Teacher Union Tries To Block Online Courses

itwbennett writes "Facing budget problems, University of California officials and state analysts say that expanding online courses could help them 'innovate out of the current crisis.' But the lecturers whose jobs are at stake see it differently. Now the UC chapter of the American Federation of Teachers is fighting to block online courses."

Comments

Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Nom du Keyboard]

Unions fighting to keep featherbedding in place and prices high. Just another reason that unions have far outlived their usefulness.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[ackthpt]

It is interesting to think that education by vending machine is turning out to be so successful. I can understand how degrees by coursework can benefit from this. It will be interesting if universities with real brands will ever allow master or doctorates to be via online study. When I did my post grad degree, I saw my supervisor for an hour every week, and I know I was lucky at that. I had a friend who was doing his PhD which saw his supervisor for a grand total of 20 hours during his entire research project. He basically just was included as a name in the research papers, and copied in on any and all email correspondence. Even thought is becoming ever more automated these days.

The argument does fall a bit on deaf ears when you are a student in the first two years at university, sitting in a lecture hall of 900 fellow students, while a teaching assistant goes through the material and can't answer any questions for your.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[obarthelemy]

Not so much vending machines as mass-produced. Which says a lot about the state of hand-crafted education. Way back when mass-production started, it actually was a way to get goods of better specifications and quality, at a lower price. It seems it's now education's turn, partly because mass-production is more efficient, and partly because hand-crafted education is controlled by cartel that has nothing but its members' interest at heart. Not its customers'.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[TheGratefulNet]

corporations have outlived their usefulness. they are now slave drivers like they were nearly 100 years ago.

we DESPARATELY need unions back again. how wrong you are young one (and I know you're young; only a kid would say this. a kid who does not know his history.)

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Jane Q. Public]

"I understand that they need to protect the interests of their members..."

Really, though, that begs the question: are they in fact helping their members?

Remember the teachers' union protests in Wisconsin? How getting rid of the teachers' union was going to make the teachers suffer and lose jobs and wages? Well, guess what?

As it turns out, the insurance company that supplied health insurance to all the teachers in the state was wholly owned by the teachers' union. The state paid the premiums... 90% in some cases, and 100% in others. Almost none came out of the teachers' paychecks. So they didn't even really know how much it cost. As a consequence, that insurance company was jacking rates up EVERY YEAR, and the teachers did not care because the taxpayer was paying for it... all of it in many cases. And to add insult to injury, where did all those excess insurance profits go? To the campaigns and political funds for the Democrat politicians who supported the Teachers' Union. Imagine that. And it's all documented.

Guess what else?

Now, it's true that some right-wing editorials exaggerated the positive results of "busting" the union... but in truth, there is little doubt that the teachers, and school districts themselves, are better off as a result. Even if the teachers are paying a bit more for health insurance now. Many teachers are even getting raises.

How's that for "suffering"?

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[PopeRatzo]

Just another reason that unions have far outlived their usefulness.

Judging from the ever-increasing level of unemployment and underemployment in the developed world, there are a whole lot of people who have "outlived their usefulness" too.

There was a time when people actually believed that automation, the Internet and increased productivity would lead to human beings living a higher standard of living, not having to work so hard, not having to work into their old age, having better health, etc. It does not seem to have worked out that way. Instead, we have developed countries, even those with stable or declining population levels, deciding that it's time for people to work longer, harder, and for less pay. Deciding that the retirement age is not high enough.

Despite an enormous increase in worker productivity and unprecedented increases in corporate profits, we learn that workers - that people - have got it too damn good. Old people have it too damn good. My favorite one that I hear a lot lately is that poor people have it too damn good. If someone suggests that a hedge fund manager (who by the way has NOT been doing all that well) who makes eight figures (all to the right of the decimal point) has it too good, we are told that is "class warfare" however.

Well, now we are learning that students have it too damn good. That they don't need all that 4 year college stuff and graduate school. That the University of Phoenix is plenty good so why should we have them come to classrooms? After all, if they're just going to come out of school and be "underemployed" (I love that expression), then youtube classes are plenty good enough for them. Because we're wasting too damn much time and money on educating students, and anyway, those professors are just going to expect pay raises and pensions and health care and then they're just going to be liberals anyway. Plus, when those students see professors with nice standards of living, then they're going to want a nice standard of living too. Like those pesky unions we had to get rid of were just making other workers think they deserved pensions and health care and weekends, universities just end up making students who are going to want it too damn good.

