Digital Diploma Mills.
Or
Chicken Little, the Sith Lords and the falling sky.
Most of the article reminded me of the slippery slope argument that you hear about with every hot and button topic and this one is no different. Many people in Academia have for years talked about how they are above the “Business of Education” as if business is beneath them. When I was in High School the teachers went on strike. Shortly before the strike every teacher in ever class explained how the Administration was trying to restrict their ability to teach bla bla bla etc etc. after hearing this from every teacher for four weeks all the students felt the teachers were justified for striking. They used their influence to promote their one sided self serving argument and that is what this article is.
In the classroom versus The Boardroom he talks about how the faculty were given “little possibility of oversight or governance; faculty were thus left out of the loop and kept in the dark about the new web requirement until the last moment.”
Not every decision need to be part of three different sub committees to give each member a platform to pontificate. Oftentimes those same people are more interested in making sure that their voices heard because what they have to say is “important” The types of decisions by committee very often have unintended consequences. A case in point, each of the Penn State campuses was allowed to decide whether they would require a residency requirement. The idea behind the residency requirement is that you must take a certain number of courses at that location in order to graduate from that College. When the Abington faculty Senate debated the topic they didn’t even really know what they were debating and so they made the decision that no residency requirement would be required. Lo and behold when students then started obtaining the history degree without ever stepping foot on the Abington Campus those same faculty who had made the decision were outraged that this could be possible. Faculty participation in decision making isn’t always the best thing.
Noble first talks about how education became commercialized. And how the focus became about research, intellectual property and intellectual capital. One of the bigger issues is that a whole generation of higher ed faculty has been raised to focus solely on “publish or perish” as well as “research” and again he blames administrators, but I’m sure there are plenty of faculty who want the release time from teaching to focus on their specialty, so it’s not just one sided. Noble then goes on to say that the administrators ignored the expanded administrative costs and focus their intentions rather upon increasing the efficiencies of already overextended teachers. I do not think that they are overextended. 3 courses one semester and 2 courses the other with a focus on some research periodically is not being over extended in my opinion.
In the section on the birth of educational maintenance organizations, Noble talks about “undermining the autonomy and independence of faculty as well as without support for their pedagogical claims about the alleged enhancements of Education without any real evidence of productivity improvements and without any effective demand from other students or teachers.” I find that somewhat ironic given that it is understood that higher education instructors are not teachers they do not go to school to learn how to teach they are material experts in their field therefore many have very little understanding of pedagogical methodologies.
The evil doers of the article, the administrators, (you know the people that were former faculty members who have risen to the level of administration ) these ultra bad guys they are the embodiment of Sith Lords. Administrations are “deploying technology primarily to discipline a skill and displace labor”. Noble also lays most of the expense of education at the feet of technology. The cost of education have continued to rise for a variety of reasons not just because of technology of which based on his statements in this article he would lead readers to believe. As an example, the societal expectations of the educational consumer surely plays a factor. I know I will be dating myself but I live in a dormitory and the dormitory had two shared bathrooms for all 40 people on the floor. The privileged lifestyle of the McMansion generation where everyone has their own bathroom creates a certain expectation. God forbid you should share much of anything with anyone so you have to have your own apartment and you have your own bathroom if that’s not enough you go to the world-class fitness centers where they have all the latest equipment (How many Planet Fitness’ do you find in a medium size college town?) there are a variety of reasons why college education could be more expensive and it can’t be all laid at the feet of Technology…. its all about your spin.
Lastly when he addresses the issue of students and realizing that their computer-based courses are often thinly veiled field trials for products and market development I think back to the first class that I know many instructors taught… their first class was an experimentation, the second time they taught that class was very different than the first did that instructor pay the student to attend? The third time was probably slightly different than the second, hence the students have always been “guinea pigs in production trials masquerading as courses”.
The important thing to think about is what benefits does any technology bring? I think that there can be benefits as well as detriments to using any technology. Isn’t that the role of Instructional Designers to help Faculty members who have little to no experience with making their teaching better because the faculty member is a material experts in their field. That is the role of instructional designers to help educate faculty on, dare I say, course design and pedagogy?
This article really just irritated me. I found it arrogant, elitist, self-serving and totally unbalanced kinda like this election cycle. And yes I made my post controversial to make it easier to comment on my one-sided view of the article, you can choose either the dark or the light either way may the force be with you.