This article was originally published in Domus 964 / December 2012
In the summer of 2011, two Stanford professors —
Sebastian Thrun, the head of Google X, and Peter Norvig,
the head of Google Research — decided to put their course,
CS221: an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, online
for anyone to follow. It's not that this had never been
done before. MIT's OpenCourseWare, for instance, had
for years put lectures online from across the university,
but CS221 would be different. Until then, online courses
such as MIT's had only targeted one of the constituent
elements of the educational process — the lecture — and
even that, in the opinion of Thrun and Norvig, was done
without imagination. In addition to lectures, they set
out to reinvent admissions, peer interaction, professor
interaction, problem solving, assignments, exams,
deadlines and certification, rethinking each one in terms
of the function of the Web.
Expecting hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students,
they wired together a pastiche of existing online tools,
shot short segments of videos that were later stitched
together into coherent lectures (in the manner pioneered
by Salman Khan of the Khan Academy) and sent out
a few e-mails. The e-mails multiplied, and so did their
student body. Soon they hit 1,000, then 5,000, then
10,000 students. By the time The New York Times picked
up the story in mid-August, they were at 58,000, which
ultimately exploded to over 160,000 by the start of the
course in October. Thrun immediately left his tenured
position at Stanford after the semester, splitting from
Norvig and announcing the following month that he
was launching his own online university, Udacity.
Thrun made headlines, forecasting the enrollment of half
a million students for his first course and the decimation
of the prevailing form of higher education, predicting that
"50 years from now there will be only 10 institutions
in the whole world that deliver higher education".
It was not long before Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller
followed suit. Ng, teaching at Stanford at the same time,
led a course that also attracted over 100,000 students, but
without the fanfare of Thrun and Norvig. Whereas Thrun
had splintered from the university to start from scratch,
Ng partnered Koller to take the opposite approach. They
developed a platform called Coursera that universities,
starting with Stanford, could use to put their existing
courses online. Other academies had unsuccessfully
attempted to establish online networks in the past, but
over 300,000 students who signed up for Stanford's
offerings in the Fall of 2011 were proof that the timing
was right. In April 2012, Coursera announced that the
University of Michigan and two Ivy League schools, the
University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University,
would join Stanford in offering online courses. Just a
fortnight later, Harvard and MIT made it public that they
were partnering to build a rival platform named edX.
A matter of days after that, MIT announced that it had
promoted L. Rafael Reif, the driving force behind edX,
to president of the university.
For MIT, embracing online education turned out to be a
king-making strategy, but elsewhere, shunning it was
grounds for a coup. Less than a month after Reif accepted
the presidency at MIT, Teresa Sullivan inexplicably
resigned from the presidency of the University of
Virginia. The New York Times Magazine later chronicled
her departure in a cover story, citing as the cause that
Virginia was "falling behind competitors, like Harvard
and Stanford, especially in the development of online
courses, a potentially transformative innovation."
Sullivan was eventually reinstated, but the following
month the university announced it had signed on
with Coursera.
Before the start of the fall semester, an additional 17
universities would sign up with Coursera, among them
the most elite in America; edX would add the University
of California at Berkeley and the entire University
of Texas system; NYU would partner with the start-up
Codecademy; San Jose State University would begin
sourcing lecture material from MIT through edX;
Colorado State University would start offering credit for
completion of a course on Udacity; and Thrun's former
co-teacher Peter Norvig would launch a new Google open-source
online learning platform called Course Builder
on the same day that Stanford launched their own such
open-source platform. Within a year, the online teaching
phenomenon had turned into what Stanford president
John Hennessy called a "tsunami". Too pervasive to go
unnamed, the title of "massive open online course" was
appropriated along with its awkward acronym, MOOC.
As this journal goes to print, the dominoes seem to be in
free fall, with MOOCs making news at an increasing rate.
According to The New York Times, "Stanford fired the
starting gun last Fall", but elite universities are not
made to run. If anything, in fact, they are machines for
standing still. Elite universities prefer not to tinker with
their academic core — rather, they add prostheses such
as stadia, libraries, research centres, global outposts and
the like to compete in an increasingly strained market.
In the past year, however, they have been compelled
to rush headlong into online learning, adapting to this
new reality at breakneck speed. Last year, student loans
surpassed credit card debt in America for the first time;
this year they totaled over one trillion dollars. To ask why
would thus beget a simple answer. A more fertile question
would be to ask how. Universities have seamlessly
slipped from their physical campuses to online platforms
because they are seen to be non-architectural, without
the strictures, weight and endurance of built form. Yet it
is precisely an architecture that they offer. More than any
formation of walls, these platforms do not simply dictate
a new financial model, but an entirely new pedagogy.
Within the walls of the platform, students are no longer
students: they have become "end users". From subjects
formed over the course of a degree, they are transformed
into fungible consumers of bite-sized technical skill.
In order to put a course on Coursera's platform, the
instructor must "chunk" their lectures into small pieces,
fragmenting a more complex arc into "meaningful
unit[s] of learning". These are the terms imposed by
scalable pedagogy, the rules required to attract hundreds
of thousands of end users. With the so-called "flipped
classroom" model, the "registered students" — the tuition-paying
university-matriculating end users — are required
to absorb knowledge in chunks, reserving class time for
problem-solving. As students and end users move into
the new classroom architecture provided by Coursera
and edX, the buildings are being left behind.
It is precisely by reframing these platforms as
architecture, though, that a space for an architectural
theory of contemporary education, and the contemporary
university, opens up. In 1991, Mark Wigley wrote that the
"contemporary architecture of digital prosthetics is what
remains of the once-solid body of the university."
For Wigley, this amounted to the collapse of a
fundamental and tortured relationship between
architecture and the university, whose very foundation
is itself architectural. As the space in which the thesis is
"either 'constructed' or 'demolished'", "nowhere is the
constitutional nature of the architectural 'metaphor'
more evident than in the university… it is, first and
foremost, a space of construction."
Yet, ironically, as a mere "mechanical art", architecture
was originally denied a place in the university.
It wasn't until 1866, when MIT first granted a place for
the discipline, that it entered the university, occupying
an unstable place somewhere between the sciences and
the arts, the precariousness of which allowed for an
architectural theory of the university to be sustained
for a century more.
Not indefinitely, however, as Wigley concluded: "the
networks of communication have become the new house
of theory… the critical gap between architecture and
its metaphor has been erased." (Mark Wigley, "Prosthetic
Theory: Disciplining Modern Architecture", in Assemblage,
No. 15, Aug. 1991, p. 9).
Wigley's diagnosis was penned just two years before the
release of Mosaic, the first graphical Internet browser,
three years before full text Web search engines, four years
before the commercialisation of the Internet and a full
two decades before the elite universities began racing
to embrace online education. In the past year, the digital
networks that threatened to dematerialise the university
have revealed their own edifice. They are no longer
limited and private, but massive and open, stitching
together millions across the globe. By reframing these
platforms for online education as architecture, the gap
reappears, and with it a place for a debate around what
this means for architecture.
Troy Conrad Therrien (@troytherrien), architect and teacher at Columbia University GSAPP
Future faculties
Leading American universities are witnessing an accelerated transfer of teaching from the actual physical campus to online platforms. In the future, responsibility for learning will in fact be switched from teacher to student, paving the way towards a new architecture of education.
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- Troy Conrad Therrien
- 03 January 2013
- New York