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Drugs, brawls and murder have landed a popular Lake Street bar in trouble.
Champions Sports Bar & Grill is in jeopardy after Minneapolis regulators and an administrative law judge recommended that the City Council vote against renewing its liquor license following eight years of pressure to end drug deals and violence.
The city's actions against Champions, which already has a federal case pending against Minneapolis officials, intensified last August after a midnight shooting inside the bar left one customer dead.
Findings documented this month by the judge have all the flourishes of a crime thriller, with references to a customer who killed someone with a gun hidden in his prosthetic leg to elude a metal detector and the chief security officer soliciting sex in his truck for $50 from an undercover cop.
The report about the bar at the corner of West Lake Street and Blaisdell Avenue S., noted that notorious drug dealers were permitted inside despite being on a list of banned customers, and patrons were seen smoking marijuana within 25 feet of security. One of the pot smokers allegedly told a police sergeant that security was "cool about it."
Ed Matthews, a lawyer for the bar, said he looked forward to explaining Champions' story at a hearing Tuesday.
"It's clear to us that the city has targeted Champions and intended to set Champions up for failure," he said.
Champions' most recent license expired last June, but the city allowed the bar to stay open pending the outcome of the administrative case.
Pulling license is rare
The Community Development and Regulatory Services Committee will conduct a license hearing Tuesday to hear arguments on the findings of Administrative Law Judge Jeanne Cochran, who suggested the city could also consider allowing Champions to continue operating but with strict conditions, including that it hire a professional security firm. Additionally, the judge recommended the city move a bus stop outside the bar, which owner Rick Nelson has long blamed for attracting much of the crime.
Pulling a bar's liquor license is rare at City Hall, where regulators usually try to work out agreements with troubled businesses in which they press for additional security or other measures. Cases go before an administrative law judge if the city cannot reach an agreement with a business for which it is recommending "adverse action" and the license holder wants to contest certain facts.
In recent years, the owners of Karma, Envy Nightclub and Bootleggers — all downtown — have closed their doors after pressure from Minneapolis over fights and police calls.
Nelson has argued that the city is punishing Champions for activity that happens off the premises, a claim that was successful for Northeast bar Gabby's Saloon and Eatery. The venue won $201,000 from the city after an appeals court found in 2009 that Minneapolis went too far in penalizing the bar for what happened off the premises. The bar, which has since closed, claimed in a federal lawsuit that the city was trying to drive away black customers who attended its hip-hop nights when it sought to limit the number of patrons and drink specials there in response to neighbors' complaints about yelling, littering and public urination.
Fines, suspensions
Champions' troubles with the city go back to 2006, when the bar paid a $10,000 fine and agreed to a one-day suspension after undercover cops and confidential informants bought drugs on the property. Champions also agreed to boost its security as part of an agreement with city regulators.
But the drug deals and nuisance calls continued: Champions paid a $5,000 fine and underwent a 14-day suspension the following year.
Nelson tripled security staff and had them use a metal detection wand on customers at the door. He improved the lighting, installed a fence and hired off-duty police officers for the busiest nights. Still, after fielding continued calls about drug-dealing at Champions, Fifth Precinct Inspector Matthew Clark — now assistant police chief — set up a sting operation that led to the arrest of 14 people involved in drug deals at or near the bar that generated much media attention in March 2012.
Clark banned the bar from continuing to employ off-duty officers, noting that they had not been effective in stopping drug dealing, though Nelson said his off-duty cops did not interfere with troublesome customers because they did not want to step on the undercover officers' investigation.
In a federal lawsuit filed in December that year, Nelson alleged that Clark set up the sting to retaliate against him for complaining about crime at the bus stop near the bar, and said that he defamed Champions during media interviews. That suit has been put on hold until the administrative case is resolved.
Champions has also claimed that the prohibition on off-duty cops has made problems worse.
Customers have left the bar with myriad injuries in the last several years. One customer was jumped by five women in the parking lot, another needed five stitches after an assailant bashed him in the head, and a belligerent customer lay unconscious with blood flowing from his ears after a security guard defended himself against the man.
In December 2012, Darnell Harris was shot to death by three men outside the bar. And last August, customer Ron Powell pulled a gun on a man who was hitting him while the bar was packed for a birthday party and killed an innocent bystander, Mark Stephenson.
According to the judge's report, Powell set off a metal detector when he walked into Champions that night but was waved through after security patted him down and saw he had a prosthetic leg with metal parts. Nelson believed the man hid the gun in the prosthetic limb.


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The new National Women's Soccer League in the USA took a significant step towards its inaugural season as 55 North American international players were distributed among the eight clubs in the division.
The allocation saw 23 American players, 16 Canadians and 16 Mexicans split between the sides, in a "fair distribution of talent across all eight team" by a panel of experts. The decisions were made based on a combination of player quality and stated preferences by teams and players.
"This allocation process is obviously a big step in building the foundation for this league and each of the teams will benefit from a group of very talented players," said NWSL Executive Director Cheryl Bailey.
The USA's entire gold medal-winning Olympic squad has been allocated to the league, with the likes of FIFA Women's World Player of the Year 2012 Abby Wambach lining-up at Western New York Flash alongside Carli Lloyd, who scored the winner in the London 2012 final.
Each of the teams will benefit from a group of very talented players.
Top scorer at the summer games and bronze medal-winner Christine Sinclair has been assigned to Portland Thorns FC, with the Canadian captain teaming up in the forward line with the USA's Alex Morgan – who was voted as 2012's third best player at the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala.
Washington Spirit, FC Kansas City, Sky Blue FC, Seattle Reign, Boston Breakers and Chicago Red Stars make up the remaining sides in the NWSL, which replaces the Women's Professional League after folding in April 2012.
The clubs' squads will be bolstered further after the college draft which takes place on 18 January ahead of the league kicking off in April 2013.
NWSL player distribution in full:
|**Boston Breakers **Sydney Leroux (USA) Heather Mitts (USA) Heather O'Reilly (USA) Adriana Leon (CAN) Rhian Wilkinson (CAN) Anisa Guajardo (MEX) Cecilia Santiago (MEX)
|**Chicago Red Stars **Shannon Boxx (USA) Amy LePeilbet (USA) Keelin Winters (USA) Erin McLeod (CAN) Carmelina Moscato (CAN) Maribel Dominguez (MEX) Dinora Garza (MEX)
|** FC Kansas City **Nicole Barnhart (USA) Lauren Cheney (USA) Becky Sauerbrunn (USA) Desiree Scott (CAN) Lauren Sesselmann (CAN) Renae Cuellar (MEX) Marylin Diaz (MEX)
|** Portland Thorns FC **Rachel Buehler (USA) Tobin Heath (USA) Alex Morgan (USA) Luz Saucedo (MEX) Marlene Sandoval (MEX) Karina LeBlanc (CAN) Christine Sinclair (CAN)
|** Seattle Reign FC **Megan Rapinoe (USA) Amy Rodriguez (USA) Hope Solo (USA) Kaylyn Kyle (CAN) Emily Zurrer (CAN) Jenny Ruiz (MEX) Teresa Noyola (MEX)
|** Sky Blue FC **Jill Loyden (USA) Kelley O'Hara (USA) Christie Rampone (USA) Sophie Schmidt (CAN) Melanie Booth (CAN) Monica Ocampo (MEX) Lydia Rangel (MEX)
|** Washington Spirit **Ashlyn Harris (USA) Ali Krieger (USA) Lori Lindsey (USA) Robyn Gayle (CAN) Diana Matheson (CAN) Alina Garciamendez (MEX) Teresa Worbis (MEX)
|**Western New York Flash **Carli Lloyd (USA) Abby Wambach (USA) Bryanna McCarthy (CAN) Jodi-Ann Robinson (CAN) Veronica Perez (MEX) Pamela Tajonar (MEX)

subset: commoncrawl


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High Hampton Inn's Summer Bucket List for Kids
From Memorial Day to Labor Day, children and teens can participate in a variety of activities at High Hampton Inn, the NC family-friendly mountain resort. High Hampton's Children's Programs offer programs and entertainment for kids of all ages, infant through teenager, including The Kids' Club, Youth at High Hampton, and The Teen Room. Each club gives children and teens the opportunity to participate in fun and unique activities to make for the ultimate fun-filled summer vacation!
