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Monoculture, Blackboard, the President’s Commission, and Accreditation
6/21/2006
Every day we're asked to pay a price to continue the existing centralized system of flowing information and creativity. What if we don't want to pay? Further, what if this system is now obsolete? Information and creativity used to be decentralized. Before the 20th century, every town had a newspaper. If you wanted to enjoy music, you either made it yourself or had a friend whose talent could entertain you.
Perhaps the centralized system that led to such a suffocating monoculture was a historic anomaly, an artifact? The technology of the phonograph, radio, and television demanded centralization. Distribution was expensive. To pay for distribution we needed financial entities who would be rewarded for risks.
In fact, it’s the big agricultural farms with their monocultural products that have brought about such bad things as Asian Ladybugs and Emerald Ash Borers – each a scourge in Michigan (just ask my wife about the “scourge” part) brought about by someone who wanted to protect vast, monocultural agricultural spreads, and who will never be held responsible. Sigh.
Two items I read in the last week bring together learning management systems and the system of accreditation that currently d'es a good job of underlying the credibility of modern higher education. They do so in a way that raises the alarm for me regarding more monoculture in higher education.
First I read a news item on InsideHigherEd, titled Digital Assessments: “Blackboard already offers the capability to do course evaluations, and for over a year-and-a-half the company has been researching more comprehensive assessment practices.”
Methinks Blackboard smells some federal money coming down the pipeline, because then I read Connecting the Dots, which is an excellent essay that brings together a lot of information about what various branches of the federal government and a wide variety of federal appointees have been doing around the area of assessment, quality, and accreditation. The author, Alan Jones, clearly fears a monoculture of assessment and accreditation potentially being imposed by the federal government.
The author of the latter, Alan Jones, writes:
The current system of institutional review through independent accreditation boards is one of the hallmarks of American higher education and is one of the most important structural safeguards of the academy’s ability to ensure academic quality and intellectual excellence. The introduction of oversight by an inherently partisan political body in lieu of the currently independent accreditation process is a peculiar remedy if the perceived ailment in the academy is political bias. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the
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