Category: Education
Online Education and Jazz
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
Sentences to ponder
A query about MRU
Christina asks on Twitter:
@tylercowen neat!#loyalreaderrequest: a post about how you all think about which courses to add?
The first prerequisite is that the teacher be interested in the material and familiar with current debates. A second issue is that it be readily teachable on-line, though I don’t think it is yet clear which segments of economics fit this bill. My suspicion is that extreme narrative material (economic history, history of economic thought) or purely technical material (“what are the mechanics of covered interest parity?”) will do best here, but that is unproven to say the least. (If that is right, why quality of coverage should be non-monotonic in degree of narrative is an interesting question.) Third, we would like to cover most courses and most fundamentals of economics, in due time, so in part these are issues of sequencing rather than either/or issues of coverage or not.
We will have many more videos coming up today, and in addition to the four new classes we are working on some forthcoming classes too. When using the new MRU page, you can go through the menus. Alternatively, I use visual fields differently than do most people, so I find it easiest to scroll down the page to the “All Videos” section and simply view the entire menu of choice. Up to you.
MRUniversity New Courses!
We have four new courses at MRUniversity and a brand new design! The new courses are
- The Euro Crisis, a 90 minute mini-course over 3 weeks.
- The Economics of Media, 4 hours over 4 weeks.
- The American Housing Finance System, 15 hours running to June taught by Arnold Kling.
- Mexico’s Economy, a 4.5 hour course over 4 weeks taught by Robin Grier.
You can find our more about all of the courses at MRUniversity. Lots of new features as well. After registering, for example, you can click the “Follow this Course” button on the main course page and receive weekly email updates on course content, video chats and what other MRU users are up to. We have also made it easy to add material by clicking the “User Contribution” section under the videos. There you can add videos, research, news and opinions related to the video. We’ll feature the best user contributions on our homepage.
Also do check out the new home page and be sure to scroll down to see The List, all of our videos released so far. And remember, all of our videos are freely available for non-commercial use. If you teach economics or related material feel free to assign a video for homework or try flipping the classroom!
Even more courses coming soon!
Finally, a big hat tip to MRU’s web guru and program manager, Roman Hardgrave, who has done a stellar job on the new features and design.
The culture that is New York/Los Angeles? (nanny markets in everything)
Dr. Heller, or the Nanny Doctor, as she calls herself (she has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology), is a consultant for an age of anxious parenting, acting as a mediator of sorts for parent and caretaker, at a rate of $200 an hour. She draws from her experiences, both as a mother to two daughters under 3 (she is married to Matt Donnelly, a TV writer), and as a former nanny to clients like the director Stephen Gaghan and his wife, Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer and socialite.
“I remember her solving a conflict with the kids, who were 5 and 6,” Ms. Mortimer said. “She had them calm down and use their ‘I’ statements. Our little girl said, ‘I don’t feel safe when you throw a Lego at my head.’ Our boy said, ‘I feel that throwing a Lego at your head is the only way to get your attention.’ She treated them with such respect and dignity.”
The article is here. For the pointer I thank @DanielMoerner.
The smell test for an academic paper
As recently as the 1990s, you could pick up an academic paper in economics and by examining the techniques, the citations, how clearly the model was explained, and so on, you could arrive pretty quickly at a decent sense of how good a paper it was.
Today there are still many evidently bad papers, but also many more papers where “the bodies” are buried much more deeply. There are many more credible “contender papers” where the mistakes and limitations are far from transparent and yet the paper is totally wrong or misguided. For instance, it is easier to “produce” a novel and striking result with falsified privately-built data than with publicly available macro data, which already have been studied to death and do not yield new secrets easily if at all.
One implied prediction is that a small number of absolute frauds will do quite well professionally. Another prediction is that having close (and reputable) associates to vouch for you will go up in value. (How reliable a method of certification is that in fact?) It may be harder for some outsiders to rise to the top, given the greater difficulty of those outsiders in obtaining credible personal certification. What would you think of a new paper from Belarus, or how about Changchun, which appeared to overturn all previous results?
What else can we expect?
I do not think we are ready for an academic world where our smell test does not work very well.