Blast into summer vacation with High Hampton's Summer Bucket List for Kids for the break of a lifetime! How many things can you check off during your visit this summer?
Fun for All Ages:
Go Swimming in High Hampton's private mountain lake
Go on a nature walk
Eat S'mores by the fire pit
Play a game of croquet
Learn how to play Bocce Ball with friends
Play a game or two of corn toss
Start up a game of volleyball
Play a game of tetherball
Join Dad for a round of putting on the green
Hit the birdie in a game of Badminton
Enjoy a hike with the High Hampton llamas around Lake Trail or to the Cherokee Campground
Race pedal boats with the family on Hampton Lake
Slide down the natural water slide Sliding Rock into a refreshing mountain pool
Climb to the top of the Rock Climbing Wall
The Little Ones:
Go on a donkey cart ride with Fred & Ed
Have a pillow fight at High Hampton's Pajama Party
Wear sombreros and play maracas at a Mexican Fiesta
Lead High Hampton's llamas through an obstacle course and have a llama race during the Llama Olympics
Learn how to fish and try to catch a Rainbow Trout
Take a tennis lesson
The In-betweeners:
Go Geocaching with friends (without getting too lost!)
Learn how to kayak
Start up a game of Frisbee with friends
Play volleyball
Learn how to play Tennis like a pro!
The Big Kids:
Go to a bonfire with your friends from High Hampton
Win a game of Foosball in The Teen Room
Play Ping Pong with friends from High Hampton
Start up a game of Ultimate Frisbee
Win a game of air hockey
Play a game of doubles at the Tennis courts with friends
Pig out at High Hampton's Pizza Party!
Go on a hike with High Hampton's llamas up Rock Mountain
Win gold at the High Hampton Olympics
To start crossing things off your summer bucket list, make a reservation at High Hampton Inn today! Call 828-743-2411 or visit the Website.


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Jamie Rezanour
Actress Takes the Stage in the Big Apple
In New York City, the theatrical scene is so large and competitive that a professional actor could go to several auditions every day and never land a part. Such is not the experience of 2004 drama graduate Jamie Rezanour. She has been demonstrating her acting chops in the Big Apple for a year, landed a job following one of her first auditions there, and is presently in yet another paying production—this one with Epic Theatre Ensemble at Culture Project.
Like her fellow performers in Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," the talented Rezanour plays multiple roles, showcasing her acting range.
"I play the character Mistress Overdone, a very bawdy woman and owner of a brothel, and I play a nun in few other scenes." Rezanour said.
An earlier performance as Helena in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" drew praise in a New York Times review.
"It was so exciting to see my name in the New York Times," she said.
Fluent in Spanish, the smart marketer successfully promotes herself as a "Texas-born Latina/Persian actress."
"Being bilingual is a huge asset, and diversity is desirable," Rezanour said. "It sets me apart from others to have a multi-ethnic and interesting look."
In the city that never sleeps, Rezanour remembers where and when her theatrical spark activated.
"I wasn't involved in high school theatre, but at UST I went to audition on the second day of school," she recalled. "I was watching the other actors perform, and that fire inside of me woke up, and I knew this was where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do."
The creative young woman with a compelling public presence calls getting her degree at UST "a great experience" and "the right path for me."
"Because it's a smaller university, I got lots of stage experience there and worked with a tight-knit group of actors," Rezanour said.
Today, she realizes the important role UST played in preparing her for success.
"One of the most valuable skills from UST that has helped me develop as an artist was good ensemble building—learning how to work within a group. In a production, it's not just about you. It's about the story and the other actors. We had a great group at UST, very talented."
The warm welcome she gets from actors in NYC has been a pleasant surprise.
Rezanour said, "I was very apprehensive at first, but the theatre community here is supportive and welcoming. We're all in the same boat, working hard to fulfill our dreams.
"There is a lot of competition and things can be tough, but I just have to be able to say that I tried it."
Like so many who came to NYC before her, Rezanour knows that if she can make it there, she can make it anywhere.


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How to Manage Your Keywords
Video Transcript
In this video we'll take a look at how to manage your keywords in Rank Tracker. We'll cover:
- How to add and delete keywords from your campaigns, and
- What it means to track or untrack a keyword.
Campaign Management Screen
First, I'll start on the Campaign Management screen.
Here I can see my list of campaigns, and I'll just click on the campaign I want to work with.
Ranking Data Screen
Now here, on the Ranking Data screen, I can see my keywords (1) and their rankings (2).
I can also see the number of backlinks (3) for each ranking page, and the date the information was last updated (4)
Sort grid by column headings
I can click on a column heading to sort the grid by the information in that column.
This lets me look at my highest-ranked pages first, separate my tracked keywords from un-tracked ones, or simply look at things alphabetically.
Expand Results
If you see a little triangle next to a URL, like this one here, this means that more than one of your pages is ranking in the top 100 for that keyword.
To see all the results, just click the little arrow to expand the row.
Adding Keywords
To add more keywords to a campaign, I simply click the "Add Keywords" button down here.
Adding Keywords
I can type in my new keywords, or paste a list I've copied from another application.
Each keyword you track in Rank Tracker counts against your monthly quota. So as you can see here, each keyword I type changes my "available quota" (1).
When you've added the keywords you want to track, all you have to click the "Add Keywords" button here (2).
Adding Keywords
Whenever you add a new keyword, Rank Tracker will usually be able to get the initial ranking result within a few minutes. Moving forward, your keyword data will be updated on a weekly basis.
Managing Selected Keywords
These buttons at the bottom of the display let me manage one or more selected keywords at a time.
Selecting Keywords
I can click the checkboxes next to each keyword I want to manage, or click the checkbox at the top of the column to check or uncheck the entire list.
Tracking and Un-Tracking Keywords
With these buttons (1), I can Track or Untrack the selected keywords, which determines whether or not they're updated each week.
If a keyword is un-tracked, it won't count against my quota, but I'll still be able to view its historical information using the button on the right side, here (2).
Export Keyword Data
I can also use the Export button to save the information about the selected keywords to a text file which is suitable to be imported into a spreadsheet or other analytical tool.
Copying Keywords
With the Copy button, I can copy a keyword and all its historical ranking data to either a new campaign or an existing campaign.
Please note that the copied keyword will count against your quota - a keyword being tracked in two different campaigns is treated as two separate keywords.
Deleting Keywords
And finally, I can permanently delete a keyword and its associated data with the Delete button. This action cannot be undone so be sure to think twice before you delete your keywords.
Automatic Weekly Updates
And that's all there is to managing your keywords in Rank Tracker.
Once you've set up your keywords, Market Samurai will automatically update your ranking data each week so that you will always have the data you need at your fingertips.
7 Responses to "How to Manage Your Keywords"
daveM Says:
September 17th, 2012 at 4:14 am
I have just entered my first campaign..... this is a truly amazing product, a great time saver. Instruction videos are perfecto...!!
Baljindra Butter Says:
January 9th, 2013 at 12:26 am
In your campaign settings, it only allows you select Region as all or a specific country. If I need to track keywords Globally and Country(UK), can this be done under one campaign? or do I have to create 2 campaigns for the same keywords?
Dr. Anthony Says:
January 9th, 2013 at 12:24 pm
@Bal - You would need to make separate campaigns for this :-)
Greg Says:
April 19th, 2013 at 4:34 am
Do you need to add your URL to match the keyword or does it pick that up somehow?
Dr. Anthony Says:
April 19th, 2013 at 9:06 am
@Greg - You need to enter a domain if you wish to track the keyword against all pages on your domain, or a URL if you wish to track a keyword against a specific page on your domain.
Will Lee Says:
April 30th, 2013 at 6:58 am
I'm having trouble getting the keyword ranking results for Google from Rank Tracker to match results from Google Webmaster Tools. They aren't even close, in fact. My update is set for Friday. What time period do the results show - is it for the prior week (7 days) through Thursday? Also, Google Webmaster Tools lets us filter for country and search type (all, image, mobile, video, or web). I set my rank tracker for US / English, so I obviously and comparing to the same in Google tools, but what search types do you include?
Dr. Anthony Says:
May 1st, 2013 at 8:00 am
Can you please contact our support team, they'll be able to take a more in depth look at this for you.
