| Blog Post Published on: | 9th November 2022 |
| Title: | Is it time for Circle Pines to dream about an online folk school? |
| Lead Author: | Fred M. Beshears |
| Type of Blog Post: | folk_school_movement |
Key Questions
What would it mean if Circle Pines Center decided to move into online education?
What would it mean if CPC started to develop online courses? And, if we did, what would those courses be about, who would create them, and who would take them?
What would it mean if CPC could finally have its own folk school where the students living at CPC would receive some of their education via online courses?
Should CPC try to go it alone, or would it make sense to form some kind of alliance with other folk schools such as the Highlander Folk School?
Introduction
Circle Pines has been a summer camp for over 80 years, and during this time many Circle Piners have dreamt about having a folk school at Circle Pines, one that could help Circle Pines teach others about the co-op form of democratic governance, the co-op business model, and the benefits of living in a cooperative, democratic society.
However, the dream of creating a folk school at Circle Pines has never come to fruition. Part of the problem has been the high cost of transitioning from a physical summer camp to a physical folk school campus. For many, the cost of making this transition brings up memories of some very old debates. Should CPC build down at the lake? If so, should CPC build according to the plans drafted by Frank Lloyd Wright. Or, should Circle Pines build the Rec Hall, bath houses, cabins, etc. near the Farmhouse and the old barn we now call Swallows.
The upshot of these old debates is that Circle Pines decided many years ago to not take the financial risk of trying to build to the Frank Lloyd Wright plans. The decision to not have a folk school, on the other hand, has not been so clear-cut. My sense is that those who do not want to take the risk and make the effort have always put the onus on those who do want a school, who are willing to shoulder the risk, and who are willing and able to pay the startup costs.
Folk school supporters have never been able to put together a plan that was seen as workable by a sufficient number of other Circle Piners. It was thought to be especially difficult to make a plan work if it required a full physical campus, either up at the Farmhouse or down at the lake.
And so, over the last 80 plus years, we have built the facilities we need for the CPC summer camp and conference center program we all know and love. But, we do not have a folk school.
Is it time for Circle Pines to consider online education?
With the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools are now having to learn about online and distance education in a big hurry. Even Circle Pines is now making significant changes – its membership meeting is online this year!
For the rest of this article, I’m going to assume that Circle Pines is at least ready to consider the idea of online education.
In general, I’m interested in online learning because I worked as an educational technologist at UC Berkeley for twenty years (1987-2007). During this time, I helped Berkeley establish support services for its campus wide Learning Management System (see article on my background at Berkeley here).
Comparing CPC with UC Berkeley
My guess is that if CPC decides to get into online learning, it will be a very different kettle of fish from what I’ve described above. For starters, CPC’s budget is much, much smaller than Berkeley’s, and CPC probably doesn’t have any in-house programmer groups who want to develop an LMS from scratch. (But, there may well be some Circle Pines members who own or work for a software vendor that sells an LMS.)
Nevertheless, there are some similarities. Berkeley is obviously an educational institution and always has been. CPC also sees education as being a central part of its mission. That’s the main reason CPC received its 501(c)-3 non-profit status. Also, from the very beginning, there has been a dream of having some sort of folk school at CPC.
The dream of having a folk school at Circle Pines
The dream of having a folk school at Circle Pines has never come to fruition, even though many share this dream and some have attempted to actually make a folk school happen. But there are problems with making this dream come true. For example, if a CPC folk school took the form of a boarding school, one such as Quaker boarding schools like Scattergood or Olney, then CPC would need to have classroom and dorm facilities that could operate year round. They would also have to recruit students, teachers, support staff, and administrators.
Of course, Scattergood and Olney were created as boarding schools for high school students, and they are large institutions compared to most folk schools. I believe they have larger budgets, more students, and more course offerings than the typical folk school. (I’d need to do some research to confirm this.) So, it may well be that their business model differs from that of a typical folk school.
It probably wouldn’t be too hard to gather up data from a few folk schools that do have missions similar to CPC’s. The Highlander Folk School comes to mind as one “folk school” that might be similar to CPC. For most of it history, Highlander self-identified as a folk school, but they have changed their name to Highlander Research and Education Center. I don’t think this change reflects a real change in their mission, however. I believe it happened because they had problems getting a license to continue on as a “folk school.” (Once again, I’d need to do some research to confirm this.)
