A Sense of Scale
Scaling, as a topic of conversation, is almost always about scaling up.
Grush: What happens when you don't assume that all scaling goes up?
Campbell: A great question! This past fall semester I taught a course that allowed me to experience a kind of radical scaling — both up and down, and in ways I hadn't imagined before. I thought, "This is scaling, but it's not all about scaling up!"
This past fall semester I taught a course that allowed me to experience a kind of radical scaling — both up and down, and in ways I hadn't imagined before.
The class was low enrollment, scaled down by pure circumstance: It was added fairly late in the registration cycle. It was also a special topics course, and those tend, especially in pre-1700 literature, which is my scholarly specialty, not to be heavily enrolled.
With this accidental scaling down, I asked myself what I might re-imagine in a scaled-down way. I chose to scale down the amount of rapid reading in the semester, while scaling up many class activities and different ways of encountering the basic text we were reading. We would spend three days on a part of the text instead of one. One of those additional days would be framed entirely in terms of students' online annotation using Hypothes.is, and another could be devoted to free-form discussion. So we were doing much more work on much less text. I didn't recognize it at first, but I was playing with scaling. And one consequence was that students felt more engaged and more accountable for their engagement.
I didn't recognize it at first, but I was playing with scaling.
Grush: Did you identify some other examples that take us out of the "one-way" understanding of scale?
Campbell: Yes, that radical scaling experience got me thinking more intensively, and importantly, more variously about what scaling really is, or can be. Why not scale down? Where might we scale down in a typical four-year baccalaureate program? I started thinking about how and why we might scale down there and scale up here… And I was questioning what that has to do with curriculum, what it means for pedagogy… And what does all that have to do with cost?
That radical scaling experience got me thinking more intensively, and importantly, more variously about what scaling really is, or can be.
Grush: What do other, external examples of scale show us — widely known education programs that address scale differently? I'd guess that some of those examples could represent fairly major trends… What can we learn from them?
Campbell: You don't hear the word MOOC very much anymore, the massively open online courses that at one time consumed so much of our attention. For a while, MOOC was the new darling, this idea that you could scale an educational experience up, not just substantially, but massively by using network effects in online learning.
Two main models of MOOCs emerged. There was the C-MOOC, built on connectivist ideas of learning that rely on network effects among the learners. And there was the X-MOOC, which tends to scale things up as massively as possible at as low a cost as possible, most often while charging tuition and structuring the course around learning management systems in familiar ways. And that became what Coursera, edX (now owned by 2U), and other kinds of X-MOOC-oriented businesses took up.
All this time, online learning became a much bigger sphere of interest and investment for colleges and universities. They wanted to be able to get in on what they imagined to be these massively profitable online courses.
Some of that initial energy around X-MOOCs morphed into the idea of so-called "evergreen" courses, in which a senior faculty member would design a course that could be more or less supervised by adjunct faculty or by term faculty who were not really involved in designing the course, but could "run it," so to speak. And more and more of the delivery of those courses became automated and readied for scaling up.