You guys really don't get it. You think your little service jobs are safe. That you're just in a temporary rut and that the 10% annual raises are coming back real soon now. That your job as a Java programmer is going to just make you impervious to the race to the bottom. That you don't need to aggregate your bargaining power with other workers because the world is always going to need network administrators and will always pay them more and more. That a brighter, healthier, more prosperous future is right around the corner because of computers and the Internet and you're all going to be entrepreneurs and corporate entities and be in the top 1%.

For a bunch of people who value science and logic and math highly, you sure don't seem able to add two plus two.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Spoken like a true academic.

Spoken like anyone who's sick of seeing his profession slandered by people who know nothing about it.

I've done a number of jobs -- the military, medicine, and academia -- that are widely misunderstood by people outside the field. Obviously, all of these jobs have significant effects on the lives of people who don't do those jobs (as well as the lives of those who do) and everyone has a right to an opinion about those effects. But opinions about how the jobs themselves are done are, yes, damn it, meaningless unless the opiner has some idea what the job looks like from the inside. GPP's laughably wrong view of the working lives of academics has exactly as much value as, say, my view on the working lives of truck drivers: none at all.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Rhodri Mawr]

Consider how many Slashdotters taught ourselves how to work with computers with only the internet as a major resource.

Consider how many Slashdotters taught ourselves how to work with computers long before the internet was a major resource.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Rakishi]

I also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read. That does describe a large fraction of the US college student population, of course, so the lecturers are still needed for them.

Your full explanation is of course nothing more than an attempt to ease your own ego. After all, in your own mind you must be better than those other people. So the explanation must involve them being inferior to you and the whole system not catering to you obviously superior mind.

Someone who doesn't need to prop up their own inferiority complex on the other hand may simply explain it as being the fact that different people learn differently. Many people can read a book but they'll simply learn better in a lecture setting.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Great post. Unfortunately too few people are able to realize the perverted nature of the economy and of those in power. We are being conditioned to make due with less and less, while they dangle false promises in front of us. Living standards for the masses are declining, so those few at the top can further increase theirs.

They managed to turn us against each other. Most people are more likely to attack teachers or blue collar workers, rather than the crooked politician or unethical banker who ruin lives by the tens of thousands.

Re:Union Featherbedding, Meh

[Omestes]

also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read.

This may or not be true, but it ignores the fact that people learn in different ways, and different forms of teaching benefit different subjects and different skills classes differently. I loved a well structured lecture, as long as it didn't focus on the slowest students, and was allowed to lapse into Socratic methodology or discussion from time to time. I could never stand group learning, but I'm sure it benefits others (who aren't inferior to me). As such, I HATE online classes, since they inevitably turn into pointless group work, and idiotic pro forma discussions. But then again I know people who excel at them.

But then again I went to school for a subject that thrived on discussion, and dialogue.

its not 'unions'.

[unity100]

its not a left issue. its a right issue - its capitalism : in this case the corporation is lecturers' union. in the case of music, it is the music corporations. in case of movies, its hollywood corporations.

its capitalism - if something may prevent your easy profits, prevent it even if it costs a major innovation for civilization.

Re:its not 'unions'.

[fferreres]

Not capitalism. Capitalism is about accumulation of capital and reinvestment. This is more politics, and a monopoly of these segments. Actually, teachers Unions across countries are one of the most powerful entities slowing down civilization, in the name of too many good things taken ransom by this group.

My solution is to give each student a voucher, and to employ free market regarding education. Not public schools, only public funding of education.

Re:its not 'unions'.

[Chibi Merrow]

How is a teacher preventing me from getting access to course materials from 1200 miles away providing me more value exactly?

Re:its not 'unions'.

[sarhjinian]

Until such time as powerful, established participants in the market tip the scales in their favour and become a de facto government. Which would, you know, totally never happen, and you know that, like, real laissez faire would work, it just hasn't been tried.

Re:its not 'unions'.

[bonch]

What a bizarre way of trying to twist this around and turn it into a critique of capitalism, and you even got modded up for it. The union is trying to protect its monopoly in the face of online courses. They're like the RIAA trying to defend CD sales in the era of internet downloads.

Re:its not 'unions'.

[hedwards]

Do you have any evidence at all to support that claim, or are you just full of it?

The free market is precisely what is ruining the educational system in the US. Generally, you don't need to be an expert to identify people that are well educated, however being well educated in the end tells you absolutely nothing about how that came to be.

Vouchers are probably one of the most damaging things to come along in the educational world in a good long time. At some point the poor achievement needs to be addressed, and if you keep closing schools that aren't achieving at some point you run into a problem. Education is more of an art ultimately than a science, and having the time to develop and improve the curriculum is invaluable. I realize that it might come as a shock to somebody with no training in education, but you can't just ship students from one school to another hoping that the next school will get it right. By that time the student is probably in high school and completely screwed. It might help the next set of students, but I doubt it, because those students are likely to be dealing with the same constantly changing set of schools as well.

