RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

School is cool. [I think.]

In light of the recent discussions as posed in class, I feel that it is the right time in the semester to transition from straight, academic prose and offer up some sort of self-reflection. While I acknowledge that this blog is meant to focus my studies of the Politics of Information, as addressed by the perimeters of the class, I would like to briefly suspend that in favor of an informal response to the question “why am I in grad school?”

Last week in class, we were transitioning from Harvey’s Rebel Cities to Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory and the topic quickly turned to the reasoning behind attending an institution of higher learning, especially given that higher degrees no longer (if they did at all) guarantee a job placement after school. I must confess that I did not participate in the class discussion as much as I normally do because of the topic at hand. I do not really know why I choose to undertake a Masters degree, especially one in English. My undergrad is in Creative Writing, and I had all but decided to pursue the Rhetoric and Composition option at the grad level, but now I’m unsure. This all comes down to the fact that I do not want to teach. While most my classmates and friends in the department have reservations about teaching, for the most part they understand and acknowledge that teaching in any capacity most often comes with a degree in English. I guess the problem really comes down to exactly what I want to do for a professional career, and how a Creative Writing and Rhetoric & Composition background will help me.

Aronowitz states that “education is successful when the student identifies with social and cultural authorities” (1). But I have to question if this is really what I’m undertaking by pursuing a higher degree. I choose English because I’ve always been interested in reading, literature, and writing, and I choose Rhetoric and Composition because – truthfully – I did not want to do the Creative Writing or the Literature option. Furthermore, theory both excites and intimidates me, as I said in the first post to this blog at the beginning of the semester. But now, having almost finished my first semester in grad school, I have to wonder if I’m really gaining anything from it. I confess I do not like the idea of being forced to identity with “social and cultural authorities.” I like to think that I am gaining something more than just base cultural information and a place in the social and economic structure of the world. Or rather, I hope that at the end of all of this – school, academic life, everything – that I will gain something worthwhile to me.

Online & On-Profit: At the intersection of education and capitalism

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

- Kurt Vonnegut

In the introduction to Digital Capitalism, Dan Schiller questions the idea of the “utopian vision” of the Internet, inquiring if that the digitalization of the “express[ion of] ancient yearnings” is equivalent, or at least indicative of, “the historical detoxification through scientific knowledge: the truth—information?—will make us free” (xiii). Despite the vast amounts of information that is available free on the Internet (although that’s not to say all of it is “true” or reliable – Wikipedia being a prime example), the majority of learners in this country remain enrolled in the traditional routes of education, although it does seem that each passing year brings more and more attention for alternative modes of schooling. Anyone who has seen advertising and/or commercials promoting the entirely of the education experience being conducted online, from the comfort of the student’s own home (you don’t even have to change out of your pajamas!), seems to be enough to make any student who is tired of dealing with long commutes, absurd parking situations and lengthy, tedious lectures held in stuffy classes turn immediately to online schooling. However nice or easy that sounds, we must continue to remember that “cyberspace itself is being rapidly colonized by the familiar workings of market system” (Schiller xiv). In this way, caution is heeded in light of the education system being further commodified from the condition it is already in.

The university is a business, and it must continue to make profits in order to keep itself afloat. But what happens when education becomes (more-or-less) freely accessible, affordable and tailored to an individual’s own learning habits?

Amada Ripley raises this question in a recent article in TIME. In “College is Dead. Long Live College!” Ripley visited both “brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen MOOCS,” or “massive open online courses,” in order to experience how each operates (it appears she focused primarily on classes, both traditional and online, that dealt with physics and/or science) (37). Although there still remains in academic circles a stigma of online courses (I personally know a handful of professor who are reluctant or refusing to teach their courses online) being somehow inferior to traditional courses, MOOCs like Udacity, Coursea and edX have some pretty legitimate support, ranging from a former Stanford professor to Princeton, Penn and Duke to MIT and Harvard, respectively.

Ripley’s experience seems positive for the most part, as she notes that the introductory physics class she enrolled in at Udacity was “designed according to how the brain actually learn” (37). She notes that former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrum, the CEO and co-founder of Udacity, saw that traditional Stanford students enrolled in his online course did better than those who didn’t take the Udacity course. Thrum relates on how he was able to adjust the course based on reactions from students, including how when “tens of thousands of students all got the same quiz problem wrong, he realized that the question was not clear, and he changed it” (39). Perhaps this is to the benefit of the students and the coursework, having large numbers of quantitative data that can be turned into qualitative changes. On the other hand, one of my own professors recently revealed to the class that she changed the final exam of the graduate theory course she has taught for the past ten-plus years after she saw that students were too stressed with a take-home exam. Arguably, she did not have, despite teaching for so long, the “tens of thousands” of students to give her the feedback that Thrum did. My professor couldn’t make changes on the fly, or even from semester-to-semester, as easily as Thrum could with a wider scope of participants and thoroughly electronic means.