Leave a Comment
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More Rank Tracker Lessons
- How to Upgrade Your Plan
- How to Manage Your Campaigns
- How to Manage Your Keywords
- More About Rank Tracker


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From CrimethInc.
Anarchism is a very loaded word that conjures specific images in peoples' minds. It's difficult to overcome these stereotypes and honestly I don't discuss it often. We can't even get Universal Healthcare in this country, how can we expect communalism, mutual aid and consensus-based decision making? I'm a poor anarchist in that I'm not very active politically. I try to live and act in manners that reduce oppression and hierarchy as this is what anarchism means to me and, like veganism, I try to live my life as an example (easier said than done!). This past weekend was the Second Annual Anarchist Bookfair and it was one of the best events like this I've been to in a long time. The location could not of been better: Barnsdall Art Park. It's near bus and train lines and easily accessible from Hollywood or downtown. Most importantly it's freakin beautiful. Trees and open space on the top of a hill with beautiful views in every direction.
I gave a workshop on veganism that addressed concerns about veganism/animal rights being an issue for only white affluent folks and otherwise unattainable. My argument is simple: You have to separate the issue from who does it. Animals are caged and killed for human use and this is an issue of oppression. I care about living beings and want to reduce suffering therefore I don't eat or wear animal products. Do you have to eat at Whole Foods to be vegan? No. In my household rice and beans (dry beans!) is a common meal, as is stir-fry with whatever veggies are in-season and low-cost at the farmers market or local grocer. There are barriers to veganism, but they are overcome with a few resources. This is the focus of my presentation. It was well-received and some good discussions developed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting with friends and activists. Hung out with the people at Earth First! and Little Black Cart. Hundreds of people attended and the vibe was great. I credit the hard work of the organizers in reaching a diverse set of folks and not having any punk bands play. The space we occupy and communicate in influences how that communication happens and this space only improved it. Bike parking would have been nice, but you know, we can't have everything.
The next event is the Anarchist Cafe on Sunday February 28th at 1pm in DTLA. I'm hosting a workshop specifically on vegan nutrition in the early afternoon. See you there.


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Tropical Storm Lorenzo maintained maximum sustained winds of 40 mph Monday night, after the storm formed over the central Atlantic Monday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
As of 11 p.m., Lorenzo was moving northeast at 9 mph about 685 miles east-southeast of Bermuda. It is the 12th tropical storm of the 2013 season.
It formed as a tropical depression over the ocean Monday morning.
There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect and no threats to land.
Tropical Storm Lorenzo is expected to turn toward the east-northeast or east on Tuesday and Wednesday, with little change in speed or strength, forecasters said.
More Local Stories:


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Zwilling J.A. Henckels Twin L Shears
Easy, hassle-free returns online and in-store for eligible items.Learn More
Earn 5% Back in rewards4 plus free standard shipping3every day when you shop with your Williams Sonoma credit card at Williams Sonoma.Apply Now Learn More
- Summary
These shears were developed as an innovative yet down-to-earth pair of shears for every day work. These shears are ideal for a multitude of tasks – from trimming meats and slicing dried fruit to shaping parchment for baking pans.
- Stainless-steel blades: one straight and one serrated.
- Ergonomic polypropylene handles have a smooth, seamless surface contoured for a comfortable grip.
- Made in Germany by Zwilling J.A. Henckels since 1731.
- Dimensions & More Info
- Made in Germany.
- Use & Care
- Hand-wash with warm water and a mild detergent. Rinse and dry immediately.
- Sharpen at home using a sharpener designed for scissors, or have them sharpened by a professional.
- Shipping
Shipping Information
UPS can deliver most in-stock items within 3–5 business days. UPS is unable to deliver to P.O. boxes.
Shipping Rates
The shipping rate varies depending on your order total and shipping destination. View Shipping Options and Charges.
Next Day Delivery
For an additional charge of $26 per address, we can expedite delivery to most destinations. This service is not available for some oversize items, items shipped directly from the supplier (including perishable and custom-manufactured items), out-of-stock items and items to be shipped outside the contiguous 48 states.
Orders received by 9:00 p.m. ET Monday through Thursday will arrive the next business day; orders placed Friday through Sunday will arrive on the following Tuesday.
Return Policy
At Williams Sonoma, we take great pride in the quality and craftsmanship of our products. Attention to design, materials, safety and construction are our priority. Upon receipt, please inspect your purchase and notify us of any damage; we will arrange for a prompt replacement.
If within 30 days, you are dissatisfied for any reason, you may return your purchase for a refund of the merchandise value. An original receipt or gift receipt is required for all returns and exchanges. Returns with a gift receipt will be refunded in the form of a Merchandise Credit for the amount indicated on the gift receipt. Returns with original receipt will be refunded in the original form of payment, cash and check refunds over $100 will be issued as a company check (may take 14 business days from time of request).
For all cutlery returns (knife sets, single knives, cutting boards, knife sharpeners and knife storage), please contact us at 888.922.4108 to initiate the return.
We cannot accept returns on monogrammed, personalized, special-order items, custom upholstery, food, items shipped direct from the vendor or on items damaged through normal wear and tear. Final sale items ending in .97 or .99 cannot be returned.
Made to Order and Final Sale Furniture items are non-returnable and cannot be cancelled once the order is placed.
For returns of items purchased from your Williams Sonoma Gift Registry, we will gladly provide a refund or exchange for the merchandise within 90 days of your event or within 90 days of purchase, whichever date is later. View Full Returns Policy.
- Free Knife Sharpening in Stores
Working with a sharp knife is safer, more effective and much less tiring than trying to cut and slice with a dull one. To ensure top performance, bring your favorite knife into your local store and one of our cutlery experts will give it a fresh, new edge using our precision equipment. The first knife is free; each additional knife is just $5.
Our stores also offer knife demonstrations to teach you the correct grip, positioning and basic knife techniques and can help you find the perfect cutlery for your needs – just ask a store associate for assistance.
- Price Match Guarantee
Williams Sonoma Price Match Guarantee
At Williams Sonoma, we're committed to bringing you the best quality at the best prices.
If you find a lower price on any of our products, we'll match it—guaranteed. Click here for details.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Ggc1 from Strong and useful Great shears for the kitchen. My other ones that came with my kitchen knife set and broke while cutting lobster tail shell. These seem a lot more sturdyDate published: 2016-11-08Rated 3 out of 5 by JohnPCola from Doesn't feel like German quality. I collect fine German, Austrian and Swiss made "instruments". Germany has sought out simplistic function with the highest quality with long experience in metallurgy. This has been a way of life for them including a law for the standard quality of their beer. Those who've ever closed the door on a Porsche 911 know what this is. I received these shears today and was surprised. I don't know if, "cheap" is an appropriate word here, but these are certainly the lowest quality in their range. After verifying that they are labeled as made in Germany, I noticed the carbon steel slotted screw which holds the blades together behind the red logo-hinge (see attached photo). The shears are very light. The blades appear to be stamped from sheet metal. The handle feels very light and brittle. After all these disappointments, I read the packaging, which reads, "The TWIN L series was awarded the IF Design Award by the Industrie Forum Design Hannover, Germany." This can't be true.Date published: 2016-05-03Rated 5 out of 5 by Ellendy from Second Pair Acquired I have owned these shears since the early 90's and like them so much that I ordered a second pair when another lesser quality pair of kitchen shears bit the dust. These work every bit as well as my old pair. I have not put them in the dishwasher yet, though I have always cleaned the first pair in the machine. I am pleased so far, but I can't say whether i will get another 15+ years out of this pair!Date published: 2014-04-15Rated 5 out of 5 by Wayoutwest from Good shears Sharp, easy to use, well designed, seems capable of opening most smaller challenging packets.Date published: 2013-03-19Rated 5 out of 5 by Meljane from Best kitchen scissors I have used. Very sharp. Feel as if they are "gliding" through meat, compared to other brands I have tried. I used them to cut up beef steaks for fajitas. Be careful, though because I am pretty sure they could do a number on your flesh! Very happy with this purchase.Date published: 2012-05-03


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Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair, also white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition. ("There are about ten passages—and by passages I simply mean a selected text, and these passages are meant for close reading, and sometimes I'll be referring to these passages as texts, or focus passages, but you'll know I mean the same thing—and each one of these requires close reading!") When he speaks outside the lecture hall, he smothers friends and students with a stew of blandishment and praise. "Thank you, Wonderful Kevin!" he might say. Or: "The Great Claudia put it so well." Seen in the wild, he could be taken for an antique-shop proprietor: a man both brimming with solicitous enthusiasm and fretting that the customers are getting, maybe, just a bit too close to his prized Louis XVI chair.
