Josh M. Beach: Why we can’t measure what matters in U.S. education

Via The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

What do students learn in school? In the 21st Century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer.

The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? And yet, when you investigate the education-accountability movement, especially in the U.S. where it began, you realize that the preoccupation with student learning is not about education. Calls for accountability have always been more focused on politics and economics.

Accountability metrics were created to sort and rank students, teachers and schools in order to create a competition where some are winners and most are losers. This type of competitive environment creates fear, and it is not conducive to learning or high performance.

Most student learning, especially the most important types of social learning and formative interactions, happens outside school, especially in early childhood. These personal experiences later go on to affect students’ performance in schools. The most important variables that affect a student’s school achievement are environmental. They occur outside schools and affect children long before they ever set foot in a school. These three variables, which are deeply intertwined, are the social construction of: race, parental income and wealth, and parental education (especially the highest level of schooling that parents achieve).

All three of these variables are proxies for a wide range of social and economic resources that can help students learn and succeed in school, such as parenting skills and child development, especially the time parents spend talking to and reading with children, proper nutrition, access to tutors and extracurricular activities, access to top-quality schools with the best teachers, and also peer networks.

Most policymakers and school administrators talk as if schools and teachers have complete control over the student learning process, but most of the important variables that determine student success, especially in terms of learning and graduating, are beyond the control of teachers or schools.

As W. Edwards Deming pointed out, “Common sense tells us to rank children in school (grade them), rank people on the job, rank teams, divisions … Reward the best, punish the worst.” (This common-sense belief is wrong, especially, as Deming emphasized, when it comes to schooling, where the objectives are supposed to be student learning and personal development.)

Over the past half century, social scientists have found that there can be many unintended and adverse consequences when high-stake metrics get linked to individual or institutional evaluations tied to punishments and rewards.

This predicament is often called Campbell’s Law. The psychologist and social scientist Donald T. Campbell explained in 1976, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

A British economist put it more bluntly in what is now called Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure used for control is unreliable.”

According to Campbell, “When tests scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

How have accountability measurements corrupted schools? Take high-stakes standardized testing as a perfect example. Many teachers now spend most of their classroom time teaching to the tests by giving students “tricks” to answer multiple-choice tests or “ways to game the rules used to score the tests,” according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Prof. Daniel Koretz. Students engage in little, if any, real or useful learning.

Grade inflation

Teachers have also been lowering their standards and inflating grades to make students look much more successful academically than they actually are. Some administrators have been manipulating the tested population of students to make sure the lowest-performing students don’t take high-stakes tests. Sometimes, this has taken the form of transferring low-achieving students to other schools or encouraging them to drop out of school. And most shamefully, some teachers and administrators have been engaging in plain old cheating by falsifying student achievement scores.

To make matters worse, because performance measures cannot be verified, judgments of quality are made on existing data, which can be manipulated, or can be partially or wholly fraudulent. This leads to the adverse selection of personnel, whereby deceitful agents who post the best performance markers get rewarded, even though their numbers may be questionable, if not fraudulent.

Often, as Koretz points out, “the wrong schools and programs” get “rewarded or punished, and the wrong practices may be touted as successful and emulated.” The opposite is also true. Honest, hard-working and effective teachers, with true but lackluster performance measures, are passed over for promotion, criticized, sanctioned or fired. Such moral hazards create a perverse Darwinian scenario: Survival of the corrupt.

When performance goals are mandated from above without employee input, subordinates are forced to follow meaningless targets without any intrinsic motivation. Thus, the only incentive for workers to succeed are extrinsic rewards, often money, which leads to shortcuts or fraud to get the monetary reward. Staff begin chasing performance markers for the monetary incentives without knowing about or caring about the fundamental purposes of the organization or the rationale behind accountability goals.

Thus, when it comes to schools, whenever lawmakers or administrators institute a single, predictable measure of academic performance linked to extrinsic rewards, whether it be for students, teachers, or the whole school, someone somewhere will be cheating to game the system.

