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Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series
Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
Is the Internet the springboard which will take universities into a new age, or a threat to their existence? Will dotcom degrees create new opportunities for those previously excluded, or lead them into a digital dead-end? From UCLA to Columbia, digital technologies have brought about rapid and sweeping changes in the life of the university--changes which will have momentous effects in the decade ahead.
In the first book-length analysis of the meaning of the Internet for the future of higher education, Noble cuts through the rhetorical claims that these developments will bring benefits for all. His analysis shows how university teachers are losing control over what they teach, how they teach and for what purpose. It shows how erosion of their intellectual property rights makes academic employment ever less secure. The academic workforce is reconfigured as administrators claim ownership of the course-designs and teaching materials developed by faculty, and try to lower labor costs in the marketing and delivery of courses.
Rather than new opportunities for students the online university represents new opportunities for investors to profit while shifting the burden of paying for education from the public purse to the individual consumer--who increasingly has to work long hours at poorly-paid jobs in order to afford the privilege. And this transformation of higher education is often brought about through secretive agreements between corporations and universities--including many which rely on public funding.
Noble locates recent developments within a longer-term historical perspective, drawing out parallels between Internet education and the correspondence course movement of the early decades of the 20th century. This timely work by the foremost commentator of the social meaning of digital education is essential reading for all who are concerned with the future of the academic enterprise.
In the first book-length analysis of the meaning of the Internet for the future of higher education, Noble cuts through the rhetorical claims that these developments will bring benefits for all. His analysis shows how university teachers are losing control over what they teach, how they teach and for what purpose. It shows how erosion of their intellectual property rights makes academic employment ever less secure. The academic workforce is reconfigured as administrators claim ownership of the course-designs and teaching materials developed by faculty, and try to lower labor costs in the marketing and delivery of courses.
Rather than new opportunities for students the online university represents new opportunities for investors to profit while shifting the burden of paying for education from the public purse to the individual consumer--who increasingly has to work long hours at poorly-paid jobs in order to afford the privilege. And this transformation of higher education is often brought about through secretive agreements between corporations and universities--including many which rely on public funding.
Noble locates recent developments within a longer-term historical perspective, drawing out parallels between Internet education and the correspondence course movement of the early decades of the 20th century. This timely work by the foremost commentator of the social meaning of digital education is essential reading for all who are concerned with the future of the academic enterprise.
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
128 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2001
49 people want to read
About the author
David F. Noble
32 books27 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Franklin Noble was a critical historian of technology, science and education.
David Franklin Noble was a critical historian of technology, science and education.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 27, 2024
This reads like a real-world version of What's going on at UAardvark?, which is a satire on the "business-friendly" American university sector. Here the author provides, in non-fiction chapters originally written as articles over a two-decade span from 1980 to 2001, evidence for how the wonted independence of the Fourth Estate has been made into a shambles, and the author therefore asks the question: "Will people enroll in higher educational institutions only to discover that they might just as well have stayed home and watched television?" (p.39)
A pointed parallelism that the author draws is how universities in the American & Canadian context (with precious few exceptions) are now dominated by what he calls for-profit EMOs or "educational-maintenance organizations", a terminology modelled after the HMOs, or health-maintenance organizations, the companies that seem to be in the business of denying healthcare rather than providing it. Here, the author means that education is being denied by outfits such as Educom, a consortium representing the administration/management of 600 colleges and universities and a 100 private corporations keen to sell their software and course content on college campuses. As to the university professoriate, these EMOs are keen on "...breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks ... Educom believes that course design, lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside commercial vendors. ... 'The potential [for] automation--smart, computer-based systems--is tremendous. It's gotta happen.' " (p.8, citing a company bigwig). By the by, Educom rebranded as "Educause" in 1998, after publication of Noble's book, but its mission remains the promotion of IT and the denial of education; the name change perhaps reflects its cynical campaign of attempted legitimation of its ambitions, as if it existed for the sake of the students and not to lobby for profit-taking by EMOs, as part of the "corporate scene" on campus. The invasion of the automated classroom is all the more relevant today with the advent of generative AI --developments in artificial intelligence which of course the author, who died in 2010, did not live to see, but who would likely have considered of a piece with the "degraded, less valuable, form of education" (p.90) that digital universities and distance-learning provide.
