Iron Triangles Are Great — Everyone Should Have One
I read Power and Gould-Morven’s paper “Head of Gold, Feet of Clay: The Online Learning Paradox” on the ride in this morning. In it, they summarize John Daniel’s Iron Triangle of education, which presents a trade-off between access, quality, and cost, then replace it with one of their own where the corners are cost-effectiveness, quality, and accessibility. That isn’t a big deal by itself, but it allows them to place stakeholders at the triangle’s corners: administrators seek to maximize cost-effectiveness, faculty to maximize quality, and students, accessibility.
All of this is warmup to claims that their BOLD (Blended Online Learning Design) instructional design methodology satisfies all three groups at once. I don’t have any way to evaluate that claim (and they only present arguments, not data), but their one-to-one match-up of stakeholders with corners seems forced to me. In my experience, these three groups have more complex priorities:
- Administrators actually do seek to minimize cost, rather than maximize cost-effectiveness. Partly, this is because they have no way to measure the latter, but another reason is that people don’t really care about how much students learn at university; they care about GPA × the school’s reputation.
- Faculty care about the quality of their research, as judged by their peers. Most care much less about the quality of their teaching: for proof, look at how few actually invest time in learning how to teach well. They also care about cost, but for them, the currency is time rather than money, since the former affects them directly, while the latter (mostly) falls on their school.
- Students… Well, that’s a hard one. The good ones care about quality, though that may be a circular definition, since I pretty much define a good student as one who cares about learning [1]. Accessibility? That’s certainly important for free-range students [2]. But I think it’s more useful to think about time cost and financial cost. The former is what matters to students who are fitting their lessons in around the rest of their lives; full-time students have, by definition, decided to devote all their time to studies, so what we see them thinking about secondarily is financial cost.
I therefore think that the triangle in education is financial cost vs. time cost. vs. quality. Administrators care mostly about the first; most university faculty care primarily about the second; and different kinds of students balance the other three in different ways. It isn’t as tidy as Power and Gould-Morven’s breakdown, but it’s a more accurate starting point for discussions about what’s worth doing, what’s likely to succeed, and why those aren’t always the same.
[1] Given a choice between an apathetic genius or someone working as hard as they can to maintain a C, I’ll take the latter.
[2] I really don’t like calling these people “non-traditional students”, since almost all learning throughout our lives has always taken place outside a formal classroom. Plus, it allows me to refer to students sitting row on row in a lecture theater as “battery-farmed”, which I like.
Another way to think about it… everybody cares about short term and long term prestige; stability/safety; and freedom.
Administrators want to keep their jobs and be respected by their peers and advance up the ladder of administration. For this, they must have a relatively smooth sailing organization, increasing levels of funding, and a few high profile programs that they can show off and speak about. The farsighted administrators at certain institutions see well-paid alumni as the best donors; but government and industry can also be major sources of income.
Primarily research faculty want to maintain their grant funding and publication record; possibly to ease their own burden, possibly to enable a lateral move to a more prestigious institution; possibly to leave a historical record or accomplish their own personal research goals. Teaching faculty tend to view successful and grateful students, rather than highly cited papers, as their payoff.
Students want to have fun; they ultimately want well-paid jobs; mostly they want the respect of their peers – which is a mix of being respected for good grades (sometimes) and being respected for extracurricular pursuits – like athletics or having nice clothes.
So, the biggest problem is that the linkages among education-salary-donation are weak. That would align the interests of the various parties.
“Plus, it allows me to refer to students sitting row on row in a lecture theater as “battery-farmed”, which I like.”
I find it strange that most of what I learnt at university, I did not learn during the time consuming lectures anyway.
At most the lecturers presented the material in a way that made it easy to understand, by using the right metaphors and models. Some were exceptional at doing this, enlightening areas and highlighting key concepts with ease. Others (fortunately few) muddled already complex topics even further, and left a lot of us more confused than if we’d just read the book. I have a strong feeling that the format of a lecture is a terrible waste of time for everyone, both student and lecturers.
Instead, the learning happened when I interacted over the material with other students, lecturers and TAs, or when we had to actually use the techniques and models on problems. Interestingly, having to program a solution from scratch during our Computational Physics classes did more for my understanding of Physics than lectures ever could.
I have the feeling (In science and engineering, at least) that programming is an exceptional gateway to understanding the underlying concepts. It’s a shame it is so underutilised.
I’m pretty sure a hybrid model, where you have guided tutorials in an interactive environment where the tutorial progresses as you manage certain tasks would probably fare better than a lecture. Something like tryruby.org, but for whatever subject you’re teaching. Providing black-box unit tests on a variety of questions would also allow students to test their understanding.
hmm…
As far as your triangle is concerned, Greg, don’t you feel that time cost and quality are not independent? Doesn’t high quality teaching *reduce* the time cost required to understand a given topic?
For the record, in a recurring activity, I think that those triangles lead to false answers. Contrary to popular opinion, and to the ire of some of my colleagues, I think that improving the quality will both reduce the time and cost of something like this.