors, and role models for students. A class or a program provides us an opportunity to serve in that support role of difference-making.

If change is now a dream of all Americans, a dream of a transformational change as a result of learning should, then, be a “secret” goal of all American educators. It is an explicit but unstated goal with the greatest reward for both the teachers and the learners. The “medal” was awarded when a student in Kerrin’s study said, “I feel from learning I am different”; my dream came true when a student wrote me a card saying, “you taught me more than Chinese but how to be a considerate and caring person;” our goal was met when faculty said in their interviews, “DOTS makes me think about teaching differently.”

Comcast Bandwidth-Control Woes

Comcast is the dominant provider of Internet service to households in many markets across America. When I first moved to Chicago, it was the provider we went with as well. Back in Minnesota, we were working to move away from it due to a little glitch they had where households in the Twin Cities were, at times, unable to access the Web sites for the college I worked for.

It took months of conversations and a good number of angry students and parents to get the situation resolved.

There was also talk of Comcast placing preferences on some sites and applications while restricting others on their network. In response, many groups around the country have focused on the concept of net neutrality, a measure that would prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain content on their network.

Today, I read an article, “Comcast Vows to Throttle Customers“. (Thanks, Bryan Alexander of NITLE, for pointing me to it.)

In a nutshell, Comcast is now trying to limit the amount of bandwidth that certain subscribers receive. If they are heavy Internet users, their service will be slowed down in random intervals of ten to twenty minutes. It is still not certain that this plan will become a reality, but let’s follow this train of thought and see what the impact for education could be.

If your students like to watch movies through Netflix, download television series from iTunes, and/or plays online video games, they may end up falling into Comcast’s ‘targeted’ demographic. So when it comes time to watch the online video you posted for class, they may encounter problems watching it. If they are taking a timed multiple-choice quiz, they may not be able to complete it in time due to technical difficulties.

As an instructor, it is imperative to be sensitive to any technical issues that may arise that are out of the student’s control. You also want to be sure to have a wide range of activities and assignments. This is ideal in that it provides high and low bandwidth assignments for the student (and even offline readings) as well as allowing multiple learning styles to be represented in the course activities.

Comcast is still in hearings with the FCC on all of this. Only time will tell what will come of it. However, it’s something to be cognizant about in the meantime.

Project readOn – Change We Can Believe In

I like watching certain TV programs with the captions on, which strikes non-family members as odd. After all, I’m not hard of hearing, I don’t have an auditory processing disorder, and English is my native language. But I did grow up in an immigrant household where my parents relied on captions to understand what was going on while they watched TV. I didn’t need captions the way my parents did, but they added to my enjoyment of television shows by turning them into animated books. I loved to see the words on the screen; to me, they offered a typographic translation of the sound. My relationship with television evolved into something not only visual and auditory, but also textual. It turns out that I’m not alone in this among so-called “normal” people.

There is a broad misconception that only the deaf and hearing-impaired benefit from captions. But in fact, there are many others who may not be as obvious. A surprising BBC study found that over 80% of television viewers turned on the captions. It’s doubtful that 80% of the television-watching population in Britain is hearing impaired, so who are these people? Some of them are students for whom English is a second language, and some are people with auditory processing disorders. Others are viewers who have trouble hearing over background noise and use captions to fill in what the ear misses. And for children, studies have found that captions help with learning to read because they tie together the spoken and printed word, each symbol system reinforcing the other. And then there are probably others like me, who just like the extra dimension that captions give.While captions enable learning for the hearing impaired, they can also enrich the experience for many others.

Despite the fact that captioned video is clearly recognized as a valuable way to help ESL learners, the learning disabled, and the deaf and hard-of-of-hearing, captioned online video is still difficult to find. By online video, I mean the video you might find on YouTube or on sites like NBC (newly captioned!), CBS (inconsistently captioned), MIT’s Open Courseware (no captions), or John McCain’s website (no captions either). Though YouTube has made advances in this area, thousands of clips are added each day to this massive video-sharing site, and kind-hearted captioners just can’t keep up with the content. So the many YouTube clips like lectures, video tutorials, and student-created content that are integrated in courses wind up excluding entire groups of students. And change isn’t happening any time soon. Since online videos, unlike broadcast TV, are not required by law to have captions, there is no tremendous groundswell for change.

