Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
2002; American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers; Volume: 77; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0010-0889
Autores Tópico(s)Online and Blended Learning
ResumoBy David F. Noble Monthly Review Press, 2002 110 pp. Few issues in contemporary academy generate rhetoric, debate, evaluation, and study as virtues and vices of technologically mediated higher education (aka online learning, elearning). In halls of Congress and nation's legislatures, corporate boardrooms, classrooms, and dorm rooms, people at all levels of involvement in higher education enterprise are struggling to unpack implications and consequences of innovations that are less than a decade old. After initial wave of euphoria that accompanies any new development, policymakers, higher education leaders, and others are just beginning to confront hard questions-How to maintain an authentic learning experience in cyberspace? How to finance an enterprise more expensive than expectations of many? How to fairly resolve vexing questions of copyright and intellectual property? Some, however, have already drawn their conclusions and pronounced sentence on this embryonic movement. Technophiles and technophobes alike have staked out their territory in debate and any subsequent facts will not deter them. Digital Diploma Mills reads like a manifesto for technophobe, whether that was author David Noble's intention or not. For online learning, trial was mercifully (or unmercifully) brief in Noble's court. The verdict? Guilty on all charges-the proletarianization of faculty, commodification of curriculum, bastardization of learning, corruption of university administration by corporate avarice-and list goes on (and on reading book's appendices, one quickly realizes that jury for this trial was rigged about 20 years ago). The tragedy of this book lies in fact that it offers important cautions and learned for current elearning debate, but obscures these insights with a heavy dose of anti-corporate, anti-administration spleen. In end, strident tone of Noble's analysis severely limits book's effectiveness and weakens position of those he is trying to help. The book starts off helpfully enough, citing Santyana's admonition about fate of those foolish enough to ignore lessons of history to introduce an analysis of parallels between online education and correspondence school movement of last century. In this portion of book, Noble draws essential lessons from American higher education's initial foray into distance education-the demand to provide education to a large number of students while turning a profit; placement of instruction and assessment in hands of low-paid, lowskilled paraprofessionals; student assessment so it bordered on non-existence; university officials anxious to be on leading edge of education while generating revenue for institution-all of which can attributed to a number of current university forays into cyberspace. At same time, however, Noble alerts reader to very real differences between correspondence schools and current rush to embrace the next big thing that should give educators and policymakers pause. One is cost of technological infrastructure, which exceeds that of its correspondence predecessors by factors of ten, if not one hundred. Another is increasing permeability of institutional boundaries, which refers to university's relationships with affiliated entities such as extension services. Here, Noble powerfully reminds reader that stakes are now much higher for those who pursue online education without benefit of hindsight. Noble devotes remainder of book to a prospective look at academy in an online world, primarily through case study of ucLAnS experience with The Home Education Network (THEN). The picture that Noble paints of that world is a grim one, indeed. It is a world in which bottom line trumps intellectual pursuit and academic freedom, as university's extension system played fast and loose in working with faculty and regents in order to seal what was hoped would be a lucrative deal with politically connected media mavens. …
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