MOOC Participation: Diversity and Assumptions of Development

Continuing my series of posts about MOOCs. Today’s is about a type of open/development rhetoric I keep hearing associated with MOOCs. It’s well meant I am quite sure, but I’ve heard the following sentiment: MOOCs will allow anyone from any continent to access content. And that in turn leads to increased education, skills for all.

I have a number of problems with this argument.

Starting with the obvious, this sentiment makes important assumptions about access. That access to the Internet and its content is uniform across the world. But it’s not. The Internet is a very different experience if you have a smartphone as your only means of access, versus if you have a laptop. Behind the hardware, there are questions of corporate policies and pricing mechanisms that influence access. Bandwidth caps, bandwidth pricing can influence how people use their phones, and in many parts of the world also how they use the wired network.

Behind these crucial practical questions of access lurk other assumptions, which warrant questioning. Is the content we create relevant or useful for everyone? What assumptions do the producers of content make about, say, what has been previously taught? What assumptions are made about the types of hardware and software the students have access too? And most critically, what assumptions get made about why the person is taking the course and whether that content will ultimately be most useful?

Although its not used too much, I have heard the word “Africa” used to describe diversity. I do think its well meant but it has the danger to collapse all of these questions into a stereotype of a person. Africa is not a person, nor is it a country, it’s a continent of great diversity in all senses. A person from Africa may well contribute to diversity in a MOOC setting, but so might a person from America.

Like others, I see this as being part of understanding the participation divide that shapes the Internet today. Some of that divide is the question of access, its costs, modalities, and so forth. But that’s not all that shapes the participation divide. When we overly simplify an entire continent we close down the question of what shapes participation in very problematic ways. If we are really committed to understanding how online education might help more people learn, the participation divide is precisely the question we ought to open up, to really take account of the highly diverse population of people that have some reach to the Internet. Because it’s only when we actually take diversity seriously that we have any shot at getting to something better than more education for the already well educated.

MOOC Diversity

My colleagues, perhaps like yours, are discussing MOOCs a lot. I’ve got my own set of reservations about them, but today I want to focus on a question. How diverse are the instructors of MOOCs and what implications does that have for increasing diversity in STEM fields?

Recently my colleague, Mark Guzdial, argued that we should do no harm via a MOOC. His point was simple, that MOOCs could reverse the decades of hard-won efforts to diversify Computer Science. I know from experience, every single time I teach Computer Science classes just how non-diverse Computing remains. I’ve been in the situation of doubling the number of women in the class more than once (especially when I have a female TA). It would be nice to get away from that.

And then I saw my colleague, Tucker Balch’s, demographics from his MOOC. Wow! Highly educated men dominated the people who completed his course. As Mark points out in his analysis of Tucker’s demographics, some of this is likely due to the nature of the course, particularly it being an elective (Computational Finance).

This led me to my question. I wonder what diversity is like on the other side, among the faculty who offer MOOCs? And I offer my story of how I stayed in STEM as an example of why I think it matters. My first Computer Science teacher was a woman. She watched out for me and the other one or two women in the class. I remember that she encouraged me, took time to talk to me beyond the content of the classroom… and so I stayed for two years in a classroom with over 25 14-16 year old boys. (I think this deserves a OBE).

This continued with my second teacher, a man. The class was very small, seven and I was the only woman. The advantage of the small class was that we all got to know each other well, perhaps too well. Some boys of 16-18 well, boosting, talking about sex and women in ways that weren’t exactly flattering…  My teacher recognized that this was hard for me, and spent time talking with me about why I should persist despite it. He taught me that developing trust, taking time with an individual student outside of the academic content, could be crucial to inspiring the type of trust that would lead to confidence.

I needed those two teachers. I needed them very much. They are without doubt the reason I am still here. Especially since while I had a couple of faculty at Leeds who really encouraged me (thank you), I didn’t find the part of the discipline that I was passionate about until I reached UC Irvine and my Ph.D.

Given the lack of women in academia, particularly in STEM, I wonder whether the pattern of male dominance repeats itself in who offers the MOOC and I wonder what in turn that does to the student population. Perhaps some would say, offer a MOOC, redress it. But, my route into the field was not about volume encounters, but about those that were very personal. Its only maybe four people who made enough of a difference that I got through, but how can any person be that when they have 50,000 students? Also, how can you achieve these intimacies at a distance, across the network as opposed to face-to-face.

Diversity and Service

As I mentioned in a previous post recently I read this article about the advantages of being married for male academics versus the disadvantages of being married for women academics. It’s left me with a lot of questions. And being inspired by  Female Science Professor‘s question “why don’t more senior women in STEM blog?” I want to continue

In addition to teaching, research, and publishing responsibilities, service constitutes a major part of a professor’s career. … The gender breakdown within a department plays a significant role. Typically, there are more men than women within a discipline, and yet committees seek as much diversity as possible. Women, then, are often asked to do double the amount of service as men, a number that increases for women of color. While service is certainly considered when promoting, publications play a much larger role.

