Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Focus
Are We There Yet?
10/29/2004
It’s probably safe to say that the Academy is in turmoil and new economic models are needed. A recent colloquy, “Faculty compensation for creating and teaching online courses” (September 6, 2004, The Chronicle of Higher Education; chronicle.com/forums/colloquy) focused on the question of how and whether to compensate faculty for creating and teaching online courses. Some discussion participants argued that creating and teaching online courses is indeed the responsibility of faculty, and that “extra” compensation d'es not make good management or fiscal sense. On the other side were faculty who had created and taught online courses and who felt that the amount of work usually needed to create quality online courses was outside the realm of “usual faculty responsibilities.” Other concerns included the dangers of taking time away from research with potentially negative consequences on promotion and tenure.Yet, there is no question that faculty specialization is here, and the positions expressed in the colloquy bring some of the effects of this shift into focus. The specialization, in fact, has been underway for some time. New cadres of professionals are working in corporate universities, for for-profit institutions, teaching online only, developing online materials only, or being part-time mentors and tutors. Duke University (NC) has taken the bold step of supporting the growth of a group of faculty who are full-time “professors of the practice.” These faculty focus on teaching and are on renewable contracts. A recent study (American Council on Education, 2002 www.acenet.edu) analyzed the state of the growing ranks of nontraditional faculty, noting that only 38 percent of all instructional faculty nationally are full-time and in a tenured or tenure-track position. What is less visible currently is the emergence of “teaching and learning superstars or personalities” that was occasionally forecasted.
Was my predicted shift to specialization on target? On the one hand, yes: We now acknowledge the need for greater efficiencies in teaching and learning. On the other hand, the path to that goal—retaining faculty leadership in knowledge creation and growth in learners—is definitely unclear. The shift toward specialization appears to include a related cadre of professionals: instructional designers and multimedia/Web developers who are creating online resources like coursepacks that complement existing textbooks. In the framework of a course, this means that faculty and institutions can “purchase” a larger percentage of course resources (à la the textbook model, but in the newer formats). Depending on the scenario, this holds the potential for reducing the time and talent needed for preparing for the delivery of online courses.
3—The link between courses and content for courses will be broken. One barrier to offering online courses is the time and talent required to create online courses. This prediction about the link being broken between courses and content for courses (captured in the phrase, “one book equals one course”) assumed that as content became mostly digital, the usefulness of the book model would go away.
Recommended Reading
- Fixed-Mobile Convergence: Dartmouth Beefs Up Cell Coverage, Cuts Costs
Problems with cell phone coverage aren't uncommon on college campuses. There are two main reasons: The beefy structure of historic buildings can block cellular reception within walls, and, on more remote campuses outside cities, signal coverage can be light.
- Thompson Rivers U Deploys Unified Digital Campus for ERP
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in British Columbia has selected SunGard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to integrate its ERP systems.
- DV Kitchen Web Video Publishing System Released
DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.
- NEC Debuts 4 Education Projectors
NEC this week debuted four new projectors targeted toward education applications, along with a new MultiSync LCD display. The new NP-series projectors are entry-level models started at $899 but are designed to provide high light output, support for closed captioning, and built-in networking capabilities.
- Security Researchers Uncover Spring Framework Vulnerability
Software frameworks are enjoying enormous popularity these days among a range of developers. It's popularity well earned; frameworks provide powerful tools for building more flexible and less error-prone applications. They generally enhance developer productivity with out-of-the-box functionality. And they can free developers to focus on features instead of common coding tasks.
- 3PAR Server Arrays Integrate Fat-to-Thin Processing
Utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the release of the 3PAR InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers. The new hardware is built on the company's third-generation InSpire architecture, featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with integrated fat-to-thin processing.