Solve for the equilibrium
Most people assume a degree in the arts is no guarantee of riches. Now there is evidence that such graduates also rack up the most student-loan debt.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of new Department of Education data shows that median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design average $21,576, which works out to a loan payment of about $248 a month. That is a heavy burden, considering that salaries for graduates of such schools with five or fewer years’ experience cluster around $40,000, according to PayScale.com.
The story is here. And here is some sad news in particular:
New York’s Manhattan School of Music had the second-highest median debt load, at $47,000. Graduates with up to five years’ experience earn an average of $42,700, according to PayScale.
Which school is number one?:
Among the 4,000 colleges and universities in the federal database, the Creative Center in Omaha, Neb., a for-profit school that offers a three-year bachelor’s in fine arts, had the highest average debt load, at $52,035. Median pay for graduates of the school with five or fewer years’ experience is $31,400, according to PayScale.com.
I say that’s a school in future financial trouble.
Sentences to ponder
The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, announced Tuesday that he would step down from the leadership of the prestigious science- and math-oriented campus in Pasadena at the end of the current school year and become head of a new and well-endowed university in Saudi Arabia.
Here is more. The school is:
…the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. The graduate-level school enrolled its first students in 2009 and, in English, educates men and women together, to the dismay of some Islamic fundamentalists. It was founded with a $10-billion endowment from the oil-rich Saudi royal family.
The current endowment of Caltech is about $1.9 billion. It is believed that Chameau will be receiving a raise in pay. By the way, KAUST seems to have no social sciences or humanities.
From my email, about the deadweight loss of Valentine’s Day
Consider:
Single people report feelings of inadequacy, anxiety.
People in relationships suffer from the tyranny of expectations. Good experiences are met with hedonic adaptation, bad experiences can be, I’m reliably informed, remembered for decades.
Florists, restaurateurs, etc., demand – and receive – excess producer surplus for their services.For years, my solution has been to randomly select a surprise Valentine’s day substitute. Our private utility is well served (the wife loves the arrangement), and as a bonus I think I am minimizing the negative consumption externality.
In my estimation, 1 and 2 outweigh 3, resulting in a deadweight loss. I’m not a naive utilitarian; yes, I understand there is value in signaling, and, believe it or not, I’m a romantic. I just think that by coordinating this behavior in holiday form we suffer on both demand side (expectations, zero-sum positional goods) and supply (constraints in providing flowers, restaurant tables).
That is from Shiraz Allidina, MR reader.
High School Safety in Northern Virginia
Here is a letter I wrote to the principal of my son’s high school:
Dear Principal _____,
Thank you for requesting feedback about the installation of interior cameras at the high school. I am against the use of cameras. I visited the school recently to pick up my son and it was like visiting a prison. A police car often sits outside the school and upon entry a security guard directs visitors to the main office where the visitor’s drivers license is scanned and information including date of birth is collected (is this information checked against other records and kept in a database for future reference? It’s unclear). The visitor is then photographed and issued a photo pass. I found the experience oppressive. Adding cameras will only add to the prison-like atmosphere. The response, of course, will be that these measures are necessary for “safety.” As with security measures at the airports I doubt that these measures increase actual safety, instead they are security theater, a play that we put on that looks like security but really is not.
Moreover, the truth is that American children have never been safer than they are today. Overall youth mortality (ages 5-14) has fallen from 60 per 100,000 in 1950 to 13.1 per 100,000 today (CDC, Vital Statistics). Yet we hide in gated communities, homes and schools as never before.
When we surround our students with security we are implicitly telling them that the world is dangerous; we are whispering in their ear, ‘be afraid, do not venture out, take no risks.’ When going to school requires police, security guards and cameras how can I encourage my child to travel to foreign countries, to seek new experiences, to meet people of different faiths, beliefs and backgrounds? When my child leaves school how will the atmosphere of fear that he has grown up in affect his view of the world and the choices he will make as a citizen in our democracy? School teaches more than words in books.
