BI’s China office asked me to recommend two books I have read in 2023 to their students, so here goes (with a few honorable mentions):
Flyvbjerg, Bent & Dan Gardner (2023): How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between This excellent book dives into why big projects (in particular, big IT projects) so often fail; i.e., they come in late, more expensive and less complete than they were supposed to be. There are many solutions to this problem, but these authors discuss them carefully and advocates modularization – dividing things up into understandable and managable chunks – as the chief solution. They do so without coming up with any kind of magical method, instead using lots of examples to help you learn. Clearly written, a pleasure to read. Highly recommended!
Miller, Chris (2022): Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Scribner. This is an excellent book on the evolution of the microchip industry and a great discussion of the interwoven nature of chip production, design and distribution. Shows how a seemingly mundane industry can become not just strategic for business people, but for politicians and, eventually, nations. Also a good illustration of value chain evolution – how profits move from one element of the value chain (design) to others (production, production equipment) and as such a book i can refer to when teaching disruption.
And here are some honorable mentions:
Stephen Wolfram (2023): What is ChatGPT doing … and how does it work? Very complete explanation on precisely what the title says. As usual, wolfram becomes a bit too detailed sometimes and endlessly promotes his view of the world as algorithm-driven, but this is interesting and, at least for the parts that explains ChatGPT, very informative.
Zeke Faux (2023): Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall A colleague of min took sick, so I had to teach a couple classes on cryptography, Bitcoin and other fashionable topics. The best book about latest wave turned out not to be (as I expected) Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite (he may have been a bit too close to his subject), but Zeke Faux’ excellent exposé of the feverish rise of various shitcoins and ditto exchanges. The best bits is when he pokes into the slave-labor economics of scam houses, where people are literally kidnapped and enslaved to try to scam you to invest in various things with X’s in their names. Dot-com all over again….and excellent reading for students who think they have discovered the next great thing.
Greimel, Hans and William Sposato (2021): Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire This is the story of Carlos Ghosn, who came in as a saviour for Nissan (in the process exposing much of Japan’s unwillingness to communicate or even think about bad news), merging it with Renault, and barely making it out of the country when he ran afoul of culture, conventions and the ministry of something or other. A proper swashbuckling business tale, entertaining and interesting in a thank-God-I-don’t-work-there kind of way. (And yes, not a 2023 book, but I read it that year.)
In May I received official message that I had been awarded the status of Excellent Teaching Practitioner with four colleagues from BI.
To cite an official description: “The excellent teaching practitioner (ETP) status is granted based upon proven merit and commitment to teaching and educational excellence. The ETP is independent of other academic promotion schemes, and the title ETP can only be awarded to people who develop their teaching competences systematically and over time to a level that is significantly higher than the required basic competence at Universities.” The program has existed at other schools for a few years, but this is the first year BI awards it.
I thought I would use this space to reflect a bit on the whys and hows of this status change – as well as the process, to encourage more of my colleagues to seek it.
Why apply for ETP? I have always cared about the teaching part of the job, partly because I am better at that than publications, partly because I think quality in teaching is an important differentiator for higher education institutions in general and business school in particular. We need good teaching. BI, a private institution competing with practically gratis public institutions, need it more than ever.
While focusing on teaching is great for your life quality and sense of purpose, it is a killer in terms of more material rewards. You will not get promoted to full professor by being a good teacher and publishing on teaching (at least not in Norway: My excellent colleague Bill Schiano was promoted to full professor at Bentley in 2015 in no small measure because of the book we wrote together.) Good teaching will be rewarded with nice words and rather quickly evaporating brownie points, illiquid outside your own institution. Unless you shift over to becoming a professor of pedagogy (i.e., change careers) you will have to take your rewards intrinsically (happy students and good experiences in the classroom) or outside the institution (consulting, speaking, board memberships etc.).
Prestige? Apparently (and I can’t find the quote, ChatGPT or not) a cantankerous old editor of The Times disallowed the word “famous” when describing someone. The reason was that if the person was famous, the word was unnecessary – and if not, incorrect.
So I am a little puzzled that the ETP is referred to as “prestigious” in the announcement. However, some really good teachers, such as my friend Arne Krokan at NTNU, has been awarded it (he was one reason I applied, actually). And I certainly feel proud when my photo appears next to my colleagues above. That is prestigious, at least to me.
The ETP status, however, carries some tangible benefits aside from whatever prestige it may confer: A (modest) salary increase, permanent and applicable towards your pension. While the sum is not large, it is high enough that it makes the process of applying worth doing in itself. (The salary increase certainly does not pay for the extra effort you have put into your teaching over the years, but it is not intended to.)
