The Work Of Education in the Age of E-College & Campus Pipeline

Chris Werry

This paper is based on a talk I gave at the RWS Department Conference, August 25, 2000. It remains a work in progress. Please send any comments, questions or critique to cwerry@mail.sdsu.edu

1. Introduction

Online education has become a topic of much debate within the academy in recent years. Martin Irvine, Associate Vice President for Technology Strategy at Georgetown University states that ‘Internet-based distance learning or elearning is on every educator's and corporate leader's agenda’, and that we are at the beginning of an ‘elearning revolution’.[1]  There has been a mad rush by universities, venture capitalists and corporations to develop online courses, virtual universities, education portals, and courseware.  The drive to develop a winning formula for commercial online education has fostered some unusual partnerships, as ‘Internet entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates, Ivy League schools, textbook publishers, venture capitalists, corporate raiders, and junk-bond kings’ look to education to drive the next wave of Ecommerce.[2]  In typically understated terms John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems has called online education the ‘second wave’ of Internet commerce, and argued that

The number of online classes offered by universities and colleges has grown rapidly.  In 1999 one in three U.S. colleges offered some sort of accredited degree online, and approximately one million students took online classes (13 million take traditional classes only)[4]. 
 
In this paper I provide a broad overview of some models of online education and the virtual university that have been developed by commercial and academic institutions. I examine some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used to talk about online education by commercial groups, and discuss some of the hopes and fears that have been associated with online instruction by academics, administrators and businesspeople.  I outline some of the main players and positions in debates about online education, and I suggest some strategies that we in the academic community might consider exploring.

2. Education Meets Ecommerce, or Michael Milken’s Plot to ‘Eat Our Lunch’

Private investment in online education went from 11 million in 1993, to just under a billion in 1999[6].  Wall St. analysts, accountancy firms, Internet entrepreneurs, and university administrators routinely tout the commercial potential of online education, and a variety of groups, both academic and corporate, have developed models of commercial online education.  According to a report issued in 1999 by Merrill Lynch called "The Book of Knowledge: Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry”, the digitization of education has made the university ripe for the kind of rationalization that took place in the health industry in the 1990’s[7].  The report prompted some Wall Street analysts to predict a future of “EMO’s”, or ‘Educational Maintenance Organizations’.  Two major investors in for-profit education, former junk bond king Michael Milken, and Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, have gone so far as to make EMO’s their explicit model.  The New York Times reports that

According to Bianchi, traditional universities now find themselves ‘part of a new competitive marketplace with other online learning providers like UNext (part of the Knowledge Universe), KaplanCollege, University of Phoenix Online, Jones International University, and over 400 new companies entering the online learning marketplace.’  And it is predicted that this marketplace will become increasingly global as the digitization of education enables education providers to reach previously local, isolated markets.  Woody states that education entrepreneurs in the U.S. are betting that people all over the world “are as hungry for U.S. education as they are for Baywatch.”
 
Many universities have responded to the specter of increased competition by launching online courses and virtual universities of their own, by forming coalitions with other universities, or by forming partnerships with corporations (for example UC Berkeley has granted AOL the worldwide rights to market, license, distribute and promote a number of its online courses.)  Woody writes that elite universities and professional schools have been scrambling to "leverage their brands", and to organize their own systems of online education. He states that:

Over the last three years Ivy League schools have, in fact, developed some of the most aggressive and sophisticated examples of commercial online education, which I will discuss in more detail in the next section.
 
News of some of these developments has not been well received by many academics.  A cartoon by Tom Tomorrow sums up many educators’ fears about Milken and Allen’s dream of ‘EMOs’, and of a corporatized higher education:[9]

The concerns expressed by these two teachers have been echoed by scholars writing about online education and the virtual university.  Tim Luke has written a number of critiques of the trend toward what he calls ‘thin, for-profit, and/or skill competency versions of virtual universities being designed by corporate consultants and some state planners’.  David Noble has argued that as teaching materials and knowledge production goes online, the ability of the corporatized university to automate, commodify, reproduce and claim ownership rights over academic work expands.   Noble’s account of the strike at York University in 1998 has become an oft repeated cautionary tale in discussions of online education. In ‘Digital Diploma Mills’ Noble describes how teachers at York University in Canada were required to put their research and teaching materials online, and to sign ownership rights to the university (faculty refused, going on strike over this, and eventually won.)