Furthermore, Ripley calls attention to the fact that according to research, “three semester of college education have a ‘barely noticeable’ impact on critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills” (36-37). This relates to a topic of discussion this week in class, in which one of my classmates brought up the criticism leveled against mandating general education units, especially at the undergraduate level. His criticism, it seemed, stems from frustration he experienced at not really gaining anything productive or useful from the wide range of supplemental classes he had to take in topics he wasn’t really interested in. However, I offered up my viewpoint, in which I noted that I made sure to take general ed classes in topics I was interested in (for example, an astronomy course in life in the universe and the possibility of aliens). In fact, I didn’t decide on my undergraduate major until taking a general ed class – Creative Writing 1. It’s not clear if the “three semesters” that Ripley cites is primarily from the first couple of years of school (which are themselves heady, uncertain times for most students living on their own for the first time) but the issues my classmate raised perhaps find some legitimacy in Ripley’s article. However, MOOCs could arguably one day be widespread and developed enough to allow students to pick from a wider range of topics than that which his provided in a traditional university setting.  More classes like the one I took in astronomy (which was, ironically, provided at Santa Monica Community College, often cited as the destination community college for both in-state and foreign exchange students as it has an extraordinarily high transfer rate to 4-year schools like UCLA and USC). In that course, we discussed possibility of alien life in the universe. We looked at the criteria that exoplanets needed in order to provide life (within the hospitable zone to a central star, the major elements, etc), read Sagan’s Contact as a required text and studied the various probes sent out over the years, as well as looking at more traditional astronomical topics like formation of stars, planets and our solar system. I was interested in the class because of its specific focus while still retaining a lot of the more “useful” components of a science/astronomy class. I was thankful that SMCC provided general ed courses that stepped outside the normal offerings of generic science classes. However, this isn’t practical in light of severely limited funding for universities and thus online courses might be a step in the direction of offering a wider range of courses for cheaper.

There is also something to be said about Ripley’s acknowledge of the fact that a lot of MOOCs, Udacity in particular, “aim to cut out the middleman [or the transferring of credits to higher-learning institutions] and go straight to employers” (41). She does note that at this stage, most of the MOOCs and other alternative learning routes “work well for students who are self-motivated and already fairly well educated,” but this could certainly change if the prices, time commitment, and end benefit of the MOOCs could be further applicable to students’ needs, or at least more so than in traditional channels (41).

Additionally, we must consider the implications of the University of Phoenix, a for-profit school owned by the Apollo Group, closing 115 facilities around the country:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ylZKk5IDc

(YouTube video not embeddable).

The reporter rightly notices the university heeding the changing times by looking for “a new business model to stay competitive” (1:28). Perhaps then, the closing of the brick-and-mortar facilities is their way to try to stay in line with the development of online learning tools. On the other hand, Ripley cites a quote by University of Phoenix spokesman Ryan Rauzon, who says that “[students] need a degree, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon,” and points out that a vast majority of companies still look for “traditional” degrees and it will be some time before the wide acceptance of online or MOOC provided degrees (40). The contradictions between what the University of Phoenix says and what it does seems to signal some sort of interstitial occupation between the “traditional” and “new” routes of education.

However, in the end, I have to wonder if all this talk about diversifying the education process (that is, even further than it is already divided) through online application is somehow reminiscent of “leading consumer products companies like Disney and General Motors [having]… ‘two-tier marking’ plans, polarizing products and sales pitches to reach ‘two different Americas’ – rich and poor” (Schiller 53). Obviously, there are already extensive differences between the experiences and education students have at, say, the Ivy League colleges versus the state-run universities. That is not to say, however, that I essentially believe my experienced and education at California State University, Northridge is somehow inferior to one I would have gotten if I had attended, for example, USC or Berkley, nor am I suggesting that I think I’m not getting something worthwhile out of both my B.A (Creative Writing) and M.A. (Rhetoric and Composition) at CSUN. I am simply acknowledging the fact that one school is considered “inferior” to the others listed above, and unless something extraordinary occurs, those divisions will remain in place. In my view, it seems that online schools, MOOCS, and other digital avenues of learning (YouTube videos, web series, etc.) are emerging as the middle-ground in between the “superior” and “inferior” division of traditional schools.

What Schiller seems most concerned with – and an issue I would have to agree with him on – is the fact that “during the 1970s… the long-standing distinction between education and business began to erode,” and it certainly has only escalated since then (147). Schiller sees the causes of this as relating to matters of in-house corporate training and education, changing information technologies and more adults returning to the academy. The “information technologies” aspect is most interesting to me, since he later takes issue with the “central selling point of most [online course production] software packages [being] that faculty members can ‘simply fill in the blanks, and the program produces a Web site’” (193). When I first began at CSUN two years ago, I had never heard of Moodle. Now, I use it everyday, and cannot think of a class I’ve taken during my undergraduate studies that did not use Moodle in some way. I consider this site, as helpful as it is sometimes, one of those “fill-in-the-blank” academic tools, one that disengages the student from the classroom instead of creating a worthwhile experience. This is one reason why I prefer the method I’m undertaking this very instant: the act of blogging. (Full disclosure: this is the third class I’ve taken with this particular professor, and a quick view of my profile will show the other blog sites I’ve made for other courses.)

In addition to outlining many instances of corporate education programs, Schiller also notes that the Apollo Group planned “an aggressive expansion” in Asian and European markets, turning the idea of the “mega-university” into a “broker of distance learning services on a world stage” (198). My primarily issue with this idea, one that Schiller seems to share, is that blending education and business, especially one primarily geared towards English/America education models, is only spreading capitalism and not necessarily the ideals of knowledge and truth. Ripley notices too the interest that venture capitalist have shown towards the “business model” of MOOCs (37). However, unlike Schiller, she does not spend too much time looking at this potential problem, noting only that it “seems likely that more people will eventually learn more for less money. Finally” (37). Ripley appears to remain optimistic about the future of education in light of technological and economic changes, while Schiller advocates caution in proceeding through the intersection of education and business.

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KCRATV. “University of Phoenix closing 3 facilities in our area.” YouTube. Web. 8 November 2012.

Ripley, Amanda. “College is Dead. Long Live College!” Time. 29 October 2012: 32-41. Print.

* Also available online: Time.com. 18 October 2012. Web. 8 November 2012. < http://nation.time.com/2012/10/18/college-is-dead-long-live-college/>

Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.