A second, and perhaps more important consideration is that the pendulum in academia has swung very far out on the research & publication end, and is now coming back towards teaching & relevance, particularly for business schools. The ETP status is something implemented by the government and adopted by BI to shift focus towards quality in teaching – and if nobody applies for it, it loses value.
So, dear colleagues with excellent experience with innovative teaching – yes, I am looking at you Ragnvald, Øystein, Hanno, Anna, Pål, Robert and doubtless many others – do go ahead and apply!
That will increase my prestige!
And now for the process:
The application itself To help people apply for ETP, BI has created an internal web page and sought the help of a consultant (Prof. Trine Fossland) to advise applicants. I had two video sessions with Trine, and she helped me structure my application. The application is quite comprehensive, and it is good advice to take out as much of your documented experience as possible (that goes into the pedagogical CV, which, if you have not created it gradually over the years, is quite a bit of work in itself.)
Writing an application is an exercise in focus: You need to show that you fulfil the criteria, that the evolution and innovation you have done is a planned activity, consciously undertaken, and that you can credibly claim to want to continue it. You need to pick a few activities and show their change over time.
For me this was difficult – I have never had a plan with what I do, but a constant dissatisfaction with my courses (I really should do better) and an appetite for new technology and new ways of doing things has helped me maintain an innovative pressure. I try to explain that I put a lot of work into my courses because I am inherently lazy and want to work as efficiently as possible, but that excuse is wearing a bit thin.
Innovation comes from trying things at the edge. I have always been someone who wants to try things out, often by “breaking” rules or at least tradition – such as currently teaching a course at UiO and BI at the same time, mixing the students. The students love it (and have asked med to force cross-institutional teams the next time I teach it), the administration at the operative level are helpful, but you do run into a lot of “this is how we do it here” issues, often expressed as pedagogical principles that as a rule are neither pedagogical nor principled.
At some point I really need to write that “Innovators are irritating” paper I have been thinking about for so long…
Pedagogical course requirement Midway through the process (actually, after the application was submitted) I discovered that one of the criteria was that I had to have the basic education course (Utdanningsfaglig kompetanse) that all newly hired faculty at BI must take. That was kind of a bummer and in my view an unnecessary formality: I have learned and taught pedagogy at HBS and many other places around the world and taught classes since 1983. Luckily, there was an option for highly experienced faculty to basically take a home exam based on the curriculum in the course, which duly did. This required writing and submitting a teaching portfolio – a mix of a short pedagogical CV, as well as a short paper reflecting on your teaching as seen through the curriculum of the course.
Initially I saw this basic pedagogy exercise as an irritant (and, to be honest, slightly humiliating), but looking back on it, I cannot say it was a totally useless endeavor. The Learning Center (Inger Carin, in my case), was very helpful. It acquainted me with some literature – and language – of pedagogy. I found that what I had been doing over the years was recommended by the pedagogues, though it must be said that pedagogy professors never use one sentence when a few chapters or a whole book can be written instead.
In the end, it allowed me with some justification to say that what I do is grounded in theory, though I discovered at least some of the theory after a couple of decades of teaching…
The panel interview The final stage of the process was an interview by a committee of assessors (professors from other institutions in Norway, all of them ETPs in their own right). I have not done many job interviews and have not done well in any of them, but apparently I passed well enough, and the report afterwards was very complimentary.
One thing I do remember was that my main teaching approach – HBS-style case teaching, where the students are supposed to do the talking and every class is a case-based class, with participation grading, fixed seating and other features – was not something the committee was familiar with (or maybe they were, and just wanted me to explain it.) I also got the feeling that the committee was not very familiar with executive teaching in a business school context.
My main advice to those of you wanting to go through the same process is to not take any knowledge about what you do for granted, but explain it and put it into a context. I did the usual smart thing and tried to check out the backgrounds and pedagogical focus of the committee members, but still managed to miss the mark a bit. However, they were friendly and pulled me back on track.
