I want to spend my final (at least for now) post on online education discussing two crucial issues which concern me most. My views on the virtues of online learning have certainly broadened since this conversation started, but the two issues I wish to discuss today, I believe, pose lingering doubts.
The first takes me back to the Illinois Online Network, from which I’ve already drawn heavily. The Network makes the following point about “curriculum,” which it lists as a potential area of weakness:
“The curriculum of any online program must be carefully considered and developed in order to be successful. Many times, in an institution’s haste to develop distance education programs, the importance of the curriculum and the need for qualified professionals to develop it is overlooked. Curriculum and teaching methodology that are successful in on-ground instruction will not always translate to a successful online program where learning and instructional paradigms are quite different.”
If the curricula and teaching methodologies of online versus brick-and-mortar institutions are so different, that makes me wonder if some subjects and some teaching methods will simply fall by the wayside as online learning grows in popularity. I worry that the traditional subjects of the humanities—English, philosophy, history, languages—will prove impossible to adapt to online curricula and teaching methodologies. Moreover, in its 1998 report to shareholders, the Apollo Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix) expressed a wish to “granularize” its curriculum—making every course exactly uniform—as the university was, even then, quickly moving more and more of its content online. “Granularization” strikes me as a policy that undermines the very spirit of the humanities, which embraces diversity, variety of opinion, and free thinking.
A couple of qualifiers: First, for-profit universities are different entities than community colleges or the hybrid learning environments offered by an increasing number of four-year colleges. Second, who’s to say that skilled online instructors can’t come up with inventive means of preserving the key qualities I’ve enumerated about the humanities, albeit in a very different learning medium?
Another major concern: All online learning depends, of course, on course-management software. Many colleges and universities have developed their own open-source software, which make up the platforms of their online courses. However, many others subscribe to privately or publicly traded course-management companies. This is an extremely turbulent industry. Perhaps the most familiar name in the industry is Blackboard (recently purchased by Providence Equity Partners), and there have been many mergers that preceded that one. More alarming, in my opinion, was the purchase in May 2007 of eCollege (at the time Blackboard’s biggest rival) by Pearson Publishing. Pearson is a giant international corporation, which owns, among other things, Penguin Books and the vast EBSCO internet archive.
So here are a couple of nightmare scenarios (the most recent review of The Last Professors characterized my conclusions in that book as “Eeyore-like,” so no one should be surprised by my worries):
1) A professor, working with Blackboard (or whatever it will now be called) puts his or her entire course online: syllabus, class notes, quizzes, tests, the works. Then the university lays off that instructor and replaces him or her with a much cheaper adjunct, who then steps into a ready-made, sophisticated course and simply facilitates it. The professor, unless a union or collective of professors have forced their employers to acknowledge that the faculty own courses, even if it’s the university that subscribes to Blackboard and pays the fee), has no standing.
2) A university subscribes to eCollege and—somewhere down the line; it hasn’t happened yet—Pearson, eCollege’s owner, insists that the entire university exclusively use Pearson materials in their courses. The common denominator here is that with the advent of online learning has come the necessity of online course-management software, and that turns the whole question of who owns teaching into an intellectual-property muddle.
I’m not describing these as situations that constitute destiny, but merely raising the thought that they are at least plausible.
My best stopping point is an e-mail I received in response to this series of blogs from Shirley Chow, PR manager for 2tor Inc, a company that “partners with preeminent institutions of higher education to deliver rigorous, selective degree programs online to students globally.” Ms. Chow sent me a remarkable article from the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic, which talked at length about the collaboration between 2tor Inc and the University of Southern California’s master’s in teaching program. Thanks to their collaboration, which allows students nationwide to receive their degrees online, USC now produces more MAT’s than Harvard and Stanford combined (1,500—up from just 100 in 2007).
So we’re past the point of yoking online learning to for-profit institutions and underfunded community colleges: USC is a major player in the national higher-education scene, and its partnership with 2tor Inc is proof that online learning, whatever my lingering qualms about it, will be a permanent force at all colleges and universities of the future.
Thanks to all for a spirited debate!