A 2013 Government Accounting Office report concluded that “officials in 40 states reported allegations of cheating in the past two school years, and officials in 33 states confirmed at least one instance of cheating. Further, 32 states reported that they canceled, invalidated or nullified test scores as a result of cheating.” One scholarly study estimated that “serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4-5 percent of elementary school classrooms annually.” Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg sardonically quipped, “Fudging data on student performance” has been “the only education strategy that consistently gets results.”

Nationwide in the U.S., we are seeing the consequences of this cynical calculation. For decades, researchers have documented rampant social promotion and grade inflation in K-12 schools and in most institutions of higher education. Koretz has argued that grade inflation is not only “pervasive,” but also “severe,” so much so that he argued that this type of subtle cheating is “central to the failure of American education ‘reform.’”

In Houston, as an example, some high schools were officially reporting zero dropouts and 100% of their students planning to attend college, and yet one principal joked, most of her students “couldn’t spell college, let alone attend.” While Texas pioneered accountability reforms in K-12 education, which became national policy through George W. Bush’s landmark No Child Left Behind law, researchers have documented how those reforms led to the corruption of education in Texas. Policymakers and administrators lost sight of education in a push to fudge the numbers so they could secure public accolades, get more funding and build bigger football stadiums.

And what is the impact of grade inflation on students? While students no doubt like high grades that they have not academically earned, they are actually harmed a great deal by such educational fraud. First of all, students become complacent and are unmotivated to learn because they think they already know it all. When students are confronted with higher academic standards in the future, they are liable to wilt under the pressure and either blame themselves or the teacher for the difficulty of authentic learning.

Disadvantaged students hurt most

To make matters worse, grade inflation affects disadvantaged students the most. Poor students and ethnic minorities, who are often segregated in the lowest-performing schools in the poorest neighborhoods, often receive the most inflated grades. This is because their teachers often can’t teach effectively due to various social, economic and environmental conditions that obstruct the learning process.

And what happens when academically underachieving high-school students fail upwards and make it into college, mostly through the open-door community college? They are then confronted with the fact that they are unprepared for academic success.

Large percentages of freshmen in the U.S. have to start college with remedial classes because they were not adequately prepared in high school. Most of these remedial college students eventually drop out of college, for various reasons, never earning a degree, and often with substantial amounts of student debt. However, many are also just passed through the college system with inflated grades and little learning.

For decades, researchers have documented the lowering of academic standards and the inflation of grades at institutions of higher education all across the U.S., especially at community colleges.

Graduating with a degree

High grades also seem to be inversely correlated with the main measure of student success in college, which is graduating with a degree. Currently, over 80% of all college students in the U.S. are earning A or B grades, but less than half of students who enroll in higher education will actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

As college admissions rose, graduation rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s because standards remained relatively high. But as admissions continued to rise, graduation rates began to increase starting in the 1990s. Students were no more academically prepared, in fact, they were less prepared, so the increase in completion rates was mostly likely due to political and administrative pressure. New accountability reforms most likely contributed to a lowering of standards, especially at non-selective public colleges and universities.

Education researchers Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini pointed out in 2005 that only about half of all college graduates “appear to be functioning at the most proficient levels of prose, document or quantitative literacy,” which means that all those inflated A and B grades aren’t translating into actual knowledge or skill, putting many college graduates at a disadvantage when they enter the labor market, and putting many firms at risk because they have hired ignorant and incompetent college graduates.

While it is certainly reasonable for teachers to use tests and grades to evaluate and measure student learning, these tools are not easy to implement in a valid way that promotes student learning and development. As Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, notes, “Measuring something as complicated as student learning” is very difficult, even under the best of circumstances, but almost impossible when it has to be done in a “uniform and cost-restricted way.” {Mr. Schneider is associate professor of leadership in education at UMass Lowell and director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment.}

Josh M. Beach is the author of a number of interdisciplinary titles, including How Do You Know?: The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy and Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States. He is the founder and director of 21st Century Literacy, a nonprofit organization focused on literacy education and teacher training.

Georgian-style Longfellow Hall at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, in Cambridge, Mass. It’s named for the daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous 19th Century poet and scholar.

