From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 27 Feb 98 19:53:42 -0500
Subject: Higher Ed Commercialized
<<< This message is part 2 of a previous message >>>
pay for it (the definition of effective demand, i.e. a market). At UCLA,
students recommended against the Instructional Enhancement Initiative. At
the University of British Columbia, home of the WEB-CT software being used
at UCLA, students voted in a referendum four-to-one against a similar
initiative, despite a lengthy administration campaign promising them a
more secure place in the high tech future. Administrators at both
institutions have tended to dismiss, ignore, or explain away these
negative student decisions, but there is a message here: students want the
genuine face-to-face education they paid for not a cybercounterfeit.
Nevertheless, administrators at both UCLA and UBC decided to proceed with
the their agenda anyway, desperate to create a market and secure some
return on their investment in the information technology infrastructure.
Thus, they are creating a market by fiat, compelling students (and
faculty) to become users and hence consumers of the hardware, software,
and content products as a condition of getting an education, whatever
their interest or ability to pay. Can all students equally afford this
capital-intensive education?
Another key ethical issue relates to the use of student online activities.
Few students realize that their computer-based courses are often thinly-
veiled field trials for product and market development, that while they
are studying their courses, their courses are studying them. In Canada,
for example, universities have been given royalty-free licenses to Virtual
U software in return for providing data on its use to the vendors. Thus,
all online activity including communications between students and
professors and among students are monitored, automatically logged and
archived by the system for use by the vendor. Students enrolled in courses
using Virtual U software are in fact formally designated "experimental
subjects." Because federal monies were used to develop the software and
underwrite the field trials, vendors were compelled to comply with ethical
guidelines on the experimental use of human subjects. Thus, all students
once enrolled are required to sign forms releasing ownership and control
of their online activities to the vendors. The form states "as a student
using Virtual U in a course, I give my permission to have the
computer-generated usage data, conference transcript data, and virtual
artifacts data collected by the Virtual U software. . . used for research,
development, and demonstration purposes. "
According to UCLA's Home Education Network president John Korbara, all of
their distance learning courses are likewise monitored and archived for
use by company officials. On the UCLA campus, according to Harlan Lebo of
the Provost's office, student use of the course websites will be routinely
audited and evaluated by the administration. Marvin Goldberg, designer of
the UCLA WEB-CT software acknowledges that the system allows for "lurking"
and automatic storage and retrieval of all online activities. How this
capability will be used and by whom is not altogether clear, especially
since websites are typically being constructed by people other than the
instructors. What third parties (besides students and faculty in the
course) will have access to the student's communications? Who will own
student online contributions? What rights, if any, do students have to
privacy and proprietary control of their work? Are they given prior
notification as to the ultimate status of their online activities, so that
they might be in a position to give, or withhold, their informed consent?
If students are taking courses which are just experiments, and hence of
unproven pedagogical value, should students be paying full tuition for
them? And if students are being used as guinea pigs in product trials
masquerading as courses, should they be paying for these courses or be
paid to take them? More to the point, should students be content with a
degraded, shadow cybereducation? In Canada student organizations have
begun to confront these issues head on, and there are some signs of
similar student concern emerging also in the U.S.
In his classic 1959 study of diploma mills for the American Council on
Education, Robert Reid described the typical diploma mill as having the
following characteristics: "no classrooms," "faculties are often untrained
or nonexistent," and "the officers are unethical self-seekers whose
qualifications are no better than their offerings." It is an apt
description of the digital diploma mills now in the making. Quality higher
education will not disappear entirely, but it will soon become the
exclusive preserve of the privileged, available only to children of the
rich and the powerful. For the rest of us a dismal new era of higher
education has dawned. In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of
our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it
happen. That is, unless we decide now not to let it happen.
(Historian David Noble , co-founder of the National Coalition for
Universities in the Public Interest, teaches at York University. His
latest book is The Religion of Technology . He is currently writing a book
on this subject entitled Digital Diploma Mills).
Notes
* Tuition began to outpace inflation in the early 1980's, at precisely the
moment when changes in the patent system enabled the universities to
become major vendors of patent licenses. According to data compiled by the
National Center for Educational Statistics, between 1976 and 1994
expenditures on research increased 21.7% at public research universities
while expenditure on instruction decreased 9.5%. Faculty salaries, which
had peaked in 1972, fell precipitously during the next decade and have
since recovered only half the loss.
** Recent surveys of the instructional use of information technology in
higher education clearly indicate that there have been no significant
gains in either productivity improvement or pedagogical enhancement.
Kenneth C. Green , Director of the Campus Computing Project, which
conducts annual surveys of information technology use in higher education,
noted that "the campus experience over the past decade reveals that the
dollars can be daunting, the return on investment highly uncertain." "We
have yet to hear of an instance where the total costs (including all
realistically amortized capital investments and development expenses, plus
reasonable estimates for faculty and support staff time) associated with
teaching some unit to some group of students actually decline while
maintaining the quality of learning," Green wrote. On the matter of
pedagogical effectiveness, Green noted that "the research literature
offers, at best, a mixed review of often inconclusive results, at least
when searching for traditional measures of statistical significance in
learning outcomes."
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Bob Olsen Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED] (:-)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