Yet some of the fears associated with online education may perhaps be a little overdrawn.  To a significant extent the dreams of corporate planners and educational entrepreneurs remain just that -- dreams.  As the dot.com bubble burst in the last quarter of 2000, many of the most ambitious for-profit online education companies have either gone bankrupt or radically scaled back their business plans.  Online education is still in its first stages, and the term itself perhaps suggests a unity that is belied by the enormous variety of practices that are currently being carried out in its name.  In the section that follows, I sketch some broad trends in online education. I then go on to discuss some of the main constituencies involved in debates about online education, how it is talked about, and how the academic community might respond to some of the challenges posed by the digitization of the university.

3. Some Broad Trends within Online Education

3.1 Networks of ‘Informal’ Online Education
Some groups have focused on organizing and commodifying the informal, undisciplined, semi-professional knowledges that circulate within academic communities.  This general strategy of making money from the resources and knowledges produced by online groups originated with commercial community developers such as Keen, Infomarkets, and Experts Exchange.[10]  These organizations invite community members to assemble resources and pieces of information (technical information, jokes, recipes, stock tips, etc.).  Member-generated content is then sold as part of an online information market or auction, used to gather demographic information, or generate advertising revenue.  This business model focuses on making money from the valuable and extensive “collective expertise” that ecommerce analysts Hagel and Armstrong argue exists within many online communities. [11] 

Some companies have extended this model to the higher education sector.  For example InstantKnowledge pays graduate students and teaching assistants to take work they have done (summaries, papers, book reviews, etc.) and make it available to students on the InstantKnowledge.com site. An email message sent to graduate students by the company in February 2000 states:

And in July 2000 their web site invited graduate students to ‘earn money doing what you love – creating knowledge, building community, establishing career credentials.  Take control of your academic career – offer your knowledge beyond the scope of the university, to the world, through the Internet’.  The site organizes and hosts the materials produced by graduate students and TAs, and makes money from sponsorships, advertising and co-branding.  InstantKnowledge is one of many commercial online education companies that do not offer courses per se, but do provide a range of services and resources to university students.  Other companies provide online tutoring services, test advice, and collect databases of student-centered course, professor and university evaluations (needless to say the criteria constructed are often quite different from the ones used to evaluate our classes).  These services function as an informal, largely invisible (to most academics, at least) network of educational materials, advice and knowledges that may, over time, subtly recontextualize aspects of the educational work we carry out.

3.2 EduCommerce
Some elearning companies have organized free online courses as a way of selling and promoting products.  A group originally called ‘NotHarvard’ (they recently changed their name to ‘Powered’, after a legal battle with the actual Harvard) is one of the pioneers of this business strategy, which they describe as 'Educommerce'.  Educommerce is defined on their website as:

3.6  The Accredited Virtual University
With the arrival of Jones International University, higher education found its ‘first fully accredited online university’[17].  Jones International University was granted accreditation by the U.S. regional accreditation agency in March 1999, and is the first online university to become fully certified by the Global Alliance for Transnational Education.  Courses at Jones International are taught over the Internet by part-time, free-lance teachers located in universities all over the U.S.  The courses are highly modular and all involve business subjects.  There is no regular faculty or participatory governance system, and no research is carried out.  Critics of Jones International argue that although it has the term ‘university’ in its title, it ought not be considered one.  Altbach argues that Jones International is merely a credentialing service, ‘a degree delivery machine, providing tailored programs that appeal to specific markets.’[18]  The American Association of University Professors has fought to prevent accreditation of Jones University, along with similar online programs.
 

3.7  The Open University’s ‘Mixed Model’
The Open University began in the U.K., and now has branches in the U.S. and around the world.  It began by offering correspondence courses, and has become a major provider of distance education classes.  The Open University is non-profit, and offers courses in a broad range of disciplines.  It draws strategically on a variety of media, and mixes face-to-face interaction with online communication.  The courses are aimed at a mixed audience (corporations, university students, the general public). 

