From Business Week (2 April 2018) about Russian startup Robot Vera:
“The co-founders, with a background in human resources, two years ago found themselves making hundreds of calls to candidates who’s lost interest in the given job or couldn’t be located. ‘We felt like robots ourselves, so we figured it was better to automate the task,’ [cofounder] Uraksin says.”
Ever feel like a robot teaching online? I know I do. Hours of time spend adjusting grades, putting in zeros for incomplete assignments, activating rubrics. Clicking to sort student names, clicking down three levels to send a student a message. I can imagine myself as a Victorian metallic automaton, typing on my computer instead of writing with my quill, mousing around, click, click, click.
Then there’s grading. I’m really fast. I can read an assignment quickly and click the appropriate boxes on the rubric. I know exactly what to look for, because the whole thing is my design. Click, click. But I have good rubrics, that give meaningful feedback to students, so that takes time to do well. Click, click.
So from the Robot Vera perspective (and that of everyone discussing automation taking over jobs), I have to ask: what part of my job should be automated? So many of the things I thought would be done by the machine, after two decades teaching online, are not. Stupid tasks take much of my time. Even auto-grading has to be double-checked (I change about 20% of auto-graded items). I don’t call support for actual help doing or creating things with the system – I get the system. I call because something horrid and unexpected happened, and 9 times out of 10, it’s because I left a box unchecked, or neglected to use a particular combination of settings. Because I wasn’t, in other words, a good enough automaton.
What would happen if I automated everything that makes me feel like a robot? Marking, grading, tracking, checking outcomes, planning courses according to state mandates to which I am opposed?
Would I have more time to do the actual teaching, the contact with students, the individual discussions, the leading of in-depth conversations? Wouldn’t that feel less robotic, like I’m a person who cannot be replaced by an automaton?
I have already noticed that handing off the grading of primary sources to my students, having them do a checklist to get the grade for their post each week, allows me time to instead respond to the sources, note connections, give feedback so they can fix their work and “earn” the points they gave themselves, encourage them to return and see the work of their colleagues. I get a better view of what’s happening, with human eyes.
I can also respond individually to their auto-graded Lecture Notes (2 points if you turn it in). Doing that this week for the first time, several students took the opportunity to engage in private discussion with me, and it was about the history, not the grades.
So instead of resisting automation, I will continue to grapple with how to make it work for us all. Because, as usual, the simplification of the problem does not reflect reality. The simple version is just a dichotomy: teacher-involved OR auto-graded. But (in current trendy parlance) it can be and. I suspect it can even be because of – because there is auto-grading, I can be more involved as a teacher.
The ideas I’m exploring (student independence, teaching as modeling and demonstrating, learning as practicing and reflecting, and transferring the burden of learning) fit well with some automating if it gives me the freedom to do what I do best: that old-fashioned human teaching. So hand me that can of oil…
[A comment from JMM, from my old blog:]
If you Flex it, I will come. (Even if you don’t Flex it, seeing as how I have 80 zillion Flex hours by the second month of the year.)
I want to learn how to do auto-grading. Yes, because I’m so overwhelmed by grading that I can’t keep up, but also because it sounds an awful lot like Learning The Material and Improving Your Own Work By, OMG what a concept, Looking At It Critically.
I am one of those who believe you can’t teach writing. You can, however, learn to write. You can even learn to write really, really well: you can learn to write like Auden if you work really hard.
You learn to write by reading great writers, admiring their use of words and their command of syntax and trying to make those dizzying skills yours. If you start when you’re, say, 10, it takes about 20 years: hence the existence of “30 Under 30” writing prizes. Most ten-year-olds are doing something else with their afternoons.
If you do not want to learn how to write, you don’t have to and likely won’t. I’ve never wanted to learn how to wax my legs or play rugby or deep-fry a turducken, and voila: I can’t do any of those things. If I were forced into a leg-waxing class (say, as a consequence of the Trump presidency), I would be a bitter C student at best. My work would be half-assed, done with minimal effort twenty minutes before class. I would not see a tutor. I would (perhaps) develop an arsenal of dying relatives and sudden out-of-town emergencies. I would cut as many classes as I could. If it were possible and I thought I could get away with it I would cheat, and as soon as the class was over I would collapse in relief and residual anger at having wasted my time on it, never wax my legs again, and wonder at those who do.
This is why compulsory education does not work, and autodidacts do.
And this brings me (at last! thank god!) to self-grading. It seems to me that self-grading done well–as I’m sure Lisa does, because she’s a genius–would be the best method by which a student could improve his/her skills and knowledge. The student who doesn’t want to improve might have to anyway, just by slogging through the process: I don’t know.
Whether self-grading can be applied to writing remains to be seen, but I’m up for the experiment. Summer lessons, Ms. Lane? I’ll do my homework and provide lunch…
I’m in for lunch so long as no leg-waxing is involved. My legs hurt just thinking about it.
And I feel obligated to cop to having been a 10 year old with nothing better do with my afternoons than go to the library.
I am working with some interesting stuff on distance ed theory (more later) claiming that immediate feedback is of far more importance than is usually assumed.
But I’m not sure I can “make” them improve.. I do have a scaffolded process for writing, and it will likely remain the only area where I do not want auto-grade or self-grade, but where general feedback is rubricked (is that a word?0 and individual feedback is minimal and focused, a shortcut for those who want to improve, and not too much reading (and writing for me) for those who aren’t interested.