In conclusion Well, there you go: A worthwhile exercise to go through to get some tangible rewards for doing the thing you love and would do anyway. Now it remains to see if this exalted status will bring reputational immortality or exciting new opportunities…
I hear so much weird stuff about AI these days that I tend to just block it out – including people talking about “an AI” as in “we need an AI for that”. So if it quite fun when John Oliver more or less nails it in this widely viewed video:
(And, well, with more than 3 million views and counting, it is not like he needs the mention. But my puny little intelligence need a place to store my references, and this blog is as good as any other place…)
Another year, another list of exciting projects (previous ones here, here, and here) from the course Analytics for Strategic Management, which I teach with my excellent colleague Chandler Johnson). In this course, students work on real data analysis projects for real companies – and here is a (rather disguised) list:
Avinor, the Norwegian Airport Authority, wants to predict TOBT (Target Off-Block Time) for Gardermoen Airport. TOBT is a measure of when the plane will leave the gate, and very important for planning access to runways and other congested areas of the airport.
Norsk Tipping AS wants to improve its marketing of certain products through predicting customers’ likeliness to adopt them (see this (Norwegian) article for a former, very successful project with this company)
An international company in the shipping supply business wants to predict prices for some of its products. A key issue here (as is often the case) is finding data from orders that were not accepted (and, hence, not registered anywhere). You cannot know what price a customer will accept unless you have access to cases where the price was too high.
A news agency wants to predict the uptake of its articles to prioritise its editorial resources. The get news articles from news agencies and other sources around the world, and need to know which of those to spend money on translating and editing for the Norwegian market.
A grocery wholesaler wants to predict demand for its products. in the grocery industry, most stock levels are determined either by having minimum levels or by going by what you bought last year with some adjustments. This group wants to see if they can improve on that.
An insurance company wants to predict churn for some of its products. This problem is common to any company running a subscription business – which is increasingly true for more and more companies.
An large business school wants to predict grades for large exams. Manually reading through thousands of exams is boring work – not to mention expensive – can machine learning in some form be used to automate some of the work?
A large engineering company wants to predict employee churn. Engineers and other specialists are difficult to find, and it is much cheaper to retain a good employee than to find a new one.
Brønnøysundsregistrene, a Norwegian register for, amongst other things, company annual accounts, wants to predict late submissions. If they can predict this, they can make efforts to follow up more carefully on those companies, rather than send out nagging reminders to everyone.
One problem we often have in these projects is difficulty in getting data. This is not the case this year. Whether this is a result of more companies saving more data, the students getting better at defining problems based on data they have, or just plain coincidence, remains to be seen. But it is a welcome development!
I have been to China once or twice every year since 2004, teaching at the BI-Fudan MBA program. As everyone else, I have observed and been impressed with the incredible development that has happened since then. When I first visited Beijing in 1995, there was a dirt road from the airport to the city. Now, of course, it is a highway with at least four lanes in each direction. I have taken the high-speed train between Shanghai and Beijing several times, and have been impressed by the sheer energy of Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley.
But there is another China that you seldom see. With the exception of a trip to Lijiang and an unplanned taxi trip to a small village outside Shanghai, I have never really seen rural China – the roughly 2/3 of China subject to hukou, a policy that disallows migration from rural to urban areas.
As Rozelle and Hell writes in this book, China has grown into an economic superpower in record time, but its public health and education system has not kept up. Children in rural areas are subject to malnutrition (chiefly iron anemia), intestinal parasites, and uncorrected myopia. Couple that with lack of intellectual stimulation at a very early age, and you get a large portion of the population that will be largely unemployable as China’s manufacturing jobs are automated or move to other countries, and construction jobs disappear because, well, everything has been built. This puts China in danger or ending up in the middle-income trap, along with countries such as Mexico and Brasil.
I remember visiting Ireland – a country that has become rich from a rather poor starting point – with students at the end of the nineties, in the midst of the Irish economic miracle. The country attracted investments because it had very little bureaucracy, low taxes for foreign corporations, but most of all because it had a highly educated, English-speaking work force. As one IBM manager put it: The country was “so poor that the only thing we could afford was education.” In an economy built on knowledge and innovation, you need a large portion of the workforce with skills at least at a high school level. Given the health and cognitive challenges in rural China (not to mention as many as 40 million lone males as a result of selective abortion) China simply is not geared for that, outside the urban areas.
This can, and must, be fixed. Some of the remedies – multivitamins, glasses, and deworming tablets – are relatively cheap and easy to implement. Training a child, especially one from an environment with little intellectual stimulation (a consequence of many children being reared by grandparents with a background in subsistence farming) up to high school levels takes 12 years, and presupposes that the child is capable of learning how to learn.
