Week 17: Activity 1 Digital Diploma Mills.

Activity 1a What kind of vision of students?

Mike Wesch’s video ‘A vision of students today’ (on youTube).

The biggest theme for me was that of the disconnection between the students and the tutors. One student hold a sign which says only 18% of her tutor knows her name, while another says there are on average 140 students in each class. It is interesting to contrast this with the  ECAR  which report 90% of students using social networking sites yet only 8% use this medium to contact their tutors (Smith and Caruso, 2010) http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ECARStudyofUndergraduateStuden/217333



 Activity 1b: ‘Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education’. Noble (1998),

Key points

• 'technological changes in universities..(the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material)...is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation'. This is similar to the 19th century vision of school/university envisioned by Wesch, however it means the automation of materials with little input by professors and indicates a divide between administrators and companies that sell educational products on the one side (eg Educom); and teachers and tutors on the other. 
• 'Or the classroom versus the boardroom'. Examples include theUCLA administration launching its historic “Instructional Enhancement Initiative” and Canada's York University unilateral  initiatives in the implementation of instructional technology (which was overturned by strike action). This initiative were taken without faculty oversight.
• Reason for change: 'A short answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of “progress”. But there is more to it. For the universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education.' involving 'systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property'.
• This happened in two phases.  in first phase: In 70s... in wake of the oil crisis and intensifying international competition...major industrialized countries recognised they were losing their monopoly over the world’s heavy industries and that, in the future, their supremacy would depend upon their monopoly “knowledge–based” industries (space, electronics, computers, materials, telecommunications, and bioengineering). Universities were their chief source especially research departments. This led to 'proliferation of industrial partnerships and new proprietary arrangements' and a' wholesale reallocation of university resources toward its research function at the expense of its educational function'. At the same time, tuition soared to subsidize the creation and maintenance of the commercial infrastructure (and correspondingly bloated administration) that has never really paid off. In the end students were paying more for their education and getting less, and the campuses were in crisis
• 'The second phase of the commercialization of academia, the commoditization of instruction, is touted as the solution to the crisis engendered by the first'. This led to 'transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market'. The foremost promoters of this transformation are (a) the vendors of the network hardware, software, and “content”; (b) the trainers;   (c) the University Administration,(who view view computer–based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs),  and (d) technozealots who think technology is the answer to everything 
• There was also a movement towards nationally connected universities (eg Canada's “Virtual U” network), and completely virtual universities (University of Phoenix) 'market orientation behind these initiatives is explicit'
• 'The implications of the commoditization of university instruction are two–fold in nature, those relating to the university as a site of the production of the commodities and those relating to the university as a market for them. The first raises for the faculty traditional labor issues about the introduction of new technologies of production. The second raises for students major questions about costs, coercion, privacy, equity, and the quality of education'.
• As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de–skill, and displace labor.  once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind.
• for all the democratic rhetoric about extending educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus remains the real market for these products, where students outnumber their distance learning counterparts six–to–one.