The 90/10 rule

The data technology revolution is here. Because we live in the midst of it, it is hard to see the magnitude of the changes we experience. Many industries have produced tremendous gains in productivity just because they found better ways of shuffling data. For example, truckers used to spend hours on the phone trying to get through to a dispatcher to assign them a load. Now they use their laptops and find a better load in no time. The global trade is impossible without informational flows on goods and capitals movement. Even fishermen and peasants benefit from improved information about market prices. People started to ask questions they have never asked before, and collecting information that was prohibitively expensive to collect before.

What about us? Has higher education, and teacher education in particular, caught up with the revolution? Has our work productivity increased significantly? The answer is no: the cost of K-12 and higher education continues to rise faster than inflation, while no one was able to demonstrate significant gains in academic achievement. So next time when you are buying a $30 DVD player in Wal-Mart, ask yourself why can’t you pay lower tuition for your kids’ colleges. The technological revolution somehow did not affect the core of educational business.

And it is not because universities do not invest in technology; they buy new gadgets all the time, dig tranches for fiber optics, purchase expensive database management systems, and hire consultants to figure out IT problems. In fact, increases in tuition are often justified with the need to purchase new technology. Yet something is wrong: phone companies do not increase their rates because they switch to computers; in fact, they will cut rates because of technology, and that is the whole idea. How come we buy computers and become less efficient? In education, many things are a lot more efficient now: it is easier to register for classes, to pay tuition, and to contact students. Why does it not translate into higher overall productivity? It is clear that the periphery of educational industry has become more efficient, but the core – the business of teaching – has not. K-12 education is a state monopoly, and thus inefficiency can be explained by lack of competition. However, higher education below Ivy League has a robust competition in many areas, and still tuition keeps climbing up. Why is that?

Part of the answer is in the very nature of teaching: it is individualized, laborious process. For example, for my students to make adequate progress in writing skills requires at least three papers a semester. When I grade them I use a number of technology tricks, like Auto Text entries, automatic calculation of total points, and e-mail notification. All these innovations I worked to implement save, oh, maybe 10 percent on my grading time. I still have to read all the papers, make sense of them, and give specific suggestions to each student on how to improve. No machine can do this yet (although ETS is experimenting with computer grading; it is not that good so far, I checked). While there are many ways to improve teaching, and make it more effective, there does not seem to be a way of increase student/teacher ratio without damaging the result; not without some horrendous Lancaster system or similar monstrosity.

Is there a way to do it though? Much of teaching is about information flows, although it is not always the type of information that is easily transferrable through computers. Teaching also involves highly individualized, and reciprocal information exchanges. In class, I can gauge how well students have learned whatever I want to teach, and quickly adjust to meet them half-way. They can ask questions, and engage in multiple participant discussions. So, the problem boils down to the kinds of informational exchanged, not the amount of information.

I believe there could be significant gains in productivity without the loss of quality, if only we overcome cultural and economic barriers. For example, there are no good training videos for teachers. I can find plenty of sugary videos with teacher stories, opinions, inspirational crap, etc. But can anyone point at a set of practical videos, where you would see, say, a first day of classes in elementary school? How about effective ways of dealing with disruptive students in middle school? How to engage a high school class in deep questioning? Given that we train a very large profession, with very high turnover rates, it is amazing to me no one has done it. We send all these hundreds of teacher candidates to more or less random classrooms, instead of carefully selecting truly best practices and showing them to all.

How about a simulation game? Pilots and military officers spend hundreds of hours in virtual reality simulation environments. Not all teaching can be simulated, but a lot of it can be.

And finally, let us take a hard and unsentimental look at what we, university professors, actually do in classrooms. Each one of us has a library of activities, phrases, little stories, and lecture bits we end up delivering again and again and again. Why not record all of this in either text or video format, so we can save energy on doing what we truly need to do differently for each individual student: answering unique questions, giving specific performance feedback, evaluating. Even then, most of the questions are the same, most of student errors and misunderstandings can be separated in a small number of specific groups, much of evaluation involves providing the same or similar feedback.

Of course, there are two barriers: first, the cultural one. We learned to value personal connection with students. They need personal connection when we intimidate them with unresponsive systems, and do not tell them what they need to learn and why. It is not like professors are so cool, students want to hang out with us. If we make our tremendous hoop-jumping machinery a bit more transparent and easy to go through, very few of us would be sought out for advising. Students need good, carefully selected information and specific feedback on how they are doing. Most professors believe (as in religious faith) that face-to-face interaction with a small class is the only form of effective teaching. Of course, none of them ever tried anything else, so their belief is not based on anything rather than blind faith with a pinch of general conservatism and unwillingness to change.

The second barrier is much more difficult to overcome: there is simply no time for me or any other professor to sit down and invest large amounts of time in designing a perfect course that can be delivered partially through video and other technologies. Such a course would require enormous resources. Of course, it could be then replicated hundreds of times, and can pay for itself over and over again. However, there is no mechanism for a university to make these sorts of investments and then benefit from its results.

In our office operations, I advocate a 90/10 rule: 90% of students should take 10% of time, while remaining 10% of students should take 90% of time. This is how things should work. We have to automate most of the processes so that those really needing individual help can have our time and energy. Well, the same rule should apply to teaching itself: 90% of it should only take 10% of professor’s time, so she or he is free to do what we can do best, and where individual attention is truly needed.