(2016-03-08) Caulfield Trump University's Online Materials Are A Lot Better Than Your University's Online Materials

Mike Caulfield: Trump University's Online Materials Are a Lot Better Than Your University’s Online Materials. Yesterday, Roger Schank (famous cognitive scientist and learning theorist) released some of the work he and his team did for Trump University back in 2005 or so.

Quick disclosures: I worked for Roger Schank’s company Cognitive Arts 15 years ago (but not for Trump University),

The Online Courses for Trump University Were Well-Designed

It probably puts your university’s online courses to shame. It certainly makes a mockery of what Silicon Valley darlings Coursera and Udacity call courses.

I think I built enough of these courses at Cognitive Arts to walk you through the design of this one

Walking Through the Course

Schankian learning experiences are often structured as simulations.

I’m still proud of the work we did at CogArts, my passions are just elsewhere now.

nothing I’ve said here defends the seminars that were staged by Trump, or the course when it switched over to a real estate focus. Nothing here defends the use of the name “University”, the price charged of people, or promises that may have been made.

the important thing about way the exercises are structured is that you have to develop those questions yourself

Evaluation

Depending on what you teach, you may not like the model here. It’s not a great model for a course in Issues in French Colonialism or other less applied material.

apart from being an example of Schank’s approach to education (simulations, war stories (tacit knowledge), just-in-time expertise, etc.) it’s well designed from a more traditional standpoint as well.

Each scenario operation builds on the next.

you submit your work to your peers in the class to evaluate. You are frequently submitting an artifact (spreadsheet, etc), but after submission you are asked to reflect on your decisions and defend them.

you receive instant feedback from experts who tell you how they would have done the activity

The modules are often structured around complicating actions. A simple analysis is done and submitted, but new information comes to light:

one of the favorite lower-end models was email simulation. (If I remember correctly, this method was partially developed from techniques Schank’s colleague Chris Reisbeck used in his computer classes).

In an email simulation, you place the student in a role, usually that of a newer worker, who is asked to create or fix some artifact for a job. You learn about these projects via a set of carefully sequenced emails and assignments

In the older language of “Goal-based scenarios” you’d have a variety of elements, structured to make the simulation meaningful

each module is based on the critical skills experts need to master and the common misconceptions novices tend to have about the subject. That is, the design team for these things will spend literally hundreds of hours talking to experts talking about how things are done and why things fail, and design the tasks and feedback on what they discover.

Design a Winning Business Based on Your Idea

If we look at the last module (“Design a Winning Business”) we can see that the scenario operations are structured in the natural sequence you would go about the activity

Each of these scenario operations (Refine the Business Concept, Validate the Market, etc) takes place in an email simulation.

Those seemingly simple questions lead to complex activities like competitive analysis, and understanding barriers to entry, etc. You’re asked to make sense of a variety of resources to determine whether the business as imagined is truly viable (and if it’s not, how can it be altered to be more successful)

As you move through these activities (usually done through free form entry in a comments box), just-in-time support is available to help you understand the methods and meaning of what you are doing

I’ve covered only a fraction of the course here, a couple segments of a couple pieces of one mission in a course

for what this class is attempting to do, this is a perfect approach. It is difficult to see the design of the Trump University online experience as anything but exemplary

More than that, consider that Coursera and Udacity built million-dollar businesses years after these courses came out. And their materials were not (and still are not) even close to this in terms of quality and research-informed design. Not even a fraction as well designed.

What the Hell Went Wrong?

Five years before these classes were being made for Trump University we were making them for Columbia University in an initiative that was called Columbia Online. I worked on these classes and can tell you they were better quality than the Trump U. classes, but used the same methods and approaches.

This was in 2000

It’s even funnier (by which I mean sad) to see former CogArts partner Columbia University hyping up cutting edge courses in ColumbiaX today where students engage in cutting edge activities like this: (junk)

How did we get here? I suppose I’ll leave that to another post, but the short answer is designing quality scalable online courses takes a lot of money, a lot of custom programming, a lot of design expertise, and no one wants to pay. Except, apparently, Donald Trump.