3.8 Course Aggregators
Course aggregators are academic and business organizations that specialize in taking online courses from a variety of different institutions and assembling them into a single electronic catalogue.  The business model often invoked by course aggregators is Amazon.com or Yahoo.  Hungry Minds is currently the best-known aggregator of online courses (it was recently purchased by IDG Books, a publishing company whose line includes the “Dummies” series, CliffsNotes and Frommer’s).  Their web site states that they offer ‘up to 17,000 courses from top universities like UC-Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, as well as leading training companies and subject experts’.[19]  Hungry Minds has signed cross-promotional deals with companies such as AOL and Yahoo in order to get its online courses featured on these portals.

 
3.9 Online Consortia/Mega-Universities
This describes the strategy whereby groups of related institutions integrate their online courses into a set of programs that are then offered by a single virtual university.  This takes three main forms:

A) Consortia of Research Universities
Ivy league schools and top research universities in the U.S. have been quickest off the mark in exploring ways of developing commercial online education.  One of the boldest such projects is Unext.  Unext is the name of a company that includes a group of top-tier universities (Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science). Unext aims to be the ‘gold standard’ in online MBAs.  The Unext web site states:

Unext has created a virtual university called Cardean, via which the group’s online courses are offered (‘Cardean’ comes from the name of a Roman goddess who guarded doorways, and thus alludes to their aim of becoming the major gateway or ‘portal’ to online business education).  Two of the largest investors in Unext are Michael Milken, the financier, and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation.  Cardean consists of a three-tier system: at the top are the academic “stars” (including several Nobel prize winners) who act on advisory boards and provide ‘insight’.  In the middle there are content providers, and at the bottom there are people who process the content and teach students.  Cardean is not an accredited university, however it is hoped that the ‘brand name’ of the institutions it draws from will be strong enough to attract students.

B) Regional consortia
Universities within a region have begun integrating their online materials and offering them via virtual universities.  For example the Western Governors University is a distance learning consortium created by the governors of 11 western states, as well as Simon Fraser University.  Courses are held exclusively online.  The web site for the college describes Western Governors University as:

C) State-wide Consortia
Some community colleges and state university systems have constructed virtual universities for their online courses.  For example in 1997 California Virtual University launched a web site that featured ‘the online and distance education offerings of all California accredited colleges and universities.’[22]  CVU’s spokesman stated that ‘we’re aiming to be the Amazon.com of the technology mediated education in California’.  The virtual university formed partnerships with Sun, Microsoft, Pacific Bell and several other companies.  CVU ran into problems when it was revealed that the money donated by these companies was in return for exclusive contracts for the university’s IT and phone services.  The project was opposed by teachers and students in the CSU and UC systems, as well as by the American Association of University Professors.  In the controversy that ensued, a number of companies left the partnership, and the project has been bedeviled by funding, staffing and training problems. CVU now currently lists over 3400 online courses.  However some critics charge that it ‘is little more than a hodgepodge catalogue of previously existing courses with great difference in format and quality’.[23] (their web site seems to confirm this charge).  Similar problems have bedeviled attempts by many other universities who have tried to form consortia of this type.

Part 4. Four Positions Taken in Debates about Online Education

There are many positions, constituencies, and players involved in debates about online education.  In this section I provide a schematic overview of four of the main positions identifiable: the administrative position, the corporate position, the ‘faculty resistance’ position, and the position of ‘critical engagement’. Obviously the schema below is an oversimplification of the complexity of positions actually being staked out, however it is intended to identify some broad tendencies within the field of debate.

