Interview with Grade Results Founder Craig Ullman

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Craig Ullman is the founder of Grade Results, a one-on-one online tutoring company. He also invented eSchool, a software suite that integrates digital video and websites into the classroom.

Ullman has been published in various magazines and academic journals, including the United States Distance Learning Association's journal. He also holds seven patents on enhanced media and the Internet.

In this interview, Ullman discusses the political implications of online teaching, the importance of the human factor, how blended teaching mirrors the business world, and more.

In your academic essay on course management systems, you describe online teaching as an enhancement of traditional teaching. Do you ever think it will be able to stand on its own?

That's a really dangerous question. It's a political question, not a technology question. You've got two political currents working in opposition. One is the strength of the teachers unions and the need for teachers to be employed in schools, and the other is the budget issues, the attempt to try to make education cheaper. There's some other issues as well. Right now, not every small school can afford a physics teacher, for instance, or high quality teachers in general. So you've got a whole bunch of different market trends all affecting what we call education, and this happens probably more in the higher education world than K12.

In the ideal world, for any educational model, a blended approach is really best. So you have the advantages of learning from other people in a classroom setting, a synchronous experience among people who have face-to-face contact, which is enormously powerful. But you also have the advantages that web-based learning offers as well. The fun part is putting all those techniques and technologies together in a blended approach, where you're maximizing the effectiveness of each modality to have a greater impact on the students.

What have been some of your biggest takeaways in your work with online learning?

Well what eSchool tends to do is to can the human factor, to provide the illusion of the human interacting with the student. As my career progresses, I've taken this idea to the next level and started an online tutoring company, GradeResults, with my partner Suzanne McElyea, and that's had great results. It supplies actual human beings who interact live with the students through chat, voice, or video. So through exploring technology, we're getting closer and closer to the original point, which is the most impactful educational technology is one teacher talking to one student. So with GradeResults, that's moved into using readily available technologies to kind of recreate the most elemental form of learning. So we've come a long way just to get back to the beginning.

Also, the interesting thing with GradeResults is that we've had a lot of experience now in very different classrooms across different parts of the country, rural vs urban, grade school vs high school vs college—we've been all over the place. Certainly for K12 one factor really stands out and it's a little antithetical, that is, the effectiveness of the online tutoring. It's significantly dependent on the quality of the classroom facilitator or teacher managing the students. You can think, "Oh that person's just a babysitter, what difference does it make?" But in fact, it makes a huge difference to keep those students on task, to maintain a positive environment, and to help the kids when they have any issues. The human factor keeps rearing its head as being the single most important factor in education and that's whether you're using a lot of technology or none at all. It's a critical importance.

What's a unique or often overlooked challenge with online teaching?

One problem with educational technology is that every product is an implied criticism of the teacher. "If you were a really good math teacher, we wouldn't need this software." Of course, that's exactly the wrong way to think about it. With this attitude, it's easy to have poor implementation of the technology and then you're gutting the possible effectiveness of the technology before you start.

How could e-learning change the way we learn?

We're stuck in the paradigm of the classroom being the locus of attention. What you can do with classroom management systems is make that the organizing principle, so that I as a teacher instead of spending my time lecturing students and being the conduit of a one-way information stream, I can now outsource that to my internet pages. Let the students come in either having seen video, heard audio, or read the lecture material, or any combination. And now the class time is about actually discussing the concepts. That makes class a lot more fun, a lot more interesting, and really takes advantage more significantly of the social aspects of knowledge. We can all learn together in dialogue.

If I'm the only one speaking and all you're doing is taking notes and occasionally raising your hand, that's really a pre-technology model. That is not very effective. If you give every student the control over my presentation so they can rewind, they can pause, they can take notes—they're not going to miss anything. That's a more effective form of a lecture and you can go even beyond that to interactive web content. Then the classroom time becomes discussion, debate, really mulling over the concepts and the students get a much more complete understanding of it by applying the concepts of the discussion.

That kind of blended approach I think for both teachers and students is exciting. It makes the teachers do some more work upfront by publishing the lectures, it makes the teachers do some more work in the class because they have to be on their toes answering questions and guiding discussions. On the other hand, it makes every class unique and fresh. You're not just doing the same notes again and you're requiring more on the part of the students because they not only have to participate, but they have to come to class having read the material and ready to engage their peers as well as the teacher in a complete period-long discussion. So it really raises the stakes for everyone in the room and makes everyone's participation in the room much more important, and that's fun. That's what learning should be.

You wrote about wikis in the classroom in your piece Wiki Nation. Can you talk a little more about that?

The wiki is a very simple and interesting tool to demonstrate that knowledge is a social construct by having a little space where everyone can contribute and review each other comments. And it's not simply a threaded discussion—which is perfectly fine—but even more than that a final object in itself. Let's say we're writing an essay together, where I write a first draft essay then you tweak it then someone else adds some more and another person some more and so on, we're literally building some other thing. Everyone is contributing to it and making it their own.

That sort of shared experience in creating knowledge is not a whole lot different from how people work in the business world, and perhaps we want to use that sort of model in education to prepare people for the business world, or maybe we don't. But that parallel is there and we should at least acknowledge it. It's also a potentially much more engaging way of sharing and building knowledge.

In your article "Daylong Learning," you talk about the idea of designing education to prepare students for the workforce, which has become mostly informational. Can you elaborate on that?

There are two schools of thought about schools of thought. Either education should mirror the type of work that students do when they get out of school, hence we have the factory model of schools to prepare students for working at factories, or we don't do that. So it's ultimately about the question of the value of education. Is it preparing students to contribute to the economic environment that they live in, or is the value of education to actualize the students, to have them become who they are?

In the traditional classroom, you have a leader and the led. The led don't have much impact in the class other than they ask questions. It's very hierarchal and it's incredibly concrete. Someone might mention or quote a book, but really education is confined to the physical limitations of that classrooms and the objects in it. I suppose if you're a carpenter, that's a pretty good metaphor for your job—you can't make things out of stuff that's not physically in front of you. But for modern office workers, people who work with information, the kind of concreteness and self-defined space that you have in school is irrelevant. There are no physical limitations to the information that we can access and manipulate in any given second. And there are no physical limitations to the people that we can access in any second. They're really completely different ways of accessing the world.

So if the goal is to prepare students for the jobs of the future—managing, interpreting, and analyzing information—then the concreteness and limitations of the traditional classroom structure are antithetical to teaching students how to think for the jobs that they're going to have. That's one level of critique. The other level is if you forget about what job you're going to have, and if your only goal is to have students achieve self-actualization, to have students develop their talents and abilities to the highest degree, that largely still argues for opening up the education experience to being able to access all the information in the world. That's going to help you self-actualize more.

It ultimately all gets back to—and this is the annoying part about education—determining the purpose of education. We have multiple values for the purpose of education, which are sometimes complimentary and sometimes conflicted. I always thought that the most effective, practical, valuable course I ever had was in logic because that's teaching you how to think. It doesn't prepare me for any individual job, although arguably it prepared me for everything. If the goal for education is just to have me smoothly enter the workforce, than logic probably hurt me. Because knowing logic makes you ask questions that people don't necessarily want you to ask. But if the goal is self-actualization, than it helped me enormously.