Nagy has published no best-sellers. He is not a regular face on TV. Since 1978, though, he has taught a class called "Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization," and the course, a survey of poetry, tragedy, and Platonic dialogues, has made him a campus fixture. Because Nagy's zest for Homeric texts is boundless, because his lectures reflect decades of refinement, and because the course is thought to offer a soft grading curve (its nickname on campus is Heroes for Zeroes), it has traditionally filled Room 105, in Emerson Hall, one of Harvard's largest classroom spaces. Its enrollment has regularly climbed into the hundreds.
This spring, however, enrollment in Nagy's course exceeds thirty-one thousand. "Concepts of the Hero," redubbed "CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero," is one of Harvard's first massive open online courses, or MOOCs—a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos. A MOOC is "massive" because it's designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It's "open" because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. "Online" refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And "course," of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take MOOCs, you're expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end, you'll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.
Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. "I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available," John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. "While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses."
Some lawmakers, meanwhile, see MOOCs as a solution to overcrowding; in California, a senate bill, introduced this winter, would require the state's public colleges to give credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state's community colleges currently have course waiting lists.) Following a trial run at San José State University which yielded higher-than-usual pass rates, eleven schools in the California State University system moved to incorporate MOOCs into their curricula. In addition to having their own professors teach, say, electrical engineering, these colleges may use videos by teachers at schools such as M.I.T.
But MOOCs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. In mid-April, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago, the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a MOOC, this spring. "There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves," the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than "a glorified teaching assistant." They wrote, "The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary."
Nagy has been experimenting with online add-ons to his course for years. When he began planning his MOOC, his idea was to break down his lectures into twenty-four lessons of less than an hour each. He subdivided every lesson into smaller segments, because people don't watch an hour-long discussion on their screens as they might sit through an hour of lecture. (They get distracted.) He thought about each segment as a short film, and tried to figure out how to dramatize the instruction. He says that crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had at the lectern.
"I had this real revelation—I'm not saying 'epiphany,' because people use that word wrong, because an epiphany should be when a really miraculous superhuman personality appears, so this is just a revelation, not an epiphany—and I thought, My God, Greg, you've been spoiled by the system!" he says. At Harvard, big lecture courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales. Instead, participants in CB22x enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards). They annotate the assigned material with responses (as if in Google Docs). Rather than writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, "The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours."
Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best—so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn't college teachers do the same? Vladimir Nabokov, a man as uncomfortable with extemporaneity as he was enamored of the public record, once suggested that his lessons at Cornell be recorded and played each term, freeing him for other activities. The basis of a reliable education, it would seem, is quality control, not circumstance; it certainly is not a new thought that effective teaching transcends time and place. Correspondence courses cropped up in the nineteenth century. Educational radio appeared in the twenties and the thirties. The U.K.'s Open University, which used television to transmit lessons to students, enrolled its first students in 1971.
The Internet was the natural next step. The University of Phoenix, for years the strongest force in for-profit online education, added a modem-dial-up support to its distance-learning program in 1989, and plans for Internet-based higher education took hold more broadly in the nineteen-nineties. At that point, the technology was shaky, and the audience was, too. Early efforts, like Western Governors University—an online school founded in 1996—saw the World Wide Web the way that many New Yorkers see Roosevelt Island: as an unexplored, accessible place with great potential of some sort, if only people understood it slightly better. In the new millennium, Harvard ran a program called Harvard@Home, initially available only to alumni. Few people watched it, though, and Harvard killed the program in 2008.
Supporters of MOOCs say that they are a different and heartier species. Rather than broadcasting a professor's lectures out into the ether, to be watched or not, MOOCs are designed to insure that students are keeping up, by peppering them with comprehension and discussion tasks. And the online courses are expected to have decent production values, more "Nova" than "NewsHour." Alan Garber, the provost of Harvard and a strong advocate of online education, told me, "Long run, I see the online courses or online components becoming pervasive. Instructors in a seminar or small course might obtain modular materials from multiple sources and reassemble them in order to put together an entire course."
MOOCs are also thought to offer enticing business opportunities. Last year, two major MOOC producers, Coursera and Udacity, launched as for-profit companies. Today, amid a growing constellation of online-education providers, they act as go-betweens, packaging university courses and offering them to students and other schools. Coursera, a Stanford spinoff that is currently the largest MOOC producer, serves classes from Brown, Caltech, Princeton, Stanford, and sixty-five other schools; Udacity, also the progeny of Palo Alto, focusses on tech and science. Last May, with twin pledges of thirty million dollars, Harvard and M.I.T. jointly founded edX, a nonprofit MOOC company that works with a dozen colleges and universities, including U.C. Berkeley and Rice. EdX is organized as a confederation, with each member institution maintaining sovereignty over its MOOC production; Harvard's line is called HarvardX. "This is our chance to really own it," Rob Lue, a molecular- and cellular-biology professor who leads the program, told me.
For decades, élite educators were preoccupied with "faculty-to-student ratio": the best classroom was the one where everybody knew your name. Now top schools are broadcast networks. New problems result. How do you foster meaningful discussion in a class containing tens of thousands? How do you grade work? Nagy's answer—multiple-choice tests, discussion boards, annotation—is something like the standard reply, although there's lots of debate. At one extreme, edX has been developing a software tool to computer-grade essays, so that students can immediately revise their work, for use at schools that want it. Harvard may not be one of those schools. "I'm concerned about electronic approaches to grading writing," Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of the university and a former history professor, recently told me. "I think they are ill-equipped to consider irony, elegance, and . . . I don't know how you get a computer to decide if there's something there it hasn't been programmed to see."
She explained, "Part of what we need to figure out as teachers and as learners is, Where does the intimacy of the face-to-face have its most powerful impact?" She talked about a MOOC to be released next academic year, called "Science & Cooking." It teaches chemistry and physics through the kitchen. "I just have this vision in my mind of people cooking all over the globe together," she said. "It's kind of nice."
On campuses now, the pedagogic ideal is the "flipped classroom"—a model in which teachers preassign whatever lecture-type material is needed, as homework, and use the classroom time for peer and interactive learning. "Students, if all you're going to do is lecture at them, no longer see any reason to show up to be lectured at," Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, who teaches computer science, told me. "Most of our classes are video-recorded, so they'll watch the recording if your class is taught before eleven o'clock."
One morning in March, I visited a meeting of what Nagy calls his "skunk works" MOOC-production team. The agenda was pressing: the next morning, CB22x was going to go live, and the videos for the first lesson were not yet finished. Natasha Bershadsky, the course's main video editor, kept checking the clock. She is not, by vocation, a Web editor: she recently defended her dissertation in Greek history, at the University of Chicago. For CB22x, she was trained in editing technique by Marlon Kuzmick, a teacher of "digital storytelling" who serves as Harvard's MOOC video guru. Nagy refers to Kuzmick as "our German director," although Kuzmick is Canadian. Nagy likes to imagine him as Fritz Lang in "Contempt," shooting a film of the Odyssey.
"Marlon has authorized one of his camera people to come to Greece with me over break," Nagy told the group that morning, shifting his eyes merrily around the table. "This is a new idea."
"It was very difficult to persuade her to do it," Kuzmick said dryly.
"It's five days of contact time," Nagy went on. "Can you imagine Delphi, where you almost always have just the right kind of mist—and you think of that scene when Patroklos dies, where Apollo appears in a cloud of mist, and then swats the hero with the back of his hand from behind, and it's the scene that my old professor at Harvard, Cedric Whitman, said was the moment of ultimate terror, holy terror, in all of literature—and at Delphi you can see a mist like that!"
Kuzmick said, "I think that we're just trying to capture moments that seem real, that seem authentic."
