Washington-WGU Link Proposed

[Yancy Derringer]

Let's see...our state really needs more online schools...where can we find one....Spokane? Oops, we ran that one out of business...let's think now.....Utah? That's part of Washington, isn't it?

Originally published Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 10:01 PM
Lawmakers debate proposed state partnership with online university
State lawmakers are considering a plan that would expand a nonprofit online university in Washington as a way to increase access to higher education.

By Joanna Nolasco
Seattle Times Olympia bureau

OLYMPIA — State lawmakers are considering a plan that would expand a nonprofit online university in Washington as a way to increase access to higher education.

The proposal, sponsored by Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, would create a partnership between the state and the Western Governors University (WGU), based in Utah.

The university would establish an online school called WGU-Washington, and would work with the state in helping meet statewide higher-education goals, such as increasing the number of students earning college degrees. The school also would be included in agreements for the transfer of college credits among Washington institutions.

WGU-Washington, however, would not be considered a public university and would not receive any state money.

The proposal, SB 5136, is backed by the state Higher Education Coordinating Board, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, among others.

At a legislative hearing last week, some representatives of existing Washington universities expressed concerns about the state partnering with the online school.

A Western Washington University professor, for example, questioned the quality of an online education compared with that of a traditional college.

But Sen. Rodney Tom , D-Bellevue, chairman of the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee, said the school would provide more access to college programs without costing the state anything.

"We need more capacity [for higher education] and there's no way the state can afford the new capacity we need in the economic environment we're in," said Tom, who backs the proposal.

State lawmakers are expected to further reduce higher-education funding this legislative session as they seek to fill a multibillion-dollar hole in the state budget. The state faces an estimated $5 billion deficit from mid-2011 to mid-2013.

WGU was founded in 1997 by 19 Western governors, including former Washington Gov. Mike Lowry. Each state contributed $100,000 toward the creation of the school.

The university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in business, information technology, education and health care, among others. Tuition for most programs is $2,890 per six-month term. The school is primarily aimed at students who are working and can't take time off to attend class.

"There are people who are 30 and above who can't drop everything and go back to college," Kastama said. "They have a hunger, a thirst for higher education. And they need it because of the retraining requirements we need in our workforce right now."

Currently, about 900 Washington students are enrolled in the online school. If WGU-Washington were created, it could serve 10,000 students within five years, said WGU president Robert Mendenhall.

WGU students complete courses by passing the required assessments, such as tests or projects, on the Web at their own pace. Students can take as many or as few courses toward their degree as they want for the single six-month fee.

Mendenhall said that on average, WGU students graduate with a bachelor's degree in 30 months.

Last year, the state of Indiana partnered with WGU and established WGU-Indiana, becoming the first state to do so. The institution opened an office in the state with a chancellor, mentors and enrollment counselors.

If Kastama's proposal were to pass, Mendenhall said WGU plans to create a similar office in Washington.

Some university representatives have raised concerns about bringing the online school into the state's higher-education system.

Though testifying neither for nor against the proposal, Bill Lyne, president of the labor group United Faculty of Washington State, said that degrees from online universities like WGU are not substitutes for those from traditional universities.

"I'm one of the professors that this kind of education is trying to get rid of," Lyne, who's also a Western Washington University professor, said at a legislative hearing last week.

For students enrolled in online universities, "the only access to someone who actually knows something about the subject they're trying to study ... is a much less qualified and much lower paid person who will answer the phone for them ... ," he said. "You cut out the cost of the faculty member."

Luke Trapp, 24, from Wenatchee, is enrolled at WGU and said he's taken classes at traditional universities, too.

"I think they [are] pretty comparable as far as the knowledge you take from it," he said in an interview.

Margaret Shepherd, University of Washington director of state relations, asked at the public hearing last week about how bringing WGU to the state would impact student financial aid.

Kastama's proposal does not address financial aid, but if WGU-Washington is created, it can apply for state financial-aid eligibility down the road, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Mendenhall of WGU said that by partnering with Washington, WGU is not looking to attract students from existing schools.

"We intend to be really expanding access to higher education, not competing for students that are going to" other schools, he said.