Circle Piners have dreamt about developing a physical campus to support a year-round school. This goes back to CPC’s origins, which included students and staff that came from the Ashland Folk School. And, many of these dreams have also been inspired by the architectural drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, which adorn the cover of CPC’s 44th Anthology. But for over 80 years now, these dreams have not come to fruition.
Would Circle Piners rather just stick with the status quo – i.e. the kind of education that has been going on at CPC’s summer camp for over 80 years now? I’m not suggesting that the status quo is bad, or that we should abandon the summer camp. I’m suggesting that it would be great if we could go further. I’m also suggesting that we should consider some modifications to the original folk school idea, modifications that have been made possible by advances in information technology.
So, is it time for Circle Piners to start dreaming about having an online co-op education program? And, if so, then what might that have to do with having a folk school at Circle Pines?
Also, if Circle Piners do start to dream about online education, they will soon realize that there are many approaches to online education, and each of these approaches entails different teaching methodologies and different cost structures.
The costs of different online education methodologies
The costs involved with developing, maintaining, and delivering online courses are very different than those of having a school with a physical campus. Most importantly, with some approaches you do not have the cost of building and maintaining a physical campus. But you do have costs, and these costs have to be covered somehow. In particular, the more high-quality online courses one tries to develop and maintain, the more expensive it gets just to create the content and maintain it as the courses evolve.
With some approaches to online education, very little money is actually spent on live teachers relative to the number of students who may take the course. There may be recordings of one or more lectures, and there may be online versions of the written and graphic course materials one would typically find in a textbook. But these are all upfront costs. And, upfront costs tend to be fixed, which means that they do not go up as you add more and more students to a class. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model takes this approach. There are the upfront costs of developing the online textbook materials and the lecture recordings, but the marginal cost of adding additional students to the course is almost zero. That’s why MOOCs can be scaled up to accommodate massive student audiences.
At the other end of the spectrum, some online courses resemble a large live lecture class. The main difference is that the lecture is broadcast out to geographically disbursed students. Often, very little is spent on developing to content for these online courses. In many cases, the students are instructed to buy a commercial paper-based textbook, as would be the case with an on-campus lecture-based course. In some respects, the large lecture halls one finds at places like Berkeley are a form of distance education! We used to joke: How many rows back does a student need to sit in one of our big lecture halls before it becomes distance education?
Somewhere in between these two extremes you have one of my favorite approaches to distance education and online education. Today it’s called Team Learning, but the original name for this approach was Tutored Video Instruction. Here you give all students some basic training in how to participate in a study group that consists entirely of students. To form a study group, one student is assigned the role of the team leader, and the rest are team members. The team leader moderates the discussion, but this person is not expected to be a subject matter expert.
Study group teams are provided with a recording of a lecture that has been broken up into small segments, each usually consisting of around 10 minutes of lecture. Sometimes students see something other than just a talking head. Lecture videos are cheap, especially if you’re already paying someone to give the lecture. Specialized videos that go beyond the lecture can be very expensive to make, but they can also add value to the learning experience.
In addition to the videos, students are also given problem sets and study questions. Their task is to work their way through the lecture one segment at a time. Students can raise questions with one another at any time, but at the end of each segment they are supposed to address the study questions and problem sets provided for that segment. Team leaders report back up to the professor, or to one of the professor’s graduate student assistants. Here, they hand in assignments and discuss questions and issues that have come up in group discussions.
Notice that team learning could be made to work in conjunction with MOOCs. And, these study group teams could be geographically disbursed. Even the students in the study groups can be geographically disbursed, but I prefer the idea of face-to-face study groups.
Also, today students don’t always have to learn in groups with videos, problem sets, and discussion questions. Online learning opens up a multitude of possibilities for self-paced learning, adaptive learning, and personalized learning environments. Some of these possibilities are exciting, but other uses are downright scary. Your government or the corporations that you interact with may end up knowing more about you than you know about yourself. Some authoritarian governments (or corporations) see this as a wonderful opportunity to build up extensive profiles on their citizens, customers, and students. These information profiles may indeed be put to good ends, but it’s also possible that they will be put to bad ends. This brings up a much more complex discussion, which is one that I cannot address in any detail here. So, I’ll mention it in passing, but otherwise I’ll stick to talking about organizing student study groups around lecture videos, which is a much older idea and one that seems much safer to me.
The idea of creating an alliance of online folk schools
In addition to thinking about tools/platforms that CPC might use for online learning, I’ve also been looking a CPC’s website to get some idea of what CPC might be interested in teaching, assuming it does want to venture into online education. In the process, I’ve also looked at the websites of folk schools in the Folk School Alliance. One caught my attention because its founder, Myles Horton, was up at CPC on a few occasions back when I was there on a regular basis.
