Response and Reflection

Noble, David F.  1998.  Selling academe to the technology industry.  Thought and Action, 14, pp. 29-40.

I don't think reading this article could have come at a better time academic and professional.  Starting my first full-time position in the academy has been an eye-opening experience.  I have learned more about higher education in the past month than I think I ever wanted to know.  Meanwhile, my technology-driven aspirations coupled with my value and system about academics has put my in quandary.  I don't know which side of the argument I am on anymore.  If I was asked a year ago, I would have advocated the continued integration of technology in higher education.  However, if businesses and administrators are so willingly going to manipulate faculty and devalue the system, I think that we should move much slower.

Much of what this article discusses is not just academic mumbo-jumbo.  This stuff is happening right before my eyes.  No stakeholder is innocent.  Book publishers extort students with high prices and hook faculty with instructional resources and test banks developed on the students’ budget.  Administrators seek to increase enrollment measured in FTE, the profit for the academy, and pressure faculty to increase retention and teach it at a distance, which empirical research continues to confirm has lower retention rates.  Faculty members either play dumb and stay out of the argument, comply with administration or potentially loose their jobs in they are not tenured (includes me), or fight the system to no avail.  At the end, we all loose and students, our primary concern feel the unintended consequences.

I once heard a story from a colleague that will remain unnamed that she found her course materials being handed out to students that she did not have.   She found that her course materials in a course management system had been duplicated and provided to other faculty without her permission.  A distance learning department for her institution had done this.  What's more, these distance learning departments in educational organizations were conceived as support units much like information technology is a support unit for the functional units in an organization.  Due to evolving nature of the discipline, these previously support structures have been transformed into functional units: hiring their own adjunct faculty, offering their own courses, and doing this all without the approval of the academic units they are supposed to support.

This type of problem is not an isolated incident.  I have talked to other faculty from other institutions where the same types of problems are occurring.  Some institutions have faculty senates or unions to combat this injustice with mixed results.  Other institutions are ineffective in their battle.  Is the integration of technology into our curriculum to meet student needs incompatible with traditional academic structures?  Is it possible for our institutions to make strides to maintain quality and expand online course offerings?  I don't know the answer to either question, but I would like to believe so.

This is the primary reason I support an open source model to instructional materials and newer initiatives like learning objects.  If administrators "ask" faculty to contribute to the body of knowledge by sharing their resources, would faculty respond in the same way?  Would faculty still feel that their jobs are potentially in jeopardy?   Would faculty be resistant to change? I am sure I would have a better attitude about things. Publishers could no longer extort our students and their parents with outrageous prices.  Quality instructional materials could be developed and shared using grant monies among institutions.  We could move to improve the quality of education while maintaining the reverence that higher education once embraced in higher education.  Everyone has their Utopia.  This would be mine!