Digital media and global telecommunications are driving new
forms of schooling at every level of education across age cohorts. Competency
rather than “seat time” is becoming the standard for assessment and
achievement. The American Council
on Education recently announced that four Coursera courses are worthy of
college credit if anti-cheating measures are enforced. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0207-online-credit-20130207,0,573675.story)
In 1999 I wrote that like workers in many fields, academics
worried whether their skills would be needed and whether their best would be
good enough for the emerging world of digital media and telecommunications.
(Knowledge in a Learning Universe: Collaborative, Recursive, and Digital) Today, globalized higher education is
upon us and professional anxieties are experienced as personal emergencies
about career and livelihood. The
future contours of higher education institutions are unclear as the job insecurities of faculty and administrators coexist with the challenges to business
models and historical claims of the academy to exclusive rights to generate and husband “knowledge.” Faculty
resistance to online innovations is frequently expressed in terms of concerns for
accountability and student access to faculty. These are often the same faculty
who lecture to hundreds of students in a large hall and defer to teaching
assistants to carry on direct conversations with students.
The debut of MOOCs such as Coursera, EdX and Udacity
presents new opportunities and challenges for students, institutions, and
faculty. Global access to courses taught by faculty at one university and accessible
to students at other institutions creates opportunities for institutions to target
funds for focus on particular fields at the same time such “sharing” obviously
threatens jobs, career paths and many if not most of the conventional values
and norms of autonomous liberal arts colleges and universities.
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