As you may know, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School, which is now called the Highlander Research and Education Center.
If you check out their website, you can see that education is their main emphasis. So, my guess is they may also be taking a fresh look at online education.
And, more generally, other schools in the Folk School Alliance may be thinking along similar lines. If this is indeed the case, then there may be opportunities for some kind of cooperative effort.
Why consider a cooperative effort? This may be obvious to most Circle Piners, but for those who haven’t grown up in the co-op tradition, a cooperative effort may well be more efficient and effective than a competitive one. For example, it would be inefficient if each folk school tried to redundantly re-create the wheel. But, sadly, it may be that although each folk school believes in “cooperation” in some sense, they still want to compete with one another in cyberspace.
On the other hand, it may be that the Folk School Alliance (or some organization) could help coordinate the development of online courses. For example, CPC may want to focus on courses that relate to the cooperative forms of democratic corporate governance, the coop business model, and the history of the cooperative movement.
Other folk schools may choose to have a different focus, one which reflects their founding mission and principles, as well as their practical experience. For example, some folk schools may want to specialize in courses on environmental issues such as climate change.
From my perspective, it is clear that a small folk school with a limited budget cannot be all things to all people. But, if folk schools coordinate their efforts, and share their educational resources, then they may be able to address the interests and needs of a larger number of potential students and co-op members.
Having an alliance of folk schools that uses online learning may also produce unexpected synergies. In fact, it might make it easier to start a small physical folk school at places like Circle Pines.
An attempt at forging a partnership between CPC and a nearby college
Many years ago, when I was still in college, I briefly attended Thomas Jefferson College (TJC), which was one of a number of experimental colleges at Grand Valley State College. GVSC has since reverted back to being a more conventional school, and TJC no longer exists. Nevertheless, while TJC did exist it was very experimental and open to new ideas.
One idea of mine that initially got some traction both at TJC and Circle Pines was to have around 30 or 40 TJC students living at Circle Pines in the spring and fall. While there, they would take courses from TJC faculty, which would be held in the Farmhouse or perhaps outdoors weather permitting. They would also rent CPC cabins. It was seen as a win-win in that CPC could make money during the off season on its under-utilized cabins, while TJC students could take their courses while enjoying the facilities and physical beauty of Circle Pines.
To justify the salaries of the faculty who would also be on-site, TJC students at CPC would need to take a sufficient number of courses from them to generate the necessary number of credit hours.
Unfortunately, before the project could really get underway, the entire GVSC system learned that it was going to be audited. Therefore, the faculty and administrators at TJC wanted to put the project with CPC on hold for a while. The audit took much longer than expected, and ultimately led to major changes at GVSC. I’m just guessing, but it may have led to TJC’s demise as well.
In any case, even though TJC no longer exists, I’ve often thought that with better planning, more persistence, and better luck it might be possible for CPC to forge a partnership with a near-by college, or form some sort of an alliance with several schools.
The problem, however, is that CPC may not be in the driver’s seat when it comes to the subjects these students want to take. They would not really be CPC students, and they would not be taking courses that originated at Circle Pines. Of course, if CPC ever decides to go down this path again, they should look for schools with a study programs that align well with CPC’s values and mission.
Could online education make it easier to start a folk school at Circle Pines?
Often, when someone initially starts to think about distance education or online education, they envision a student sitting alone at home staring into their computer screen. Many recoil from this off-putting vision of isolated learning.
But, in the midst of a pandemic, isolated learning goes hand in hand with self-imposed isolation. Of course, once the pandemic subsides, we may all go back to our normal routines, and memories of hurried attempts to do distance education may simply reinforce our previous distaste for the idea.
However, there are approaches to online learning that actually do involve a great deal of face-to-face social interaction – much more so than the conventional live lecture. As I mentioned earlier, team learning (aka tutored video instruction) is one such methodology.
Team learning can also work in conjunction with MOOCs, if the MOOC has been properly designed. Therefore, it may be possible to organize students living at very small folk schools so that they can take online courses together in small study groups.
In an alliance of folk schools, for example, each folk school could specialize in creating and maintaining content for a relatively small number of online courses. These courses could, of course, be taken by students living locally. But, most importantly, they could also be taken by students at geographically disbursed schools in the alliance.
By cooperating in this fashion, a folk school alliance could produce its own online courses and share them with other folk schools in the alliance.
