End of the University Part II/III : online education

Oh dear. Everybody knows you should never write Paper I unless you really are going to do Papers II, III etc. Posterity looks unkindly on failed pomposity. Back in November I wrote End of the University : Part I which was about the Browne report and a naive approach to “student choice”. I think perhaps I can count The Big REF Gamble as Part II – lots of us are investing for success, hiring new staff before the REF, but we can’t all win. These are both examples of market disruption, which may force a re-structuring. You may have various opinions on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

So what about good old disruptive technology? The music business got turned upside down by the internet and file sharing, and the book business is likewise in turmoil. The disruptive technology here is the ease of copying. The reaction of entrenched commercial interests was the development of digital restrictions management. Whatever you think of that, the market structures are re-forming, and we need to get used to the idea that we don’t own works of art, we rent them – or if you like, we pay for performances. Of course the logic that follows is that payment for performance should go straight to the artist – who needs the middleman?

So can the same thing happen to education? They key thing here is not ease of copying but economy of scale. Hundreds of years ago we invented lectures so we could teach 150 students at a time instead of 5. Now we can do thousands at a time. My own university has started its own experimentation with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). My colleague Charles Cockell ran a five week course in Astrobiology. Forty-one thousand students registered, and five thousand survived the whole course. I am toying with another course idea myself, along with the boundlessly energetic Dr H. Well this is very exciting of course, but you start to wonder why anybody would pay nine thousand sponduliks for a university degree from the University of West Somerset when they can sit on their sofa and take courses from Harvard…

One answer is assessment and another is feedback, and the whole business of giving credit. Marking exams has not gotten any more efficient, and likewise the provision of individual feedback. Multiple Choice Quizzes are good, but not enough. If somebody can solve this problem, things will really change. This recent Guardian article reports the debate in California about whether MOOCs will allow private providers to move into education.

Meanwhile, it could well be that content delivery and assessment will decouple. Oh what interesting times.

Pippa Plugging (and a bit of Chas)

Had a rather jolly evening last night. I went to a book launch. I’d never been to one before and didn’t quite know what to expect – lots of air kissing and long fingernails I guess. In fact it was full of nice normal looking peoples, who divided into three tribes – aspiring writers, civil servants, and astronomers. The common link you see is that they were all friends of Pippa Goldschmidt, who just published her first novel, The Falling Sky. Some of you will know that Pippa used to be an astronomer in Edinburgh and Imperial, then moved into government, and has now re-invented herself again as a writer. You can buy the book from Amazon, or, if you prefer to support the UK tax system, from Freight Books. The novel is about a young female astronomer who makes an unexpected discovery which at first is very exciting but which throws her career into confusion and hostility, at the same time as her personal life is unravelling. Thats enough given away. I just finished reading it, and its really v.good indeed. I hope a lot of astronomers will read it, and half of them will think they know who the characters are. Here is a picture of a happy Pippa at the launch, with her PhD supervisor Lance Miller. Who is DEFINITELY not The Deathstar.

The Internut is a wondrous thing, as we daily re-discover. I found myself thinking how intriguing it is to finally see someone portray the real life of a scientist so accurately. There are books and movies and plays about famous scientists like Galileo and so forth, and of course squilliards of entertainments featuring nutty or mad scientists, but how often do you see real ordinary scientists? So I Googled “Scientists in Fiction” and found that there is an entire web magazine devoted to this subject – the rather marvelous LabLit.com. It has a long list of books I now want to read. Thats me sorted for about thirty more birthdays. (He said optimistically).

Its been a good month for astronomically related authors. Old RGO chum Chas Parker has just published his fourth – no hang on – his fifth – book about motor racing. His Amazon page is here. Somewhere in deepest Sussex, Chas still has my beard in a tin, but I can’t explain why without breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Korean controversy posturing

Emerging from a spot of lurgi so maybe just a  postette.

I just watched the controversial Korean undercover documentary. Given the fuss, I was surprised to see there was no mention of students whatsoever. They just said they were on a tour. If the LSE hadn’t made a fuss, no-one would have had any idea that students were involved. Now … it may or not be that the film makers dealt fairly or safely with the students. Thats between the BBC and the students concerned. How has it got anything to do with the LSE? As far as I have been able to tell, it wasn’t an official LSE trip, an LSE-organised trip, or an LSE-branded trip. They just happened to be students from an LSE student society. The LSE do not own these students. They are adults. As said very nicely in this piece by Robin Lustig it just sounds like “nobody told us” harrumphing.