4.1 The Administrative Position
Over the last few years journals aimed at university administrators have tended to focus on how online education can be used to increase student admissions, keep up with technological advancements, and manage costs.  For example Irvine compares the costs of traditional education with those of online education, and discusses how ‘expensive overhead’ such as human resources, security and police, counseling and career services, facilities and management, health care and utilities, can be ‘unbundled’ from the educational product with online education. He writes:

While ‘visionaries’ like Irvine embrace such changes, many administrators are less sanguine about them, and express a degree of anxiety about how to manage the challenges that online education pose. Often they harbor reservations about jumping on the e-learning bandwagon, but worry that if they don’t act fast their university will be left behind - their students and their resources snapped up by corporate/academic competitors, and their star performers cherry-picked.[24]  Hayden notes that Michael Crow, the vice provost of Columbia University, has stated that Columbia’s foray into online education was motivated in part by concerns about competition with rival education companies:

4.2 The Corporate Position
Futurists like Negroponte, corporations such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems, and academic organizations such as Educause (the group that promotes distance education in the U.S.) argue that online education will play a revolutionary role in higher education, that this will lead to the increased corporatization of the university, and that this is generally a good thing.  They argue that the digitization of the university will bring about a leaner, flatter, more flexible and efficient institution, one that will more closely resemble the structure of the modern corporation.  This argument is often accompanied by claims about the impending collapse of the traditional university.  Management guru Peter Drucker famously articulated a version of this position in a Forbes article several years ago:

Such arguments are sometimes expressed with a sense of resignation that is tinged with sadness or nostalgia. However most often the tone is one of revolutionary fervor.  The most consistent message is that universities must act now or they will lose out.  Irvine writes that if they wait, ‘universities and colleges that could have led the transition of a new business model and could have captured a larger piece of the marketplace for themselves will find that they have become dangerously uncompetitive, like IBM’s mainframe business in the 1980s.’


4.3 The ‘Faculty Resistance’ Position
Some important critiques of online education have been produced by scholars such as David Noble and Cary Nelson.  Many of these critiques of online education focus on its potential role in the corporatization of the university, and in the casualization of academic work conditions.  Noble warns that online education may lead to ‘digital diploma mills’, electronic sweatshops in which teachers lose control over the products of their labor, and in which their work is automated, reproduced, and commodified.  Nelson focuses on how online education may exacerbate academic work conditions in a variety of ways.  Noble and Nelson propose strategies of resistance that include demanding faculty control over intellectual property, strengthening tenure, and advancing the struggle for faculty unionization.

Noble and Nelson provide strong critiques of some uses of online education, and they suggest general political strategies that may be useful.  However Noble’s arguments in particular entail a withdrawal from the sphere of online education – they do not explore forms of contestation that center on producing alternative models of online education.  What is frequently lacking in Noble’s work is an engagement with ways of contesting and reconfiguring online education that are more amenable to the general interests of academics.  I would argue that what is needed is a slightly different form of public intellectualism on the part of academics – one that engages sympathetic administrators, and provides them with an alternative to corporate models that have so far dominated discussion.  The writers in the ‘critical engagement’ position provide some of the tools to do this.


4.4 The ‘Critical Engagement’ Position
The work of Andrew Feenberg and Tim Luke provides examples of a position I call ‘critical engagement’.  Feenberg is a pioneer of online education, while Luke has played an important role in the Virginia Tech Cyberschool, one of the most ambitious and successful programs of online education.  Both advocate bottom-up, faculty-driven, craft-style forms of on-line education that carefully adapt existing teaching practices to new technological environments.

Feenberg champions the principles that guided low-tech, text based systems developed in the 80s.  He writes:

Feenberg wants to reanimate and extend the educational principles embodied in these earlier experiments.  Luke focuses less on issues of technology, and more on the pedagogic, administrative, and political conditions that a successful program of online education should be guided by.  He writes that online education must be designed to

The goals elaborated by Feenberg and Luke, and the practical example set by initiatives such as the Virginia Tech Cyberschool may help academics construct alternative models of online education, models that are both pedagogically effective and in line with the interests of the academic community.

Part 5. The Rhetoric of Commercial Online Education

I believe that rhetoricians, along with scholars in many other disciplines, ought to initiate a careful analysis of the rhetoric of online education.  It is important that we examine how teachers, students, knowledge, academic resources and community are represented; how key terms are defined and struggled over by different groups, and how persuasive language is used to convince various constituencies of the benefits of particular visions of online education and of the university.  In the section that follows I identify several areas where a study of the rhetoric of online education might focus.

