Michael Moore’s office shelves are crammed with books on business startups and online learning and psychology and statistics and digital analytics, and he’s using all of them as he plans the launch of the University of Arkansas eVersity.
The vice president for academic affairs for the University of Arkansas System borrows ideas like “fail fast” from the Silicon Valley startup culture, and he divides the colleges of the future into three categories: brick, click and brick-and-click. The statistics that transformed baseball, as described by Michael Lewis in “Moneyball,” have arrived in higher education, he says, and it’s time to take advantage of digital analytics to help students succeed.
“College should be hard,” Moore says, “but going to college should be easy.”
To that end, he’s been especially influenced by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s 2008 book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.”
Anyone who has been involved in the college application process, then, will appreciate Moore’s idea that the school could get the applicant’s high school transcript as easily as the student could. And that the school could help fill out the dreaded FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. And help the student plan ways to fill the gap between the cost of college and his available funds.
But the “nudges” Moore has in mind for eVersity students go beyond enrollment. With all work being done online, there’s no reason a student can’t know immediately when he’s falling behind. Web analytics can make it possible for a student to compare his study time with the average of other students — and to see how his grade compares as a result.
Like Fitbit, the electronic exercise and fitness monitor, such nudges don’t do the work, but they can serve as reminders and encouragers.
Instructors, too, can use the analytical properties of online learning to help students. They can see when a student’s attention to the coursework has dropped off and quickly make contact. It might be, Moore said, that a student knew she was going to have to travel and so worked ahead. Or it might be that a prompt intervention by the instructor is all it takes to get the student back on track.
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