As many of you know, I teach online at one of the bigger online universities. It's one that has a "for profit" model, as do most of the primarily online schools. I don't have any problem with seeking profit - in fact, I firmly believe in capitalism. However...I'm not sure that for profit and education can really coexist peacefully, because there will forever be a need for balance between student as student and student as consumer/customer, and often this is an incredibly hard balance to strike.
On the one hand, education, if it is to mean anything, needs to be rigorous. It's challenging to shake the reputation of "diploma mill" once you get it. On the other hand, you need students to commit to buying your brand of education - because there's a lot of competition out there. So, what many schools, mine included, seem to focus on is student retention. And it is rapidly becoming the bane of my existence.
My current school has a very long, drawn out, and complex system for instructors to follow up with their students when students choose not to participate in the online discussion or turn in assignments. I use the word choose because I believe that's the case - these are not elementary school children who need reminder after reminder after reminder because they're just learning about school and responsibility. These are adults. Adults who are paying for their education. Adults who made a conscious choice to undertake that education. So why, I ask myself, do I need to spend roughly 4 hours a week trying to chase them down to remind them to turn in their work? I'm not their mother. And I hope that if I had been their mother I would have instilled a little more sense of responsibility before they were grown and out of the house.
Yet, I still do it. Maybe it's my own misplaced sense of responsibility, or maybe it's simply because deeper down I understand that in order for "for profit" and "education" to coexist there has to be some give. Just some weeks, I wish the "give" didn't involve so much of my time.
5 days ago
I agree with your comments about the balancing act. The idea of privatizing adds a lot in terms of teacher accountability (a good thing), but like you said, it also means extra, non-teaching work for the teachers. Teachers should not be in a position of having to worry about bottom line profits. While profits matter, I still believe (naively, perhaps) that doing the right thing (hiring the best teachers and selecting the best students to teach) will drop the most profits to the bottom line. Like every endeavor, it seems that as soon as the attention turns to the end goal of making a profit instead of the means for doing good work, everybody loses.
ReplyDeleteGwynne, I would agree, except that for the ideal world to work, they'd have to actually suck it up and hire full time teachers, not try to skate by with adjuncts who are willing, for whatever reason, to teach for peanuts. When I work out my hourly rate...well..it's less than minimum wage. When I taught at a CC full time, while I still did a lot of hand holding, etc., I at least made closer to a professional wage.
ReplyDeleteBut I do agree that focusing on profit never seems to turn out well, regardless of the endeavor.