Christina Cliff: Teaching in the active shooter era

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Journal of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

I’ve been teaching political science for about a decade now. I teach students about the international system, the functioning of government, foreign policy, national security. My teaching is based on my 12 years of higher education and shaped by my life experiences.

I’m a Cold War kid. In grade school and junior-high classrooms, we had “duck and cover” drills for what to do in the case of a Soviet attack. I grew up in a place considered a strategic attack target, so we likely did these drills more than the average American school kids. I still remember crouching under my desk, staring at the fossilized gum on the underside, waiting for the teacher to tell us the drill was over so we could go out to recess.

Even as a child I knew that we weren’t really likely to be bombed. There had never been a missile attack on the U.S. I believed in my own safety because the threat that I was told was a possibility was never a reality.

This is not to say the experience didn’t affect me. Being a Cold War kid in the U.S. meant that you knew the Soviets—and maybe China—were the enemy. Cold War kids knew that protecting us from those enemies was the primary focus of our government. We knew this because they told us. We mostly believed the politicians, because we stayed safe from the threats they told us they would combat.

When the Cold War kids grew up, some of them became educators. What we were taught, what we learned, was affected by our experiences. And when the Cold War kids grew up, some became politicians. Those childhood memories and experiences informed the way they governed. They believed that the enemies of our childhood were the enemies of our future. This belief shaped our policies, sometimes to our detriment.

We weren’t prepared for 9/11 in large part because our leaders were shaped by their experiences that said that if we would be attacked, it would be by a country. We believed, because of what we thought the Cold War had shown us, that we could deter an attack by using our threat of force or our economic influence. We did not comprehend, even though the Cold War should have taught us this as well, that you can’t deter an ideology, and that our might does not ensure our safety or victory.

A Cold War kid teaching the post-9/11 generation

I now teach classes on political violence, terrorism, international relations, and on global security and diplomacy. I’m a Cold War kid, but my students have a very different frame of reference. My students are now the post-9/11 generation—often too young to remember the actual event, though old enough to enlist in the ongoing wars that were a response to that attack. They don’t really understand why the politicians are so concerned about North Korea.

Today’s college students didn’t have my childhood, so they don’t understand the fear of a nuclear threat. What my students know, unlike the Cold War generation, is that might does not guarantee victory—and that war is endless.

What my students know, what they do remember, and what shapes their perspective, are hate crimes, terrorist attacks and mass shootings. My students know about El Paso, Dayton, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Parkland, Pulse Nightclub, Thousand Oaks, Las Vegas, Tree of Life Synagogue, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Emanuel AME Church, among so many others.

My students didn’t just duck and cover under their K-12 school desks. They learned to tie tourniquets, and have been taught how to block doors, how to stay silent in a coat closet. My students look for all of the exits at a public event, they are cautious at stores and movie theaters. They carry their phones at all times, not because they are checking their social media, but because they want to be able to reach their parents at any moment.

While they do not remember the 9/11 attacks, today’s college students do remember others. Unlike the Cold War generation, they have learned that might does not guarantee safety.

They have now also experienced more than a year of the effects of a global pandemic, which included school shutdowns, virtual learning and catastrophic death tolls. My students have seen Asian people being targeted for hate. During the pandemic, my students watched a Black man die with an officer kneeling on his neck, protests and riots erupt over police brutality. My students saw a violent insurrection storm the U.S. Capitol and kill a police officer in an effort and stop a presidential election.

Thoughts and prayers

With each shooting, with each attack, with each eruption of violence, new debates about gun control, mental illness, hate and terrorism erupt. Sometimes, our representatives enact legislation, but more often they do not. We offer prayers, we offer thoughts. But we do very little.

My students are America’s mass-shooting generation. They have learned that the potential threats may be in their hometown. They do drills in school because the threat has become reality. They didn’t wait for the recess bell to end the drill; they waited to see if it was only a drill. They didn’t stare at fossilized gum—they waited for a shadow to cross in front of the classroom closet they were hiding in.

