From ivory tower to academic sweatshop

For many faculty members in the late 1990s, the dot-edu bubble may have seemed a distant rumble: an emblem of that era's speculative excesses and of the vainglory of administrators and dubious Internet visionaries. Now, fast-forward to 2005. Just as many companies spun out their Web operations as dot-com subsidiaries in the late 1990s, only to bring them back into the fold after the IPO market evaporated, so have many of the dot-edu initiatives found new life back on campus.

SetonWorldWide launched in 1998, at the height of the dot-edu boom. Growing slowly and deliberately, Seton today enrolls about 300 online students. DiSalvio, the program's director, expects the online school to fold itself back into the university mother ship over the next few years. "We started out as an entrepreneurial unit, but as online education has become mainstream within the school, as it's become more prevalent and accepted, we see the logic of decentralizing the program and putting it into the respective schools and colleges, under the management of the deans."

Although many schools made the mistake of approaching distance learning as an entirely new product during the dot-edu boom, they are now beginning to recognize its potential as a new channel in the supply chain. And just as the Web has enabled many companies to reengineer their supply chains to integrate more closely with partners and customers, so some schools are beginning to integrate their distance-learning programs more deeply with corporate agendas.

At Arizona State University, students can now earn not only a fully accredited MBA online from the W.P. Carey School of Business, but many of them do so under the auspices of the school's Corporate Program, in which local employers like Lucent and ChevronTexaco partner directly with the business school to create tailor-made MBA programs for their employees.

When a Lucent employee enrolls in a managerial economics class online, the course Web site comes pre-populated with a set of Lucent financial data, which provides the fodder for most of the class exercises. To earn the MBA, the student must undertake an applied project that produces a measurable business outcome for the employer. "The goal is to realize a cost saving for the corporation," says Steve Salik, the manager of delivery systems and strategic development for the business school. "By having the students achieve that cost savings, [the corporation] can recoup the entire cost of the program."

Corporations aren't the only customers looking for that kind of deep integration. In 1999, the U.S. Army launched eArmyU, a distance-learning network that ties together 29 accredited universities into an online learning consortium. The network offers degree programs through a centralized portal developed under contract by IBM. To date, 30,000 active-duty soldiers have enrolled in eArmyU; program administrators hope to have 80,000 student-soldiers enrolled by the end of 2005. The Army program has proved a great boon for schools like Excelsior College in Albany, where active military make up more than 25 percent of the student body.

While soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan undoubtedly benefit from access to educational opportunities, their academic freedom is hardly unbound. The Army will reimburse students only for classes taken within strict degree requirements, and it won't reimburse for elective classes that fall outside those requirements; you won't find Uncle Sam footing the bill for Renaissance poetry seminars. "The military wants courses that are relevant to what they're doing," says Susan Nash, the associate dean of liberal arts at Excelsior and a longtime distance-learning professor. Recently, she has worked with the Army to develop practical course offerings with titles like "Leadership in Difficult Times." "I can understand their reasoning, but I think it's bad for education," Nash says. "If we're not careful we're going to lose the ability to think spontaneously. We're being programmed."

As schools react to growing institutional pressures, faculty are discovering that those influences extend beyond the contents of the course catalog. "Institutions have put in place a production process that hadn't existed before," Pittinsky says. Just as the Web transformed the role of the information technology staff in many corporations -- bringing them out of the back office and into the front line of marketing and sales operations -- so online learning technologies are changing the makeup of academic organizations.

The most dramatic change for most academic departments has been the emergence of IT professionals from the administrative back office to the forefront of curriculum development. "Seven or eight years ago, the only systems administrators [on campus] would be managing things like e-mail systems, systems that really didn't touch teaching and learning at their core," Pittinsky says. "They were this kind of back-office priesthood. Now, you see an entire group of professionals who have the tech savvy to manage systems at a large scale, but they are also consultative to faculty on instructional design."

The ascendancy of information technology staff is changing the way courses get produced and is introducing a corporate organizational model into the traditionally benign dictatorship of the lecture hall. For faculty brought up in the old school, amid the Byzantine hierarchies of academic departments, the new model of integrated teamwork may take some getting used to.

