These days many professors make their lecture materials — and even recordings of their class sessions — free online for anyone beyond the campus to learn from. But a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas hopes to try to offer even more of his course to a wider audience this fall by allowing outsiders to participate in course discussions online.
“Serious, you can just take this class for free,” wrote the professor, David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, on a post on his blog AcademHack. The course is a graduate seminar on “Networked Knowledge,” and Mr. Parry had already planned to make recordings of class sessions available online. But he’s now offering to hold a weekly online discussion group by video chat for those tuning in remotely as well. “Think of it as a more formalized reading group,” he said.
Those auditing the course who aren’t enrolled won’t get any credit, though. “The knowledge is free, the degree will cost you money,” he wrote.
He cautioned that he might not be able to pull off his proposed experiment in open education, but that he hopes 5 to 10 people will take him up on the offer — and keep up with the assigned readings.
Mr. Parry made news earlier this year for experimenting with Twitter in his courses. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Parry said that he got the idea to open up his course after a couple of graduate students from other institutions contacted him via Twitter saying they would love to take his course, which he had been writing about on a blog.
He predicts that it will take him an extra couple of hours per week to do the online discussion group, but that it would be worth his time. “I get a lot back from this in that I’m really interested in the future of education,” he said.
Have others already tried allowing outsiders into online course discussions? Should professors open their classroom doors even wider online? —Jeffrey R. Young
17 Responses to Professor Proposes Taking Open Education Beyond Posting Course Materials
John D. Cook - April 15, 2012 at 11:03 pm
I decided to leave academia after interviewing with a university that was looking for a full-time teacher who also kept up a research career. I wonder sometimes whether I made the right decision, but after reading your article I think maybe I did.
tjic - April 16, 2012 at 8:24 am
> Second, the Ph.D. pipeline will dry up
Hardly likely. Right now there’s a 5:1 ratio of new PhDs to tenure track positions. That’s the reason that schools feel free to make these demands – it’s a buyer’s market.
The market will clear either with (a) schools asking for insane amounts of labor – which PhDs are willing to give, or (b) an 80% drop in the number of PhDs that schools mint.
Right now schools get the best of both worlds: large numbers of deluded PhD students who work their butts off for close to free, and large numbers of academics working their butts off.
Schools make the entire market and front run it.
It’s a genius scam.
…and it’s not going to stop until the federal government stops pouring stupid amounts of money into mostly-useless academic programs.
John D. Cook - April 16, 2012 at 8:37 am
tjic: Not everyone who gets a PhD wants to be an academic. It’s increasingly common, for example, for someone to get a PhD in biology with the intention of working in industry. But I imagine the majority of PhD students do aspire to an academic career, and your point remains valid.
davi2665 - April 16, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Oh, boo hoo about the long hours and hard work. Anyone who wants to be successful faces the exact same pressures. An entrepreneur trying to build a new business will routinely spend 80+ hour weeks, often with little or no salary because the investment is in the business. A physician during residency training is restricted to 80 hours/week, but after getting into private practice or an academic positions often works longer hours than that, with patients’ lives on the line, not just a positive tenure recommendation. I grow weary of the “poor me” posturing about an academic job. With the insane overproduction of Ph.D.s, faculty members should be aware that their position could be readily filled with submission of dozens of applications for a single position. It is called supply and demand.
dr_bibliotekar - April 16, 2012 at 2:36 pm
That would be hundreds of applications for a single position.
unenclosed - April 16, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Why I hate comments like this: They justify existing practices on the basis that, well, such practices exist, or the idea that it is wrong to complain about suffering if other people also suffer. The question is not, “Do some people have to work hard to succeed?” but “Is this a condition that leads to the best outcomes for the individual and/or society at large?” While entrepreneurs are a special breed, I doubt that it serves the public, or any individual’s, interest that doctors should work such long hours. The doctor may get rich, but patient care will suffer. In this case the medical profession is corrupted, as the doctor ministers to patients not in the interest of the patient’s health but in the doctor’s interest in getting paid (and protecting themselves from getting sued for malpractice). Similarly, if I’m teaching a 4/4 load with hundreds of students, and expected to do high-quality research and serve on committees and engage with both my discipline and the larger community, something is going to suffer, and given that my training is in research, not teaching, what’s most likely to suffer is the students. Besides that, while I may be comfortable, there’s little chance of me getting rich. So, not only is the comparison problematic in its very nature, the things you are using are not analogous.
blowback - April 16, 2012 at 11:51 pm
To try to correct once again the repeated disinformation that there is an overproduction of Ph.Ds– this is often directed at the humanities–I’m not sure how the person up above arrived at his 5:1 ratio since like many others who make the claim that there is an overproduction there is a failure to document the claim. What we do have in higher education is a de-professionalization crisis in which full time positions have been replaced by adjunct positions filled by those who do not have Ph.Ds. Therefore, it is not correct to say that there is an overproduction of Ph.Ds. What we have is the exact reverse of conditions that we now find in secondary and primary education in which demands for better qualified teachers now exist—-some years ago one was faced with story after story of those without the proper qualification teaching math and science classes in public school. Over time such practices were no longer accepted and they were changed. However, the use of non-Ph.D faculty in higher education has been ignored by the general public. No political leader would go before a PTA and state that all the teachers of their children would be replaced by teachers with lesser degrees and yet we accept this norm in higher education. Less than 50% of all college faculty are full time tenured track with Ph.Ds. In some departments in the humanities it is less than 30%[MLA]. A recent article that appeared in the New York Times on “Garage Universities” in Ecuador makes clear that American Higher Education is approaching the rates one now finds in what the article called one of the worst systems of higher education in Latin America(19 March 2012 NYTimes).—only 20% of those who teach at public colleges have Ph.Ds in Ecuador.
