BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past decade Audrey Watters has proven to be one of our most knowledgeable, insightful, critical, and, well, just plain entertaining commentators on educational technology. Her Hack Education blog is a must-read for anyone who cares about teaching and learning at any level. One terrific feature of that blog has been…
BY AARON BARLOW At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we…
BY STEVE BUTTES Last week the AAUP launched its Faculty Anti-Privatization Network (FAN) week of action and shared new resources to raise awareness and build faculty solidarity around the increasing risks that online programs are posing to the academic freedom, shared governance, educational quality, and reputation of public and private institutions across the country. This…
BY HANK REICHMAN October 1 was the legislatively mandated opening day for California’s new ridiculously named fully online community college, Calbright. But there were no classes. There were no instructors. There were no students. There were, however, some applicants. According to Taylor Huckaby, Calbright’s communications director, about 655 people had started an application, of which…
BY JONATHAN REES Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo and a member of the AAUP Council. The following is reposted from his “More or Less Bunk” blog. This morning [August 1], I delivered this paper in the Academic Freedom session at the West Coast Division of the American Historical…
BY AARON BARLOW Never were online courses adequate substitutes for face-to-face teaching. Like correspondence courses before them, they do fill a need and they can provide motivated students with a viable alternative. But they should never have been preferred or seen as a blanket equivalent to direct interaction with a professor. That is more true…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog about graduate student debt in which I cited an article in the New York Times that reported, among other things, that students in an online social work program at the University of Southern California (USC) averaged an extraordinary $109,486 in student loan…
BY AARON BARLOW One of the more depressing articles I’ve read recently—outside of politics—is Kevin Carey’s “The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education” for Huffington Post. He writes: Instead of students receiving a reasonably priced, quality online degree, universities are using them as cash cows while corporate middlemen…
BY MONICA OWENS In support of the launch of our national Education Not Privatization campaign this week we interviewed David Hughes, vice president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers University to learn more about how the Rutgers chapter successfully organized to defend academic freedom and exercised oversight of online offerings in the Rutgers-Pearson eCollege contract.…