A Sense of Scale

• 02/10/25

One professed goal for these evergreen course models was to increase what they called "student success," which was all too often defined only in terms of a grade of C or higher in the course, pushing people through the four-year program more rapidly and at greater completion rates, while minimizing labor costs. So with that, we're talking about content transfer and course certification. We're not talking anymore about ideas for learning. We're not talking anymore about a really rich or engaged or sophisticated student experience. And we're back to talking about maximizing income while minimizing labor costs. All this really does change the conversation when we think of the university experience, about what we are offering our learners. It's concerning.

Grush: That is concerning. What tools do we have that we can learn to use to support scaling up and/or down, while avoiding these pitfalls?

Campbell: You can scale up or down well if you employ network effects and develop a sense of scale to pair with that; an awareness of the impacts of scale on what you are doing. We should always remember that, as Doug Engelbart reminded us, scaling is not linear. You can't have a sixty-foot tall human being with the same proportions as a six-foot tall human being, because the six-footer's bone and limb structure cannot support a sixty-footer!

You can scale up or down well if you employ network effects and develop a sense of scale to pair with that; an awareness of the impacts of scale on what you are doing.

The rise of decentralized, non-algorithmically-driven social media might be a good example, if you think of it in terms of blogging, which is a great tool and was the word of the year at one point in the 2000s. Blogging is a way of employing network effects in which the value of the network increases the more people are blogging on it, because the potential for connections among the networked writers and readers becomes greater the more people who are on the network.

Another great example of network effects, right there in front of us, is Wikipedia, which has a really interesting infrastructure enabling focused, cumulative building in a decentralized network largely made up of volunteers. The result is the largest and most comprehensive reference work in the history of human civilization. As the old saying goes, "It'll never work in theory, only in practice." That's the kind of thinking, based on a rich understanding of the web and what it enables, that can transform one's sense of scale.

You can think about network effects in these examples as ways of scaling up. But what you're scaling up if you're thinking about connections is the opportunity for connection — actually supporting the potential scaling down to the interactions between as few as two people.

And in that, you're not scaling up the way you would as though you were asking, "How many pigs can we put in the pen so we can fill the trough and feed them all at once?" That to me is a disastrous way to think about learning! But with a more developed sense of scale, and tools like blogging put in the hands of people who care, we can avoid the pigpen problem.

Still, have we thought as hard about scaling as we could? Not yet. There's not a huge amount of that way of thinking in my experience of higher education.

Have we thought as hard about scaling as we could? Not yet.

And to try to do something as hard as scaling up a scaled-down experience — pick almost anything a small class enables — would require a great deal of ingenuity, considerable resources, and what I would call a kind of ferocious commitment to finding ways to do this. It might be disruptive. It would be uncertain.

But have such experiments really been tried? Have colleges and universities, public and private, but especially large public universities, made a serious effort to do this thinking about scale? Or have we been going for the low-hanging fruit of replicating massive learning experiences, usually, almost always, enabled with online learning in ways that will minimize labor costs while nevertheless charging students at the same tuition level that they would be charged anyway?

I don't think those experiments have happened. I don't think colleges and universities really understand how to employ network effects. And I don't think they've thought very hard about the way the web was designed: not as an information superhighway, but as "small pieces loosely joined" — more like Jane Jacobs's linked neighborhoods, and less like Robert Moses's brute-force expressways.

I'm always hopeful that there can be some inspired thinking that will move us beyond the barriers that constrain our better use of scale.

All of these questions were stimulated by my inadvertent, almost accidental seminar that happened in the fall. And these are only a few of the ideas that I explored as I played with scaling. I'm always hopeful that there can be some inspired thinking that will move us beyond the barriers that constrain our better use of scale. Maybe we'll eventually develop that sense of scale we can pair with network effects, ultimately to benefit learners.

[Editor's note: Image by AI, created with DALL-E]