“Axel Tschentscher” / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
BY AARON BARLOW
When I was in Peace Corps in West Africa, I could always tell where the butcher’s stand was by the vultures circling overhead. Today, I am seeing similar carrion feeders, ones hoping to snatch up the offal from the COVID-19 situation…
The COVID-19 college closures are being seized upon by the EdTech industry to further its agenda. The offers of free services to help us that we are seeing are not signs of altruism but are attempts to create new profit centers by an industry already attempting to kill higher education in the United States and feast off the carcass.
Teachers who have never used more than rudimentary digital tools are now being asked to find ways of finishing the current semester online. Already, the EdTech industry is planning on using this to show that more and more classes could easily be moved online in the future without problem. The offers of help we are receiving are meant to facilitate what we must do, certainly, but the EdTech people recognize that our success will play into their plans for further incursion into American higher education. As usual in the current neoliberal mythology, disruption can be seen as opportunity—and the COVID-19 closings certain are disruptive.
Though most of us already use digital tools in our teaching (we would be foolish not to take advantage of them), few of us want technology to be the driving force in our practice—at odds with EdTech thinking. We don’t subscribe to their because-I-have-a-hammer-everything-is-a-nail school of thought but choose tools that meet the needs of the particular situations we face.
We are able to pick up digital tools to partially compensate for the suspensions of our face-to-face teaching resulting from the current crisis. We will also know when to put them down. Our greatest tool is ourselves in our physical presence with physical students—and we will return to utilizing it as soon as we can.
If, that is, the money hungry EdTech birds of prey don’t swoop down and snatch education from our hands.
If we succeed in rescuing this semester from the disaster that these closings could be—and we probably will do that—there will be EdTech heroes arguing that we have proven that old-style classrooms are no longer necessary, that we can turn many of our physical college facilities to other uses and the bulk of higher education to online learning.
This is nonsense, of course. But so was the claim that the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) could revolutionize higher ed, a claim that, though there are many stakes through its heart, refuses to die. There’s too much potential profit involved, and dreams of money can jolt a corpse to a semblance of life as effectively as Dr. Frankenstein’s electricity. It is jolting EdTech right now.
What is bothering many of us professors is this realization that our success in managing our courses in the face of school closures will be used as an argument for, in effect, keeping them closed. Maybe not right now, but in the future. In addition, we know that we will be accused of being greedy ourselves when we resist. We will be told that we are trying to stop the inevitable simply to keep our own careers, for online teaching can be handled in a gig-economy fashion more easily than on-campus teaching, accelerating the move to casualization of all college teaching.
What we don’t know is if we have the resources to successfully fight the coming attack by EdTech, even though our organizations, including the AAUP, will try as hard as they can to support us.
Online teaching, we know, will always be second best. It is an approximation of what face-to-face teaching gives; it does not offer a real alternative but simply an imitation. For proof, we need look no farther than the schools that those with ample funds choose for their children, schools with low student/teacher ratios and an emphasis on real interaction even beyond the classroom. The elite small colleges that provide the best undergraduate education in America encourage their faculties to live close to campus and to engage in activities with students beyond the classroom. Plenty of technology is available but the heart of learning beats in personal interaction. For all of the touting of digital tools, personal interaction is the basis for the best education, for it centers on modeling, mentoring and motivating, three things that education mediated by technology cannot provide.
That won’t change, not even if the EdTech vultures are successful, for the top schools don’t feel the pressure from funders that the rest do, especially those dependent on public money controlled by politicians easily swayed by EdTech arguments of lower costs. But, for the rest of us, things could quickly deteriorate, the divide between education for the rich and education for the masses growing faster than it ever before has.
There are those who insist that online courses and degrees are just as good as face-to-face courses and degrees. We’ve probably all heard this stated. To them I think we ought to say, ok, then be willing to list any course taken and degree obtained online on students’ transcripts as having been taken online. In all seriousness, this is an academic policy change that faculty could push for on their own campuses.
Great idea!
With several kids in college, I’m getting all sorts of family and parent notices, or policy, concerning this virus program. I call it a “program” because it has all the hallmarks of programmatic management, for cognitive purposes. With a professional background in defense, security and technology, this is not unexpected or certainly infeasible.
The writer here, pointing to “EdTech,” is identifying part of the larger mix of special interests. I would say two things in response to his article: Yes, indeed, live, in-person, interactive learning has no equal, and done well is highly motivational and rewarding. The “tech” part can at best merely serve as an “adjunct” infrastructure to support, prepare and reinforce certain learning tasks (the “language lab” has been around since magnetic tape recorders; pilots train in simulators with an instructor; medical and architecture students use cadcam; researchers of all kinds in the humanities have profound new powers of search and discovery methods of texts and sources; musicians use computing technology for sound recording, play-back performance assessment and even bio-posture and body mechanics insight and adjustment; sports athletes can “pitch,” swing,shoot, kick or a dozen other movements, to a computer generated simulation, as can police officers who now train in unheard of technical fidelity simulators involving scenario encounters).
So EdTech has and continues to be vital, and innovative. But, two, can it “replace” the teacher or professor? I do not believe that is feasible or desirable in most learning stages, even re-currency training for previously learned tasks, memory items, or behaviors.
The real issue isn’t really the professor, or the human pedagogy role (aviation and transportation generally, is facing the same controversy over pilots versus robots) but the university as an institution. Most are now a somewhat unsightly mix of medieval heritage, joined to a modern corporation, like a conjoint twin. It is the “Medieval” part that is arguably worth protecting vis-a-vis value transmission (although the values are sadly not generally sufficiently diversified or intellectually robust) and independent cognitive development, but the modern university’s corporate transformation (and administration acting like corporate executives, including in expectations and entitlement) are wearing away the traditional foundation.
Some traditional institutions will survive and prosper; some will close, merge or restructure. But the labor component is going to face an unavoidable cost rationalization, as the higher education sector has so “milked” the education cow, that she is about to collapse from the weight of cost, debt, and mostly, poor management.
Importing the gig economy into higher education is not a good solution. We know how badly adjuncts are treated, how the system is destroying tenure. Eventually, no one with a brain who needs a decent salary and wants respect would go into teaching as a career.
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US higher education has many other avenues to take–some already being taken (campuses abroad where students pay full freight and admin is not so burdensome a part of the salary budget, etc.)
Dear Ms. Gullette (from Brandeis I assume?): I greatly admire your books on “ageism” and your general thesis. It is enlightened and inspiring. Concerning higher education policy, I wonder if your ageism thesis is partly if not significantly an explanatory factor in university labor and cost trends (or contentions)? Like many other institutions with a seniority system (like airlines, for example, or the military or medical field even), senior labor costs are considered the “low hanging fruit” in cost cutting, including benefits and retirement. Many, if not most US universities are being managed under a private sector corporate model that among other elements, stresses labor unit costs. Ironically (or perhaps predictably), much university administration is quite aged, and very expensive. At the University of Chicago, for example, the president and trustee chairman are together nearly 160 years old, and he and his staff among the highest compensated among all global universities. You may appreciate my opinion in the university press, below., “University Goes Corporate.” With Regards.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/6/7/university-goes-corporate/
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