5.1 How Online Entrepreneurs Address Different Audiences
One area I have been investigating involves the ways in which commercial developers of online education talk to different audiences, how they tailor their message when talking to teachers, students, administrators and investors.  What I’ve found is that when organizations such as Campus Pipeline produce written materials intended for their investors, they stress how the portal locks in the most valuable yet difficult to reach demographic in the country – college students.  They stress its ‘must use functionality’ - how it is integrated into different aspects of student life, such as registering for classes, emailing professors, and accessing course information. They focus on the relationships they are forging between students, advertisers, marketers and vendors, and on how they plan to become portals with the kind of influence possessed by AOL or Yahoo.[25]

In materials written for administrators, what is typically stressed is the savings that will be made, and the increases in efficiency and flexibility.  The information packets sent to administrators by companies such as Real Education, Jenzabar, and Campus Pipeline often talk of education in terms of a ‘conduit’ model that stresses the efficient transport of educational units (even Campus Pipeline’s name suggests a conduit, and of education conceived in terms of delivery.)

However when courseware vendors or education portals discuss online education in materials intended for faculty, a very different tone is registered, one in which “community” tends to be a central motif.  For example issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education are crammed to the brim with advertising from online education companies.  A common theme in these advertisements is the notion that the vendor’s software system will enhance ‘community life’ in universities, make academic community resources easier to use, and connect academics with the wider communities outside their gates.  Thus Campus Pipeline’s advertising slogan is: ‘a community dedicated to meeting individual needs.  A business streamlined for maximum efficiency.  And a campus that never closes.’[26]  And Campus Pipeline announces in its mission statement: “We will revolutionize education by connecting the collegiate community, enhancing the way higher education builds relationships with its students, faculty, staff and alumni.”  In much of the material Campus Pipeline has produced for teachers, the term “community” appears to function as a way of reassuring educators that courseware vendors are sensitive to the social and communicative aspects of teaching.  ‘Community’ becomes a way of managing some of the tensions inherent in systems that tend to reify educational practices.  The discourse of community appears strategically drawn on to reassure educators - to quiet their fear of automation and of being displaced, and to show that the company understands that education entails issues of culture, communication and socialization.[27] 

5.2  The Use of ‘Learner-Centered’, Constructivist Models of Education.
Many proponents of commercial online education stress the need to move from a traditional Fordist, mass production based model of education, to a more flexible, Post-Fordist, ‘mass customization’ model.  This is sometimes allied with the language of constructivist, learner-centered approaches to learning – language that talks about the importance of student-centered approaches in which knowledge is constructed within a community of learners.  For example Irvine talks of how universities are moving from ‘an academic model with a legacy system tied to industrial and agrarian economies to a learner-centered Internet economy model.’  In some instances the connection between flexibility, mass customization, and constructivist pedagogy is thought through in a principled, sophisticated way.  However sometimes this focus on ‘student-centered’ education seems to be used merely as a way of camouflaging shortcomings in models of online education.  With some all-Internet courses there is no face-to-face interaction, and there is significant dissociation between different levels of the educational enterprise – between managers, advisors, system designers, content providers, technical assistants, teachers, etc.  Furthermore the system is designed to be modular and scalable, so that teaching assistants and adjuncts can be slotted into different courses as required (Irvine proposes that future models of online education will center on ‘reusable learning objects in customized modules with assessments for specific outcomes’.)  In such contexts students must, of necessity, show a great deal of initiative.  They are at the ‘center’ of the system in the sense that they must take charge of their education in a way that traditional students aren’t required to.  However it isn’t clear that this necessarily empowers students, provides for a better educational experience, or is really in line with constructivist pedagogy (there is a sense in which automated phone mail systems in which information is distributed within a network of options could be called ‘learner-centered’; however it is debatable whether this is inherently superior to the traditional ‘instructor-centered’ experience of getting information from a human being).[28] 

This impoverished notion of ‘student-centered’ education is often part of an argument that the technology will somehow democratize education and make student-centered learning happen by itself.  Thus Andrew Rosenfield, chairman and CEO of UNext.com has stated: “lectures are dead.  They are not a good way to learn…People want to learn what they need to know, not what professors want them to know.  You can only do that on the Internet”.[29]  The technological-determinist argument that the Internet has the miraculous ability to democratize and empower its users is familiar enough.  However Rosenfield appears to extend this argument to say that the Internet will also democratize education and empower students.  Rosenfield often invokes student-centered, constructivist goals, and yet the courses offered so far by Unext appear to approach such goals in a rather superficial way.