The author, writing back in 1993, is aware that he's riffing on Robert Reid's much older Diploma Mills (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1959): The typical diploma mill has "no classrooms," "faculties are often untrained or nonexistent," and "the officers are unethical self-seekers whose qualifications are no better than their offerings." The difference is that now with EMOs the student as a person drops out of the equation; the students are reduced to cyphers, or 'bums on seats', to be counted and manufactured in a seemless continuity, as part of a uniform 'output', so long as they fit into the "university-sanctioned regimen of skills training" (p.88). It is perhaps time that college & university students insisted on turning this for-profit EMO business model on its head, and instead demand that their universities and colleges provide "human-mediated environments" (HMEs), rather than virtual learning environments (VLEs). Students need not accept, instead of a genuine education, that they should have "to go online for training, and to do it all alone." (introduction, p.xii)
The last chapter "Defense Dollars and the Future of Education" (that appears to have been written in the year 2000) is in the same vein as two roughly contemporaneous. but earlier, book titles by Seymour Melman, including War, Inc. and Profits Without Production, about the distorting effect of Pentagon contracts on the market. For more by Noble on this topic, see his Progress Without People.
A pointed parallelism that the author draws is how universities in the American & Canadian context (with precious few exceptions) are now dominated by what he calls for-profit EMOs or "educational-maintenance organizations", a terminology modelled after the HMOs, or health-maintenance organizations, the companies that seem to be in the business of denying healthcare rather than providing it. Here, the author means that education is being denied by outfits such as Educom, a consortium representing the administration/management of 600 colleges and universities and a 100 private corporations keen to sell their software and course content on college campuses. As to the university professoriate, these EMOs are keen on "...breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks ... Educom believes that course design, lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside commercial vendors. ... 'The potential [for] automation--smart, computer-based systems--is tremendous. It's gotta happen.' " (p.8, citing a company bigwig). By the by, Educom rebranded as "Educause" in 1998, after publication of Noble's book, but its mission remains the promotion of IT and the denial of education; the name change perhaps reflects its cynical campaign of attempted legitimation of its ambitions, as if it existed for the sake of the students and not to lobby for profit-taking by EMOs, as part of the "corporate scene" on campus. The invasion of the automated classroom is all the more relevant today with the advent of generative AI --developments in artificial intelligence which of course the author, who died in 2010, did not live to see, but who would likely have considered of a piece with the "degraded, less valuable, form of education" (p.90) that digital universities and distance-learning provide.
The author, writing back in 1993, is aware that he's riffing on Robert Reid's much older Diploma Mills (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1959): The typical diploma mill has "no classrooms," "faculties are often untrained or nonexistent," and "the officers are unethical self-seekers whose qualifications are no better than their offerings." The difference is that now with EMOs the student as a person drops out of the equation; the students are reduced to cyphers, or 'bums on seats', to be counted and manufactured in a seemless continuity, as part of a uniform 'output', so long as they fit into the "university-sanctioned regimen of skills training" (p.88). It is perhaps time that college & university students insisted on turning this for-profit EMO business model on its head, and instead demand that their universities and colleges provide "human-mediated environments" (HMEs), rather than virtual learning environments (VLEs). Students need not accept, instead of a genuine education, that they should have "to go online for training, and to do it all alone." (introduction, p.xii)
The last chapter "Defense Dollars and the Future of Education" (that appears to have been written in the year 2000) is in the same vein as two roughly contemporaneous. but earlier, book titles by Seymour Melman, including War, Inc. and Profits Without Production, about the distorting effect of Pentagon contracts on the market. For more by Noble on this topic, see his Progress Without People.
May 8, 2008
seems so far like good story-telling/journalism, but the same old rather useless argument about the commodification of something which was once free and common and beautiful.
July 18, 2011
Confirms my experience with a variety of roles in higher ed-- just wish he would have given citations along with many of the points he was making.
November 24, 2012
Interesting book on higher education and role of technology in commercialization of higher education and the distance education. This book takes up various examples of US.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews