From Salon: From ivory tower to academic sweatshop
There's more to the article - It's a good read which I recommend.After a few dot-com-era bumps, online education is back and bigger than ever. But so is corporate influence and bottom-line pressure.
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By Alex Wright
Jan. 26, 2005 | As he walked into the gloomy, windowless auditorium inside Denver's Colorado Convention Center, Geoff Hunt remembers thinking, "God, there are a huge number of people here."
Hunt, a history professor at the nearby Community College of Aurora, had accepted a friend's invitation to attend the University of Phoenix graduation ceremony for its Denver-area students. Hunt was keen to take a closer look at Phoenix, the for-profit juggernaut whose booming distance-learning programs were changing the calculus of higher education at schools nationwide, including his own. Outside the Aurora faculty lounge, dark rumors were swirling of state bureaucrats talking up a troubling notion: the "professor-less classroom."
Hunt listened intently as the commencement speaker, a Phoenix professor who had recently been named Faculty of the Year, gave a speech describing how Phoenix had transformed her role as a professor. "She defined her job," he remembers, as "delivery of chapters."
That phrase, Hunt says, "just sent chills down my back."
Hunt isn't the only faculty member feeling the chill. As distance learning grows into a $5 billion a year market -- up 38 percent in 2004 alone -- virtual classrooms are no longer the sole province of dot-coms and for-profit schools like DeVry and Phoenix. Top universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Duke now offer full credit for online courses. On campuses nationwide, distance learning is moving out of the pedagogical fringe and into the institutional mainstream.
While faculty continue to debate the educational merits of online teaching (a recent national survey found their opinions roughly divided), most agree that distance learning is here to stay. To some optimists this is an unqualified good thing -- a chance to increase access to educational opportunities and to break down the hierarchies of traditional university bureaucracies. For every worried Geoff Hunt, another teacher is happily working at home, content never to see the inside of a lecture hall. But others are more alarmed and are beginning to wonder whether their jobs will ever be the same.
Just as the Internet brought wrenching operational changes to many corporations, so online learning is triggering a seismic shift in the academic power structure. Those changes stretch far deeper than the visible presentation layer of courseware, online discussions and multimedia presentations. Distance learning is changing not only teaching methods but also the shape of the curriculum itself. As schools reach out to a market composed largely of professional, career-minded students, they face growing pressure to cater to employers' agendas; in some cases, even wiring themselves into the corporate information technology (IT) infrastructure. If a company like Lucent underwrites online courses at a business school, it expects a direct return on its investment.
"Universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation," writes York University professor David F. Noble, a vocal critic of distance learning. "Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education."
When a cat named Colby earned an MBA online from Trinity Southern University in Plano, Texas, last year, distance-learning critics found a ready caricature for a popular stereotype: distance-learning schools as glorified diploma mills, doling out easy credentials to anyone with a Web browser and a credit card.
Indeed, plug the words "distance learning" into Google and you'll see ads in the right-hand column of the Web page for dubious alma maters like Almeda University, promising your choice of associate's, bachelor's or master's degree with "No Books! No Courses! No Studying!" But if distance learning were so easily dismissed, one might expect a little less enthusiasm from the 97 percent of public universities that now offer online courses. Last year, an estimated 3 million students took at least one class online and 600,000 students completed all of their coursework online.
While many educators continue to insist on the irreplaceable quality of in-person teaching, numerous studies show that under the right circumstances, and with certain subjects, online students achieve learning outcomes similar to those in physical classrooms.
Even critics acknowledge that distance learning opens doors for working professionals and residents of remote areas who would otherwise have limited access to higher education. But these students differ significantly from on-campus students, who often take years off to immerse themselves in a particular discipline. Distance learning students are typically older, mid-career, and careful about managing their time. They favor practical, skill-building courses like those in business, nursing, accounting, computer science and other marketable trades.
"Hitting the sweet spot in online education today means going after the working professional who wants to advance their career by taking courses," says Philip DiSalvio, program director of Seton Hall University's SetonWorldWide program.
While many schools also endeavor to offer "soft" subjects in the humanities online, the market overwhelmingly favors professional education. "There is strong pressure to make education more technical, more like training," says Andrew Feenberg, research chair in philosophy of technology at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University. "That pressure comes both from the corporate world, and from students themselves, who are very career oriented." The result: a growing commoditization of the curriculum and a tendency for schools to market education as a "product."
At some schools, the boundaries between physical and virtual classrooms are dissolving into so-called blended learning environments that incorporate the Internet as an adjunct to the traditional lecture hall. Many faculty now routinely take advantage of courseware like Blackboard or WebCT to publish their lesson plans and lecture notes and to moderate online discussions as an extension of the classroom experience.
Noah Butter is working on his master's degree in library and information science at San Jose State University, a blended program that incorporates online and offline courses. Of the 11 classes he has taken so far, four have met exclusively online, including his two current semester classes in online searching and information technology. All of his courses involve some form of online component, some meeting in person as infrequently as twice a semester.
Butter has discovered that online courses are no cakewalk. "Online courses are a lot more work," he says, pointing out that classes require students to participate actively in online discussions and to stay on top of a constant stream of e-mail. Indeed, Butter feels that he has gotten more for his money from online classes than from some of his in-person classes. "It depends on the teacher," he says. "When teachers don't use the technology, and you only meet a few times during the semester, you end up feeling a little ripped off."
But while Butter knows he is acquiring the professional skills he needs to pursue his chosen career, he sometimes longs for a more traditional campus education. "I have missed having more student and teacher face-to-face interactions," he says. "In the courses where I have met students in class, I wished we could have spent more time together."
Given the demonstrated effectiveness and broader outreach made possible by distance learning, only the most strident Luddite would argue that distance learning has no place in the arsenal of modern instruction. But the larger effect of distance learning technology extends beyond student-teacher dialectics and into the realm of institutional power relationships.
In addition to external market pressures, corporate influence also manifests itself in the expanding role of commercial software vendors, administrators and information technology professionals, who not only wield a growing influence over teaching methods, but who also bring to bear corporate values like teamwork, accountability and an overarching emphasis on "the customer."
Arlene Hiss is a former Indy race-car driver, now the owner of a commercial recording studio and an occasional washboard player in a bluegrass band. She lives in a geodesic dome in Lake Elsinore, Calif., where she logs on each week to conduct an undergraduate class in critical thinking at the University of Phoenix Online. A Phoenix professor since 1991, Hiss loves teaching in the distance-learning program. "They give you everything: the syllabus, the textbook, weekly assignments," she says. " They put the lectures on the Web." By "lectures," she means the written documents furnished to her, and her students, by the Phoenix courseware servers.
With a Ph.D., MBA and 30 years of teaching experience, Hiss is perfectly qualified to create her own course materials. But Phoenix has built its business through economies of scale, developing a course once and then replicating it, so that many teachers can administer the same course to the school's vast 200,000-plus student body.
That model of replicable courseware is taking hold at other schools as well. When she's not teaching at Phoenix, Hiss leverages her Phoenix experience to develop courseware for the University of Liverpool, where she works as a so-called module manager, creating class syllabuses and assignments for online business classes. After she develops the course, Hiss then oversees a network of lower-paid instructors who teach the class using her materials. The other instructors are welcome to make suggestions, but as the module manager, Hiss has the final say, ensuring that teachers won't make idiosyncratic changes to the curriculum.
When she's not teaching at Phoenix or Liverpool, Hiss also finds time to teach online courses at Capella University, Southern New Hampshire University and Upper Iowa University.
Hiss may have her hands full, but she's happy. "As long as my eyes work, as long as my fingers work, and as long as my computer works, I can't even imagine going back to the ground." Teaching at Phoenix gives her time to juggle other teaching jobs, manage her recording studio, play with her bluegrass band, and enjoy the freedoms of the contractor lifestyle. But personal freedom is one thing, academic freedom quite another. Like the other 8,000 faculty members who teach at Phoenix Online, Hiss will never have tenure.