Rozelle and Hell stress that the central government is moving in the right direction, making basic education free and repurposing the “one-child” control bureaucracy towards ensuring better child care. China is a rather well organized country, and central campaigns for change tend to work. But does China have the time needed? It worries me that Xi Jinping apparently has outlawed the term “middle-income trap” (along with images of Winnie the Pooh), afraid of the apparently necessary transition to more democracy that inevitably will come from a better educated population. Possible disasters (civil war, outward aggression to deflect attention from internal problems, mass criminality a la Mexico) are many. China’s leadership and communist party has to a large extent been based on meritocracy, but as Adrian Wooldridge writes in another highly readable book, the signs of cronyism are already there.
This kind man, perhaps the currently living person I most admire, tells stories I have heard and read before – and finishes with flourish. Life of the mind, indeed.
— is the title of a talk I will give for EGN internasjonal this Thursday May 27. at 0900-1000 Central European time. The talk (which will be a conversation between me and the CEO of EGN Group, Jonatan Persson) will be about why Tesla may be a threat to large parts of the car industry, including a dive into just what the real difference (according to me) is between Tesla and the more traditional car manufacturers (electric or not.)
The webinar is open for anyone interested – you will find a description here and registration here.
EU has recently release a proposal for regulating the use of AI in companies and regulations. As far as I can see, it is modelled on the GDPR regulations: Assigning responsibility to board and top management, sanctions expressed in terms of percentages of revenues, and (hopefully) som sort of “safe harbor” rules so you can be somewhat confident in that you are not doing anything wrong.
An interesting aspect here is that the EU is early with regards to the use of AI (yes, I know “AI” is a really diffuse concept, but leave that be for a moment) and is again taking the lead in regulation where Silicon Valley (and China) leads in implementation.
This means that managers, board members and researchers will need to learn more. I plan to do this by attending a webinar at Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2021. This webinar (May 27, at CDT 1430-1600) is open for everyone who registers. It will be facilitated by Elin Hauge, who is a member of one of the EGN networks I lead.
I have just finished teaching a four-day course in Strategic Technology and Innovation Management in the BI-Fudan MBA program. This is the second time I teach this way – the last time was in June, where we divided the course up in two two-day modules and everyone was on Zoom. This time about half the students were in the classroom in Shanghai, the rest on videoconference.
Last time I did this, it was an enormous amount of work. This time it was easier – not so much because of routine (though that helps) but because my strategy of building up a library of video classes has helped me reduce the workload in later courses. Normal teaching hours when videoteaching to China is from 0700-1400 Oslo time, which is 1400-2100 for the students. This has meant, for me, that I have had to be in my office (where my fast computer is) at about 0630. So how to bridge the time difference productively?
My strategy has been to have the students work on case analysis in their mornings, and to make 5-minute videos where they present their case analysis. So, when I get up at 0500, I watch their videos, grade and comment on them. Then I get to work, where we start the day with discussing the case. For some of the mornings, I have also asked them to watch videos of presentations (the airline series, in particular). I have also used other videos where the students have either watched them on their computers or on a large screen in the classroom, instead of me talking into the camera. And when I am talking into the camera myself, I have made sure that I capture sound, picture (with a good webcam) and the slides for future videos.
The upshot: I now have about 10 hours of videos which I can reuse. They are decent quality, in English, and will allow me to teach by having the students watch the video, then meet with me to discuss the content. This is much less tiring for both parties – the experience for the students is a presentation (which can be paused, speeded up, and watched when they want to) and a discussion with me, the experience for me is an interesting discussion with prepared and interested students. Having the presentation recorded allows time-shifting, and avoids all kinds of trouble with videoconferencing.
I am a very lazy person, so I have been working very hard to create a library of teaching material which will allow me to work less (or, perhaps, teach more but work the same) in the future.
We’ll see how that works. The students seem to like it. And it would not be China if it did not include a group shot with the professor…
Here is a little video I did on how to do a research interview.
30 minutes long, fairly straightforward, I now have the technology sorted that I can make videos like this fairly easy and with decent quality. Might have used a better microphone, but what the heck, it works and only took me about four hours, including writing the outline.
As usual with these things: Caveat emptor. But this approach works for me.
This video will tell you all you want to know about the rigging of historic sailboats (tall ships excluded) with just enough detail to make it a learning experience rather than an overview. And if you want to see more of Leo and his amazing project rebuilding the historic gaff cutter (yep, it will be explained) Tally Ho, go here. If you want to support him, go here.
I have always loved the USA, but it has been hard to do that lately. But this poetry reading by Amanda Gorman well, saved my day. I am two months shy of my 60th birthday and very aware of it. Praise to this 22 year old woman for raising my spirits!
