The Academic Graveyard Shift: Staffing “State U Online”

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

State U Online recounts the exodus of distance education by the University of Chicago in 1906 upon the death of its champion, and the university’s storied founding president, William Rainey Harper. With Harper gone, influential faculty members, like noted economist Thorstein Veblen, disowned the mission of democratizing knowledge and spelled the end of Chicago’s extension efforts. The University of Wisconsin picked up where the University of Chicago left off, by wrapping distance education into the seminal public service agenda that became known as “The Wisconsin Idea.” Once again there was disagreement, not over whether to embrace a program of extension but rather over what sort of curriculum extension would entail. Some faculty wanted to offer a liberal arts curriculum, while others wanted to provide technical training for the Wisconsin farm industry. In the end, students voted with their feet and overwhelmingly pursued the technical courses. Of course, with the introduction of computers and internet, distance education has become synonymous with technology-based education today. It also remains largely a proposition of democratizing knowledge, which is to say expanding access to college.

Weighing the balance of both archetypal modes of post-secondary learning—technical and liberal arts—has long historic roots, but it now applies to several thousand public colleges and universities serving a vast array of personal and societal needs. The conversation about appropriate pedagogic applications for emerging e-learning tools is also developing alongside the tools themselves. And, in addition to expanding access to higher education, states are increasingly concerned about the rising costs of such investments. They are interested to see whether technology (particularly massive open online courses, or “MOOCs”) can deliver cost efficiencies.

When learning is easily testable, a trait often associated with technical education, MOOCs hold great promise for cost reduction through technology-labor exchange. In fact, universities went down this path decades ago with a strikingly similar, cost-efficient system: part-time faculty. Many part-time faculty teach from prescribed syllabi and administer assessments of learning that seek to regulate course delivery across sometimes vast numbers of students. This creates an uncomfortable outlook for part-time faculty, who now comprise the largest group of the U.S. academic labor force. In cases where traditional instruction and assessment have become so assembly-lined, the prospect of a technologic replacement properly scaled to produce cost savings is appealing.

It is important to recognize that not all part-time faculty are staring down the machines. Many are responsible for developing their own courses and assessments, some are successful in nonacademic careers and teach on the side, and some are included in collectively bargained contracts that provide some amount of improved working conditions, if not job stability. However, when faculty hear about the technology revolution in academe, they might just draw parallels to the story of John Henry, the American folk hero who beat his technologic replacement, though it cost him his life.

The fact that universities already treat large numbers of faculty members like machines is upsetting to many in higher education. That discussions about the future of college instruction continue to imply faculty members’ obsoleteness in light of new technologies is understandably cause for anxiety. But as universities explore technology solutions to problems of cost, they also need to keep an eye on effectiveness. Technology solutions have not yet solved the problem of how to assess much of the learning that falls under the liberal arts education umbrella without faculty involvement.

As State U Online intimates, MOOCs are the latest evolution of correspondence instruction; they claim a much longer tradition than many give them credit for, and they are here to stay. Nearly two centuries ago, the faculty of Yale University famously stated, “The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.” While they argued differently at the time, both elements are of critical importance to modern higher education. The question today is whether states will overemphasize the furniture—technical education—as they continue to explore technology-labor exchange.