[Albert Hidel]

Some university representatives have raised concerns about bringing the online school into the state's higher-education system.

...Bill Lyne, president of the labor group United Faculty of Washington State, said that degrees from online universities like WGU are not substitutes for those from traditional universities.

"I'm one of the professors that this kind of education is trying to get rid of," Lyne, who's also a Western Washington University professor, said at a legislative hearing last week.

Now there's a surprise. Leftist union goons opposed to online education and increased access to higher ed at lower cost? Who would have thought? Unfortunately, not trying hard enough to get rid of luddite turds like Bill Lyne.

[Herbert Spencer]

Now there's a surprise. Leftist union goons opposed to online education and increased access to higher ed at lower cost? Who would have thought? Unfortunately, not trying hard enough to get rid of luddite turds like Bill Lyne.

Interesting how one of the biggest obstacles to online education seems to be the union goon professors who fear that the new technology will put them out of work.

Yeah, it's those "motivational" relationships with the socialist pervert profs that keep the students coming back for more. Selfish, self-important, self-absorbed, self-delusional....

Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: February 5, 2011

WHEN colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet, most professors will lose their jobs.

Many leading universities have put free videos online featuring their best lecturers. One aggregator site, Academic Earth, offers 150 courses.

That includes me. I’m not worried, though, at least for the moment. Amid acute budget crises, state universities like mine can’t afford to take that very big step — adopting the technology that renders human instructors obsolete.

I began teaching classes online 10 years ago, but the term “online” is misleading. What I really mean is that I teach a hybrid course: part software, part hovering human. A genuine online course would be nothing but the software and would handle all the grading, too. No living, breathing instructor would be needed for oversight.

“We should focus on having at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses,” Bill Gates suggested in his 2010 annual letter for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Developing that best-in-the-world online course — in which students would learn as much, or more, than in an ordinary classroom or a hybrid online class — requires significant investment. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed about 15 sophisticated online courses, mostly in the sciences, spent $500,000 to $1 million to write software for each. But neither Carnegie Mellon nor other institutions, which are invited to use its online courses, dares to use them without having a human instructor, too.

For at least 50 years, the computer has been experimentally employed as the unflaggingly patient, attentive teaching assistant. In 1960, the University of Illinois created Plato, pioneering courseware whose offerings would eventually span the elementary-school through college levels. It and its software successors have supplied individualized pacing, frequent quizzing and help that is tailored to each student’s needs. Computer-aided instruction, however, has lacked a human touch.

Separately, many universities have put free videos online featuring their best lecturers. And Academic Earth, an aggregator Web site founded in 2009, makes the lectures easy to navigate. It says it offers 150 full university courses.

But even when lectures are accompanied with syllabuses, handouts, sample problem sets and other aids that Academic Earth has for some of its courses, is the experience really complete? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also shares the raw materials of courses in its OpenCourseWare program. For the benefit of autodidacts who aren’t M.I.T. students, it strives to publish materials online for every M.I.T. course. But students cannot interact and do not receive vital feedback about their own progress that an instructor or software provides.

“Unlocking the Gates,” by Taylor Walsh (Princeton University Press) is a recently published history of M.I.T.’s online venture, as well as those of Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the University of California, Berkeley, and others. Comparing the book’s case studies, I found that Carnegie Mellon seems to have made the most progress in developing fully self-contained online courses. Anyone can use them free, with the proviso that Carnegie Mellon doesn’t offer credit.

But course credit can be earned at other institutions if instructors send their students to the site. Students pay nominal course registration fees, generally $15 to $60, and Carnegie Mellon sends data about each student’s progress to the instructor at the student’s home institution.

Carnegie Mellon, however, does not use these online courses as replacements for its own humanoid instructors. “Any tuition-driven, private university would have a hard time being the first one to make a change as drastic as offering an entirely automated course,” Ms. Walsh told me recently.

Candace Thille, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s program, put it this way: “There is something motivating about the student’s relationship with the instructor — and with the student’s relationship with other students in the class — that would be absent if each took the course in a software-only environment.”

Those relationships — with humans in the flesh — help students to persevere. Online courses are notorious for high dropout rates.