What the heck, I am suffering from low productivity today anyway. So: I can heartily recommend Rick Beato‘s channel Everything Music if you are in need of distraction. He is. a music theorist and producer, first because Youtube famous with a video of his son having perfect pitch, and discusses all kinds of music theory. Most will like his lists of greatest guitar solos and so on, but I think his best video so far is this one, which was recorded, I see, the day before Eddie van Halen died:
Last year (with Chandler Johnson and Alessandra Luzzi) and this year (with Chandler, Jadwiga Supryn and Prakash Raj Paudel), I teach a course called Analytics for Strategic Management. In this course executive students work on real projects for real companies, applying various forms of machine learning (big data, analytics, whatever you want to call it) to business problems. Here is a list (mostly anonymised, except for public organizations) list from this year:
One group wants to use machine learning to predict fraud in public security contracts in a developing country
A credit agency wants to predict which of their customers will pay their bills by the end of the month
An engineering company wants to predict the number of hours needed to meet demand for each month in each department
One group wants to predict housing prices within Oslo, to help house sellers get a realistic estimate of what their property is worth
A higher education provider wants to predict which students are likely to fail or not qualify for an exam, to be able to intervene early
A couple of municipalities want to predict who will accept a kindergarten allocation or not
A telecommunications company wants to predict which customers will churn
An Internet product company wants to predict necessary capacity for picking and shipping work every day
One group wants to predict the likelihood of a road closing due to bad weather, in order to warn truck drivers so they can detour
One group wants to predict the future financial health of companies based on employee engagement numbers
One group wants to predict efficiency of production in a wind power park
And last year we had these projects:
An investment company wanted to predict bankruptcies from media events
Ruter, Oslo’s public transportation authority wanted to predict the number of passengers (for each station, to great precision) for one line on the metro
A telecommunications company wanted to predict customer feedback scores from analyzing customer interactions (so the customer does not have to answer a survey afterwards)
The Norwegian Health directorate wanted to predict general physician “fastlege” churn
A commercial TV station wanted to predict subscriber churn
An insurance company wants to identify customers likely to buy a group insurance package
An online gaming company wanted to predict customer churn
A large political party wanted to predict membership churn
One group wanted to start a company based on using machine learning to diagnose hearing problems
A large retail chain wanted to predict churn based on customer purchase patterns
Yesterday began with a message from a business executive who was concerned with the security of Zoom, the video conferencing platform that many companies (and universities) have landed on. The reason was a newspaper article regurgitating several internet articles, partly about functionality that has been adequately documented by Zoom, partly about security holes that have been fixed a long time ago.
So is there any reason to be concerned about Zoom or Whereby or Teams or Hangouts or all the other platforms?
My answer is “probably not” – at least not for the security holes discussed here, and for ordinary users (and that includes most small- to medium sized companies I know about).
It is true that video conferencing introduces some security and privacy issues, but if we look at it realistically, the biggest problem is not the technology, but the people using it (Something we nerds refer to as PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)
When a naked man sneaks into an elementary school class via Whereby, as happened a few days ago here in Norway, it is not due to technology problems, but because the teacher had left the door wide open, i.e., had not turned on the function that makes it necessary to “knock” and ask for permission to enter.
When anyone can record (and have the dialogue automatically transcribed) from Zoom, it is because the host has not turned off the recording feature. By the way, anyone can record a video conference with screen capture software (such as Camtasia), a sound recorder or for that matter a cell phone, and no (realistic) security system in the world can do anything about it.
When the boss can monitor that people are not using other software while sitting in a meeting (a feature that can be completely legitimate in a classroom, it is equivalent to the teacher looking beyond the class to see if the students are awake), well, I don’t think the system is to blame for that either. Any leader who holds such irrelevant meetings that people do not bother to pay attention should rethink their communications strategy. Any executive I know would have neither time nor interest in activating this feature – because if you need technology to force people to wake up, you don’t have a problem technology can solve.
The risk of a new tool should not be measured against some perfect solution, but against what the alternative is if you don’t have it. Right now, video conferencing is the easiest and best tool for many – so that is why we use it. But we have to take the trouble to learn how it works. The best security system in the world is helpless against people writing their password on a Post-It, visible when they are in videoconference.
Bank in the nineties, I facilitated a meeting with Frank Elter at a Telenor video meeting room in Oslo. There were about 8 participants, and an invited presenter: Tom Malone from MIT.
The way it was set up, we first saw a one hour long video Tom had created, where he gave a talk and showed some videos about new ways of organizing work (one of the more memorable sequences was (a shortened version of) the four-hour house video.) After seeing Tom’s video, we spent about one hour discussing some of the questions Tom had raised in the video. Then Tom came on from a video conferencing studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss with the participants.