What’s the excuse? Captioning tools exist, right? There’s DotSub, Veotag, TubeCaption. But regular people typically don’t have the time or resources to caption that “Third Video Remix of Lazy Sunday”. And some of the do-it-yourself tools for captioning videos can produce some really poor quality captions which detract from any learning experience. Captions that can’t be turned off or are barely legible are a visual nightmare. Outsourcing is the most logical solution, but if colleges do have the funds to pay someone to outsource, they certainly don’t put that random student-created video at the top of the captioning heap. But there is a new service that sounds as if it could make a difference—an organization called Project readOn. This group has partnered with the Obama campaign and has captioned every single video on his website (can’t we follow this lead?). Project readOn will caption any web-based video for you at no cost. You can send in your request and it will be placed in a queue. The length of time your video will be in the queue is unknown. I’ve had some videos in the queue for over three months now. But when captions are added, they appear in a pop-player above the original video. This service is still in the development stages, so the interface is not perfect and the website itself is a navigational nightmare. But I am not going to pick it part excessively because I’m just happy to see an organization that is providing this service for free. What a boon to a huge population of people whose lives are enhanced by being able to see the spoken word. I just hope they get back to me with my captions soon…

Notes from the 24th Annual Distance Learning Conference, Madison, Wisconsin

Ironic that those of us in the trenches of online learning—instructional designers, flash developers, leading-edge online instructors and administrators—enjoy a face-to-face gathering periodically. Just this past week, some eighteen of us from DePaul found ourselves at the 24th annual Distance Learning Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For me, the three keynote addresses tied the conference together: Curtis Bonk (known as Curt once you’ve shared a drink with him) charged the group with his ever-present enthusiasm for all things online. Those of us from DePaul were delighted to find that Curt—who is the pure definition of a “connector” personality type—now includes in his presentation a reference to and photo of our own James Moore’s blog about the Pulse electronic writing tool. And here is James’ blog about that event.

Speaking of connections, George Siemens (University of Manitoba), in his keynote address, presented a new theory of learning—connectivism—based on the realities of the Web 2.0 world, where “learning is the act of building a network and moving through that network in a meaningful manner.”

The final keynoter, Marilyn Moats Kennedy (a former DePaul instructor, by the way) amused the audience with her insights into the defining characteristics of five generations of employees and how to manage them. (As a “boomer,” I’m delighted to know that those who manage me will do almost anything to keep me!) Her engaging approach harbored some interesting observations about the younger generations and provided some interesting perspectives on how we (boomers) can view and assess our students, what motivates them to learn, and how they relate to the workplace. For example, a generation that experienced their boomer parents being laid off is not likely to be a generation that exhibits loyalty to “the company.” They will move around; they expect to move around.

There were multiple opportunities to hear about case studies, rules for assessment, guidelines for designing for critical learning, and issues on institutional policies and support structures. These are the to-do lists we carry back home from such a conference: learn more about Pulse pens, look up this Web site, find out how much it would cost to get a site license for this or that application. The blinders go on—as they need to—and we focus once again on our own institution, our own job description, our own unique set of challenges. And yet, we are fed in some small way by this connection, this face-to-face time to exchange lessons learned, hear new ideas, place our piece of the puzzle into the bigger picture.

And next year… some of us will return to celebrate this opportunity’s quarter of century mark!

Avatar photo

Online Video Editing and Slideshow Tools

I gave a presentation at the New Media Consortium conference back in June on a slew of web 2.0 video and slideshow tools I’ve been testing. The idea for the presentation began nearly a year ago when I was frustrated with the growing divide between the amount of foreign-language media available on the web and the number of teachers taking advantage of it. Initially, I thought the presentation would focus largely on JumpCut.com, a site that offers a fairly robust, web-based video editor. Users can upload video, audio, and images to their JumpCut accounts, then use the editor to create short movies.

