Commodification of Education
A short article in TheAtlantic does a good job of identifying the challenge we face in higher education today.  The challenge is multi-layered.  Starting with the timeless difficulties surrounding intellectual inquiry, teaching and learning we add to that the rapid pace of change in knowledge production today and the intense pressure from outside academia to commodify education.

The Atlantic focuses on how these forces intersect to create policy initiatives that do not focus on learning, because they are driven by economic and political and cultural interests other than education. 

“There are a whole bunch of policies—like getting students through more quickly—most of which don’t pay attention to what they are learning,” Humphreys says. “It could be making a bad situation worse if we don’t look at the impact of not only how many students get through, but what they learn.”

We need to continue to improve what we do and be more attentive to costs, but what we do is educate so job one is to retain a focus on student learning.  And learning is labor intensive and interpersonal. 

The best ways to help students succeed include providing them with “a critical mass of interesting peers, interactions with professors and outside-the-classroom experiential learning,” says Boston College’s Arnold. Yet, “At the same time we know this, we are moving in the opposite direction.”

Take MOOCs. “Thousands are looking at this. But few are finishing the courses,” Arnold says. “In the end, education is an interpersonal endeavor.”

Mayra Besosa, a lecturer in Spanish at California State University-San Marcos, is more blunt. “Anything that creates distance in the teacher-student relationship will hurt the student,” Besosa says.

We need to meet our students where they are and guide them to better understandings of the world we share.  For those developing online courses, this is the challenge: to find ways to use new technologies to make that delivery mode as much, or more, interpersonal as possible.

To do this we need faculty-led universities, where faculty and student affairs professionals (like advisors) working with students face2face every day are driving our efforts to improve what we do and contain costs.

About 100 university faculty-members from all over the country plan to meet in January in New York under the umbrella of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a national movement that aims to “include the voices of the faculty, staff, students and our communities—not just administrators, politicians, foundations and think tanks—in the process of making change.”