The interesting thing, to me, was that the participants experienced this meeting as “three hours with Tom Malone”. Tom experienced it as a one hour discussion with very interested and extremely well prepared participants.
A win-win, in other words.
I was trying for something similar yesterday, guest lecturing in Lene Pettersen‘s course at the University of Oslo, using Zoom with early entry, chat, polling and all video/audio enabled for all participants. This was the first videoconference lecture for the students and for three of my colleagues, who joined in. In preparation, the students had read some book chapters and articles and watched my video on technology evolution and disruptive innovations.
For the two hour session, I had set up this driving plan (starting at 2 pm, or 14:00 as we say over here in Europe…):
Leading the discussion. Zoom allows you to show a virtual background, so I chose a picture of the office I would have liked to have…
14:00 – 14:15 Checking in, fiddling with the equipment and making sure everything worked. (First time for many of the users, so have the show up early so technical issues don’t eat into the teaching time.)
14:15 – 14:25 Lene introduces the class, talks about the rest of the course and turns over to Espen (we also encouraged the students to enter questions they wanted addressed in the chat during this piece)
14:25 – 14:35 Espen talking about disruption and technology-driven strategies.
14:35 – 14:55 Students into breakout rooms – discussing whether video what it would take for video and digital delivery to be a disruptive innovation for universities. (Breaking students up into 8 rooms of four participants, asking them to nominate a spokesperson to take notes and paste them into the chat when they return, and to discuss the specific question: What needs to happen for COVID-19 to cause a disruption of universities, and how would such a disruption play out?
14:55 – 15:15 Return to main room, Espen sums up a little bit, and calls on spokesperson from each group (3 out of 8 groups) based on the notes posted in the chat (which everyone can see). Espen talks about the Finn.no case and raises the next discussion question.
15:15 – 15:35 Breakout rooms, students discuss the next question: What needs to happen for DNB (Norway’s largest bank) to become a data-driven, experiment-oriented organization like Finn.no? What are the most important obstacles and how should they be dealt with?
15:35 – 15:55 Espen sums up the discussion, calling on some students based on the posts in the chat, sums up.
15:55 – 16:00 Espen hand back to Lene, who sums up. After 16:00, we stayed on with colleagues and some of the students to discuss the experience.
The dashboard as I saw it. Student names obscured.
Some reflections (some of these are rather technical, but they are notes to myself):
Not using Powerpoint or a shared screen is important. Running Zoom in Gallery view (I had set it up so you could see up to 49 at the same time) and having the students log in to Zoom and upload a picture gave a feeling of community. Screen and/or presentation sharing breaks the flow for everyone – When you do it in Zoom, the screen reconfigures (as it does when you come back from a breakout room) and you have to reestablish the participant panel and the chat floater. Instead, using polls and discussion questions and results communicated through the chat was easier for everyone (and way less complicated).
Satisfactory results, I would say.
I used polls on three occasions: Before each discussion breakout, and in the end to ask the students what the experience was like. They were very happy about it and had good pointers on how to make it better
We had no performance issues and rock-steady connection the whole way through.
It should be noted that the program is one of the most selective in Norway and the students are highly motivated and very good. During the breakout sessions I jumped into each room to listen in on the discussion (learned that it was best to pause recording to avoid a voice saying “This session is being recorded” as I entered. The students were actively discussing in every group, with my colleagues (Bendik, Lene, and Katja) also participating. I had kept the groups to four participants, based on feedback from a session last week, where the students had been 6-7 and had issues with people speaking over each other.
Having a carefully written driving plan was important, but still, it was a very intense experience, I was quite exhausted afterwards. My advice on not teaching alone stands – in this case, I was the only one with experience, but that will change very fast. But I kept feeling rushed and would have liked more time, especially in the summary sections, would have liked to bring more students in to talk.
I did have a few breaks myself – during the breakout sessions – to go to the bathroom and replenish my coffee – but failed to allow for breaks for the students. I assume they managed to sneak out when necessary (hiding behind a still picture), but next time, I will explicitly have breaks, perhaps suggest a five minute break in the transition from main room to breakout rooms.
Conclusion: This can work very well, but I think it is important to set up each video session based on what you want to use it for: To present something, to run an exercise, to facilitate interaction. With a small student group like this, I think interaction worked very well, but it requires a lot of presentation. You have to be extremely conscious of time – I seriously think that any two-hour classroom session needs to be rescheduled to a three hour session just because the interaction is slower, and you need to have breaks.