Bershadsky showed a video segment that she had been up late cutting the previous night—a part of the online class's first lesson, setting up a concept that Nagy would use through the course. The segment started with a head shot of Nagy talking about the 1982 movie "Blade Runner." His lecture was intercut with a muted clip showing the rain-drenched death soliloquy of Roy Batty, the movie's replicant antagonist.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," Roy says in the movie. "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
Nagy spoke the crucial words and started teasing them apart. "The tears in rain are a way of comparing the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the rain that is enveloping the whole scene," he explained. " 'Time to die'—and, for me, a good point of comparison is the word hôrâ, which means the right time, the right place, the seasonal time, the beautiful time. Where everything comes together."
The word hôrâ appeared floating in the air beside Nagy.
"There's the subtitle!" he cried delightedly from across the table.
In the Web lecture, Nagy talks about the scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: "You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don't die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you're not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word 'glory' to translate kleos—is not just glory. It's the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry."
The lesson was one of ten short ones composing the first hour of Nagy's course. Following standard MOOC wisdom, each bite-sized chunk of lecture addressed a single topic and was filmed with as much visual variety as possible: Nagy said he wanted to avoid "The Greg Show," in which students saw only his talking head. When presenting Achilles' kleos quandary, for example, he was sitting at a table with two members of his skunk-works team, Claudia Filos and Jeff Emanuel, both posing as students. They nodded as he talked. Then Filos spoke up:
FILOS: So this one small passage, actually, has a lot to teach us about the whole epic tradition.
NAGY: In a way, it's a micro-narrative of the whole Iliad, Claudia. I couldn't agree more.
A little later, Nagy read me some questions that the team had devised for CB22x's first multiple-choice test: " 'What is the will of Zeus?' It says, 'a) To send the souls of heroes to Hades' "—Nagy rippled into laughter—" 'b) To cause the Iliad,' and 'c) To cause the Trojan War.' I love this. The best answer is 'b) To cause the Iliad'—Zeus' will encompasses the whole of the poem through to its end, or telos."
He went on, "And then—this is where people really read into the text!—'Why will Achilles sit the war out in his shelter?' Because 'a) He has hurt feelings,' 'b) He is angry at Agamemnon,' and 'c) A goddess advised him to do so.' No one will get this."
The answer is c). In Nagy's "brick-and-mortar" class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants' deeper comprehension of the text. The online testing mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer. And it lets them see the reasoning behind the correct choice when they're right. "Even in a multiple-choice or a yes-and-no situation, you can actually induce learners to read out of the text, not into the text," Nagy explained. Thinking about that process helped him to redesign his classroom course. He added, "Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience."
When people refer to "higher education" in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It's made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you'll find a Byronic young man reading "Cartesian Meditations" on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they're hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.
But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.
It is also under extreme strain. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, two economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, diagnosed a "cost disease" in industries like education, and the theory continues to inform thinking about pressure in the system. Usually, as wages rise within an industry, productivity does, too. But a Harvard lecture hall still holds about the same number of students it held a century ago, and the usual means of increasing efficiency—implementing advances in technology, speeding the process up, doing more at once—haven't seemed to apply when the goal is turning callow eighteen-year-olds into educated men and women. Although educators' salaries have risen (more or less) in measure with the general economy over the past hundred years, their productivity hasn't. The cost disease is thought to help explain why the price of education is on a rocket course, with no levelling in sight.
Bowen spent much of the seventies and eighties as the president of Princeton, after which he joined the Mellon Foundation. In a lecture series at Stanford last year, he argued that online education may provide a cure for the disease he diagnosed almost half a century ago. If overloaded institutions diverted their students to online education, it would reduce faculty, and associated expenses. Courses would become less jammed. Best of all, the élite and populist systems of higher education would finally begin to interlock gears and run as one: the best-endowed schools in the country could give something back to their nonexclusive cousins, streamlining their own teaching in the process. Struggling schools could use the online courses in their own programs, as San José State has, giving their students the benefit of a first-rate education. Everybody wins. At Harvard, I was told, repeatedly, "A rising tide lifts all boats."
Does it, though? On the one hand, if schools like Harvard and Stanford become the Starbucks and Peet's of higher education, offering sophisticated branded courses at the campus nearest you, bright students at all levels will have access. But very few of these students will ever have a chance to touch these distant shores. And touch, historically, has been a crucial part of élite education. At twenty, at Dartmouth, maybe, you're sitting in a dormitory room at 1 A.M. sharing Chinese food with two kids wearing flip-flops and Target jeans; twenty-five years later, one of those kids is running a multibillion-dollar tech company and the other is chairing a Senate subcommittee. Access to "élite education" may be more about access to the élites than about access to the classroom teaching. Bill Clinton, a lower-middle-class kid out of Arkansas, might have received an equally distinguished education if he hadn't gone to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, but he wouldn't have been President.
Meanwhile, smaller institutions could be eclipsed, or reduced to dependencies of the standing powers. "As a country we are simply trying to support too many universities that are trying to be research institutions," Stanford's John Hennessy has argued. "Nationally we may not be able to afford as many research institutions going forward." If élite universities were to carry the research burden of the whole system, less well-funded schools could be stripped down and streamlined. Instead of having to fuel a fleet of ships, you'd fuel the strongest ones, and let them tug the other boats along.
One day in February, 2012, a social scientist named Gary King visited a gray stone administrative building in Harvard Yard to give a presentation to the Board of Overseers and Harvard administrators. King, though only in his fifties, is a "university professor"—Harvard's highest academic ranking, letting him work in any school across the university. He directs the university's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and he spoke that day about his specialty, which is gathering and analyzing data.
"What's Harvard's biggest threat?" King began. He was wearing a black suit with a diagonally striped tie, and he stood a little gawkily, in a room trimmed with oil paintings and the busts of great men. "I think the biggest threat to Harvard by far is the rise of for-profit universities." The University of Phoenix, he explained, spent a hundred million dollars on research and development for teaching. Meanwhile, seventy per cent of Americans don't get a college degree. "You might say, 'Oh, that's really bad.' Or you might say, 'Oh, that's a different clientele.' But what it really is is a revenue source. It's an enormous revenue source for these private corporations."
King rattled off three premises that were crucial to understanding the future of education: "social connections motivate," "teaching teaches the teacher," and "instant feedback improves learning." He'd been trying to "flip" his own classroom. He took the entire archive of the course Listserv and had it converted into a searchable database, so that students could see whether what they thought was only their "dumb question" had been asked before, and by whom.
With compilation tools like this, online education turns from a dissemination method to a precious data-gathering resource. Traditionally, it has been hard to assess and compare how well different teaching approaches work. King explained that this could change online through "large-scale measurement and analysis," often known as big data. He said, "We could do this at Harvard. We could not only innovate in our own classes—which is what we're doing—but we could instrument every student, every classroom, every administrative office, every house, every recreational activity, every security officer, everything. We could basically get the information about everything that goes on here, and we could use it for the students."
A giant, detailed data pool of all activity on the campus of a school like Harvard, he said, might help students resolve a lot of ambiguities in college life. "Right now, if a student wants to learn What should I do if I want to become an M.D.?—well, what do they do?" he asked. "They talk to their adviser. They talk to some previous students. They get some advice. But, instead of talking to some previous students, how about they talk to ten thousand previous students?" With enough data over a long enough period, you could crunch inputs and probabilities and tell students, with a high degree of accuracy, exactly which choices and turns to make to get where they wanted to go in life. He went on, "Every time you go to Amazon.com, you are the subject of a randomized experiment. Every time you search on Google, you are the subject of an experiment. Why not every time a student here does something?"
The promise of proprietary data-gathering is appealing, because, with digital life wearing down the gates of élite universities, schools are no longer competing solely with one another; their command of the educational marketplace is being challenged by industry. A few months earlier, Faust, Harvard's president, had happened to speak with Hennessy, Stanford's president, during a congressional lobbying session in Washington. At that meeting, Faust told me, Hennessy talked about an early MOOC on artificial intelligence by one of his professors, Sebastian Thrun. The course had exploded—it ultimately gained more than a hundred and sixty thousand participants—and Thrun was not blind to the opportunity involved: he later took the MOOC from Stanford and used it to co-found Udacity with venture-capital money. When Faust returned to Boston and met with a subcommittee of deans she'd previously assembled to think about the future of education, she told me, it was with a fresh sense of urgency about needing to make online education work at Harvard. King was invited to speak at the February meeting; the Overseers asked follow-up questions that continued by e-mail and by phone during the next few weeks. Less than three months later, it was announced that Harvard and M.I.T. would launch their nonprofit MOOC-making start-up, edX.
