There's a thread about distance education going on within the JESSE list,
which is more or less the US equivalent of lis-bailer, at the moment, under
this rather obscure title (Adjuncts vs. faculty lines). I thought this
cautionary tale was worth forwarding to UK colleagues.
Fytton Rowland.
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>Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 11:35:24 -0800
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>Subject: Re: Adjuncts vs. faculty lines
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Though not strictly DE, I taught classes at "satellite" campuses for
"professionals" at a private Jesuit university in San Francisco a few years
ago and was pretty struck by what I saw. The students were receiving BAs
and MAs for basically enduring "accelerated" classes. In exchange, I
figured at the time that the school was paying me about 2 1/2% of the money
they were taking in per class (even with administrative costs, I'm sure the
school was raking in money). Almost all faculty in the "School of
Professional Studies" were part-time, paid a fraction of the
administrators' salaries and a fraction of what the students themselves
were making in private corporations. The students knew that the faculty
were making poor money and were dependent on their evaluations and they
used it to their advantage. We had no department heads, proper, and
complaints (which were many and frequent) went directly from the students
to their supervisors to our administrators and down on us. (Some of the
administrators had also gone through this program as students and had
gotten their Ph.D. in similar programs. They had, really, no experience of
the culture of higher education and its historical traditions.)
My feeling was that these students were not receiving anything near an
education and that the school had no problem accrediting and running what
was in essence a diploma mill and a money cow, from the level of BAs to, in
reality, the level of Ph.Ds. Grade inflation was out of control, there was
little academic culture, and the students were, well, as a group pretty
uneducated upon receiving their degree (but yes, they were satisfied).
There was a sense that because these were 'professional' students and
'adult learners' this was ok, that they weren't training to become
academics so many of the traditional interests of academe didn't apply.
The bottom line was this: "you pay the money, we give you the degree and
certify you as being 'educated' in a professional field. For this, you may
keep your job or move up." The two criteria for education were, basically,
money and student (known as "customers") satisfaction.
I should add that I have no idea if things there have changed or not;
this is my picture of the situation during the approximately two years I
taught there. At the time, I didn't see any reason why things would change
or any will to change them. The money was coming in, the number of degrees
being handed out was increasing, and these seemed to be the raison d'etre
of the college.
I'm sure that the example I gave above doesn't apply to many LIS
distance education programs, but it does apply to what many (especially,
private schools are doing and the trend is extending into public, even
elite public institutions. It's a very different experience of getting a
higher education than what I had, though much can be said about that, as
well. But I'm afraid that the bottom line and the criteria described,
above, are what underlies some of what goes by the term "nontraditional"
education in this country, and increasingly (from what colleagues abroad
tell me), at least in Britain and France. Satellite programs were an early
form of distance education. There are real lessons to be learned here, and
I'm sure I'm not the only one that can give tales like the above. The
difference is that I'm a teacher that has so far survived; most of my
colleagues either quit or became administrators within these types of
programs themselves.
Ron Day
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Fytton Rowland, Director of Undergraduate Programmes,
Department of Information Science,
Loughborough University,
Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK.
Phone +44 (0) 1509 223039 Fax +44 (0) 1509 223053
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://info.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/staff/frowland.html
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