I understand the logic, to have a diversity of representation/voices at the table and so forth. But this is clearly the flip side of it, that women and minorities can get over-serviced. And since time is limited, service will eat into other important activities like research and teaching. This is a serious problem. But I don’t know what to do to change it. In the long-term we do need to recruit and retain women and minorites in STEM, but what do we do in the short-term? There seems to be a conflict here: we want to hear from diverse voices but in so doing we ask them to participate in things that compete for their precious research time.

One short-term piece of advice I would offer to anyone who fits this potential category, is to be very aggressive about saying no. Benchmark your service against a non-minority in your department at your rank. Do no more. (Read studies such as Link et al. “A time allocation study of university faculty” to see broad trends and uneven distributions as a reminder to do no more.)

The Marriage Advantage for some Faculty

I was just catching up on Female Science Professor’s blog (fabulous). Last year she asked “why don’t more senior women in STEM blog?“

I’ve been quiet on my blog for a while, I had lost touch with it. It was out of my routine. So it sat quietly.

Recently I read this article about the advantages of being married for male academics versus the disadvantages of being married for women academics. It’s left me with a lot of questions.

Female professors were more likely to have a spouse or partner with a doctoral degree, 54.7 percent to men’s 30.9 percent. Their partners were also more likely to work in academe, 49.6 percent to 36.3 percent.

I wonder whether the same is true in Computing? I was thinking of my department, counting up the numbers of men and women married to other academics. There’s a difference.

A woman is quoted with her theory about why the balance is the way it is, she says

“I have a theory about this,” said Tara Nummedal, an associate professor of history at Brown University. “It seems pretty clear that smart women are going to find men who are engaged, but I just don’t see that it works the other way.”

I have another theory, based on my experience of dating, which is that some men find dating women with doctorates (when they don’t have one) difficult. I recall with some pain a date in which I was subjected to something that felt a bit like being on a quiz show. Yes, I happen to know what the second longest river in the U.S. is the Mississippi since the first longest is the Missouri, but I didn’t need to spend an evening playing this game. And, more crucially, a Ph.D. is not actually about being good at quiz questions. You can guess that the relationship didn’t last long, but this experience was emblematic of the problems I had dating non-Ph.D’s.

She added that a female professor with a stay-at-home spouse is quite rare, but often sees men with stay-at-home wives, allowing them to fully commit themselves to their professions.

I’ve wondered this before also. In one job I had, where I was one of a very small number of women, two of us were single and the other married to an academic. There were some single men in the department, but it was a small fraction of the entire department and a healthy number of my male colleagues, including all the managers, had stay-at-home wives. At that time being married to someone who could take care of all the things that arise in life that require being dealt with during office hours seemed like a huge advantage to me. Some of it was probably that I was often lonely (I had very much made my employment decision because I knew it would advance my career and not my personal life, that was hard, but I think it was crucial for getting to the next steps where I was able to balance both). Years later, I’m not sure whether it’s an advantage or not, because I’ve not ever experienced it. I have no comparison points, nor am I sure that the division of labor that I’ve described is ideal (accurate, enthusiastically embraced)… and I am more aware that my salary is a luxury that these families do not have. But, returning to the point of the article, I think it’s important to pay attention to the last part of the sentence, if there is the possibility for someone to fully commit themselves because that’s what the relationship supports, then yes, I still think that is a type of advantage.

I’ll cover another piece of this article later. That’s enough for now.

Using those Six Years

One of the most common things I hear from new PhD students is that they do not want to be in graduate school for six years. There are a variety of reasons for that including explaining it to parents, wanting to earn a decent salary, and just not being able to imagine what one might spend six years doing.

It’s this latter point I want to take up today. What might one spend six years in graduate school doing. Recruiting for the next job is one way to think about it. Many students come into graduate school not really knowing what they want to do. I respect that, many people who embark on a PhD are fairly young, life is going to involve many changes (as an advisor one of the loveliest things I’ve experienced in graduate school is weddings, seeing my students and others find their partner). But that doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t give some thought to what you want to do post-graduate school.

Perhaps a different question is what are the options available that I would like to explore when I leave. And this begs a second and far more important question, what will I have to achieve while I am in school if I want to explore those options? Since you are probably only going to do one Ph.D. you might not want to leave these things to chance. And the later in graduate school the more your options have been made, either by what you chose, or by what you didn’t. This applies not just to how you are mentored while in graduate school but what you are being mentored for post-graduate school. Understanding that you are responsible as the student for finding someone who can do both is part of (as the book says) “getting what you came for.” I want to reiterate this point… in addition to finding someone who can mentor you effectively during graduate school, you want to find someone who can effectively mentor you for what you want to do post-graduate school. You can not leave this to chance. Or you can, but then you’ll have effectively made some choices that you may never have realized.