As Winston Churchill almost said (he said a lot, didn’t he): We make our tools, and then our tools make us. We now have the tools, it will be interesting to see how the second part of this transition plays out.
At BI Norwegian Business School, we are (naturally and way overdue, but a virus crisis helps) moving all exams to digital. This means a lot of changes for people who have not done that before. One particular anxiety is cheating – normally not a problem in the subjects I teach (case- and problem oriented, master/executive, small classes) but certainly is an issue in large classes at the bachelor level, where many answers are easily found online, the students are many, and the subjects introductory in nature.
Here are some strategies to deal with this:
Have an academic honesty policy and have the students sign it as part of the exam. This to make them aware of they risk if they cheat.
Keep the exam time short – three hours at the max – and deliberately ask more questions than usual. This makes for less time for cheating (by collaborating) because collaboration takes time. It also means introducing more differentiation between the students – if just a few students manage to answer all questions, those are the A candidates. Obviously, you need to adjust the grade scale somewhat (you can’t expect all to answer everything) and there is an issue of awarding students that are good at taking exams at the expense of deep learning, but that is the way of all exams.
Don’t ask the obvious questions, especially not those asked on previous exams. Sorry, no reuse. Or perhaps a little bit (it is a tiring time.)
Tell the students that all answers will be subjected to an automated plagiarism check. Whether this is true or not, does not matter – plagiarism checkers are somewhat unreliable, have many false positives, and require a lot of afterwork – but just the threat will eliminate much cheating. (Personally, I look for cleverly crafted answers and Google them, amazing what shows up…).
Tell the students that after the written exam, they can be called in for an oral exam where they will need to show how they got their answers (if it is a single-answer, mathematically oriented course) or answer more detailed questions (if it is a more analysis- or literature oriented course). Who gets called in (via videoconference) will be partially random and partially based on suspicion. Failing the orals results in failing the course.
When you write the questions: If applicable, Google them, look at the most common results, and deliberately reshape the questions so that the answer is not one of those.
Use an example for the students to discuss/calculate, preferably one that is fresh from a news source or from a deliberately obscure academic article they have not seen before.
Consider giving sub-groups of students different numbers to work from – either automatically (different questions allocated through the exam system) or by having questions like “If your student ID ends in an even number (0,2,4,6,8) answer question 2a, otherwise answer question 2b” (use the student ID, not “birthday in January, February, March…” as this will be the only marker you have.) The questions may have the same problem, but with small, unimportant differences such as names, coefficients or others. This makes it much harder to collaborate for the students. (If you do multiple questions in an electronic context, I assume a number of the tools will have functionality for changing the order of the questions – it would, frankly, astonish me if they did not – but I don’t use multiple choice myself, so I don’t know.
Consider telling the students they will all get different problems (as discussed above) but not doing it. It still will prevent a lot of cheating simply because the students believe they all have different problems and act accordingly.
If you have essay questions, ask the students to pick a portion of them and answer them. I do this on all my exams anyway – give the students 6 questions with short (150 words) answers and ask them to pick 4 and answer only those, and give them 2 or 3 longer questions (400 words or so) and ask them to answer only one. (Make it clear that answering them all will result in only the first answered will be considered.) Again, this makes cheating harder.
Lastly: You can’t eliminate cheating in regular, physical exams, so don’t think you can do it in online exams. But you certainly can increase the disincentives to do so, and that is the most you can hope for.
Department for future ideas
I have always wanted to use machine learning for grading exams. At BI, we have some exams with 6000 candidates writing textual answers. Grading this surely must constitute cruel and unusual punishment. With my eminent colleague Chandler Johnson I tried to start a project where we would have graders grade 1000 of these exams, then use text recognition and other tools, build an ML model and use that to grade the rest. Worth an experiment, surely. The project (like many other ideas) never took off, largely because of difficulties of getting the data, but perhaps this situation will make it possible.
Last Thursday, I was supposed to teach a class on technology strategy for a bachelor program at the University of Oslo. That class has been delayed for a week and (obviously) moved online. I thought about doing it video conference, but why not make a video, ask the students to see it before class? Then I can run the class interactively, discussing the readings and the video rather than spending my time talking into a screen. Recording a video is more work, but the result is reusable in other contexts, which is why I did it in English, not Norwegian. The result is here:
To my teaching colleagues: The stuff in the middle is probably not interesting – see the first two and the last five minutes for pointers to teaching and video editing.