Those who continue to argue that there is an overproduction of Ph.Ds will need to address where have all these overproduced Ph.Ds gone to? If there are so many Ph.Ds then one should expect that many of them–especially those in the Humanities whose degrees do not allow them to transition as easily as other Ph.Ds in other disciplines to non-academic work—would be teaching as adjunct professors in these Humanities departments but this is not the case. So where have they gone to? If there are so many Ph.Ds as many still claim one should expect to find them on campus but we do not do we! Those who continue to base this claim of overproduction based on the number of recent application for a job search should realize that you may have the same small set of applicants who are applying year after year. Also many who apply are also those who may be partly qualified–they have a Ph.D but their major area may not be in the area or sub-area that has been posted. We all know that how the post is written determines who will apply for the post and often the posting is written in a way to get as many people to appy–even those who already have a tenure-track position but who may wish to move. So I am afraid you will need to have better evidence than merely the number of people who applied to your recent posting. There are other logical flaws in those who claim that there is an overproduction—let me end by pointing out that in Literature there were fewer than 800 Ph.Ds in 2010 and there are more than 4,500 two year and four year colleges and universities of higher learning in the U.S and many of these institutions have more than one campus and hence more than 4,500 individual departments and programs for literature and college writing. When we find departments made up of less than 20 tenured faculty but with 60-75 adjunct faculty I think it is time that we put an end to the disinformation about there is an overproduction of Ph.Ds .
Because we do not have in the U.S any centralized authority to oversee higher education these abuses will continue–what are the logical consequences? After doing away with Ph.Ds from higher education will U.S colleges replace even faulty with a Master’s degree with faculty with no college degree at all. When will this downward trend end or are we to assume that the future of higher education in America will in time mirror the times of the cultural revolution in China when any one with an advanced degree was driven from the university. It is interesting how the forces of market capitalism begin to mirror more and more the forces of those things that capitalism opposes–at least what it states it opposes.
iamherenow - April 17, 2012 at 6:19 am
In regards to the comment of the pipeline for PhD students drying up, I doubt that will happen anytime soon due to the state of the economy. There are more applicants to PhD programs this year because fewer alternatives exist for younger Americans. Law school is an increasingly poor option. The job market is weak and offers poorly paid non-professional positions. From what I hear, health care is the only field that is hiring, and medical school is an even bigger investment that the doctoral track. Even if American PhD applicants resented the pressures, they have few real options. There are more foreign applicants to American graduate programs, especially because the European job market is even worse for European twentysomethings than the American job market is for American recent grads. For American students, the influx of foreign grad students means more competition in an increasingly globalized academic market that puts American higher education at the top of the hierarchy. Again, American recent grads don’t have real alternatives to this more competitive academic market. Graduate programs don’t even pay close attention to the placement rates of their PhD graduates, so the only person left to care about how one PhD holder does is the holder himself or herself. Graduate students need to organize themselves (unlikely given the buyer’s market), faculty need to step forward to offer full funding for graduate students and more attention to placement rates, universities like the University of Washington shouldn’t globalize entirely at the expense of its local graduates.
edwoof - April 17, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Well, maybe. I’m in my 50′s and have worked in both industry and academia. In either direction, there seems to be a lot of people who, despite the complaining, actually want to be working all the time. This is true especially for men. My theory is that in the office or classroom, men actually feel in control while their homelives are less than perfect and negotiating all the compromises a sound relationship takes actually requires more energy than staying at the office a few extra hours. There are enough of these types out there to raise the bar for everyone else.
Yes, I understand that academia is currently a buyer’s market, but in any market these people will exist and their work product and output is not going to be subject to market forces because their work is just not fulfilling, it’s their method of avoiding everything else.
Carsten Holm - April 18, 2012 at 12:38 am
…
Ummi Mental - April 18, 2012 at 11:47 am
I like this title….”
The bubble within the bubble”
skeletonsincloset - April 18, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Last I checked, doctors and entrepreneurs also get to choose when they go on vacation, and aren’t restricted to the two weeks out of 52 in which there aren’t classes, committee obligations, conferences, grades due, etc.
Andrew Lynch - April 18, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Having been on the job market this year, I can support the authors claim about some liberal arts schools being the worst offenders. I was very surprised about the varying research requirements across schools with the same teaching loads. Many of them were very reasonable (3/3 or 4/4 with minimal research). There were several, however, with considerably higher research standards yet would expect 3 or 4 classes a semester (often with many/rotating preps). I have some friends who can teach 4 classes a semester and still put out quality research (and they impress me greatly). However, they are the minority in my experience.
austinbarry - April 19, 2012 at 8:38 am
Also entrepreneurs have an end in sight – perhaps the company will grow to the point that they can hire good people to run the company, or the company gets brought and the entrepreneur gets to enjoy the money. The 4/4 course load isn’t going to get any lighter, and even if you win the Nobel Prize, there’s always more research to be done. That is – until you retire.
Guest - April 21, 2012 at 12:34 am
>careerists who have made an art of
strategically making pedagogical choices that are better for the
professor than they are for the students while making students happy
enough in the moment not to notice
Can someone please clarify this for me: examples of such professor-not-student-oriented pedagogical choices, explanations for why students might be nonetheless happy, why this “careerist” model is a Bad Thing, and why it would not rather be an accurate description of exactly the type of person who should be placed in a position with high workloads of both research and teaching?
ageofknowledge - April 21, 2012 at 2:44 pm
The whole system has failed.
fortysomethingprof - April 24, 2012 at 11:25 pm
Generally those friends who do all that don’t have families or they have a spouse who stays home. Correct?