Is higher education really student-centered?

Not actually about online teaching/learning. But, triggered by reading about an experience that one of our team members went through .....

To a large extent, the whole academic enterprise has become a system of exploitation. At research universities, the tenured and the tenure-track can't be bothered with teaching and, therefore, these research universities lure a whole bunch of instructors for the lower division courses by offering them graduate assistantships. Rarely does any university do a full-disclosure that most of those aspiring doctoral or masters students will find academic jobs. After all, getting a Phd from Harvard is one thing; getting a Phd from some Podunk university is a totally different thing.

I am simply amazed that this system continues on, and gains strength.

Instead of addressing this point of departure, students and faculty get distracted with negotiating better compensation for these graduate assistants. I don't mean to suggest that compensation is not an issue. It is. But, negotiating a better compensation without doing anything about the very issues that trigger the need for graduate assistants in the first place is to merely "paint a lipstick on a pig"

So, from that very moment on, we have a system that intentionally graduates way more masters and Phds than it will ever need. which means that we then run into situations where for every academic job opening we get gazillion applications, and we also have a huge army of highly qualified but unemployed people who are willing to carry on as adjunct instructors. And this then leads to the temptation to abuse adjuncts ....

I have run into quite a few people who now regret ever having gone on to graduate school, and for a PhD .... their comments are typically along the lines of "if only I had known that getting a job will be this difficult", or "if only I had known how little academic jobs pay" ....

Universities do a fantastic job of glorifying the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake--but the ones who glorify them are the ones with safe and secure jobs.

We do this in our own world here at WOU--we tell students how wonderful liberal education is, without ever telling them anything about the reality of the employment world where a liberal education diploma from WOU might not even get them a job at McDonald's .....

Which is why I suppose I warn students that they are screwed. Yes, I actually use these very words. And then follow it up with how they might prepare themselves. I warn them about how they are screwed because while it is a great idea that man doesn't live by bread alone, well, when that bread isn't there, it gets to be a horrible existence. (I am fortunate that I haven't experienced it myself) furthermore, I do not want to prepare students for that kind of a horrible existence where they have to wonder where their daily bread will come from after getting into a debt of more than 20,000 dollars for a diploma that won't get them any job.

I wrote an op-ed about some of these issues; the editor titled it "Does U.S. oversell college?, which wasn't much liked at least according to one response piece that was published in the same paper!

Our ultimate bottom line is the betterment of our students at every level of higher ed. If we don't do that, and instead we screw up their lives, well, ....

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

If the university is really interested in revising our LACC, and seriously rethinking and restructuring liberal education, then the AACU annual meeting is the place to send a bunch of committed faculty and administrators. While it is not perfect, the AACU has always been one of the go-to places for me when I want to learn more about higher education, innovative pedagogies, etc.

One of the workshops at the annual meeting has a fantastic title: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, written by Don Finkel (Heinemann, 2000), challenges faculty to think of teaching as a practice of designing intellectual experience for a community of students, rather than one of “telling.” Drawing from the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire, Finkel proposes a variety of teaching practices that put the material at the center of students’ experience in the classroom, such as the Conceptual Workshop – a practice that engages students in community dialogue and inquiry and gives them the opportunity to apply ideas to complex situations.

I am sure you have figured out the rationale for posting this in this blog, as opposed to my other blog: when we teach online, don't we teach with our mouths shut? That in the online mode we put learning in the front and center?

As I noted in a posting in my other blog,
In the Chronicle, [former Harvard president] Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview."
They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

Isn't online teaching and learning a part of the process of experimentation, gathering evidence, and fine-tuning our approaches? Or, have we just stopped doing science altogether? I hope not.

So, ready to head to the AACU meeting? It is right up the road in Seattle, in Jan 2009.

Should small colleges offer online instruction?

We typically offer arguments in favor of small colleges, small class sizes, personal interactions, etc. While I personally favor all these, I am not sure whether we truly achieve significantly better outcomes just because, for instance, a class is small size. My colleagues teach intro classes that have between 70 and 100 students each. I always cap my intro classes at 40. Not that we have done any systematic studies that measure how much students learn in these competing formats, but I am tempted to conclude that there is not much difference in the outcomes. If every one of us learns differently, then does it also not mean that some students might prefer the anonymity of a larger classroom for their learning, while some might like smaller classrooms so that they don't feel lost? I mean, that is only one example, right?

We can take it one more step; most students prefer not to come to class at all. Not anything new. I suppose as long as we have had classes, we have also had students who were not thrilled to be in the classroom. So, there could be a demographic group that actually will prefer online education? So, ought we not serve them? Well, that is the question handled in this Q/A with the president of

Brenau University, a small college in Georgia, has a strong focus on distance education. The institution offers 11 online degree programs, most of them career driven, an uncommon focus for a liberal-arts college. Brenau's president, Mr. Schrader, says that about 40 percent of faculty members teach the online courses.
Q. Why did a liberal-arts college like yours decide to start an online program?
A. We did it to meet the communication needs of the current generation of students. If the majority of the world is going to learn online, the liberal-arts schools will have to make a decision. They can't give up on their responsibility saying they don't like online courses; either they participate in them and do it well, or they throw in the towel.
The complete interview is here in the Chronicle of Higher Education