An individual folk school may well have on-site teachers who are subject matter experts in the content being locally developed. But, if students use team learning, then they can have lots of social interaction with other students and faculty do not have to be physically present when students take their course.
In addition to subject matter specialists, it would be good to have some poly-math teachers with a broad knowledge of many subjects. These teachers would be especially useful when students take a variety of courses outside the expertise of the local subject matter experts. The poly-math teacher may not be as knowledgeable as the specialist who developed the course remotely, but the poly-math teachers may well be better informed than any of the students taking the course. Also, they may be in a position to help students integrate knowledge from a number of divergent courses.
Finally, the study group team leaders could, ideally, interact with the remote subject matter expert(s) at other folk schools. This could be done via Zoom, Skype, email, a shared Learning Management System, or a MOOC platform such as Coursera.
The early history of Tutored Video Instruction at Stanford
When Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, J. F. Gibbons, developed Tutored Video Instruction back in the late 1970s, he organized study groups of HP engineers who were living in Santa Rosa. They saw the same lectures, did the same homework assignments, and took the same tests as the Stanford students.
Back then, Stanford was conducting distance education with engineers scattered around Silicon Valley. But, the HP engineers in Santa Rosa were outside the range of Stanford’s broadcast TV system. So, Gibbons decided to send video cassette tapes and other materials by courier to Santa Rosa. There, the HP engineers were instructed to gather in study groups to watch the lectures on a brand new piece of technology: the VCR.
When Gibbons compared the results of students in the TVI group (e.g. homework grades, exam grades, etc.) with those of his own Stanford engineering students, he was shocked to learn that the TVI students were slightly outperforming their on-campus counter parts. This was especially impressive because his Stanford engineering students were head-and-shoulders above the HP engineers in terms of SAT and GRE scores. So, he thought his own Stanford students could easily out-perform the HP engineers, but they did not. In fact, the Stanford students were slightly behind the HP engineers. Mainstream higher educations has been trying to cover up this result ever since.
Summary
Perhaps, then, it’s time for folk schools and educational institutions like Circle Pines to start exploring online learning. In the process, I hope they are able to re-discover interesting methodologies like team learning that have been lying dormant, hidden really, for so many years.
Discussion
JoanneB
I read the book “Summerhill” by A.S. Neill in 1965 and longed to create a similar education experience at CPC. I guess many, many others did, too.
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FredB
Thank you for your reference to Summer Hill. Also, I guess it might be good to say something about my own experience and how it shaped my views on education.
Although I attended Olney for the first three years of high school, I also thought about (and visited) The Meeting School.
It’s closed now, but in its day it was considered to be very close to Summer Hill. Like Summer Hill, the Meeting School tried to be very democratic, giving students a great deal of say over how the schools was run. Also, they offered a great student to teacher ratio.
One issue I struggle with is that it is not realistic to think that it is politically possible to provide every child with a Summer Hill or Meeting School learning environment. So, I knew at the time (perhaps not a clearly as I do now) that I was privileged to attend a boarding school with a great student-teacher ratio.
Today, Quaker boarding schools even more expensive than they were in my day, mainly because they are very labor intensive. If you cannot automate something, the costs tend to rise relative to things that you can automate.
So, how can one scale up that kind of labor intensive learning experience for all children? I wish I had a realistic answer, but I don’t.
One thing I do know, however, is that technology can and has improved things on the education front over long periods of time. Both writing and the printing press are examples of technologies that improved both the quality of education and access to education. They also were both very disruptive to the job market for academics. Writing, for example, put a lot of story tellers out of business. Likewise, the printing press did the same to scribes. But, how many of us would want to go back to a society that lacked these two technologies?
References
Circle Pines Center
https://www.circlepinescenter.org/
Coursera
https://www.coursera.org/
Folk School Alliance
http://folkschoolalliance.org/
Highlander Research and Education Center
https://www.highlandercenter.org/
Learning Management System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system
Massive Open Online Course
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
The Meeting School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meeting_School
My background with educational technology and online learning at UC Berkeley
https://memeinnovation.wordpress.com/2020/05/25/my-background-with-educational-technology-and-online-learning-at-uc-berkeley/
Olney Friends School
https://www.olneyfriends.org/
References on Circle Pines History and Co-op Economic Philosophy
https://memeinnovation.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/references-on-circle-pines-history-and-co-op-economic-philosophy/References
Scattergood Friends School
https://scattergood.org/
Summerhill by A. S. Neill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_(book)