In many ways, being a Cold War kid defined how I viewed the world and our place in it. During my childhood, the biggest threat was nuclear war that would destroy the planet. But it never happened, and I believed that our government could keep us safe. I think, I had it easier than my students do.

Many of today’s college students are growing up believing that thoughts and prayers are insincere and something that takes the place of action. They don’t believe the politicians, because the politicians haven’t kept them safe. Their generation has become used to the idea that the enemy could be anyone, that they could be anywhere, and could strike at any time.

My students are members of the active-shooter generation, and that means that I have to be prepared to address topics that they have personal experience with as they may arise in the curriculum. I have students who were at the Boston Marathon bombing, and I have students who had family and friends who survived Sandy Hook. In the classroom, I have to understand trauma in order to educate in a way that respects and acknowledges those experiences, an approach that most Cold War kids would have never expected from their teachers.

Someday, my students will be the leaders of the world. I can teach them, but their experiences will shape everything. And I have to ask, after watching the successes and failures of the Cold War kids, what will these future leaders’ policies will look like? What did the Cold War generation leave for our children?

Christina Cliff is an assistant professor of political science and security studies at Franklin Pierce University, in Rindge, N.H.

Franklin Pierce’s Mountain View apartments, with Mt. Monadnock looming in the background

— Photo by Fsguitarist

View of Mt. Monadnock from the famous Cathedral of the Pines, in Rindge

— Photo by John Phelan -

John O. Harney: Getting ready for the sixth mega-extinction

BOSTON More than 250 higher-education leaders from campuses across the U.S. met last week in Boston for the 2014 Presidential Summit on Climate Leadership.

The summit was organized by Second Nature, the supporting organization for the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Almost 700 colleges and universities have signed the ACUPCC and committed to achieve carbon neutrality by balancing the amount of carbon released with an equal amount offset or buying enough carbon credits to make up the difference, but boosters voiced frustration that the number hasn’t been growing in recent years.

Registering at the Revere Hotel (still the 57 to me) I was greeted with a questionnaire that Emerson College students are using to track the summit's carbon footprint. I was proud to declare that I came by train and on foot.

On the way into town, I had tweeted about a new finding that global warming (recently sanitized as ‘’climate change’’) is wrecking havoc on fall colors. Also that day, papers were reporting on 35,000 walruses coming ashore in Alaska due to melting sea ice. Just two weeks earlier, 400,000 people marched in New York City and elsewhere to call for action on climate change. The summit seemed timely, if not late.

At the conference, Kate Gordon, executive director of the Risky Business Project, outlined her no-nonsense research focusing on climate change’s impacts on energy, agriculture and extreme heat. She and her co-authors wanted to speak in the language of business so they framed the issue as a “risk assessment” and delivered their report in the backyard of Wall Street.

Assessing economic risk of climate change is complicated. Louisiana’s gross state product fell slightly after Hurricane Katrina, but the rest of the country’s grew based partly on storm-related recovery activity.

More importantly, some of the risks of climate change will cascade. For example, there’ll be more “heat stroke days” when the body cannot cool itself off by perspiring. That will mean lost labor productivity (especially in states with lots of outdoor work, led ironically by North Dakota) as well as more air conditioning and therefore demand for more power plants, which incidentally are mostly built along rising seas.

The Southeast will be hit especially bad. And that’s where much of American manufacturing, including green manufacturing, is increasingly based. There was dark joking about moving football’s hot (in more ways than one) Southeastern Conference to the Northwest, where warming with make the weather better suited for outdoor sports. But dead seriousness about how Cargill (whose exec is among the veritable rogue’s gallery of backers who advised the work) could move its corn farming from Iowa to Manitoba to keep up with the weather, but Iowa farm families would be left high and dry.

Among other things, Gordon urged a more interdisciplinary look at sustainability. Why not make it a case study for first-year business students, she asked.

In a separate session, George Washington University President Steve Knapp and American University President Neil Kerwin explained how their campuses are meeting more than 50% of their energy needs with solar energy from North Carolina.