One of the features that excited me about JumpCut was its ability to let users remix each other’s work. After watching any movie produced on JumpCut.com, users can click a remix button, which launches the video-editor interface and populates it with all of the video footage used in the movie. I thought this feature had great potential, and dreamed of assignments in which students would take a pool of raw footage, add their own material, do a little creative editing, and create spectacular mini-movies.

Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that there were several flaws in my plan. First, JumpCut doesn’t allow users to share audio, making it difficult to provide students with any sort of communal pool of voiceovers, sound effects, background music, etc. In addition, obtaining raw footage for students to manipulate was time consuming. I was able to download some great public domain video from the Internet Archive’s moving images database, but breaking these clips up into manageable chunks for use in JumpCut wasn’t easy. As an alternative, I experimented with capturing scenes from the game The Sims 2. The Sims proved an excellent visual resource for domestic drama and for reinforcing basic household vocabulary. As a result, I was able to work with Claudia Fernandez, a Spanish professor at DePaul, to create a sort of “video dictionary.” The goal of the project was to demonstrate everyday actions to help students master simple phrases in the past, present, and future tense.

As I started to push the limits of what could be captured in The Sims, I began exploring a variety of other tools that I thought might help faculty spice up their lectures and assignments with multimedia. I started my search in the hopes of finding a tool similar to JumpCut, but with the added ability to import video directly from YouTube and other video sharing sites. (Omnisio was the closest thing I could find, but it paled in comparison to JumpCut as a video-editing tool.)

My search quickly expanded beyond online video editing, and I found myself fiddling with subtitling tools like Overstream, slideshow presentation and annotation tools like VoiceThread, and multimedia-enhanced timeline generators like CircaVie. I quickly realized that I was going well beyond the original intent of my presentation, which was supposed to be a hands-on demonstration of JumpCut’s features. I decided to expand the focus of the presentation (even though it was too late to change the description in the conference agenda) and I offered attendees a comparison of nearly all the video and slideshow tools I had tried.

In the end, this approach seemed to go over very well with the audience. Several people thanked me for taking the time to do more than just recommend a long list of trendy tools I had never tried. I also got a lot of positive feedback on my example uses of the video editing and slideshow tools. Hopefully, by sharing them here, more people can benefit from what I’ve learned. Feel free to email me at dstanfo2@depaul.edu with any questions about the tools or my experience using them.

How much is that Ph.D. in the window? The commodification of higher education.

Last week my wife and I had dinner with an old friend who’d come in from out of town for a rare visit. She’s a remarkable woman, with a long stint in broadcasting followed by the acquisition of an advanced degree at UC Berkeley, which led to her current vocation as hospice chaplain in a major west coast city. Warm, intelligent, inquisitive and urbane; she surprised me with her announcement that she was about to start her doctoral studies. Online. And not at a school I would’ve guessed.

Because she’s such a hands-on kind of person her decision to study online seemed unusual to me, but I was really interested why she didn’t choose to pursue her studies at one of the universities in her area. Surely they offered online courses. Why this school, with so many prestigious alternatives?

Ph.D. = Driver’s License?

She allowed that she knew the degree wouldn’t be held in the same regard as one from the brick and mortars in her region, but that cost and flexibility had been deciding factors. Further, she assured me, the Ph.D. she would earn would be sufficient for attaining the job she wanted. It was, she concluded, the same as a driver’s license. It didn’t matter where you studied for it as long as you got one.

Give them what they want

I’m fascinated by this commodification of higher education and its acceptance. At both the recent Sloan-C symposium in Carefree, Arizona and an enrollment management workshop a couple of weeks ago I heard a lot of discussion about how traditional student populations are declining, how the survival of educational institutions is dependent upon attracting and retaining non-traditional (usually adult) students, and how both Millennial and adult students demand educational opportunities and experiences that are decidedly consumer-based and market driven. Give them what they want or watch your college wither and die, keynote speakers declared.

It’s rough out there

I understand the pressures that inform a prospective student’s decisions on what, how and where to study: I’d love to be studying theology or literature for personal and spiritual growth, but I invest my school’s tuition waiver benefits in professional development courses. And I understand the need for institutions to adapt strategically. It’s rough out there in consumer society.