In his office that afternoon, overlooking a small quadrangle and the back of the Swedenborg Chapel, King told me that he didn't think MOOCs were quite ready to replace the classroom. "At the moment, there's a very big difference between an online experience and an in-person experience," he said.
Just how much is lost has lately been a subject of debate. At Harvard, as elsewhere, MOOC designers acknowledge that the humanities pose special difficulties. When David J. Malan, who teaches Harvard's popular and demanding introduction to programming, "Computer Science 50," turned the course into a MOOC, student assessment wasn't especially difficult: the assignments are programs, and their success can be graded automatically. Not so in courses like Nagy's, which traditionally turned on essay-writing and discussion. Nagy and Michael Sandel are deploying online discussion boards to simulate classroom conversation, yet the results aren't always encouraging. "You have a group who are—they talk about Christ," Kevin McGrath, one of the coördinators of CB22x, told me soon after the discussions started up. "Or about pride. They haven't really engaged with what's going on."
"Humanities have always been cheap and sciences expensive," Ian M. Miller, a graduate student who's in charge of technical production for a history MOOC intended to go live in the fall, explained. "You give humanists a little cubbyhole to put their books in, and that's basically what they need. Scientists need labs, equipment, and computers. For MOOCs, I don't want to say it's the opposite, but science courses are relatively easier to design and implement. From a computational perspective, the types of question we are asking in the humanities are orders of magnitude more complex." When three great scholars teach a poem in three ways, it isn't inefficiency. It is the premise on which all humanistic inquiry is based.
Speaking with King that afternoon, I mentioned that it was especially difficult to turn humanities courses into MOOCs. King wrinkled his brow.
"Why?" he asked. "Why should it be?"
Evaluating student performance on massive scales can be harder when you're teaching qualitative material, I said.
King disagreed: "I think assessment is probably harder in those fields to begin with—not because it's harder to assess but because it's harder to define what you wish to evaluate." Big data might help resolve this. The real potential of MOOCs, he went on, is to randomize input within a single virtual "classroom" in the way one can't in a traditional setting. "It would be possible to randomly assign different teaching methods, and different approaches, and different ways of seeing the screen, and all kinds of things," he told me. "And since the numbers are large and the potential for running many experiments is great, what you could do is completely solve, at least in an online setting, this huge problem in educational research."
For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse and scant. A cornerstone of the case for them is a randomized study that Bowen helped plan, through the Ithaka organization, a Mellon Foundation spinoff. It showed no significant difference in educational outcomes between online learning and traditional classroom learning. The MOOC in question was a statistics course, however, and a "hybrid" one: its students had a weekly in-classroom Q. & A. session. When MOOCs are a purely online experience, dropout rates are typically more than ninety per cent.
"I feel as if we're very much in the experimental stage," Kathleen McCartney, a developmental psychologist and the dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, told me one afternoon in her offices on the edge of the old Radcliffe Yard. This summer, she'll leave Harvard to become the president of Smith. In May, 2012, when edX was announced, Alan Garber, the provost, asked her to serve on its board. "It really is a value-added question," she said. "What is the value added that a college or a university, and professional schools within the university, can offer?" Later, she got up to look for a paper that had impressed her. "This guy is a really good thinker," she said, handing me a printout of a report by Michael Barber, an adviser to the publishing and education conglomerate Pearson, with two co-authors. The paper, titled "An Avalanche Is Coming," was released this past March by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British think tank. The avalanche in question, according to the report, is the upheaval that digital culture will bring to universities. Its authors write, "The one certainty for anyone in the path of an avalanche is that standing still is not an option." For instance, it says, Brezhnev's Soviet Union was in the path of an avalanche and didn't prepare—look what happened. Also, Lehman Brothers. The foreword was by the economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers.
Written in a portentous tone and drawing heavily from the literature of tech-business strategy, "An Avalanche Is Coming" cites Richard Florida and Clayton Christensen to propose that schools take advantage of an "unbundling" in their educational responsibilities in order to remain competitive—a popular idea among MOOC supporters. "Some of the leading entrepreneurs of our times, including Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, dropped out of college to move to Silicon Valley," the report says. "Driven by the purpose of city prosperity, technology hubs could be the universities of the future." The idea is increasingly popular among a certain sector of the higher-education community. (The Minerva Project, an online-based liberal-arts university being developed with a twenty-five-million-dollar seed investment from Benchmark Capital, will have its students travel among as many as seven campuses globally, doing online-based work at each; Larry Summers chairs its board.) McCartney said, "I think it's a good paper. I got it three times yesterday."
One sunny afternoon in March, the president of edX, Anant Agarwal, a fifty-three-year-old professor of electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T., showed me around the company's new offices. EdX is two blocks from Google's Boston offices, near M.I.T.: an area of Cambridge that, in contrast to the undulating brick sidewalks and noodle-shaped streets surrounding Harvard, comes across as sleek and angular and most efficiently traversed by car. "Welcome to our start-up," Agarwal said when we shook hands. "It is very start-up-y." He gestured across the open-floorplan office, filled with ferns and stylish blond-wood furniture. Flat-screen TVs hung from the ceiling. Employees strode between workstations. "As you can see, this is what a start-up looks like," he offered one more time.
Agarwal has started up a lot of start-ups, most recently one that made multicore processors. He told me that he drinks coffee, nonstop, all day. That isn't hard to believe; he walks as if in fast-forward, and when he's sitting he fidgets. In December, 2011, he launched something called MITx, under the aegis of the university, ostensibly to put his spring-semester circuits-and-electronics course online. "When we started, a sweet-spot number of students I was looking for was about ten times as many students as the M.I.T. class," he said—about fifteen hundred. "In the first few hours of posting the course, we had ten thousand students sign up, from all over the world." The course ultimately enrolled a hundred and fifty-five thousand students.
Agarwal realized that he was onto something big. When the M.I.T. and Harvard brass approached him about running a MOOC partnership, he drew up a budget of sixty million dollars. At current rates, he estimates, the investment will cover edX's needs for "approximately a couple of years." He said, "As the business builds, we will see how it goes, and what we really do, what we don't do, and shuck and jive as we go along, as you might imagine in any start-up company—this is a start-up company."
How edX will make money remains a little murky. Courses in the HarvardX program are now free. That will change this fall, as Harvard starts conducting what it calls "revenue experiments." MOOCs are costly to produce—Rob Lue, the HarvardX leader, told me that some courses require "in the hundreds of thousands" of dollars to get up and running—and so far there are no significant returns. The university regards its thirty-million-dollar pledge as a "venture capital" type of investment, and hopes to get its money back.
One idea for generating revenue is licensing: when the California State University system, for instance, used HarvardX courses, it would pay a fee to Harvard, through edX. Another idea, geared toward the individual home user, is a basic per-course fee: you'd pay to enroll in a course you liked. There's an existing market for tuition-based online courses—the University of Phoenix, for one—and, to compete in that field, edX will have to choose its per-course price points carefully. A model often mentioned is iTunes.
For the professors involved, too, the financial details remain vague. Should you get paid extra for conducting online classes? (Michael D. Smith, the dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told me that Harvard plans to start paying MOOC teachers when revenue begins flowing.) There are gnarly intellectual-property issues: if a professor launches a MOOC class at Harvard (an edX property) and then takes a job at Princeton (Coursera), who keeps the online course? Will untenured professors, who may have to find jobs elsewhere, be discouraged from MOOC-making? While nonselective institutions winnow staffs and pay licensing tithes to the élite powers, MOOCs offer substantial opportunities to academic stars, who might aspire to have their work reach a huge international audience. When Nagy decided to turn his popular class into a MOOC, he was thinking not only of its global reach—he's already working to secure CB22x inroads into Greece, India, China, and elsewhere—but of the long half-life that the course would have once it's circulating on the Web.