D.C. is promoted among the best college towns in America, but Knapp and Kerwin agreed that colleges in other places could forge collaborations for this purpose. Though some experts are skeptical about locking in rates because energy costs could go down, Kerwin said the ability for the colleges to come together allowed their supplier Duke Energy Renewables company to go to capital markets for better deals. Knapp and Kerwin also credited politically savvy students with the success and urged other higher ed leaders to prepare the ground with trustees in advance.

A panel moderated by New England Board of Higher Education President Michael K. Thomas explored how sustainability champions can get their message to national audiences. Portland State University President Wim Wiewel suggested more emphasis on foundation support in the face of a tight federal government as well as forming a committee to focus on “partnership creation.” Millersville University President John Anderson noted that he is using his appointment to a hospital board to advance AAUPCC's message by reminding them how hurricanes Sandy and Katrina clobbered hospitals.

The audience provided solid observations about building national action. Cal State Chico reps observed that student associations are key. A former Second Nature employee said she previously worked at NACUBO, where staff listen most attentively to advice when it comes from presidents. Penn State's sustainability director said he gets together with counterparts via the Big 10 athletic conference. The president of Cal State Northridge noted that she is a member of the NCAA, and pondered what might happen if the national athletic association turned to sustainability. A staffer from Illinois State University asked how can colleges can leverage their alumni on behalf of climate efforts. A GW sustainability official called for more positive stories and more group purchasing. An official of the American Meteorological Society said his group has courses at universities across the nation. Another campus official noted that federal policy on sustainability is out of touch with newer thinking. Sustainability guru Tony Cortese, formerly of Tufts and a co-founder of the AAUPCC, said the time is right now for climate action, as it was when AAUPCC started.

One non-scientific observation (a rarely acknowledged qualifier on this subject) is that the audience revealed a remarkable lack of diversity, even for a meeting of New England “thought leaders.” Also some communication contamination … lots of diagrams and terms like programs and ideas being “birthed” … perhaps because these folks know the end is nigh with, as another sustainability hero, former Unity College President Mitch Thomashow warned, the human-caused sixth mega-extinction knocking at the door.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

Jay A. Halfond: Wallflowers in the online-education revolution

By JAY A. HALFOND

BOSTON For the past decade, we have been mired in generalizations in debating online education. Broad, often anecdotal and generally unsubstantiated comparisons have been made about the virtual and physical classroom–often taking the worst of one in contrast to the best of the other. But the range of what falls under the rubric of online distance learning is now far too vast to support simple and sweeping generalizations.

Most education conducted online is not necessarily for students at a distance—but an option for traditional, on-campus students. These students are mixing and matching, opting in and out of various learning modalities — and, in effect, voting for variety in their choice of how and when to learn. Still other institutions have developed programs offered fully at a distance to a national and increasingly global audience—which poses far different challenges.

Some institutions encourage faculty to build homespun online courses on their own, with little or no support, and of dramatically variable quality. Others provide sophisticated assistance and tools that help develop educational products with what Hollywood would call high production values. Some institutions target older, post-traditional students, who have the maturity and motivation to participate in asynchronous learning.

As with online courses, in-person classes reveal remarkable disparity, and those who know something about both have great difficulty comparing the average of one with the average of the other. Reducing so much variation into a glib opinion can be tone-deaf to the rich nuances and diversity of what is taking place. The academic landscape is vast and complex—and this complexity is humbling for those trying to understand our era or forecast its future.

But this is what survey research attempts to measure and help us better understand. The 2013 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, jointly administered by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, is the second annual attempt to gauge academic opinion on technology and teaching. Often, faculty opinion is based on little direct experience or familiarity, or biased based on their own plunge into online learning. Regardless, the evolving subjective perceptions of e-learning are fascinating to see unfold. Even when experiences are anecdotal or uniformed, this survey shows how, in aggregate, educational technology is gradually becoming a fixture within academe. But not without its nagging controversies. We are in the midst of something between an evolution and a revolution — a modification of business-as-usual and a major transformation. These findings provide a snapshot of our changing times, which will likely look dated and even naive a few years from now.