5.3 E-commerce and Online Education.
Many concepts, themes and categories derived from electronic commerce have been influential in discussions of online education.  This is hardly surprising given that many companies involved in electronic commerce (and in particular companies involved in commercial online community development) have moved into the area of online education. I will discuss some of the most commonly used ones.

‘Disintermediation’
‘Disintermediation’ is often talked about in relation to online learning.  It is proposed that the digitization of education will enable teachers and students to interact in ways that are less encumbered by the traditional bureaucratic structures of the university.  This is an interesting claim, given how the new technological interfaces involved seem hardly to reduce the need for ‘mediation’.  And when one looks closely at enterprises like Unext or Jones International, instead of disintermediation, one finds complex forms of ‘remediation’.  In fact many new layers of mediation appear to be involved, since in order to make teaching as modular, scalable and automated as possible, traditional faculty roles get differentiated and parceled out to networks of advisors, content providers, teachers, technicians and administrators. A number of E-commerce texts have argued that claims about the Internet's role in disaggregation and disintermediation are greatly exaggerated. Downes and Mui write that 'in many sectors intermediaries have proven to be remarkably robust. Long chains are being taken apart, but they are also being put back together in new configurations.' (Downes and Mui, page 152). Ester Dyson, the head of ICANN, has argued that claims about the disintermediation brought about by the Internet are often misguided. She writes:

So it would seem quite likely that some of the models of online education we have looked at will not involve disintermediation so much as they will involve different kinds of mediation, by different groups of people, perhaps residing to a greater extent outside the university.[31]

‘Internet Democratization’
Electronic commerce texts often talk about the democratizing effects of the Internet. Discussions of online education often make corresponding arguments.  Mccright describes a talk given by John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, in which the democratizing potential of online education is stressed:

Irvine makes a similar argument.  He writes that the emerging system of online education, which he calls the ‘Internet Elearning Model’, produces a ‘shift in authority and agency to the learner’.  He writes that the ‘demand driven economy of the Internet, which communicates the needs of customers and suppliers more rapidly than ever before’, is paralleled by the ‘learner-centered paradigm of elearning, in which the learner-customer has far more authority, control, choice, and agency in personal learning and knowledge production.’  Yet the notions of democracy and agency advanced in such arguments are often very limited, and are closely tied to consumption model of education.  Furthermore, the argument that the digitization of education will democratize learning is often at odds with the idea that in order to move quickly in the Internet-age, deliberative democracy within the university itself must be lessened.  For example Taylor writes:

It would thus seem that increased 'consumer/student choice' and flexibility must come at the cost of a decrease in deliberative democracy for teachers and researchers.

‘Frictionless Education’ 
There is much talk of the new, more ‘frictionless’ education market, where students anywhere are able to engage in classes that suit them.  It is often claimed that the digitization of education will one day enable everyone on the planet to take classes by Harvard professors.  And while increased accessibility is certainly a possibility, the trouble with this way of thinking about education is that it reduces education to delivery, and underestimates how other aspects of E-commerce models run counter to this.  A number of Ivy League schools have in fact made it clear that they are pursuing a policy of price differentiation, and so won’t mass market their courses precisely because they don’t want to damage their ‘brand’.  The dean at Duke’s Fuqua online business school, which offers a virtual MBA writes: “We could offer 60,000, 100,000 MBAs, but we want to be an incredibly desired product that far more people want than can get” (an online MBA from Duke currently costs $90,000).  The way around this problem, according to Irvine, is to ‘segment the total market served and bring differentiated products to the marketplace of learners’.  However this seems to run somewhat counter to the ‘frictionless’ ideal in which the highest quality education can be reproduced and made available to anyone anywhere.

