… what looks to me like a stealth effort on the part of high-ranking administrators there to turn ASU into their own personal for-profit online domain. Here’s the background on the quite astounding story of ASU’s former president – now a professor there as well as (until recently) the president and chairman of an online for-profit educational outfit – who, along with ASU’s interim chancellor, apparently tried to power through a takeover of the faculty for the business.
The faculty have been a bit slow to catch on, but have now passed a “resolution calling for a moratorium on any further involvement with Academic Partnerships until the partnership [can] be investigated…”
You can understand the ex-president’s eagerness, though. Online for-profit is SOOO much better than face-to-face non-profit, he just couldn’t wait to offer its blessings to the youngfolk.
Mike Shields, a retired Marine Corps colonel and human resources director for U.S. field operations at Schindler Elevator Corp., rejects about 50 military candidates each year for the company’s management development program because their graduate degrees come from online for-profits, he said in an interview. Schindler Elevator is the North American operating entity of Schindler Holding AG in Hergiswil, Switzerland, the world’s second-largest elevator maker. “We don’t even consider them,” Shields said.
This sort of outcome makes paying your loans back difficult.
… to better out of state universities.
The president of the University of Nevada Las Vegas says he’s losing faculty like mad because “They are frustrated with the perception that higher education isn’t valued here.”
UNLV can’t do much about faculty flight; but both UNLV and the University of Nevada Reno have “built programs that guarantee [their strongest applicants] what [UNR’s president] calls “tons of online classes taught by part-timers.”
No, no. Let’s try that again. “[O]ne-on-one … relationships with a distinguished faculty.”
Randall Stross, in the New York Times, talks online university education:
Candace Thille, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s [Online Learning Initiative], put it this way: “There is something motivating about the student’s relationship with the instructor — and with the student’s relationship with other students in the class — that would be absent if each took the course in a software-only environment.”
Those relationships — with humans in the flesh — help students to persevere. Online courses are notorious for high dropout rates.
And people are racing to put high school educations online! With their greater maturity, high school students will certainly do even better than university students at online education.
Stross points out that if your choice is a humongous statistics lecture course or an online statistics course (whose air traffic controller almost certainly will be handling more students than the in-class lecturer), you might as well go online (likely to be a trash course either way).
But in [the] case [of statistics], the subject matter is distillable into a handful of concepts, and the exams use questions with only a single correct answer. That’s not an option for just about all of the humanities and vast swaths of the social sciences.
Stross concludes by quoting Berkeley’s Wendy Brown:
“What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”
If your answer is that most Americans don’t care about this sort of education, and just want to get a job, then go to it. Clean up Kaplan and the other shady operators and give America respectable online vocational institutions.
True, some of our universities are already purely vocational – or they’re well on their way toward being purely vocational. They should (UD has predicted that many eventually will) shut down their physical campuses and join the vocational onlines. But some universities are real universities of the sort Brown describes. Leave them alone.
… hit.
But with boosters like “Papa Doc” Bob Barr in their corner, they’ll be fine.
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Update: Nice and concise: “[T]he explosion in for-profit schools over the past two decades has created an environment in which schools whose primary purpose is to make money for their stock-holders sign students up for federal student loans, then turn huge profits while giving their students such a lousy education that when they graduate they can’t get a job and end up defaulting on the loans.”
Good summary here of the fearful trip to the bottom the Washington Post is taking, lashed to its for-profit mate.
The wretched of the earth are restless.
Idaho’s education superintendent wants to mandate a number of online courses for all high school students in the state. Resistance to the idea has propelled his proposal into a national story.
This is from a letter to the editor of an Idaho newspaper, about introducing online high schools:
I had a very positive high school experience, because I had excellent teachers who inspired me to love subjects. I remember fondly government classes with Mr. Schiess and Mrs. Wolf, art with Mrs. Burgie, English with Mr. Wakefield. These teachers made a difference in my life.
How do you get that online? No interaction with the teacher, no discussions in class, no new friends from group assignments. As far as education goes, getting high quality teachers is far, far, far more important than getting fancy computers to take online classes on.
Please, Mr. Luna, don’t take away the humanity of education.
At an education hearing:
Pat Bollar, a teacher in Minidoka County, said that in her career, she has seen “self-interested institutions” develop programs, all touting claims of enhanced learning.
“As these innovations come and go, my years have taught me that some things remain the same,” Bollar said, dubbing education as “a direct contact with teachers and students in the classrooms.”
Peter S. Goodman, The Huffington Post:
… [T]he same company bearing the name of the newspaper that uncovered Watergate, that published the Pentagon Papers, and more recently revealed the existence of secret CIA-operated prisons in Eastern Europe now draws its largest share of revenues from an enterprise that seems on par with subprime mortgage lending in terms of its commitment to public welfare.