So, how do you know what you want to do? Look at what students who’ve graduated have gone on to do. Can’t decide among those choices, then plan for the one that looks the hardest for you to accomplish. You can course correct later on, but only if you’ve started down a path that allows for it. This is what you should use those six years for, and this is what you, as a graduate student, are responsible for doing. Irrespective, I would say, of what you might get told, you need to develop that internal sense of what you want and decide whether there’s appropriate alignment. You may have to ask to get what you want, or whether that’s even possible. Its crucial to understand that your goals may not align completely with another person’s, but it’s still your responsibility to get what you want (or risk becoming what someone else wants you to be).

Aside: to me this is just a variant of understanding evaluation. Every year in corporations, and regularly in academia, people are evaluated routinely as well as for promotion. Understanding how you are going to be evaluated is essential to understanding what you need to do to be successful. There is not always a clear alignment between what others may want and what you need to succeed. But your odds of succeeding are so much better if you pay attention to the means by which you will be evaluated and you plan to achieve it.

I’m Sorry I Didn’t Make Class, Did I Miss Anything?

Another day in the office, another student asks me the time honoured question.

Hi Professor <look a bit sheepish> I wasn’t in class the other day, did I miss anything?

This is one of those moments where because they are young, and because I was once young too, I find myself suggesting that they borrow someone else’s class notes and talk to someone who was there. But every now and again I get this urge I have to suppress to respond in one or more the following ways.

1. No. You missed nothing. I come here only to entertain myself, frankly you’d be better off talking to your cat to get the answers to your midterm/homework.
2. Yes, you missed approximately 1.5 hours in which I lectured, the students discussed, we conducted some group assignments, I provided feedback. Now go and write me an essay about why that might constitute missing something in class.
3. Actually I told the people who bothered to show up what questions were going to be on the final. And I made them promise not to tell you.
4. Really, seriously?

Theory

There was a panel about theory in HCI at the NordiCHI conference today. I wonder what they discussed. It made me think about questions I’ve been asked about the role of theory in human-centered computing, particularly in the context of teaching the Introduction to Human Centered Computing class (which is a survey of a variety of theories about technology). In that class, I recently said something about my own relationship to theory, and now I’m wondering whether it’s true for others, so here goes.

I find some theories more personally compelling than others. They speak a type of truth to me, one that I find very engaging. They bring out, for want of better words, the researcher in me. What I find very useful about this is that because theory is related to methods and questions, I can use these connections to focus in on particular problems. One of the first theories I ever used was Grounded Theory, it’s in my dissertation. I took the route of building more theory atop of articulation work (and to some degree social worlds) to develop my theory of software recomposition. The theory, modestly, explains some of the reasons that software is hard to produce, its because the process of modular decomposition creates a division of labor full of dependencies that are often underspecified and then change during the course of development. All of these dependencies are discovered at integration, unless they are well managed, and that makes production difficult.

Grounded Theory spoke to me. The works I read seemed to address problems that I found compelling, and using methods that I enjoyed to use. It didn’t help me find the domain, that was a different inspiration, one largely stemming from a sense that HCI had overly focused on the end-user taking the engineer to task and I wondered whether the work worlds of developers were as socially and technologically complex as those of the end-users and if so, whether we had to make inroads there in order to make the world of the end-user better. But it did help me formulate questions, operationalize them empirically, and do analysis.

Focus is the enemy of a new researcher. Being reflective on what your passions are might be one way to do this. I’m very lucky I also know the things I do not like to do. I am glad when others do them because I don’t want to.

Well that leaves all the big questions open like what is a theory in HCI, what should it do, what does it mean that we have multiple theoretical approaches, should we develop our own theories or use those developed by other disciplines. But, it is an answer to what problems should I work on? If you can find research that speaks to you very deeply, that supports the answering of questions you find interesting and using methods that you find enjoyable to practice, that seems useful.

Concerns about the Omission of HCI in Impacts of CS “Tire Tracks” Diagram

Recently, the “tire tracks” diagram of how Federally funded research has led to impact on the Computing industry and American experience was updated. Appreciative of the work that it does to continue to make the case for basic research in Computer Science, I was keen to see it. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that HCI was not present.