‘Disaggregation’, or the Unbundling of the Educational Experience
Educational Entrepeneurs often argue that just as the Internet has fostered decentralization and disaggregation in a variety of traditional markets, a similar process will take place in the education market. Irvine writes that:

Irvine proposes that the ‘core’ services and products provided by the university will be disaggregated from the peripheral ones; a variety of differentiated services and products will emerge in order to cater to different market segments, and that this process of unbundling will enable highly flexible forms of mass customization.  The viability of this paradigm is dependent on the extent to which education can be divided up into modular, scalable units, which remains an open question.



6. Solutions?

There is an urgent need for critical work by academics that deals with the complex specifics of discourses, technologies, institutions and economics shaping online education.  Too much academic work ignores the most important forces shaping online education, leaves large areas of debate uncontested and doesn’t really speak to groups actively involved in new media who could constitute potential allies.   When it comes to how we might think about the future of online education, there are several areas that I think academics need to focus on. 

 
1. Give Administrators Alternatives
As I argued above, I believe that academics need to do more to engage sympathetic administrators and provide them with constructive alternatives.  Feenberg tells an interesting story of the time he met the Chancellor of the California State University system and discussed CETI, an ambitious online education project that involved the construction of a significant amount of new technological infrastructure.  Feenberg asked the Chancellor what pedagogical model had guided CETI.  Feenberg writes that: “the Chancellor looked at me as though I'd laid an egg, and said, ‘We've got the engineering plan. It's up to you faculty to figure out what to do with it’. And off he went: subject closed!”  Feenberg is surprised by this response, and states:

Feenberg’s concern is justified, and one might expect that teachers would generally take a more enlightened view.  However it is by no means clear to me that the Chancellor’s assumptions are greatly different from those held by many teachers.  For example, the American Association of University Professors, a key policy making organization within academia, recently came up with a policy paper on distance and online education.  The document produced by the AAUP outlined the rights and responsibilities of faculty.  Here is an excerpt:

What is striking is the way the document reproduces some of the assumptions that Feenberg ascribes to the Chancellor.  The language of the document recreates a split between pedagogy and technology, between providers and users.  It still thinks of technology primarily as a delivery mechanism for teaching, rather than a new environment.  And it does not make the case that academics ought to have a significant role in shaping that environment.[33]  I believe that we ought to play a role in shaping that environment, and that we need to provide constructive alternatives for administrators in order to make this happen.  If resistance to 'thin, for profit' models of online education proceeds via claims that education and academics are somehow ‘special’, exempt from conditions that so many others must work under, then we run the risk of being represented as backward, obstructionist and selfish.  We need to offer alternatives as well as critique, and we need to link our struggle to those of other groups.


2. Ensure Control of Academic Resources & Construct Strategic Alliances
It is important that academics carefully consider strategies for organizing their resources online.  We should explore models that are open, participatory and democratic, that respond to a variety of social interests, include a strong public service commitment, and which embody the kind of broad intellectual mission that characterizes institutions such as San Diego State.  I believe that teachers need something like an 'open source' movement for on-line academic resources, and that taking a leaf out of the book of groups like the Free Software Foundation, we ought to create something like a 'Free Courseware Foundation', which gives teachers greater control of their resources, and better enables them to share materials with other teachers and with the public.[34]  Michael Jensen, director of publishing technologies at the National Academy Press, puts the issue in the following terms:

A major obstacle in developing an open source movement for on-line academic resources has not been a lack of expertise or resources or skilled people – it has largely been a problem of organization, coordination, political will, and funding. 

In some respects academia as a whole is facing a situation similar to the one that faced by Rhetoric and Writing scholars in the late 1980s and early 1990s (albeit much increased in scale).  At this time many writers in Rhetoric and Composition argued that the community urgently needed to produce writing software that was driven by a more sophisticated understanding of writing and electronic literacy than was evident in commercial writing software.  Texts such as Paul LeBlanc’s Writing Teachers, Writing Software: Creating Our Place in the Electronic Age made powerful arguments for the importance of software shaped by the insights of writing teachers.  Jay Bolter and a handful of other scholars in Rhetoric and Composition built some ambitious software packages for advancing such a project.  However the movement was largely unsuccessful, and as a result our students compose with software packages designed not by writing experts, but by Microsoft.  I would argue that this failure was in part because each individual foray in developing writing software remained too isolated, and because the developers were not generally committed to an open source model.