"I could easily see a great institution like Harvard having a dynamic archive where, even after I'm gone—not just retired but let's say really gone, I mean dead—aspects of the course could interlock with later generations of teachers and researchers," Nagy told me. "Achilles himself says it in Rhapsody 9, Line 413: 'I'm going to die, but this story will be like a beautiful flower that will never wilt.' "
In Cambridge, when the weather starts to warm up, fragrances return: first, there's a soft, faint scent of earth and fog; the grass comes back; and trees begin to blossom in the courtyard of the old-books library at Harvard. Groundskeepers set down mulch. On one of the first warm days of the year, I met Peter J. Burgard, a professor of German at Harvard, at the back entrance of Widener Library, where he keeps a research study separate from his office.
Burgard is a tall man with a crown of wavy silver hair. That afternoon, he wore a green-and-bright-blue striped shirt, bluejeans, and lime-green socks. For all his claims to scholarly immurement, he reads a fair amount online, and speaks with a young standup comic's restless, patter-and-punch-line lilt. Unlike most tenured professors, Burgard teaches advanced German-language courses by choice, and, each summer, leads an intensive immersion program, in Munich. His other teaching is varied: his subjects include the German Enlightenment; baroque literature and art; twentieth-century art; and Goethe, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Burgard is a highly regarded teacher. Since edX was announced at Harvard, though, he's been a persistent and outspoken critic of it. "I made the decision that I will not teach in HarvardX," he told me, swivelling in his chair before a large iMac. Behind it, propped on one wall, was a huge black-and-white reproduction of Gustav Klimt's "Jurisprudence," left over from a 2005 exhibition that Burgard co-curated; it depicts a man being ensnared by an octopus in front of three nude women. "To me, college education in general is sitting in a classroom with students, and preferably with few enough students that you can have real interaction, and really digging into and exploring a knotty topic—a difficult image, a fascinating text, whatever. That's what's exciting. There's a chemistry to it that simply cannot be replicated online." Burgard also worries that MOOCs may slowly smother higher education as a system.
"Imagine you're at South Dakota State," he said, "and they're cash-strapped, and they say, 'Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We'll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we'll have the students watch this TV show.' Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, 'First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don't have as many graduate students. You don't need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.' And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there."
I asked Michael Smith, the Harvard dean, whether he worried about the effects of MOOCs on the academic job market. "I think oftentimes this question is oversimplified," he said. "We're working very closely with our graduate school and our graduate students to think about how they can be involved in this process." Job offers today, he said, will necessarily "be different from the ones I saw when I finished up graduate school." Some Ph.D. students are being trained in MOOC production as "HarvardX fellows."
Yet Burgard is not alone in his concerns. Last month, when Amherst College turned down an invitation to join edX, it was by a faculty vote of more than sixty per cent. A lot of teachers, some of whom had been browsing Harvard MOOCs, worried that they threatened to centralize higher education to an uncomfortable degree, and that their giant scale clashed with Amherst's small-class style. A single MOOC could exceed the number of alumni, dead and living, that Amherst has seen in two centuries.
"I was surprised at the outcome," David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, told me. "It seemed to come down the road as something that was going to happen." Wills started out being open to MOOCs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX's representatives seemed able to address them. "One of the edX people said, 'This is being sponsored by Harvard and M.I.T. They wouldn't do anything to harm higher education!' What came to my mind was some cautious financial analysts saying, about some of the financial instruments that were being rolled out in the late nineties or early two-thousands, 'This is risky stuff, isn't it?' And being told, 'Goldman Sachs is doing it; Lehman Brothers is doing it.' " The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors. "It's like higher education has discovered the megachurch," he told me.
He and others worried about what this might do to smaller preachers. "I have to say, it turned my stomach to think that we were going to be making decisions about other people's jobs in a discussion to which they were not party," Adam Sitze, a member of the department of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst, told me. "Some very brilliant people are at institutions that are not wealthy." In a meeting, one of Sitze's colleagues, the political theorist Thomas L. Dumm, described the conveyance of MOOCs to weaker universities as "eating our seed corn."
I was curious whether graduate students at Harvard, the élite professors of the future, shared any of these concerns. Most I spoke with seemed fairly sanguine about the future of a MOOC-sustained academy or, at least, upbeat in their disenchantment. "I have a hard time seeing how this makes an already dire situation for the humanities worse," Stephen Squibb, a graduate student in English, said.
Might it make some things better? Peter K. Bol, a Chinese intellectual historian, started depending on computers as a graduate student at Princeton, in the late nineteen-seventies, because he was a sloppy typist. Today, as the director of Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis, he's a leading exponent of the use of geographic-information-system technology in historical study—like Google Maps, except with a historical record's worth of information in it.
To him, MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. "The question for us here was: How do you take what you're teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?" Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. "Unless I'm writing popular books, I'm not reaching those people. I'm not telling them stuff that I've worked hard to try to understand."
Now he thinks he can. This fall, Bol will launch ChinaX, a survey of Chinese cultural history from the neolithic period to the present day. He has also launched a course to let students get involved in preparing that program. Those in "Chinese History 185: Creating ChinaX"—a campus class offered only to Harvard students—have spent this term building Bol's online course, module by module, in small groups under his direction. Teaching takes place in both a classroom and a computer lab. I sat in on one of the class meetings.
Bol is a gifted teacher. When he takes the head of the classroom, his weary, slightly stiff manner falls away, as the years melt from a veteran stage actor when the curtain rises. He speaks energetically and clearly, gesturing briskly with both hands, as if making two marionettes dance. His jokes get full-classroom laughs. It was the first time I had been in an active university class since my time in college, and I fell back into old habits and a long-forgotten rhythm. I found myself taking lots of notes, college-type notes, notes more nervously dutiful and conceptual than I often take today. Once, when Bol was speaking, I glanced at my phone to see whether an important e-mail had come through. When I looked up, I found Bol's eyes on me, and flinched. I had adopted again the double consciousness of classroom students: the strange transaction of watching someone who watches back, the eagerness to emanate support. Something magical and fragile was happening here, in the room. I didn't want to be the guy to break the spell.
Near the end of the two-hour session, a student raised her hand and asked Bol what he meant by a phrase he'd used, "the historian's mind-set." There were a few minutes of class left. Bol nodded and perched on the edge of a table with his legs dangling below him. A colleague and collaborator had slipped into the room, the historian Mark C. Elliott, and Bol asked him to come up to the front. The two sat side by side. Bol said, "How do I know the historian's mind-set when I see it? I know it because it's somebody interested in how things change over time, but not just that. They're also interested in the problem of how things change over time. And how to account for change over time."
"I would answer it a little bit differently," Elliott said. "I would say the historian's mind-set is the person who sees what's going on, today, and assumes that whatever's happening is not happening for the first time. And that whatever we're seeing must have happened in some iteration, at some point, sometime in the past somewhere. And that those versions of the kinds of change that we see around us in various scales are just the latest installment of a very long series of similar such changes."
Bol cocked his head. "So it sounds to me that you're saying—"
"Here it comes!"
"—that history is sort of repeating in some ways. But isn't history also cumulative—that when we see it happening a second time it's somehow different from the first time?"
"Yeah, I certainly don't mean to say that it's repeating. There's a great Shirley Bassey song, actually, 'History Repeating'—"
"If you could sing a bar or two—"
"I'll send you the MP3. It doesn't repeat, but it rhymes."
Their discussion left an energetic silence in the room, a feeling of wet paint being laid on canvas. Sitting there, I thought of similarly fragile, unexpected moments that together helped define my college education. Once, during a bout of warm midwinter weather, a teacher of Baroque chorale harmony pranced into the room and spent half of class analyzing a song lingering in his mind; the song was "June in January," and today it puts me in mind of open windows and warm Fridays. I can still see the faculty office—small, dimly lighted, chilly—where I sat as a freshman, having come with a question, as the professor, a charcoal-gray scarf looped around her neck, mentioned a document trove that became the basis for my senior thesis. I recall being in a survey-course lecture so slick and wrong-headed that, at one point, the woman sitting next to me reached over and wrote ugh-get-me-out-of-here comments in the margin of my notebook. And that she used a blue-ink Uni-ball Vision. And that the seconds while she wrote each note were bliss. I remember those moments, and I remember more. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Education is a curiously alchemic process. Its vicissitudes are hard to isolate. Why do some students retain what they learned in a course for years, while others lose it through the other ear over their summer breaks? Is the fact that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to revolutionize the tech industry a sign that their Harvard educations worked, or that they failed? The answer matters, because the mechanism by which conveyed knowledge blooms into an education is the standard by which MOOCs will either enrich teaching in this country or deplete it.
