I desperately wanted to attend the CIC conference for several reasons, but the biggest one was this – every library conference I go to, I always attend to the instructional presentations, excited to hear what other librarians have to say, and I’m frequently let down. Not because the presenters do a poor job, not at ALL, but because often their solutions and experiments are designed for small liberal arts colleges with blissfully small student populations (and their own problems, often involving a too-small library faculty or budget). Their pedagogical solutions, brilliant though they often are, just don’t scale.

The CIC conference was full of librarians who face the same kind of scale challenges, and I really wanted to hear what they had to say, but it turned out that what impacted me the most wasn’t from a librarian at all, but instead from Randall Bass, the conference’s keynote. And this isn’t something that I can package up easily and we can all take to heart and use in the classroom. Instead it’s a question, a challenge that I can’t stop thinking about as a librarian who who both creates online content as well as provides resident instruction. I think it’s a question we all need to think about more and more as time goes on.

Now Bass is a lot of things, a vice-provost and an English professor included. But the most interesting thing about him to me (and I think the conference organizers as a whole) was his third hat, the Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University. The center was created to bridge the gap between emerging technology and pedagogy, and it’s focused on a much more holistic application of pedagogies (both online and otherwise) to student learning processes. Bass spoke a lot about many of their initiatives, but the one that specifically stuck out to me (and has been gnawing at me ever since) goes a little like this. I suppose it could be considered a really dramatic form of flipping the classroom.

Self-directed statistics modules are assigned to students in the early weeks of a semester. Students complete them and their answers are automatically corrected by the system. The results from the modules are forwarded onto the instructor, who then spends the rest of the semester doing very focused instruction on what it is the students have missed, or spent the most time on. Bass compared this very effective model to the diagnostic computers put in cars by manufacturers. These computers can pick out ninety percent of what is wrong with a car – it’s up to mechanics to diagnose the last ten percent.

In the interest of full disclosure, my dad is a mechanic, and he hates those computers with a passion. They are not infallible, and things that would be easy for him to fix are sometimes made infinitely more difficult by the elaborate circuitry that has been added to what should be basic mechanisms of the vehicle. Of course this evidence is, obviously, extremely anecdotal in terms of the effectiveness of such automated systems (in vehicles or in education), however, it did make me turn Bass’ statement over in my head a lot. 

Even if these automated systems are effective, what exactly did it mean? 

Does it mean that we can use these models to teach more and more students since we only need instructors for ten percent of the material? 

Or-

Does it mean that with such models, teachers can be certain that the most troublesome concepts receive the most time and effort?

I think Bass’ answer would be the latter, but there was no time for my question, unfortunately, so I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Every CIC institution has some issue of scale, and again and again, online learning is brought up as a solution for these issues. And if we go out on a limb and use the the statistics course model that Bass presented as the gospel truth for all disciplines (which it may or may not be), ninety percent of instruction CAN be automated. But there’s that last ten percent, the part that computers can’t address, whether it’s in cars or in human learning.

The question to me is this then: Are we going to stretch instructor mediation, giving one instructor the job of ten (since they only have to teach a tenth of the material), or are we going to give one instructor the class time to focus on the problematic ten percent of the content that takes up ninety percent of the students’ effort?

My gut tells me that online elements of learning will never be effective if they are not given the same time and resources as resident instruction, but as we work to increase enrollment, is this even possible? What is it that we are trying to do with online instruction? Are we trying to enrich it as a viable pedagogical format, or are we trying to use it to triple the number of students we have?

I don’t really know the answer we have, but I know the answer I want.