The Wisdom of Margaret Soltan, on the Onlining of Higher Education:
It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.Because, you know, even the online stuff is being farmed out to off-campus vendors.
That is all, darlings. There are painters in the house and a paper to be written in Roxie's World today. The summer of home maintenance continues, and the last precious moments of someone's leave are ticking away.
Click on that sound file and imagine if you can the sorrow of the Moose. Oh, and have a nice day.
"He worries that bottom-line thinking will drive decisions about how colleges deliver courses. They might choose exam formats that are easier to grade, for example, to keep costs down."
ReplyDeleteDoesn't that make you want to find out more about these easier-to-grade exam formats? Why don't they just outsource the grading, too I wonder. Then they'd have students working at home, on courses provided by offshore knowledge transfer corporations, being graded by professional graders, and presumably attending graduation ceremonies organized on facebook and conducted via Web conference. The University of Az finally becomes the University of Oz.
Outsourced grading is here, my friend: http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Grading-With-Su/64954/.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to Oz -- or Hell.
Alright -- so professors become project managers. Tenured project manager...hmm I could go for that.
ReplyDelete