William W. Fisher III, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been experimenting with ways to split the difference. This spring, Fisher is teaching his first online course, CopyrightX, through edX. But he's also a casual student of the medium. Fisher's field is intellectual-property law—he was among those to represent Shepard Fairey and his "Hope" poster—and he works a lot on rights in the digital age. I met him one morning in his office, which had a standing desk and an ergonomic keyboard in one corner. At one point, Fisher's Portuguese water dog, Nica, wandered in. He explained to me that he has reservations about MOOCs.
"Two features that can be found in most of this recent wave of online courses are: first, what could be described variously as the 'guru on the mountaintop,' or the 'broadcast model,' or the 'one-to-many model,' or the 'TV model,' " he said. Fisher has a shock of strawberry-blond hair. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and, incongruously, tan hiking boots. "The basic idea here is that an expert in the field speaks to the masses, who absorb his or her wisdom. The second feature is that, to the extent that learning requires some degree of interactivity, that interactivity is channelled into formats that require automated or right-and-wrong answers.
"I think this fails to capitalize on many of the most important advantages of new technologies vis-à-vis education," Fisher said. "It's possible that it's optimal for math, computer science, and the hard natural sciences. I don't teach those things, so I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not optimal for social sciences, humanities, and law. So I wanted to try a different technique."
Fisher's idea is to constrain his online course as much as possible. Online enrollment in CopyrightX was capped at five hundred students. In picking students, he looked partly for a range of ages and professions: his goal is to seed knowledge of digital-age copyright law among people who will apply it creatively in their own circles and work. Unlike most MOOCs, CopyrightX runs simultaneously with the version of the course that Fisher teaches at the law school. This lets him link the two communities. Students in his law-school course, and alumni of it, volunteered to serve as "teaching assistants" for the online students. He divided the five hundred online students among these volunteers.
Each week, the law-school class has two Socratic sessions on campus. The online students, meanwhile, have "sections" on the Web, taught by the teaching assistants. Every other week, the whole group convenes, in person or remotely, for an evening session at the law school. Artists, writers, and other copyright holders visit and speak about their legal concerns. The teaching assistants are in the room, but also online with their Web students, who are watching the event through a Webcast. "The teaching fellow is monitoring this discussion, participating in it, and then forwarding questions into the room," Fisher said. "So in the room there are two screens: one screening questions from the Harvard Law School students, and the other featuring the questions that are curated by the teaching fellows. And we oscillate the discussion between them."
As the wheels of CopyrightX begin to turn, the course tries to deliver on all promises of online education: it proliferates useful knowledge beyond Harvard, it lets students learn by teaching, and it enriches the classroom environment by giving more time to discussion of hard problems. It also is not massive, open, or entirely online. "This is an old idea—it's basically the way seminars have been run for centuries," Fisher said. "But it remains a good one." ♦


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This blog still has some activity from readers, but since I have left the University, I am no longer writing for it. No-one else has taken it on, so it has somewhat withered!
However, you can keep on reading about UX design, data visualization, usability, etc, especially as applied to scientific web sites and applications, over at the EBI Interfaces blog, where I write a lot thesedays.
Filed under: Resources, data viz, design, ebi, interfaces, ui, usability, ux, visualization


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Today was the third day of CI 2008, and it didn't disappoint. I really thought that nothing could top Dr. Cooper's keynote yesterday (Pam blogged about that below, so be sure to check it out), but this afternoon's panel session "Fitness Business at a Crossroad: How to Hold on in Today's Economy and Prosper for the Future," was insanely good. Moderated by former Lifetime Achievement award winner Rick Caro, the sessions addressed issues affecting club owners today, and, yes folks, they said the "R" word: recession. The panel consisted of health club giants: Jeff Klinger, CEO Anytime Fitness; Gale Landers, CEO, Fitness Formula; Carl Liebert, CEO 24 Hour Fitness; and Scott Chovanec, president, Scott Chovanec and Associates.
To start the session off, Caro asked the panel to describe how their clubs were affected by the weakening economy and what they were doing to counteract it. Liebert started things off by saying that it was actually refreshing to hear people admit that the country was in a recession and that his 400+ 24 Hour Fitness locations were hoping to take advantage of the situation as much as they could by really focusing on member needs.
"Get out and talk to the people who are paying your bills," Liebert said. "Talk to your members."
Chovanec said that he was focused on retention as well, noting that it's five to seven times more expensive to attract new members than keep current ones. Klinger said that because he has smaller franchise clubs that they hadn't as dramatically felt the economy slowing, but that he was focused on all Anytime Fitness locations improving their club culture. He also hoped that the bailout on Wall Street would help shore up the ability to expand business. Landers said that attrition at Fitness Formula was up slightly but that the club company created a new member program in response to help with retention.
Focusing on retention and maintaining good, quality service was a theme heard repeatedly during the session, which later was open to questions from the audience. I was particularly struck by how solid the attendee's questions where. From picking Liebert's brain about how the fitness industry differs from Fortune 500 companies (Liebert was previously the CEO at Home Depot and said that although management may not be as strong as in some industries, the passion for helping people was unparalleled) and ways to reduce energy expenditures in the face of increased prices (turn the lights down and don't be afraid to bargain with your utility companies), you could obviously tell how important this issue was to people and what a great chance it was to pick these top dog's brains.
Over and over again, the panelists brought up the importance of a quality staff and quality programming, particularly for new members who are deconditioned and may be intimidated by the club. In addition, group exercise was said to be a fantastic retention tool that creates invaluable member-to-member relationships.
"Can you give them an instant experience?" Landers said. "As an industry, we have failed sometimes in giving a high-quality experience. We must use our current members to grow our current business through word of mouth."
For more on this issue, be sure to check out the magazine in the coming months. The editors will be covering this issue and bringing you the latest on how clubs are enduring these tough times.


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This open-concept, single story home features a gallery entry, two bedrooms and one bath at front hall and spacious private master suite. Master bath includes linen storage space, walk-in shower, double vanity, enclosed water closet and large walk-in closet. Kitchen and dining are open to Great Room, ideal for entertaining and family movie nights. Island includes Stainless Steel single-basin sink, dishwasher and additional seating space. Plentiful pantry shelving compliments substantial cabinet storage. Laundry conveniently located at garage entry.
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Boulder County commissioners and fracking foes continue to disagree about whether a home rule charter could give the county any more legal clout if it attempts to prohibit that process of freeing up underground oil and gas deposits.
During a meeting Monday with three representatives of the Boulder County Community Rights Network, Commissioners Elise Jones and Deb Gardner said the advice they've gotten is that a home rule charter wouldn't give the county any more authority to ban hydraulic fracturing in unincorporated areas — or any more of a legal basis to defend such a ban if it's challenged in court.
But Mary Smith, one of the Community Rights Network activists attending Monday's meeting, argued that a home rule charter containing language about protecting the community and its residents would provide "a legal structure that allows us to assert our rights."
Sarah Larrabee, another of the Community Rights Network representatives, said a county government structure is needed "that balances property rights with civil rights."
Community Rights Network representative Merrily Mazza, who's also a Lafayette City Council member, told commissioners that without a change to home rule, "you can't do anything" under current state law to provide the public health and environmental protections possible under a home rule charter.
But Boulder County attorney Ben Pearlman said that the Colorado Constitution and state law would probably still prevail in any court disputes over how much a county can do in restricting oil and gas drilling procedures, even if a county has its own home rule charter.
"You only have the ability to put in your charter the things the state allows you to put in the charter," said Pearlman, a former county commissioner.
Boulder County commissioners have rejected a request from the Boulder County Community Rights Network to schedule a special July 15 election on the question of whether work should begin on drafting a home rule charter. The Community Rights Network is now expected to begin collecting petitions in an effort to force that special election to be held.
Contact Times-Call staff writer John Fryar at 303-684-5211 or firstname.lastname@example.com