How Not to Use Powerpoint
Fast Education, Part II
Parents and students “have no solid evidence, comparable across institutions, of how much students learn in colleges or whether they learn more at one college than another” (13). To address these problems, the Spellings commission urges a number of reforms. The most controversial is that, to improve accountability, “higher education institutions should measure student learning” (23) using “quality-assessment data” that would be made public. These “outcomes-focused” measurements of what students are learning at particular colleges would “be accessible and useful for students, policymakers, and the public,” as well as for academics themselves (23), and would enable parents and prospective students to compare the quality of education offered by different colleges and universities.
Comments on the Spellings Commission Report, from the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America, March 2007
First there was the fiasco of No Child Left Behind, which Brian Stecher has called “a failure of imagination,” that “focuses on a very narrow set of outcomes, and ignores many elements that students and their families find satisfying, challenging and motivating about their schools.” It’s also a boon for the standardized testing industry and contributes to shrinking budgets for everything from physical fitness to music education.
In classic Bush fashion, since it did not work, it’s time to bring the same programs to colleges and universities. This time, though, things are different. The Bush administration does not quite have the sexy cache it once had, to say the least, and the parties involved are much more powerful than teacher’s unions and parents groups. So the creation of a denatured, narrow curriculum, seem to have hit a snag. Here’s the MLA’s timid but nonetheless strikingly critical response.
What’s interesting about the Spelling Commission’s report is its utter irrelevance. It says nothing about the rise in the use of part-time labor, inflated tuition and fees, the destruction of academic freedom of speech, the rise of proprietary education. or the general dying up of funding for higher educatoin. It looked at an entire system in crisis and it decided that the best solution was standardized testing.
Fast-Education
A major factor for e-learning’s growth potential is the part-time or adjunct instructor. Each adjunct costs about 20 percent (or less) of a full-time counterpart on a per-class basis.6 An adjunct professor often receives no office, phone, mailbox, computer, health benefits, and so forth, and needs another full-time job to survive… The growth of part-time faculty has been significant: according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), during the period 1975 to 2003, full-time tenure-track positions increased by 18 percent while full-time non-tenure-track and part-time positions grew at 10 times that rate.
from E-Learning at a Crossroads—What Price Quality?
By Stephen R. Ruth, Martha Sammons, and Lindsey Poulin
I wrote about this subject at a recent Computers and Writing presentation I gave and while it was well received I could also tell that I had not persuaded my audience of the scale and scope of the problem. I think this is because they were mostly traditional academics immersed in the trials and tribulations of attempting to integrate technology into education.
They have a particular agenda, and a specific set of associated problems, and it is hard for them to commit their limited energies elsewhere. I understand that completely, because I was in that situation for a long time. This problem cannot be ignored for long. As I argued in my talk, I believe that the proprietary institutions are creating a second tier of education focused on the bottom of the class hierarchy.
On the one hand, this could be making education available to those that would not otherwise have access. On the other, this could be the birth of the fast-education market, analogous to the birth of fast food in the 1950s. Ruth, Summons, and Poulin, somewhat optimistically argue that “the biggest problem could be finding and integrating tens of thousands of new adjunct professors as partners in the academy.”
I am a little less optimistic, simply because the U.S. academic system is so profoundly rooted in class privilege and material entitlement. It might be possible, for example, to isolate and shrink proprietary education by offering a cheaper alternative taught by well-paid (and medically insured) full-time professors. That might even be the ethical thing to do. It’s as difficult, though, as asking the insurance industry to accept national health care.
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