If we are to have more success in ventures designed to advance an open source movement for on-line academic resources, we will need to construct much broader sets of alliances.  At present a number of organizations are working on projects that are broadly compatible with an open source movement.  For example The National Academy Press has begun developing a range of tools that will be made open source when they are finalized.  The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication has developed resources and tools that are open source.  The ‘Linguist’ site, which enables communication, coordinates activities, and acts as a repository for the large amounts of electronic text produced by members of the American linguistic community, constitutes an interesting model for the organization of scholarly resources.  And the English server, a cooperatively run academic site that publishes humanities texts, journals, and other scholarly collections, has developed a number of tools for managing academic resources.[35]  However these remain largely isolated projects.  What is needed is coordination, along with institutional and financial support.  And we may need to look for allies outside the university. We need to talk to groups involved in the Open Source and Free Software Foundation.  Many of these people are sympathetic to the kind of project I’ve described.  For example I recently co-edited a book about online community and online education. We invited Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, to contribute a chapter in the book.  Stallman was very interested in the issues that the book addressed, and outlined a number of ways in which academics might draw on some of the principles of the Free Software Foundation.[36]  

Lastly, we need to ensure that the universities we teach at, and the professional organizations that represent us, produce policy that ensures faculty control of online resources.  And when we negotiate contracts with publishers we need creative policies to deal with the issue of future electronic property rights.


3. Examine the Rhetoric of Online Education
We need to critically examine the rhetoric of online education, to analyze the figures, narratives and rhetorical strategies used to talk about it.  And we need to produce a history of how it has been talked about.  David Noble’s work on the history of correspondence schools is exemplary in this regard.  Noble demonstrates that when correspondence courses first emerged, predictions made about its revolutionary, democratizing, transformative effects bear an uncanny resemblance to claims made today about online education.

Part of this project of rhetorical analysis could include constructing a set of criteria for talking about online education.  The trends and strategies described in the sections above illustrate the enormous range of uses of online education, and the enormous range of models being experimented with.  However within this range there are some broad criteria we can use to start thinking about online education.  These include the extent to which control over the construction, organization and delivery of online courses is ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’; the degree to which the course materials are ‘mixed’ or ‘all-internet’, consist of  ‘education in a box’ versus a more holistic approach to education.  Many commercial models of online education are designed to be modular, scalable, reproducible, amenable to automation, consistent with the goals of cost-cutting, and with a ‘work for hire’ concept of intellectual property (teachers are hired to produce work that then becomes the property of the hiring agency). Alternative models of online education tend more often to involve adapting new technologies to particular learning communities and sets of pedagogic goals, to constitute an extension of existing practices, and to involve faculty/public ownership.  There are of course a range of other possibilities, and many other criteria we can draw on to evaluate online education, most notable those articulated by writers such as Tim Luke and Andrew Feenberg.


4. Proceed Cautiously
Until recently it has been difficult to make the argument that the development of online education ought to proceed slowly and carefully.  The argument that academic institutions must ‘lead or bleed’ has been dominant.  It may be easier to advocate a more gradualist approach now that the economic situation has changed so much.  I believe that Downes provides useful advice when he states:

 

5. Train Students to be ‘Community Architects’
In the E-commerce text Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities,
 Hagel and Armstrong describe how to organize and exploit the resources produced by online communities.  They discuss how to train “community architects” whose job it is to “acquire members, stimulate usage, and extract value from the community.”[37]  I would like to suggest that in our teaching practices we could attempt to produce oppositional ‘community architects’.  This would entail resituating courses that deal with online information as part of an expanded project of critical practice in which students are seen not just as technical problem solvers, but also as critics who actively intervene in situations in which issues of value, power, and social organization are negotiated.  Such classes might promote the idea that it is important that those who are engaged in the design and publication of electronic texts, interfaces, databases, and tools for the formation of online resources think about the cultural, political and social implications of their work.  Training community architects could involve looking at how competing discourses and competing information architectures represent the possibilities for organizing online space, activity, access, assembly, public use, control and ownership.