But depressingly, Universities UK and even the Royal Society are  taking a line supporting the LSE, saying that it threatens the ability of UK universities to be trusted abroad. Pardon my French, but absolute bollocks. Pompous posturing. And also quite shocking to be blustering about such a thing when the people of Korea are starving and its leaders may launch an international war.

Again, let me stress that I cannot tell whether the BBC was sensible in their dealings with students – I think they probably were, but the public evidence so far is contradictory. But it has nothing to do with UK Universities in a corporate sense or the Royal Society.

How depressing.

Tieless in Gaza

Party at Professor P’s house last night. We were celebrating our three new appointments and bonding and stuff. Three? Well, our REF gamble is going to work, don’t you know. Of course one of those three is what our American chums call “Faculty shuffle” – or perhaps electron-hole jumping in a a semiconductor is a better analogy. Professor H went orff to Imperial; Prof L left Sussex to come here; Professor C left Cardiff to fill the hole in Sussex. Professor WT had already left Cardiff City for Preston North End, so things might get exciting in Wales.

I was a bit late because I had been gulping vino at government expense at the Scottish Parliament, where there was a reception attached to an exhibition about the Large Hadron Collider. (You can see the exhibition on Parliament TV ! Check out the “Partical Physicist”) Earlier in the day, Wommers had I understand been giving the Science and Technology Committee a pitch on how good this stuff is for the Scottish Economy. He also gave a wee speech at the reception of course, but was correctly upstaged by the (late) appearance of Peter Higgs. Yesterday I referred to Peter as being “quarter house trained” but really should have explained that Peter has  got it just right. He allows himself to be paraded around and lionised wherever this is good for science, but never loses his shyness, modesty and general nice guyness. In his speech he basically told us to be proud of the engineers who built the LHC. He did also apologise for all the work that “we theoreticians” had put them too. Wommers picked up on this but added that he wasn’t so sure about “who-ever invented supersymmetry”.

More than one person raised an eyebrow at my lack of tie at this august gathering. OK, couldn’t resist the title. Never read Milton, but a big Aldous Huxley fan. Not that I am suggesting that at the reception I was in chains and pulled down the temple and all that. Just got a few sniffy looks.  Later at Professor P’s party, Dr F said that I shouldn’t go thinking of myself as a dangerous radical, otherwise I would have worn a skirt.

The Big REF gamble

Three days in a row? Crumbs. Better do some real work soon.

Interesting but perhaps not surprising that the reactions to yesterdays Tricky Dicky post were all about University PR and Corporatism. Universities are in a tricky situation; its quite right that they should be more business-like, but not that they should be run as businesses. Education is not simply a commercial transaction; but we do have to balance the books, attract students, maintain a brand, and so on.

The public worry tends to concentrate on what the evolution of student fees is doing to the university infrastructure. (Or at least the English infrastructure; Scotland is a kind of giant experimental control…) Everybody is obsessed with bums on seats, and with the ghastly Key Information Sets etc (see this post). Market forces will mean that some thrive and some sink.

But thats only half of it. The other half of our income comes from research funding, and most of that still comes through HEFCE, SFC etc. This is why we are all panicking about the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF). The money we get will depend in an unknown but certainly highly non-linear way on our gradings. Universities are being very entrepreneurial about this : there has been a burst of academic recruitments, getting fresh young stars in just in time to count their papers.

If this works, you are in the money; if however your grading comes out low, you are stuffed. Stuck with a salary bill you can’t pay.

Maybe, like RBS, when some big universities fail, the government will buy 80% of them.

Smoking Lectures

I am down in Sunny Sussex. My seafront hotel satisfies all the Brighton cliches. Expecting to meet Dickie Attenborough in the pub with Julian Clary any moment, after an invigorating windy spray-sodden walk following my greasy spoon breakfast.

Anyhoo. I was here last night for Seb Oliver’s inaugural public lecture, and a jolly fine occasion it was too. It was called “Smoke signals from the distant universe” and featured Herschel heavily as well as some fun demos involving TV remote controls, infra-red cameras, and smoke bombs. Rumour has it that the VC was pleased, which is what really matters of course. Chatter afterwards over the canapes was that he was heard to note that Scientists did these things better than Humanities types. Some of my fellow chatterers nodded, reminiscing about English and History inaugurals where the New Prof offered a dry reading-out of a written script, like a spoken essay, before a bemused public.