Lack of familiarity breeds contempt

More than one-fifth of America’s faculty—regardless of rank, institution and first-hand experience—agrees that online education can produce learning outcomes comparable to the traditional classroom. While 21% of all faculty respondents agree or strongly agree that “Online courses can achieve student learning outcomes that are at least equivalent to those in-person courses,” this ranges from 17% of tenured faculty to 25% of part-time faculty and 59% of Technology Administrators. (I would predict lower results had the word “can” not appeared in this question.). All faculty, though, tend to think more highly of their own institution’s capability for quality online courses, with agreement growing to 26%. And those who themselves have taught online are twice as positive as those who only teach in-person. In short, the closer professors are to the actual experience, the most favorable they are. Faculty engaged early and often in online learning become the true believers—and enthusiasts for innovative teaching that seeps into all of their instruction. The key is to make the initial experience positive—by providing adequate support, reward, and respect for the time commitment this takes.

Context matters. The faculty surveyed are more prone to be positive for any one of a number of factors: if an online course is credit-bearing, part of a full degree or certificate program, or offered by an accredited not-for-profit institution, particularly those that offer both online and classroom-based courses and has a proven track record in technology-enhanced education. The institution’s halo establishes confidence in its course offerings, including those online. Online distance learning needs to be woven into the mainstream to seem credible.

The Inside Higher Ed survey substantiates the important role that accreditation plays as gatekeepers in distance learning, even if regional accreditors are just beginning to construct their capability to assess online quality. And those who have taught online value the institution’s track record more so (91%) than those without first-hand experience (79%). Faculty with online experience place a greater emphasis on that experience in determining institutional credibility. These professors perhaps appreciate the important collective element in introducing fully online programs—that it takes a village to deliver a quality distance-learning program. Quality distance-learning programs envelop faculty with the tangible resources to succeed. Institutions with reputations at stake will not leave faculty adrift to create quality online courses.

Drilling down to the components of the learning process, faculty generally believe that the online classroom is most effective at conveying content, but less so in addressing individual student needs (such as interaction in and out of class, especially in reaching students at risk).

Across this survey, tenured faculty emerge as those most leery of the quality of the online classroom. Is this because of their relatively older age? Their conservatism, cautiousness or protective concern for the institution’s reputation? Or simply their relative lack of first-hand familiarity with the online experience? Across this survey, those who have experienced online teaching are more likely to find it equal or superior to in-person teaching especially in conveying content, responding to individual students, grading and communicating to the class. The best way to convert faculty to the cause of online teaching is to have them participate, and ideally more than once. Engagement seems to correlate with support. If skepticism dissipates with experience, what will happen as more and more faculty engage in online teaching themselves?

Just a few years ago, we saw a knee-jerk negativity toward distance learning—both as pedagogy and as relevant to the academic mission. There was a casual association of online and for-profit education, and a tendency to hold upstart alternative means of course delivery to an even higher standard than the conventional classroom. Online was vilified and the traditional classroom glorified. The skeptical spotlight was on new modalities and rarely on the mixed success of prevailing modes of teaching.

But when experience conflicts with beliefs, cognitive dissonance sets in, and those beliefs are forced to adjust. And that is what has been occurring across academe—as professors alter their attitudes toward online education to match the evidence from their own teaching and among colleagues and institutions they respect. A surprising 29% of the faculty respond that they have taken at least one credit-bearing online course—and 49% of those who teach online indicate they had had also been a student in an online course. Fundamental assumptions and beliefs about teaching and learning are slowly being questioned, re-examined and debated. All students—both those who learn at their computer as well as those who attend courses on campuses—will benefit as a result.

Prejudice against the virtual classroom is evolving towards a more balanced view. Academic DNA inevitably generates a healthy skeptical perspective—but faculty minds are now opening up to new possibilities.