Yours sincerely,
Alex Tabarrok
Interview with James Heckman
More than just the usual, this is a real interview, recommended. Excerpt:
James Heckman: Well, the reason why I’m skeptical is that the most salient work on Head Start is this new evaluation which came out last October. It actually came out later than I responded to Deming. I am skeptical for the following reason. It’s really heterogeneous, and I’m sure there are some very high quality programs and some very weak ones. The latest study showed very weak effects. That was a short-term followup. Head Start has never had a long-term followup.
I was surprised by the extent to which he defends Head Start, and to the extent he sees part of that program as Perry follow-ups.
TANSTAAFL?
Love actually rings in at $43,842.08, according to RateSupermarket.ca, which has calculated the price tag of the typical modern relationship – from a one-year courtship, followed by a one-year engagement to the wedding day.
And it is itemized:
The Toronto-based independent financial products comparison website pegs the price of courtship at $6,936.74. That includes a dozen “fancy dates” (nice restaurants and theatre tickets), a dozen movie dates, 36 “casual dates” (take-out food, coffee and movie rentals), weekend getaways, a beach vacation plus random other expenses for things such as “apology flowers,” treats and new clothes.
The engagement period rings in at $9,944.34, which includes more dates, an engagement party with a price tag of $2,000 and the big ticket item, a ring with an average estimated cost of $3,500. (The popular wedding website TheKnot.com estimates that cost at around $5,000, but RateSupermarket.ca pointed that that it doesn’t consider rings purchased from lower-end retailers such as Walmart.)
Oh, and the wedding? Well that’s another $26,961.
Here is more, with the pointer from Chad R.
What do I think of Obama’s universal pre-school proposal?
Of course there are no significant details yet, but here are a few points.
1. The evidence that this can be done effectively in a scalable manner is basically zero. Aren’t massive policies (possibly universal?) supposed to be based on evidence? (How about running a large-scale RCT first, a’la the Rand health insurance experiment? And by the way, here is a quick look at the evidence we have on pre-school, and here, not nearly skeptical enough in my view. And think in terms of lasting results, not getting kids to read nine months earlier, etc. You can find evidence for persistent math gains in Tulsa, OK, but no CBA.)
2. That doesn’t mean we should do nothing.
3. Let’s say we have “the political will” to do something effective (debatable, of course). Is adding on another layer of education, and building that up more or less from scratch in many cases, better than fixing the often quite broken systems we have now? I know well all the claims about “needing to get kids early,” but is current kindergarten so late in life? Why not have much better kindergartens and first and second grade experiences in the ailing school districts? Or is the claim that by kindergarten “it is too late,” yet a well-executed government early education could fix the relevant problems if applied at ages three to four? Would such a claim mean that we are currently writing off many millions of American children, as it stands now?
4. This is what federalism is for. Let’s have an experiment emanating from the state and/or local level.
5. What should we infer from the fact that no such truly broad-based state-level experiment has happened yet? (Georgia and Oklahoma have come closest.) That the states are lacking in vision, relative to the Presidency? Or that a workable version of the idea is hard to come up with, execute, and sell to voters?
6. In Finland government education doesn’t really touch the kids until they are six years old. Don’t they have a very good system? Some call it the world’s best. Maybe the early years are very important, but perhaps pre-schooling is not the key missing piece of the puzzle. (NB: See the comments for dissenting views on Finland.)
Addendum: Here are good comments from Reihan. See also this Brookings study: “This thin empirical gruel will not satisfy policymakers who want to practice evidence-based education.”
Sentences about France
…nearly 40 percent of French 15-year-olds have repeated at least one grade — three times the O.E.C.D. average.
And:
“This is the only country I know where the adults work 35 hours a week, but they expect their kids to work more,” said Peter Gumbel…
The story is here, interesting throughout.
Bruce Caldwell emails me
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics this summer, June 2-21. The three week program is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and is designed primarily for faculty members in economics, other social sciences, and the humanities, though three of the twenty-five slots are reserved for graduate students. Participants will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive a $2700 stipend for attending, out of which they will pay for their own room and board. Our line-up of discussion leaders is pretty impressive, and includes scholars from economics, political science, and history. The deadline for applying is March 4. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, http://hope.econ.duke.edu
This is a superb program and I recommend it heartily.