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What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia?
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
How would this be useful again? Let's remember that if the objective is to self educate, you can already do that quite well in this day and age. The Internet makes almost anything available to you, there are libraries (including the ones on Universities) open to the public, and indeed you can sit in on classes at some universities, even if you aren't a student (some have to allow that). Learning when and what you choose has never been easier.
However that's not the point of a university. A university is about providing a structured program, with some verification for people that complete it successfully. That has value above and beyond just the education received. This is by no means a complete list but some of the major things:
1) It provides some proof of what you've done. When someone is self taught, they could well be full of shit. You have no idea. If they have a degree, at least you know that they did well enough for the university to consider it ok. I'm not saying that is a guarantee of competence but it is a whole lot more than just "Trust me, I know what I'm talking about."
2) It shows the ability to stick with a lengthy, difficult, endeavor and succeed. That is a worthwhile personality trait to have.
3) It hopefully means you got a broad base of knowledge in the subject. When someone self teaches they often focus just on what interests them or is relevant to the task at hand. A university can mandate a broader range of study on things, and focus on theoretical backgrounds to practical items where the use might not be readily apparent, but important later on.
4) The accredited ones are held to some standards. Not only is the university itself examined, but individual programs are. It isn't just all up to whatever they feel like.
I can't see how such a "Do whatever you want," kind of university would be at all useful. Sure you could learn things, but as I said, if all you are going to do is learn what you want, attend the classes you want, then it really isn't any different than you just teaching your self, watching lectures online, etc.
This doesn't mean university is the be-all, end-all, but the point of the institution is more than just teaching people whatever they happen to be interested in.
Here in Canada, an undergraduate degree from a respected, accredited university is in effect a 'certificate of cleverness.' It says to potential employers that you're smart enough to have completed four years of full-time course work at a place that is reasonably hard and that you've produced the requisite outputs. With a few exceptions (undergraduate engineering etc.), it's not considered 'job training.'
It may be different in the USA, I'm not sure...
The University of Phoenix has an interesting delima. They have a goal of offering as much opportunity as possible (lax admission standards), because it is profitable. I am an MBA student with the University of Phoenix, because I live in the middle of BFE, and drank way too much beer during my undergraduate program several years ago and graduated with a 2.5, which took a lot of schools off-the-table without a stellar GMAT score. Because of their lax standards of admission, they sign on a lot of students who simply cannot handle the program. I was enrolled on Academic Probation in which I had to maintain a 3.0 through the first four classes. During those classes, the quality of my classmates quickly improved as those who were not committed or incapable of the work dropped.
Phoenix gets penalized for giving students like me an opportunity to try to be successful in the program, but having a high failure rate when those students don't cut it in a program that is comparable to a lot of state-school MBA programs.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I got my Masters in Education from Phoenix, so I'll share my experience. Bear in mind, I'm not in IT, I'm just a finance analyst, so my experience is going to be different than what true IT workers have encountered.
To be honest, I went in because I needed a Masters degree to move up the corporate ladder. In my opinion and experience, a Masters takes ten years off the advancement clock in the corporate non-IT world, and I didn't want to do the fifteen year Sales grind, or having to change careers at 30 and start at entry-level with entry-level pay yet again. I already have a Bachelor's degree, but chose to go out into the real world and get my teeth kicked in for five years rather than jump to grad school (I had too many friends going to grad school straight out of college, getting their Masters, and then ending up as grocery store clerks or waiters because MBAs and what-not weren't guarantees of jobs anymore- this was in 2000) So I decided to do a Masters in something I thought would be interesting: education. I chose Phoenix because I didn't have the time to go back to a traditional school for two years. I also didn't want to do the night school option for an MBA, as I believe those degrees are overvalued due to market saturation, and not worth the debt. Better to study something you're interested in than following the crowd.
My recruitment, in retrospect, was something out of a boiler-room. The difference was that I was ready to commit, and my recruiter was actually pretty cool (she wasn't Mormon, unlike the vast majority of them). Anyway, I jumped into the UoP online program and went in.
Several things became immediately apparent: The GRE, MAT, and other exams are there for a reason-to weed out people who shouldn't be in grad school. Some of the students I saw in my initial classes were atrocious-they should have been kicked straight back to grade school, their academic skills were so awful. The emphasis was more on producing volumes of writing initially than on quality; and the textbook resources were customized for Phoenix exclusively.
Basically, I experienced every horror story you've read about or heard. And my Master's thesis was a joke. But here's the difference. I only had two truly godawful teachers that made me question the integrity of the program: a teacher in a class about a year in, and the one who managed the end step of my thesis. The rest of my teachers (aside from those two) were highly trained educators who worked in the fields they taught in, and they knew their stuff. Wow, were they good. I learned developmental theory, organizational theory, curriculum design & instruction, statistics, educational psychology, etc from people who lived it every day. And by that point, most of my fellow students were also working teachers who knew what they were doing. So I had to pony up and put in mucho hours of study and work in order to be taken seriously by my classmates and my instructors. THOSE people are why I learned what I did about education.
When I found out about all the scandals with UoP, I was devastated. Here I was, a 'smart' guy, who'd been conned out of two years and $50K. It was one of the most traumatic moments of my life. I gritted it out and finished with my degree anyway, but I was convinced that my life was over. I'd done all that work for nothing - a tarnished degree worth nothing. But then my wife (who's a teacher herself) would talk with her fellow teachers about some pedagogical matter, and I not only knew what they were talking about, I could describe it and solve their issue better than they could. I knew what the big issues surrounding Education in the US and worldwide were. And, my company transferred me from sales into finance at a much higher salary and more secure position because I went through what I did.
To wit, the scandals are valid because there are huge problems with UoP.The media says Phoenix is trying to fix the problems, and I've seen their commercials, but I'll believe they've reformed when I see it. I got suckered, a
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
What if the point of going to a university was to actually learn something rather than to get a piece of paper? How I see it, these kinds of changes would make colleges less useful for hiring decisions, but far FAR more interesting for people who actually want to learn something. I don't see that as a bad thing. Most degrees should mean very little anyway. The idea that having a degree means someone can do a specific job better than someone with it is popular but seems to be wrong in most cases. Why not get rid of the BS and make universities actually worth going to?
There are a lot of very good schools that let lots of people in but still manage to graduate a decent proportion of their students. Mine was a pretty common story: at 18 I "went off to college" at my nearby Enormous State University (University of Colorado in my case) and partied all the time, ended up with a crappy GPA my first semester, dropped out and spent a few years in the service, then came back with a much more mature attitude and a determination to do better. The problem was that CU didn't want me back (I mean, my GPA was really bad.) So I did my BS at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which admits just about anyone with a pulse, but still maintains high educational standards. It cost me a lot less than CU or CSU would have, too.
Did it work? Well, I'm back at CU now ... working on my PhD and supported by an NIH fellowship. It worked for most of my classmates, too, many of whom had hard-luck stories like mine. I don't know where we'd be if we'd decided to go the UofP route, but I'm guessing most of us would be a lot worse off, educationally and financially, than we are now.
UofP's problem isn't low admission standards. Its problem is that it's a moneymaking machine run by vultures who prey on desperate people.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Hey, we have those! We call them "tech schools" or, if you want to be fancy, polytechnics. They teach things like welding, power engineering, plumbing, electrical, etc. Programs are one or two years, or sometimes shorter.
The real problem is that so many of us are so rich that we can spend four years of our lives "finding ourselves" at university, but we're also so whiney we can't see it as a great triumph of modern civilization but rather complain that the university didn't teach us anything useful in the courses we chose.