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Thursday, June 10, 2004
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PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE
"Students need teachers," writes The Guardian newspaper in what would seem, in most contexts, an obvious truth. But in the context of the spectacular failure of the British government's recent "webucation" (on-line learning has lent itself to a large number of depressing puns) venture, certain resounding truths have had to be re-sounded. Thirty million taxpayer pounds were wasted on "UKeU" before the government shut it down. Few students enrolled; the cost of everything turned out to be exorbitant. Even as the lights blinked out, UKeU executives rewarded themselves with generous bonuses for a job well done. "The dream of taking the best of British higher education to the world has ended in an embarrassing closing down sale," writes Donald MacLeod. It was all about money - part of the general marketing of the university. British campuses would get rich off of packets of information they'd transmit to end users (don't call them students) everywhere... . Only it turns out that students need teachers. "As a series of universities around the world has discovered," writes The Guardian, "there is less demand for online study than enthusiasts predicted." A chastened government has now announced that any new distance learning arrangements will "put a greater emphasis on public good rather than commercial objectives." That's a thought. In all of this, England trailed just behind the United States; the British figured they'd better get busy in the online market instead of letting us make all the money. But just as they were revving up, our own universities' e-learning enterprises were sputtering. NYU Online spent twenty million dollars on itself and then closed down. Columbia's Fathom did the same. There were a number of others just like these, all at very respectable American campuses. It's precisely that respectability that seems to be the problem. If you're Phoenix or DeVry, you don't pretend to do anything but deliver profit-making data to real estate agents and office managers. There are all of these other things which actual institutions of higher education are caught up in -- the common pursuit of truth, for example, which turns out to be difficult to put on a disk. |