Comments on: U of California Resuscitates the Master Plan

By: Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis

Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:36:30 +0000

Dear Anya (if I may),

Where to begin untangling the knot of confusion, fallacy, craven politics, complacency, intellectual drift and ideological entrenchment we call ‘higher education’? I share your impatience with things as they stand, in no small part because things rarely stand still for very long and the initiative doesn’t always line up with the good. I’m willing to listen to any proposal which promises to improve education while lowering costs. Instead I hear the largely self-serving sloganeering of the established academy being confronted with the facile, imprecise, and profiteering claims of ‘innovation’ and ‘cost-cutting through technology’, which have acquired the thought-numbing properties of mantras –just keep repeating them and the questions and doubts will dissipate. The “online class(room)” is a self-contradictory metaphor parading as a cost-efficient substitute for an admittedly inadequate teaching model (now mostly reserved to the humanities and social sciences) developed to serve a time now irrecoverably remote to us. You have rightly noted in your writings and interviews that we should not expect simply to transfer online the existing habits and rituals of education we charitably call a ‘system’, from curricular conventions to degree requirements. You don’t have to dig up your copy of Macluhan to recognize that the self-determining nature of the online media must and will shape the message of education. But if that message is to merit being called ‘education’ it is unlikely to be inexpensive or efficient. In fact my experience of such innovations has been quite the opposite. We spend more than enough on university education, we just spend far too much of it unwisely through an agglomeration of systems designed to placate many, educate a few, and please none.

Regards,
Emmanuel

By: admin

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 23:14:12 +0000

actually @Hal, when the crowd corrects my spelling, that’s networked knowledge at work! Thanks, by the way!

By: Hal

Hal — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:30:43 +0000

U of California Resucitates the Master Plan

The last thing you want to do in an article celebrating edu-innovation is mispell “ResuScitates”.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:05:37 +0000

Hi Bryce,
All good points. Better to have the UC doing it themselves than have Kaplan U providing the online courses though, right?

By: Bryce

Bryce — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:51:09 +0000

I read the article, and got a “glass is three-quarters empty” vibe from it. From the faculty who wanted everyone to be clear that attending an online class isn’t really accessing the UC, to the faculty who see this as a real money maker for the school (implying that the courses will be priced at or near the cost of regular classes), it has me thinking that innovation will have to come from outside.

My hope is that, because California schools are facing a real budget crisis, and because institutions are facing a genuine crisis of legitimacy, that real reform is possible. My fear is that they’ll let this crisis go to waste.

By: Andrew Careaga

Andrew Careaga — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:36:26 +0000

Glad to see you picking up on this, Anya. Not sure whether you've had the chance to see my review of your book, but I connected the California Master Plan heritage with DIY U in the penultimate paragraph. Here's to a fruitful discussion tomorrow.

By: bob bradley

bob bradley — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:36:12 +0000

Great news here; we’re looking at similar strategies to scale nationally with our Governors Challenge at http://www.sandboxnetwork.org .

Thanks to you, too, for keeping these issues in the light.

bob