"There are some faculty who get it, and some faculty who don't," DiSalvio says. "We have found there are some faculty who may be charismatic in person, but they are terrible online."

Those faculty who do participate in online-course development often have to adjust to the unfamiliar dynamics of team-based course design. In many cases, that means faculty members work as part of interdisciplinary curriculum-development teams, alongside other skilled "knowledge workers" like instructional designers, systems administrators and media specialists.

"If you look at how a lot of [courseware] is really being produced, they're sweatshops," Nash says. "You have these busy people creating these objects -- like multiple-choice tests, or little games, or learning objects -- these are people who are paid nothing, whereas other people are paid a lot for overseeing it, like factory owners."

"Our professors are content experts. That's all they are," says ASU's Salik, voicing a not-uncommon administration view of the professor's role in online-course development. For institutions, the reduction of faculty to "content experts" does yield clear economies of scale. That sentiment also echoes an old dot-com ethos: separating content from delivery. Says Salik: "If the executive education director calls me up and says, 'This guy from Honeywell is here, and they want a one-day executive education seminar, but they want one piece from course A, one piece from course B, one piece from course C,' we can roll that together and send it out the door in about 20 minutes."

The reuse of online courseware will likely extend not just between courses in a single school, but between institutions as well. "Once universities start learning how to cooperate with each other through productive associations," Nash says, "I think we'll see a lot more sharing of learning objects, a lot more sharing of strategies and even revenue."

The prospect of assembly-line course production and the repurposing of courses between schools seems to confirm some of the critics' worst fears. "Faculty have much more in common with the historic plight of other skilled workers than they care to acknowledge," Noble writes. "As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de-skill and displace labor." And while breaking instruction into modules may yield tangible benefits to students and employers, faculty find themselves in an increasingly reactive posture to institutional pressures on the curriculum.

The trend, Feenberg says, leads toward "deprofessionalization," which he describes as "taking highly respected and reasonably well-paid professionals and substituting them with part-time people who would have no regular employment, sub-contractors, and so forth."

Whether online learning spells a new age or a dark age for higher education, even its most strident critics agree that distance learning will be part of the educational firmament for a long time to come.

But if the Internet has taught us anything, it is this: Open networks have a way of undermining institutional agendas, and putting power back in the hands of individuals.

While corporate software vendors and university administrators seem to be steering the distance-learning agenda today, there are signs of a nascent open-source movement on the horizon that just might upset the balance.

In 2002, MIT announced an ambitious initiative to publish all of its course materials online -- free of charge -- through the MIT OpenCourseWare projects. By 2007, the school hopes to have the full contents of all 2,000 of its courses available on the Web. By making its course materials freely available, the school hopes to encourage academics at other institutions to do likewise and percolate a broad resource-sharing movement among universities.

Already, many professors are contributing their materials to public open-learning object repositories, freely available on the Web and easily accessed through ad hoc courseware using personal publishing tools like blogs or HTML editors.

It's too early to say whether these experiments will ever pose a threat to the corporate distance-learning economy, but they hold out at least the possibility of a new model of courseware development. "I think there's a strong force back to the individual," Nash says. "I think that eventually stuff won't be so locked away. I think we'll see more porous borders."

That kind of porousness might someday even call into question the structure of educational institutions themselves. No less a futurist than Peter Drucker has predicted that by 2020, "the universities of America, as we have traditionally known them, will be barren wastelands."

Whether or not such a dire scenario comes to pass, a more open model of distance learning does seem to hold out at least the possibility that institutional pressures might give way to a renewal of personal bonds between teachers and students. "There's an old saying that the ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log, and a student on the other," Pittinsky says. "When you break the classroom out of the limitations of time and place, that becomes a lot more achievable."

But that Arcadian ideal seems a long way away from the commercial reality of today's distance-learning market. "The reduction of education to a kind of simplified training violates one of the most basic features of all human societies: the personal transmission of culture," says Feenberg, who wonders just how far we have come from the deeper origins of teaching, when an elder would gather children around the fire on some ancient evening and say: "'This is the story my father told me, and I'm going to tell it to you, and you will tell it to your children.' And then he tells them a story about plants and animals, and the gods."

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