As a student, I can remember crashing the lectures of some arty friends and being a bit shocked – same thing… stand at lectern, read out essay, no eye contact. Is it still like that ? Any Humanities-type readers out there or is this purely a nerd-filled zone ?

It was suggested that lively public lectures is a scientific tradition because we all had childhood radio/TV role models – Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan, Brainy Cox etc. But hang on, what about Kenneth Clarke, Bettany Hughes, Neil Oliver etc ? So perhaps the two provocative questions would be :

• Why is TV History so wonderful when Academic History is so awful ?
• When Historians do public lectures, they treat it as a version of academia; whereas when we do public lectures, our instinct is to treat it like TV … why ?

TTFN.

Accidents do happen

Maybe time to move on from the religion wars.

In case you hadn’t heard, there was an accident recently at the 4m Blanco telescope at CTIO. The f/8 secondary had been removed to allow the installation of the camera for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). At first I heard a rumour it had actually fallen out, but it wasn’t quite that dramatic. The cart carrrying it on the dome floor toppled over. Two technicians were injured, but it seems they will be ok. The mirror is cracked. DES soldiers on apparently.

I guess we should be grateful it wasn’t worse in human terms. Telescopes are huge chunks of balanced metal and glass, and their infrastructure is chock full of electrical, chemical, and mechanical hazards.

I just know that every infra-red astronomer over a certain age is thinking of Marc Aaronson. Marc was killed in 1987 in a freak accident at Blanco’s twin, the 4m Mayall telescope on Kitt Peak. He was crushed by the revolving dome. The NY times news article is here  and there is a Wikipedia page  about Marc. Steward Observatory set up a Memorial Lectureship, which has  has had some very distinguished holders, including two subsequent Nobel prize winners.

I am aware of other close calls. The week before one of my WHT observing runs, a parked car was destroyed by a huge slab of ice sliding off the dome. Nobody was inside, luckily. They don’t park there any more. Visitors to the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii may recall a scary photo just above the reception hatch, which I reproduce here.

This is what happens if you drive too fast on the Mauna Kea summit road. This picture is actually from the wall in JAC. I don't know who took it. I think this is a scan of a 35mm slide of a picture I took of the picture many years ago !

Academics hate bureaucracy of course. A favourite whinge is  “Health and Safety”. Well, I guess its true that it is often the victim of administrative excess … but … accidents do happen, boys and girls.

Admissions : Scottish Paranoia episode 2,317

News from UCAS this morning about the idea of post-result applications triggered a Scottish grump. I am not Scottish, but as soon as you have lived here for a bit you develop the small-partner paranoia thing. You are watching TV and some Holywood starlet plonks down  on the chat show couch and the host says “Welcome to English TV” and the starlet says “I love England !”. You start waving at the TV and shouting HELLO we are here too !

Anyhoo. So anyway. UCAS are flying a kite, wondering if things could be a bit simpler if “UK university applications” were made after A-level results were known. The problem of course is that the timing is a bit tight. Maybe A-levels will have to be three weeks earlier. Listening to this on Beeb Radio 4, I was assuming that any moment somebody would mention the fact that Scottish students applying to Scottish Universities can apply on the basis of their Highers results while they are still doing their Advanced Highers year, and a large fraction get offers on the basis of their Highers. Sometimes you put a condition on the Advanced Higher , but a large fraction at least are sorted in advance. So it seems like we already solved this problem.

Not a dicky bird. The guardian has an interestingly different spin on it, but still no Scottish perspective.

Bibliography Blues

The JWST discussion is getting vairy interesting. But meanwhile life continues. There are students to meet and papers to write. I am trying to finish writing up something I have been fiddling with for yonks. Let me burden you with three niggles about writin’ papers these days. The first of these I already tried out on the Twittersphere, but got a three-way split, so I am trying again….

We are not amused

I am writing a single author paper. Do I go for “I” or “we” or the passive voice ? Nothing seems right…

“In this paper, I consider the effect of X on Y…” Sounds a bit arrogant.

“In this paper, we consider…” So, Andy, is that the royal we ? Or are you having a personality crisis ?

“The effect of X on Y is considered…” By who ? Sounds a tad dry and formal.

Gaagh. What do I do ? I am bound to be wrong.

