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.'"

Comments

Re:Phoenix is the model?

[Ohio Calvinist]

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.