Much, of course, depends on the subject being taught. An introductory statistics class taught to 600 students in a lecture hall won’t offer much of a relationship with the professor. Moving it into a self-contained, adaptive software package — Carnegie Mellon’s online program offers two statistics classes — would arguably offer a superior learning experience. But in this case, the subject matter is distillable into a handful of concepts, and the exams use questions with only a single correct answer. That’s not an option for just about all of the humanities and vast swaths of the social sciences.

LAST year, the Regents of the University of California approved a proposal to test the viability of offering a bachelor’s degree that could be earned entirely online.

Wendy Brown, the Heller professor of political science at the Berkeley campus, spoke witheringly of the idea at a campus forum in October: “What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”

If administrators at many state universities ever secure the funds to make capital investments again, they may be ready to look anew at the shelf where those wholly self-contained courses now sit. My job is safe, I think. Carnegie Mellon hasn’t yet developed software for the courses I teach — thank goodness.


Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

[ham]

Candace Thille, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s program, put it this way: “There is something motivating about the student’s relationship with the instructor — and with the student’s relationship with other students in the class — that would be absent if each took the course in a software-only environment.”

Those relationships — with humans in the flesh — help students to persevere. Online courses are notorious for high dropout rates.

And traditional universities aren't high-dropout places? PFFT!
Motivating? You mean the harassment and brainwashing of your typical left-wing cracker who will "weed out" students according to political biases? Or (as in 99.999 of undergraduate courses) leave teaching and mentoring to teaching assistants? It's that the way to "motivate" them? When I dropped out of a course, the instructor was THE problem.

One aggregator site, Academic Earth,

That's THE way to go...

[ham]

I have been sampling (and downloading) a few lecture series on academic earth. I think the materials are good and the effort to put them online is highly commendable. What reinforces my idea that DE/DL is THE way, is that in no way I can see how such lectures (obviously hand-picked to represent the best) could justify the extortionate tuition fees students are liable to pay to the likes of Yale, Harvard etc etc.
Honestly, folks...who are we kidding?
I am NOT saying that academics should wander like stoned, barefooted red Christs preaching their gospel for free, but on which ground in hell do we justify the difference from say an Athabasca kind of fee (not the least expensive, by the way ) and a Yale or Harvard or Oxford one?!

[Don Dresden]

...on which ground in hell do we justify the difference from say an Athabasca kind of fee (not the least expensive, by the way ) and a Yale or Harvard or Oxford one?!

Not to justify, but to explain: Subsidies Raise Prices

[ham]

I read the prices for one moderately known/upscale Canadian boarding school: CAN$50.000 a year for a boarder. In 5 years that amounts to CAN$250.000. Are we kidding? And in their former newsletter format, they featured an alumni column...I read of a couple who claimed to be...BARTENDERS?! Very few claimed to split atoms in the basement or stuff like that. Of course they didn't tell you whose father owned the company or "had friends"...people who would have gotten the job anyways. Many had very ordinary jobs. If you add the price of an equally moderately known university, what's the bill up to for boarders? 450.000? 400.000? 350.000? Try investing that at 3% risk-free per year and come back in 20 years to see if you have made that as a surplus with your supposedly upscale education. I say supposedly because -of course- there were other boarding schools/universities that ranked considerably higher than the ones you attended by whichever criteria employers may use to hire people...

[ham]

There is a Yale course 'modern social thought' available online for free.
Professor Iván Szelényi in one discussion mentions Louis XIV, the French roi soleil, whom the phrase "The State it's me" is attributed.
Now, in the Yale course the phrase is reported as "L'Etat c'est moiS".
It's the same in English as mistaking seen for scene.
Of course, it might be a typo or something else...no time to review lecture notes, I understand...but my contention remains...why would anyone PAY the princely fees these platinum schools charge, to have a product that basically resembles a public college's?
Another freely available online course on Classical Mythology has the professor to declare he has devised criteria to catalog heroes...then offers a version of the famous Raglan score passed off as his own invention.
Go figure...
Oh, yea...(lord) Raglan was an English scholar of the 1930s, not that kewl rapper of color who sung 'Fackya bicch'...