By Professor
Doom
Admin: “Utilization of Online
Education will change the interface of higher education! We need to position
ourselves to take advantage of these learners by installing dashboards and
establishing metrics to strategically enhance our retention plan for growth in
the 21st century…”
--I’m kidding here, completely making
up the usual administrative gibberish…I bet I fooled a few.
Online
education is all the rave now, since supposedly it’s the wave of the future,
the One True Way that will make higher education available to all (but what
about public libraries, haven’t they been around for many decades?). I can’t
even begin to estimate the number of hours I’ve had administrators lecture me
on how important it is to maximize this revenue stream, the better to enhance
their administrative salaries.
At
my alma mater, a small, private college, there are 350 faculty members, 67% of
whom are contingent labor and 4% of whom are tenured. There are 2200 students
and--wait for it!--1300 administrative positions. What in the world can ever
explain those numbers?
--part
of the advantage of online work is faculty become basically irrelevant to
higher education. There
is a book on this.
I’ll grant I
have the resistance to change that all “old folks” have, but allow me to inject
some sanity into this mad rush to onlinedness for everyone.
There has
always been an interest in using newfangled technology for education. Over a
century ago, reliable mail service made “correspondence courses” a possibility.
You could sit in your farmhouse with a kerosene lamp and take college courses,
reading books on your own time and demonstrating skills. Back then, institutions
of higher education had integrity, and, realizing that correspondence courses
required very little effort on the part of the institution, charged a much
reduced fee for this type of course. You can still find that now, and every few
years I get a student taking such a course looking to hire a tutor to help with
the concepts. “Cheap” correspondence courses didn’t have much prestige, and
were pretty vulnerable to scammers, but never really caught on.
This is no
surprise.
For most of
human existence, the key way humans learned a skill was to be physically near a
human demonstrating the skill, one willing to explain exactly what he’s doing.
This is what most “apprenticeship” programs are, after all, and it’s little
different in higher education, where the skills are far more arcane than
necessary for almost all human beings. A hardworking student could nevertheless
learn a skill from a book (I even learned how to juggle
just from reading a book, and, of course, with much dedicated practice) if no
other option was available.
Radio next
became the hot new technology for education. There were radio courses—talk
about available to everyone!—which admittedly weren’t so effective, since you
had to actually tune in at the right time to catch the lecture, and humans
really benefit from seeing a skill in action.
Then came
television. The hot new technology was exploited via “Sunrise Semester,”
where the university would broadcast taped lectures very early in the morning.
The student could wake up early, and watch, or just use the Betamax machine (I
might still have a few such tapes in a box somewhere) or VHS to record the
lecture, for later consumption. These were offered at my institution when I was
an undergraduate, and I imagine other major schools had something similar.
Although these courses are not much different than long YouTube videos, they
never caught on enough to really matter. It worked for a few students, but most
folks really needed the “old school” way of direct learning in the presence of
someone who knew the material.
Now, we have
the newfangled technology of the internet…and it’s wildly successful, despite
being little different from Sunrise Semester. Now, absolutely, much of that
success is both
obviously and completely bogus, but even so it’s still more successful than
previous techno-offerings of delivery.
Admin won’t think about the origin of the success of online coursework,
instead being content to suck up all the student loan money despite the blatant
fraud. Allow me to explain the difference why videos today are so much more
popular than videos 20 years ago. Next time.
Britain's Open University -- founded by the Labour government in 1965 -- managed to make use of television. They would broadcast their lectures (maybe still do) early in the morning and late at night on BBC2. I watched some of the math lectures back in the late '80s -- on Fourier analysis, complex analysis, differential geometry and Galois theory. The quality was high -- much better than the ill-organised and ill-presented lectures I had to contend with at the U of London. Unfortunately what's missing is interaction with other students (the faculty are typically not approachable or available).
ReplyDeleteIn the USA there's been this obsession with tech as educational panacea throughout the 20th century. Not once have the wild expectations with regard to a new technology been met. The latest craze revolves around "MOOCs" (e.g., Coursera and Udacity). But the same fundamental problem remains -- little or no access to faculty and other students. Learning, math, and science generally are *social* activities -- this can't be emphasised with sufficient strength. The real purpose of the MOOC is to cut faculty yet further. Some of this may trickle down to lower fees -- for instance, Georgia Tech is offering a cut-price $6,000 online Master's in computer science.
Yes, the same problems remain, but now suddenly they're very popular. I'll finish that thought next time.
ReplyDeleteI did see the Georgia Tech has shown some integrity and offered cut-rate prices for cut-rate education. I hope it works out for them.