For the rest, here is a short table of contents (with approximate time stamps):
0:00 – 2:00 Intro, some details about recording the video etc.
2:00 – 27:30 Why technology evolution is important, and an overview of technology innovation/evolution processes
6:00 – 9:45 Standard engineering
9:45 – 12:50 Invention
12:50 – 15:50 Structural deepening
15:50 – 17:00 Emerging (general) technology
17:00 – 19:45 Substitution
19:45 – 25:00 Expansion, including dominant design
31:30 – 31:45 BREAK! (Stop the video and get some coffee…)
31:45 – 49:40 Disruption
31:45 – 38:05 Introduction and theory
38:05 – 44:00 Excavator example
44:00 – 46:00 Hairdresser example
47:00 – 47:35 Characteristics of disruptive innovations
47:35 – 49:40 Defensive strategies
49:40 – 53:00 Things take time – production and teaching…
53:00 – 54:30 Fun stuff
This is not the first time I have recorded videos, by any means, but it is the first time I have created one for “serious” use, where I try to edit it to be reasonably professional. Some reflections on the process:
This is a talk I have given many times, so I did not need to prepare the content much – mainly select some slides. for a normal course, I would use two-three hours to go through the first 30 minutes of this video – I use much deeper examples and interact with the students, have them come up with other examples and so on. The disruption part typically takes 1-2 hours, plus at least one hour on a specific case (such as the steel production). Now the format forces me into straight presentation, as well as a lot of simplification – perhaps too much. I aim to focus on some specifics in the discussion with the students.
I find that I say lots of things wrong, skip some important points, forget to put emphasis on other points. That is irritating, but this is straight recording, not a documentary, where I would storyboard things, film everything in short snippets, use videos more, and think about every second. I wanted to do this quickly, and then I just have to learn not to be irritated at small details.
That being said, this is a major time sink. The video is about 55 minutes long. Recording took about two hours (including a lot of fiddling with equipment and a couple of breaks). Editing the first 30 minutes of the video took two hours, another hour and a half for the disruption part (mainly because by then I was tired, said a number of unnecessary things that I had to remove.)
Using the iPad to be able to draw turned out not to be very helpful in this case, it complicated things quite a bit. Apple’s SideCar is still a bit unpredictable, and for changing the slides or the little drawing on the slides I did, a mouse would have been enough.
Having my daughter as audience helps, until I have trained myself to look constantly into the camera. Taping a picture of her or another family member to the camera would probably work almost as well, with practice. (She has heard all my stories before…)
When recording with a smartphone, put it in flight mode so you don’t get phone calls while recording (as I did.) Incidentally, there are apps out there that allow you to use the iPhone as a camera connected to the PC with a cable, but I have not tested them. It is easy to transfer the video with AirPlay, anyway.
The sound is recorded in two microphones (the iPhone and a Røde wireless mic.) I found that it got “fatter” if I used both the tracks, so I did that, but it does sometime screw up the preview function in Camtasia (though not the finished product). That would also have captured both my voice and my daughter’s (though she did not ask any questions during the recording, except on the outtakes.)
One great aspect of recording a video is that you can fix errors – just pause and repeat whatever you were going to say, and the cut it in editing. I also used video overlays to correct errors in some slides, and annotations to correct when I said anything wrong (such as repeatedly saying “functional deepening” instead of “structural deepening”.) It does take, time, however…
My excellent colleague Ragnvald Sannes pointed out that this is indicative of how teaching will work in the future, from a work (and remuneration) perspective. We will spend much more time making the content, and less time giving it. This, at the very least, means that teachers can no longer be paid based on the number of hours spent teaching – or that we need to redefine what teaching means…
Another video on moving to video-based teaching, this time about some things to consider to make the transition as easy for yourself as possible (as well as increasing the experience for the students):
From the Youtube posting:
Many teachers now have to move their courses online, and are worried about it. Teaching online is different from teaching in a classroom, but not so different: The main thing is still that you know your material and care about the the people at the other end. There are some things to consider, however, so here are five tips to think about when you move your course online:
Talk to one student, not many.
Structure, structure, structure (much more important in online teaching).
Interaction is possible, but needs to be planned.
Bring a friend: Teach with a colleague, for mutual help and a better experience.
Use the recording as a tool for making your teaching better, by reviewing it and editing it yourself.
Last year (with Chandler Johnson and Alessandra Luzzi) and this year (with Chandler, Jadwiga Supryn and Prakash Raj Paudel), I teach a course called 
Applied Abstractions 