MNRAS long author list bug

Like many of you, I use BibTeX, and when writing a MNRAS paper, use the standard Blackwell supplied  LateX stuff including mn2e.bst file and a \bibliographystyle{mn2e} command. Mostly this works fine, but if you have a paper with a very long author list, it throws up an error when you run BibTeX:

Warning-you’ve exceeded 250, the entry-string-size, for entry Crenshaw1996 while executing-line 1223 of file mn2e.bst . Please notify the bibstyle designer.

and then LaTeX compilation bombs. Previously I have just excluded that paper and then added another \bibitem by hand. The Blackwell folk know this is a problem, because the README says

Note that there is a known bug in the .bst file: for very long author lists BibTeX reports an error. We are aware of the problem and hope to correct this in a future release

Unfortunately the README has said the same thing since Feb 2001. However, as often in geekdom, the community rides to its own rescue. I found a fix  written by Michael Williams at MPE. His file has the same name as the official Blackwell version, but I renamed it when downloading so I would know when I am using the fixed version. Thank you Michael !

Ex Libris Xerxes

What do people use these days for collecting and sorting their private libraries of research papers ? I have been oscillating around various options and not quite stabilising. At two ends, the constraints are clear. One wants a .bib database for squirting things into our LaTeX documents; and one wants to grab things from ADS and arXiv . In ADS itself you can construct private libraries and export them, and I use this a fair bit, but it doesn’t give me the sort of hands-on metadata editing I sometimes want, or the sorting, grouping, tagging and general manipulative ability that you want. For that sort of thing, there are quite a few commercial packages, like EndNote, Papers, Bookends, etc, but I have always used the free Java app Jabref. This is v.good, but it doesn’t give me the ability to grab and add things from ADS.

Some publishers have tried to solve this problem via a web interface, and of course lock you into their world while they are at it. Springer tried CiteULike  (worst —  name — ever) and Nature publishing tried Connotea . Being server hosted, they can add a social networking side. Join a group, share your favourite papers with your chums etc. Then I discovered Zotero. This is a kind of hybrid. Its a firefox extension that feels like a proper app but works with ADS, giving a one-click import. It has FOLDERS not just bloody tags so you can organise things just as you want them. But it also has that social groupy thingy. Its lovely. But I wanted to use Chrome… or at least not be locked into Firefox. So I decided to give it up.

So then I discovered that the trendy young things these days use Mendeley. It is a commercial enterprise, but with an open feel. The basic version is free, but you pay for premium service like more storage and extra features. There is a desktop client and a server side, so they try to get the best of both worlds that way, but that does mean you have to keep synchronising. The most annoying thing has bee the lack of sub-folders (I like a hierarchy myself) but I heard a rumour the new version fixes this.

So anyway I will keep at it for a while. But right now my chain of action is (i) Browse ADS. (ii) Grab into Mendeley. (iii) Export folders to bibtex. (iv) Fiddle with bibtex with Jabref (v) Run LaTeX.

There is probably a discussion on Astrobetter  somewhere, but of course I can’t be arsed to go and look for it. Stufff to do.

Education, Education, Education : Cost, Cost, Cost

Whats the word I am looking for ? Chutzpah ? Brass Neck ? Arrogance ? Yet again, the coalition government are launching into an extra-ordinarily radical reform agenda with no mandate whatsoever. I refer of course to the appearance of David Willetts this morning on the Today programme, trailing the HE White Paper that isn’t even out yet. You can listen to the interview here, and read summaries from the Guardian and the THE; and here is the opposition response from, John Denham.  The pitch is (i) More power to the student with the money ! (ii) More competition please ! (iii) More concentration on teaching quality !  (iv) More information so students can decide !

Some concrete ideas seem to be (i) Remove the quota on places. (ii) Universities must publish information on employment outcomes of degrees (iii) Universities must publish data on contact hours. (iv) Universities must account for how they use fees. (v) Courses that employers don’t like should be scrapped.

Why is this happening ? Whats broke that needs fixing ? Well partly its the good old “profit motive fixes everything”, but mostly its about COSTS. Government wants large fraction of people to have HE. But can’t afford this from public purse. So get universities to charge the customer. But this is impossible for most families  unless big loans are available, so government has to cough up in first instance. Mega cash flow problem unless universities bring in full fees a little bit slower please. Ooops. Everybody wants to charge 9000 NOW. Ok. Only option is force some universities to get cheaper. Drive them into competition and let some go to the wall unless they develop cut price versions.

I am not sure I am totally against more university competition. But please don’t believe any of the bollocks about improving student experience etc. Its exactly the opposite. The whole thing only adds up if some universities are dirt cheap, and offer an experience to match. OK, so this is a real option. Lets be open minded. But lets call a pig a pig.

If you are upset enough, you can sign a no confidence petition here.

Oh .. and .. anybody know what will happen in Scotland ?