If UCOP and the Regents end up trying to use the expansion of online courses–rather than say the increase in the number of faculty–as a way to overcome so-called “bottleneck” courses, and if they use online courses as the primary means to allow community college students to meet their lower-division requirements then, as a practical matter, students will be compelled to take online courses even if they are not officially required…

It has been the austerity policies of the last twelve years–not the invention of new technologies or the alleged conservatism of the faculty–that has driven the dialogue and the seminar to the margins of the university. If we are serious about the quality of education then returning the dialogue and the seminar to the center is the task facing education going forward–whether digital or not,

“Whose Online? What Online?” Michael Meranze

Roughly speaking, there are two sides to the sorts of Utopian thinking that have flourished around new communication technologies and online education. On the one hand, you have the run of the mill electronic naif, naively enthusiastic about the possibilities and seemingly oblivious to the practicalities of everyday life, economic and otherwise. We can call this the Napster side. Thomas Friedman and his ilk go here; Meranze calls him a ‘technopulicist‘.

The technopublicist enthusiasm may or may not be self-serving, since many of them are involved in companies of various kinds (Udacity, Coursera). The other side of this technological Utopian thinking is the side– we might call it the administrative side– that uses this naïve discourse and enthusiasm to both drive a specific anti-labor agenda and to obscure problems it has no desire to solve because the solutions don’t serve its interests.

Meranze suggests that this administrative strategy, at least in California, is faltering as students and faculty begin to articulate a response to the cynical policies that promote the growth of online education in order to protect the status quo and its top-heavy administrative costs and over-reliance on contingent labor. The real Utopian possibility in online education is not just pedagogical, it’s an end to the exploitation of teachers in the universities.

The fundamental question that must first be addressed (and consciously built around) is: “Why are we doing e-learning?” Is it to increase tuition revenue? Decrease costs? Create greater access? Allow greater flexibility for our students? Experiment with new pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, so as to better educate a different generation of students? All of the above?

Without a clear and unwavering “will,” it makes little sense for a college president to discuss the “way,” because ultimately the senior no-wake proponents on campus will delay and/or sabotage any meaningful e-learning strategy.

“The ‘No Wake Syndrome‘” Kenneth E. Hartman

I think that Hartman is right; the MOOC’s put on a big show, with lots of sturm und drang, they are more a symbol of change than evidence of the change itself. Most universities, as Hartman suggests, have yet to build a viable online program. Online education, like Rome, isn’t going to be built in a day. Lots of folks, he says, are going to resist this change because they resist all change. Hartman, of course, thinks like an administrator.

It’s not about new ideas; it’s about managing people. He knows who’s going to cause a stink and he tries to find a way to placate them preëmptively. In this case, he’s thinking about the elderly academics who, curmudgeons that they are, will say no to just about any new thing. Administrators say these sorts of things no matter what change they are suggesting, even if the change isn’t designed to do much more than increase revenues.

What is fascinating is that Hartman and administrators like him don’t seem to want to address what is arguably the most serious problem in the current system in the discussions over the future and online education. Is he going to talk to contingent faculty– part-time, adjunct, graduate students– and see what ideas they might have? I bet their priority would be to use the online revolution to create (or re-create) a system based in full-time employment.