[The Washington Post’s publisher] spend[s] his days defending the interests of Kaplan, a company that increasingly looks like a machine built to gobble up burgeoning quantities of federal financial aid dollars while selling students’ bogus dreams…
The University of Massachusetts system has attracted a lot of attention on this blog lately — whoring after bone marrow, whoring after Adderall, upsetting the neighbors, adding – at a time of low employment for new lawyers, and in a state with plenty of law schools – an unimpressive new law school…
Some of these things are typical university events (the drugs; annoying the neighbors) some are weird (the marrow) and some are bafflingly self-destructive (the law school). When you put them all together, they suggest a system adrift.
A reader, Jeremy, sends UD this article from today’s Boston Globe about the “oversubscribed classes and faculty shortage” on the Amherst campus. They’ve gone seriously adjunct and way-seriously online. “Only half of UMass Amherst students graduate in four years, and 66 percent do so in six years.” We know that the online course completion rate is much lower than the in-class, so these numbers will almost certainly rise. A sociology professor summarizes: “The expectation has cheapened.’’
Students are sitting in dorm rooms teaching themselves by watching movies with their professors in them.
Eventually the state of Massachusetts will see the light. It will shut down the physical U Mass campus and put the whole thing online.
The university wants three year degrees and – of course – oodles of online courses.
The panel’s report was quickly criticized by faculty members who view online classes and three-year degrees as quick money-makers that may fill university coffers, but ultimately come at the cost of a quality college education.
“These efforts to push people through in three years and moving to online education reflect a privatized model where you bring people in based on how much profit they’ll create,” said Stanton Glantz, vice president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. “The priorities of the institution will reflect the market interests instead of the public interest.”
The UC system — a Phoenix rising from the ashes.
… universities, we should remind ourselves that there’s a whole other world of legitimate education out there, one which students are more and more ably defending.
Here, in an opinion piece titled Fordham Rightly Resists Offering Online Classes, a Fordham student gets it said. His writing’s a bit awkward, but he gets it said. Excerpts:
… The foundations on which Jesuit universities, particularly Fordham, have been built upon are not in accordance with online courses. Though it may be convenient for students, it does not provide the degree of education we are paying for. The realm of learning and studying is completely altered under these conditions, with a less hands on approach.
If Fordham were to offer online courses, its credibility in teaching would be strongly questioned. Even if a student was able to get beyond the idea of no personal interaction with professors and no thought-provoking ideas of classmates, there is still no guarantee that the quality of education in the online classes will be up to par with that which Fordham instills.
… Sure, online classes can reach a larger amount [should be number] of people, especially those looking to attend part time. This, however, compromises the integrity of the order devoted to education by lacking a creation of relationships and the true development of the whole person that cura personalis stands on…
Serious, legitimate education isn’t just for Jesuits.
FSU is another school that should put itself entirely online.
During my spring semester at Florida State University last year, I took an art history course that met at 10 a.m. in a lecture hall across campus — at a location prohibitively distant from my dormitory at that point in my life. Apart from quiz and test dates, I showed up to the class exactly three times that semester: the first day of syllabus overview, the second day when I realized the professor was reading directly from PowerPoint presentations posted online and the third day midway through the semester when I found an attendance policy in the syllabus.
Almost got away with it, too; and I’m sure he’ll be able to swing something like this again. Just needs to lie low a bit. Like Sarah Ferguson.
Les Wyatt, the former [Arkansas State University] president, [is] making $150,000 a year though living in Dallas and not teaching while on paid leave… [He is also] head of an outfit marketing on-line courses for colleges and universities.
….American University System … had listed Wyatt as “president and chairman.” AUS is an on-line education firm that has listed Arkansas State as a client. The listings were removed from the website after reporters asked about them. ASU faculty have raised questions about a possible conflict of interest, since Wyatt is still on the Arkansas State payroll, now as a professor on “compensated leave.”
The listings were removed from the website, and now Wyatt has been removed from Arkansas State’s payroll, faculty there having noted that this is one hell of a knock your socks off conflict of interest.
Plus real universities don’t consider going to Dallas to run your business research leave.
[Faculty concerns about] conflict of interest were brought up when last month it was discovered Dan Howard, interim chancellor of ASUJ, was serving on the board of a subsidiary of [Academic Partnerships, a for-profit company running online courses at ASU], and Les Wyatt, former ASU System president and current ASU professor emeritus of higher education and art history, was found to be serving as president and chairman of American University System, another AP subsidiary.
Fan-fucking-tastic deal for these guys — and for Arkansas State faculty onliners, who get thousands in compensation for generating online courses, and nada for generating off-line:
[F]or each course developed with AP the department chair for that course currently receives $1,000, faculty members developing the course receive $4,500 and departments receive bonus payments of $500.
… Jack Zibluk, professor of journalism and Faculty Senate president-elect, pointed out faculty only receive compensation if they develop online courses. Faculty members developing traditional courses taught in the classroom receive no extra compensation for their work.
The real beauty of this deal – as soon as Howard and Wyatt can wriggle out of the hands of a few faculty malcontents – is that Arkansas State will be a fully online university before you can say Kaplan Test Prep.
The provost of Texas Tech
suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.
More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…
Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.
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Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?