My friend’s decision was pragmatic; she’d pursued her ideals as a younger undergraduate and graduate student and was now positioning herself in a competitive marketplace. Higher education must also adapt and make practical, unsentimental strategic decisions to survive and prosper. I do not pretend to have any answers to how we do that without abusing our principles. But I like to think we stand for something greater than market share. That we take a position rather than seek one. And that we’re more than mere commodities.

LPs Versus CDs: An Unnecessary (and Often Annoyingly Ignorant) Debate

I am truly at a loss as to why we are still arguing about this, but we somehow still are! (See “Retailers Giving Vinyl Records Another Spin.”) Here is the quick answer: digital-audio techniques and media can capture and reproduce sonic events far more faithfully than any analogue technique and medium. Note that the focus of the above statement is fidelity not preference, a distinction that most “LPs versus CDs” debates wrongly blur.

Old news

More than twenty years have gone by since the first time CD sales surpassed those of LPs, and several highly qualified acousticians and engineers have since weighed in on the LPs-versus-CDs topic, outlining in numerous books, scholarly journal articles, and presentations the mathematical, acoustical, signal-processing, and perceptual issues involved. (See the relevant, well-written article on Wikipedia for a partial bibliography. See, also, an intelligent talk on the topic by Princeton University’s Paul Lansky.) Some of these experts have also sent relevant letters to the popular press or have published blogs and other online resources. (See this post by analog-integrated-circuit designer Mike Demler.)

Still, self-proclaimed “experts” and die-hard lovers of popular myths, who seem to approach knowledge almost exclusively through what C. S. Peirce, in the 19th century, called “the method of tenacity” (holding on to one’s already established beliefs at all cost), insist on keeping the analogue-versus-digital-sound debate alive. See, for example, this thread on Audiokarma.org’s discussion forum, which includes a typical example of the types of arguments used by LP advocates: “I know vinyl is better because… it just is” (emphasis in the original!).

I will not waste any time here repeating in detail the arguments for the superior audio fidelity of CDs versus LPs. Interested readers can find more information through a relevant Google search, assuming they know how to weed through the returned results and evaluate Internet resources. (e.g. Does the author identify him/herself? What are his/her credentials? Are the arguments supported by references to credible, peer-reviewed sources? Are the sources of information properly cited? etc.)

I will simply outline the inherent and unsurpassable limitations of analog media, such as vinyl LPs, and highlight an important distinction between fidelity and preference that seems to be overlooked in digital-versus-analog debates.

Limitations of LPs

The mechanical nature of sound-signal capture and reproduction in LPs and the associated issues of inertia, momentum, and interference impose frequency and dynamic response limits (i.e. limits in both the range and fineness by which a signal’s frequency and amplitude content can be captured and reproduced without interfering with adjacent signals) that constitute an unavoidable fidelity bottleneck within the medium. CDs completely bypass these issues thanks to optical methods of sound-signal capture and reproduction, assuming appropriate digitization (sampling-rate and bit-depth choice), storage (CD-surface and surface-coating choice), and handling (CD-surface protection during use to minimize the need for digital error correction).

Fidelity versus preference

Advocates of LPs and other analog sound media often cite the analog sound’s greater “warmth,” “smoothness,” and “fullness” as the main reasons for choosing analog over digital. Interestingly, these subjective sound-quality characteristics are related to acoustic side effects imposed on live, sonic events by the analog media themselves. Preference for such sonic qualities may be based on familiarity and habit (having grown up listening to music exclusively through analogue media, showing a conditioned preference towards the “familiar”) or may constitute a conscious aesthetic choice (intentionally altering a sonic event, through the sound-quality distortions introduced by analog media, to achieve a given aesthetic result). Regardless of the reasons behind some listeners’ preference for the sound-quality distortions introduced by analog media, the fact is that the sound quality carried by such media is exactly that: distorted. Preference for analog over digital and the other way around occupies an inherently subjective, gray area, and discussions on it can and will continue. However, when it comes to sound fidelity (how accurately an acoustic vibration is represented by a sound signal) it’s just black and white, with digital coming out the clear and undisputable winner.