The Next Education Bubble

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Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much broader demographic. Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid….

I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”

“Revolution Hits the Universities,” Thosm L. Friedman

I am fascinated by this juxtaposition; one from the first section of the article and the second from the last section. First, the reality of MOOC’s (so-called massive online open courses), which set up fantastically wild expectations– a hundred thousand students take a course online!– and then completely fail to meet them in any real fashion.

Never mind that those certificates and so on that will supposedly make it all worthwhile may well price any but the wealthy out of the system, just as the old system did. Then we have the last section which sets aside all the ongoing problems and dreams– once again– of the revolution in human potential that is– it must be!– just around the corner.

I love the technology too, but this is crazy talk. After all, higher education in the U.S. is hardly thriving; it’s rooted in a system of labor exploitation– little pay, no benefits, or job security for most teachers– that would have made Harry Bennett blush. Those sorts of problems, though, just are not sexy enough to get you an article in the New York Times.

Posted in: Writing

Butts and Jobs

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On a national radio program Tuesday morning, [North Carolina Governor, Patrick] McCrory, who goes by Pat, said he would push legislation to base funding for the state’s public colleges and universities on post-graduate employment rather than enrollment.

“I’m looking at legislation right now – in fact, I just instructed my staff yesterday to go ahead and develop legislation – which would change the basic formula in how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges,” McCrory told radio host Bill Bennett, who was education secretary under President Reagan. “It’s not based on butts in seats but on how many of those butts can get jobs.”

The Republican governor also called into question the value of publicly supporting liberal arts majors after the host made a joke about gender studies courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it,” McCrory told the radio host. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

“Another Liberal Arts Critic,” Kevin Kiley

The right-wing political agenda for U.S. higher education makes a certain amount of sense. It’s rooted in facilitating profits– usually for the largest corporations– and in a kind of irrational market religion that is almost laughably self-serving. That is, it serves the selves that have the money, and dam the rest of us if we cannot keep up. It’s a game with rigged rules.

In other ways, the right-wing’s agenda is a little mysterious, if not cryptic. Even if we accept the (overly simple) notion that the right always champions individualism (and the left collectivism), it seems strange that the right endorses standardized testing. What could be less individualized? Of course, the mystery is largely solved when you consider that standardized tests can be so easily mass-marketed and sold at great profit rates.

Individual instruction, of course, is a different matter, rooted less in modern production and more in older craft models. (Don’t even think about the unions that arose out of the crafts.) Even more mysterious, in some ways, is the right’s homophobia and sexism. It’s easy to understand McCrory’s dislike if not hatred of universities: he thinks academia is a communist stronghold, and more importantly, far too interdependent of the discipline of the market.

There are profits, in other words, trapped in those public schools. Why does he see gender studies as the epitome of useless humanities research areas? Nothing could be sillier, in his view, than trying to understand gender; except, maybe, trying to teach students your understanding of gender (read: women and queers). Somehow, underneath the macho market talk of “buts that can find jobs” is a very basic kind of sexual insecurity and anxiety.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Language

Textbo-tainment

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Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital products shouldn’t even be called “textbooks.” They’re really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments. But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never graded the homework. And while they contain sample exam questions, they couldn’t administer the test themselves.

One publisher calls its products “personalized learning experiences,” another “courseware,” and one insists on using its own brand name, “MindTap.” For now, this new product could be called “the object formerly known as the textbook.”

“The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook,” Jeffrey R. Young

Universities are full of people who either know how to design software or want to know how to design software. We could have spent the last 30 years building an infrastructure of these people and ended up with a public software sector– an entire ecosystem of people and technologies–that made education cheaper and more accessible. It wouldn’t have stopped the commercial sector, but it might have pushed it to do more for less money.

This is the way research and development used to work before “buying from the lowest bidder” (if there was a competitive bidding system at all) was the only model. We got what we paid for, of course. Commercial software has helped to make online and traditional education more rather than less expensive and, arguably, slowed down the development of new communication technologies. We got a system that serves billionaires instead of the public.

Now it’s happening again as we move out of the age of paper-based textbooks. Once again we have the chance to create a public system of open source textbooks rooted in the huge numbers of education professionals who know how to create multi-media textbooks (writers and designers as well as scientific and humanities researchers) and the huge pool of people who want to learn how to do these things. We need a public textbook infrastructure.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional, Writing