Somewhere along the way, students and educators became an afterthought at this school.
When, on April 25, 2013—a day after undergraduate classes had ended—Duke’s faculty representatives voted against the adoption of online courses for credit, certain decisions had already been made. A special session of the Arts and Sciences Council had to be scheduled to approve an agreement with a for-profit corporation, 2U, that the Provost signed five months prior. Wary of unanswered questions, faculty representatives voted to break that contract.
But pursuing online education had long been promised—and not by people in classrooms. That commitment carries forward.
Over the summer, the University named a new vice provost specifically to “oversee Duke’s experiments with online education.” (Details are hazy, but it’s clear who the test subjects will be.) Since then, departments have been hit with solicitations for online proposals, the campus with a surge of presentations promoting the medium. I attended two in just the last week.
It’s part of a wave sweeping across American universities, one that conservative columnist David Brooks calls a “campus tsunami.” What these tides will bring—and who they might submerge—remains to be seen.
In the midst, we are pushed along like so much flotsam.
As for many of my fellow students, this story—the future they foresee for us—was unfamiliar to me until recently. It only broke the surface when, on November 7, a concerned faculty member emailed me writing of “terrifying” curricular changes advocated by the administration. The letter describes “alarm wide-ranging attempts by the provost and dean, with the acquiescence and eager cheerleading of the chair of Trinity Arts & Sciences Council, to push through a fundamental transformation of undergraduate education at Duke.”
This tenured professor with a family and children prefers to remain unnamed for fear of professional pressure. After further conversation, however, I was introduced to several other faculty members relating the same issues.
“We’re talking about the questions that don’t even get raised, because there’s no place to raise them,” says Wahneema Lubiano, associate professor of African and African American studies. “If you show up to a forum that tells you how to do online teaching, that’s not the place where you can say: Wait, isn’t there an earlier conversation that we should have had, before we got to how to do this thing? Why do we do this thing, and under what conditions? For whom is this intended?”
These are people, in the words of Priscilla Wald, professor of English and women’s studies, who are “profoundly committed teachers.” Potential erosion of the pedagogy so central to their lives has driven them to voice their concerns.
Jocelyn Olcott, associate professor of history and international comparative studies, literally drove from research leave to speak with me. She articulated a position shared by all of the educators I met, far from simple opposition to new technology. They agree: Lectures made freely available, a kind of “educational television,” are overwhelmingly positive. But should that subsume the classroom?
“In general, online seems good for highly specialized courses,” notes Olcott. “It works well for remedial education, where there’s a pretty clear answer.” Research, critical engagement and students with special needs—what distinguishes a school—are tossed by the wayside.
I found that even administration-sponsored presenters generally concede this point. Online packages follow a typical formula: resource pages, comment threads and taped lectures/discussions that leave “synchronous” engagement for office hours and seminar sessions. “At its worst,” says Olcott, “it’s a cookie-cutter approach that assumes knowledge is static and all students learn in the same way.”
In its open letter rejecting the offer to adopt Harvard’s online course surveying justice, the San Jose State University philosophy department was less polite. To teach justice via “videotaped lectures that include excerpts of Harvard students making comments,” they wrote, “amounts to a cruel joke.”
“Scholarship is something that lives,” Wald emphasizes. “Over a year, I’ve changed my perspective; I’ve read other things … I have—best of all—learned from my students.” Micaela Janan, associate professor of classical studies, observes how old the proposed model actually is. “It’s the teacher with the yellowed notes,” she says, referencing the crude practice of giving unchanging lectures.
Put differently, it’s an upscale University of Phoenix, at $58,278 a year.
The headlong rush to digitize curricula has left questions lingering across campuses. Academic labor implications, for one, are staggering. While Dean Laurie Patton proclaims “profit is not a dirty word,” as she did of 2U, faculty members foresee funds flowing from teaching positions (you only need the one on video, after all) outward to a handful of Ivy League stars and tech corporations.
And we still barely understand what “online” does to “education.” A 2010 Department of Education report found only five sufficiently rigorous studies on online education’s “learning effects,” concluding that the research largely remains to be done. A study published this year found instructional technology generally “helps in logistics, not learning” at research universities. Its author, sociologist David Johnson, describes with dismay the “ceremonial myth” among administrators “that being a cutting-edge university means being high tech.”
There’s a better way for Duke to be cutting-edge in its cohort, and it’s what these dedicated teachers ask. Let us think through what this means for our community: broadly, openly and collaboratively. Let us set the terms of our relationships collectively.
Isn’t that what the internet was supposed to be about?
Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday. Send Prashanth a message on Twitter @pkinbrief.
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