Leadeth me beside
the submerged school desk.
… One of the ads for the Kaplan, Inc. division (and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.) is a 60-second commercial depicting a professor at a lectern before his students. The professor apologizes, saying “The system has failed you; I have failed you” because higher education, “is steeped in tradition and old ideas.” As he argues that it is time to use technology to “rewrite the rules of education,” the camera cuts to different people in different locations watching his speech from laptops and mobile digital players.
A second commercial shows a series of video shots of school desks arrayed in odd locations, like a beach, submerged in a river, in subway cars, and in supermarket aisles. A college-guy voiceover says “Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education, that classes only take place in a classroom?” …
January 7th, 2009 at 12:29PM
Actually, you underestimate the vast number of potential students who have been dismissed or neglected by the traditional system but who can be reached for the first time by an underwater university. This is an important way forward for the future, and the fact that you can’t appreciate that only demonstrates your own narrow reliance on unthinking tradition, and oxygen.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:37PM
It doesn’t help, of course, that "traditional" universities are making the same argument to sell their online programs, whether highly profitable, like the one at mine, or desperately-hope-to-be-profitable-some-day, like some you’ve profiled.
Newspapers are failing because while they accepted the fact their business would go online at some point, they failed to manage the transition correctly. It seems to me that the way universities are approaching these challenges is to say, well, what we do is going to go online, so the question is how do we manage the transition to that, and that’s how we’ll survive.
But why doesn’t someone sit down and say, okay, there are good things about residential colleges. (Obviously people recognize that, since a number of commuter colleges are successfully transforming themselves into residential colleges.) There is something good about the traditional lecture model. Let’s build on that. Let’s stop trying to figure out how we can compete online against companies whose sole focus is on that (outside of the few universities that are out there already and successful) – especially since our advantages of being locally centered vanish – and instead figure out how we can be better at doing what we’ve been doing for the past millenium or so. It’s not glamorous, and improvements will be incremental, but it’s the only way to challenge the threat posed by online education. But, the first step is to really believe that there is something special about lectures and recitations, and that there are fundamental flaws in online education for anything beyond fact delivery. I’m not convinced that this belief actually exists at contemporary universities.
What really upsets me is that among young faculty, no one seems to be thinking about this. (Maybe it’s because I’m in science/engineering?) I end up being on the same side as all the old fogeys (and I mean that affectionately). This is especially puzzling, because if you don’t think there’s anything special about what you do, then why would you sign on to a faculty position that basically takes you out of the running for private sector work after a few years, with the possibility that by the time you’re 50 you’ll be out of a job, tenure or no tenure?
January 7th, 2009 at 12:39PM
Rita: I have to admit you have a point. Your point holds not only for submerged students, but students scaling Everest without oxygen. Where is it written that they have to take a professor with them?
January 7th, 2009 at 12:42PM
All sorts of good points, Bahrad. Rather than respond to them (in a way, I’ve been responding to them on this blog for years), I’ll wait and see if some readers take up what you’ve said.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:36PM
Perhaps UD will have something to say in response to Harold Shapiro’s interview today at IHE:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/07/devry
January 7th, 2009 at 5:19PM
Many thanks, RJO. I’ve just read the interview — and the comments on it — and am working on a post about it.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:12AM
I used to dream of the day when every student would have a laptop. (Because I taught in a computer lab.) When that day came, I was going to hold all of my classes at the beach.
Why not learn Photoshop while SCUBA diving?
I did in fact, once upon a time, apply to a position at the University of Hawaii for almost no other reason. I can only imagine committees there throw away resumes by a lot of people like me.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:54AM
Bahrad,
I agree with you. At Kaplan, we believe that America has the greatest higher education system in the world. The country needs those campuses, in all their diversity, operating successfully. Theirs is the foundation of academic success that we all build on. At the same time, however,we must reach the people at the margin, people of capacity who, for so many reasons, are "Smart at Home and Dumb In School" (title of my current book in progress). We need them for the workforce, where we face a 7M job surplus by 2010 and a 20M job surplus by 2020. And we need them socially and civically in the country’s life. It is not an "either-or" situation. We need all kinds of successful educational practices and models, and we need to understand and celebrate each for its merits.
Peter Smith