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Online Drones

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today is reporting on resistance to online courses at Rutgers.  Blog readers who have followed the online ed/MOOC debates won’t see surprises except for one element:

The effort to offer more graduate degree programs online at Rutgers University at New Brunswick hit a snag on Wednesday, as faculty members in the Graduate School voted to block new programs from being approved…

Faculty members have to sign a separate contract with the university to create an online course, which Hughes said strips them of their intellectual property rights. A draft of the agreement states that “Due to the particular requirements of an online program, this license specifically includes the right to have the course taught by others.” 
“A lot of faculty see red when they read that,” said [Anthropology Professor David] Hughes, who pointed out the clause would allow the university to “unbundle” the role of an instructor. In a worst-case scenario, he said faculty members could in the future be replaced by an underpaid “drone army of course facilitators” hired to teach course material created by their predecessors…

Perhaps you will recall former UC president Yudof’s statement at the Regents that we wouldn’t have droning:
Note: Another article in Inside Higher Ed reports:

…AAUP says that colleges and universities have ramped up ownership claims to property subject to copyright, as well – including online course content…

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/11/new-aaup-report-urges-faculty-protect-intellectual-property-rights

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Jerry Brown Looks for an Online Course that Requires No Human Interaction

Byuclafaculty

At the Regents meeting of January 22, 2014, Gov. Brown seems to be searching for an online course that requires no human interaction.  Such a course, he reasons, could have unlimited enrollment because it is completely self-contained.  He gets some pushback from UC Provost Dorr, who thinks courses should have such interaction.  You can hear this excerpt at the link below.  The entire meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy of the Regents was posted yesterday.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tYFLJvrE3g?feature=player_detailpage]

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Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

Byuclafaculty

As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year.  So we dutifully record the sessions in real time.  Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22.  This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy.  Gov. Brown was in attendance.  We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments.  But for now, we provide a continuous recording. There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope.  The discussion then turned to online ed and…

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MOOCs in the Muck

Byuclafaculty

Good question! Inside Higher Ed today runs an article on MOOC offerings at the U of Texas and Cornell.  At the former, there are the usual extremely low completion rates.  At the latter, resident students are asking the question in the photo at the right: …”A year after UT began rolling out nine Massive Online Open Courses, the results are in,” The Daily Texan wrote in a Jan. 29 editorial… Among the “results” are completion rates ranging from 1 to 13 percent, the lack of credit granting courses and the $150,000 to $300,000 production costs…  (S)tudents at Cornell voiced similar concerns,…

Is there Twitter after retirement?

Byuclafaculty

Of course, the Big Question is usually is there life after death?  But we can’t answer that one here.  The lesser question – Is there Twitter after retirement? – can be answered, at least in the case of former UC prez Mark Yudof.  YES!  Not surprisingly, Yudof stopped tweeting around the time he left the UC presidency.  But then, in late December, came another tweet.  It’s actually a link to a Harvard Business Review piece, and says: “Once you know your greater purpose, there are lots of roads that will take you there.” http://s.hbr.org/18NiGul [See https://twitter.com/mark_yudof] I always thought the…

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MOOc

Byuclafaculty

An interesting analysis of MOOCs in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby suggests that heavy dependence on online ed won’t work for what she terms highly selective post-secondary educational institutions.  In essence, such institutions depend in important ways on alumni loyalty which is hard to obtain if students take courses online that come from anywhere. Abstract: I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE)in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in return…