Maybe HCI is omitted because the “tire tracks” diagram focuses on product and not business practice outcomes. One major impact of HCI on industry is User Experience design. Don Norman and his team at Apple first popularized that term, in a paper they wrote about Apple’s User Experience (UX) practice, the research that continued to inform those corporate practices, writing it up for an HCI conference, the ACM’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Now consider, Google’s focus on keeping it simple. I’ve asked UX professionals and global estimates (based in part on membership in professional societies) are as high as 44,000 people who work in the field (another estimate was that about 10K of those people work in the United States). That’s a pretty significant type of employment impact!

Returning to the product-oriented outcomes, Brad Myers has done an eloquent job of explaining the role of HCI in the software and systems we take for granted today. He has even produced tire tracks. His diagrams suggest to me that HCI may have gotten folded into Computer Graphics in the CRA’s version of “tire tracks”. But, to omit explicit recognition of HCI is to preclude innovations that came from explicit consideration of humans, whether it be as information processors or soci0-technical beings. Yes, sure, the product innovations happened in the graphical user interface and how it is manipulated and interacted with, but reading the history of innovations at that interface it’s clear that the inspiration and the basic science that was drawn on included science about people, and developing a basic science of the interaction between people and machines. One particularly fruitful area for development that is of interest within HCI and appears to be missing from the tire tracks is input devices and techniques…

PARC features in some of the industrial work, and it is worth noting that the culture of PARC was to have a focus on the relationship between people and machines. J.C.R. Licklider’s Introductory Note to an anthology of papers about Computers and Systems in the book about the first decade of PARCs research: A Decade of Research: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 1970-1980 captured this as follows:

In my opinion, the interaction between people and computers is the most exciting new frontier of our time; here, in these pages, are many superb contributions by colleagues who not only share the excitement of that frontier but are developing the new land and building a new way of life in it.

These papers are an eloquent testimoney to the fact that, in the ten years since it’s conception, the Palo Alto Research Center has flourished. In that short time, many computer scientists, I among them, have come to consider it as the leading center of research in interactions between (or, in 1960’s terms, the symbiosis of) human beings and digital computers. …

The science and technology of the human use of digital computers are being created right now. p3

I’m disappointed that as we continue to chart this frontier of novel people machine interactions that the role of HCI has been omitted by the people making the case for the future of our science. I think Computer Science will come up short without taking people seriously. After all, in the marketplace we can ask whether the truly successful technologies are just a matter of their hardware and software, or is it that they deliver something that people want, desire, find useful and useful, and connect them to others.

HCI Challenge Three

Recently I wrote a post about top challenges in HCI. I had been asked by someone to list the top three challenges in HCI. Mine are about the field as a whole, and a reflection on the field, which I think is broad in both theory and problem domain.

I could only come up with two challenges at the time, but I have a third to add. Keeping up with it all. I suspect that this is not a problem unique to HCI. Keeping current with the literature is a significant challenge. There are a profusion of conferences and journals in my field, and due to search engines like Google Scholar and repositories that synthesize collections such as the ACM’s Digital Library (which keeps it’s own materials but also makes available other publishers), it’s relatively easy to end up even after a short search with enough materials to last the year of reading.

In HCI there’s also the challenge of doing the reading in order to be able to understand the readings. This is related to the first challenge. In a field that is theoretically diverse, sometimes it’s not possible to get the full import of the paper without reading some of the related background theoretical pieces. And so another package arrives from Amazon of things to read.

So challenge three, keeping up with it all.

I’m curious, what are your top challenges in HCI?

Top Challenges in HCI

Recently I was asked what the top three challenges are in HCI. At the same time I was reading Yvonne Rogers’ new book on theory in HCI (and revisiting Harrison, Sengers, and Tatar). It was an interesting time to be asked that question given my reading choices at the time.

I’ve wanted to—although since it’s the summer, time for academics to work on research—survey my HCI colleagues at Georgia Tech, what would we write as our top three challenges. I suspect we’d pick different challenges. And perhaps that’s OK, since we are working on different things and our challenges represent our orientations.

But the question was: what are the top three challenges in HCI and not “what are the top three challenges in your area of research” (at least that’s what I thought I heard)? So, what then was I to answer.

Challenge one: there’s no common core in HCI? (I use a question mark because I am not sure that that’s a problem). The theoretical plurality within HCI allows a variety of research questions to be pursued following a vast number of methods, and with answers that have very different beliefs about knowledge embedded within them. On the other hand, I suspect that some theories have established a stronger voice at the table than others. Are there actually theoretical sub-specialities within HCI?

Challenge two: what are the boundaries of HCI? (Again a problem?) Asked another way, what is not legitimate to study under the banner of HCI? One way I think about this is that HCI has followed computers as they left the military and large corporations into the hands of users wherever they are located and whatever they happen to be doing. That’s likely not the right set of ways to carve the boundaries, so then in what way should we cut them up?

So I am not sure that either of these are problems perse, but it does seem to me that its a very interesting time to be in HCI, whatever that is.