Tempered view toward MOOC-mania

America’s faculty, according to this Inside Higher Ed survey, are not swayed by MOOC hoopla. MOOCs are so remote to their world, involve only a tiny fraction of faculty at a still very small number of institutions, and, thus far, do not represent an enviable or desirable form of academic delivery. Only 14% of faculty respondents say MOOCs are offered on their campuses, and 17% say their institutions are planning to offer MOOCs. More than three-quarters of the respondents accuse the news media of overstating the value and importance of MOOCs, and only one-quarter believe MOOCs have great potential for positive impact. The fact that elite universities are offering some MOOCs has done little to improve online learning, according to all but 19% of the respondents. They are simply not persuaded that this is a development that matters much, or at least as much as pundits claim. Those who champion this revolution might very well be underestimating the counter-revolution it likely could generate.

Only 22% are inclined to believe MOOCs are creditworthy, and 67% fault the offering institution for not granting credit to its own students who enroll in MOOCs produced by their own faculty. Only 10% find MOOC completion rates acceptable. However, about half feel that MOOCs have some potential to address the high cost of higher education for students and their families. Only 13% say that MOOCs make them excited for the future of academia. Perhaps this is because any potential impact of MOOCs would be a double-edged sword. To address the challenges of tuition cost and student access, online education would need to become so scalable (with a much higher student-teacher ratio) that fundamental changes in teaching would occur. While adaptive learning, competency-based curricula and sophisticated analytics are very promising, faculty are likely to be concerned that any new structural model that addresses cost inevitably disrupts their roles, independence, satisfaction, and even job security—and likely to be questioning whether MOOCs, pedagogically, are a step forward or backward.

Those elite schools offering MOOCs have done so often outside their own internal and external processes. This skunk-works approach helped launch these efforts, but faculty believe they must now be drawn back in to justify the institution’s brand. Indeed, 81% of those surveyed believe that the accrediting bodies should be evaluating MOOCs, and 82% believe that these first need to be reviewed internally by the institution’s faculty.

Disrupting the advocates of disruption

Despite its spotlight, online teaching is still nascent. Almost three-quarters of all faculty have never taught online, and a surprising 30% of those say they have never been asked to. Robust distance-learning programs are still a minority activity across the vast array of American academe. From this survey, we learn that only 27% of the schools where these faculty teach even have degree programs offered at a distance, and only another 23% of these institutions provide random online courses. (This likely understates reality since faculty might not be aware of particular online efforts at their institution.

This also raises the definitional question of what constitutes an “online” course or program.) Thus, half of America’s institutions might not even be in the business of online education—yet. Though the prophets of disruption are either premature or perhaps sublimating their own hopes, they may yet prove correct as elearning evolves gradually over the decade ahead. But we should not underestimate the resilience and openness to managed change within America’s faculties. Professors may tinker with the technology and integrate it over time into being better teachers—but perhaps with a speed and subtlety that frustrates those calling for quick and comprehensive solutions.

Thus far, the evidence does not suggest that a significant portion of the student population—especially those in the traditional years of college—want to abandon the on-campus experience altogether in favor of distance learning. The excitement of our times is that students at each successive stage of their higher learning now have choices. Opting for newer modes or opportunities does not mean relinquishing traditional ones. The menu simply has grown.

We are still at an early phase — and the Cassandras will need to be a little more patient for patterns to emerge. Responsible academic leaders, observers and writers will need to temper their enthusiasm that online learning will be the panacea for all that ails academe. The overwhelming majority of America’s faculty have little first- or second-hand familiarity with online teaching.

Until they do, they are less likely to fully recognize its value and virtues. Online teaching is still a minority and marginal component of higher education—though rapidly seeping into the mainstream. As it does, we are likely to see its growing acceptance, along with a more discerning view of the benefits and rich diversity that digital technology provides in reaching and educating an ever-growing segment of the population. When that happens we are also likely to hear far fewer generalizations, even in opinion surveys. We could also see a renewed appreciation of the traditional classroom and residential campus.

Jay A. Halfond is former dean of Boston University’s Metropolitan College, on sabbatical before returning as a full-time faculty member at Boston University, and currently the UPCEA Innovation Fellow and Wiley Deltak Faculty Fellow. This originated on the news and opinion Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (www.nebhe.org), on whose editorial advisory board I served.