If you read up a bit on pedagogy, particularly the history over the last 100 years or so, you'll see what I mean, education is changing constantly, and a lot of it is garbage.

Ultimately, capitalism is about providing things as cheaply as possible. It's one of the reasons why the US has some of the lowest standards for teachers of foreign languages in the developed world. It's cheaper to just hire random native speakers from other countries than it is to ensure that they've been trained in the relevant techniques necessary to be productive. Teaching a language isn't the same as teaching a content area, and the training necessary isn't the same. There's some commonality, but there's a lot of linguistic gotchas that aren't necessarily obvious.

Re:its not 'unions'.

[BlueStrat]

its not a left issue. its a right issue - its capitalism : in this case the corporation is lecturers' union. in the case of music, it is the music corporations. in case of movies, its hollywood corporations.

its capitalism - if something may prevent your easy profits, prevent it even if it costs a major innovation for civilization.

Capitalism is the worst system ever invented. Except for every other system ever invented. The problem is that the current system the US is operating under isn't really capitalism, it's crony-capitalism, and people opposed to capitalism point to the crony-capitalists and claim capitalism is to blame, when it's actually the corrupt politicians who have caused the problems and allowed and covered for the crony-capitalists to continue their corrupt ways.

Capitalism is the only system ever created where wealth is a renewable resource for everyone as long as they are willing to work and/or come up with an idea, skill, or invention thatâ(TM)s useful to someone else.

Capitalism has raised more people from poverty than any other system ever created.

Capitalism has allowed more people to live in freedom than any other system ever invented.

Capitalism has allowed the US to provide more humanitarian assistance to those in need around the world than any other system or country in history.

For these reasons and many, many more, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Islamic Caliphate, and the so-called âoeNew World Orderâ are doomed to failure and to taking their rightful places on the junk heap of other failed ideologies and social/economic systems which are based upon hate, greed, fear, and lust for power.

Strat

Unions College educated people

[John.P.Jones]

I will never understand the need for college educated knowledge workers to need union protections. This isn't a coal mine or dangerous factory job. I also don't see the need for unions for any government employee even dangerous jobs like Fire & Police. When you combine the two, high-education government employees it is insane.

Disclaimer my wife is a Ph.D. working part-time lecturing community college Chemistry courses and fully supports online courses when she sees a whole class of students whose combined course fees don't cover half of her own salary, much less all the other expenses involved in running a college. This just isn't sustainable.

Those lousy teachers

[bigsexyjoe]

In spite of all the efforts of our saint-like Wall Street speculators, bankers, and corporate executives; teachers are out to destroy everything! I don't know why people have so much trouble recognizing the scourge of people that actually want to engage the youth!

And college professors are people who could have easily gotten MBA's but instead choose a life of intellectual exploration. These people are clearly insane!

And everyone knows that everyone in a labor union is a lazy freeloader! At least unemployed people have the decency to not sabotage our economy by involving themselves in the affairs of the wealthy!

Professors, not high school teachers

[msobkow]

Professors with tenure at universities are pretty much the last bastion of job security in North America. They've remained silent while everyone else's job was automated and offshored, only now that their own jobs are threatened are they speaking up.

Unfortunately, half of my professors in University were not good educators. They'd slap up overheads for you to copy down while they read from the overheads, which could be done by any machine.

The profs who actually discussed their topics with the class and explained things when people had questions were another story, but such professors only constituted maybe half of the ones I had.

I'm all for well-paid educators, but I have no use for the dead weight whose focus is their research and paper-writing. If you want to do pure research, find a lab some where, don't drain the university and college systems. With the many thousands of dollars students pay for their education, they deserve better.

If the colleges and universities switch to online courses, what's the benefit of paying them so many thousands of dollars for an education that you can get for free from something like the Khan Academy videos? People need and want an education, not a video lecture series.

there's a reason for that

[damn_registrars]

I'm all for well-paid educators, but I have no use for the dead weight whose focus is their research and paper-writing. If you want to do pure research, find a lab some where, don't drain the university and college systems. With the many thousands of dollars students pay for their education, they deserve better.

The faculty involved in research are not even close to being the "dead weight" you claim. They bring money in to the university, as well as prestige.

However you are also missing the value of being taught by a researcher. Sure you could take some of your courses from someone who hasn't acquired any new knowledge on the topic in the past decade, but you'll finish those courses with that level of knowledge yourself. It is important to have educators who are well versed in the topic and aware of where that topic is going. That is a big part of why faculty who teach also do research.

Re:Unions College educated people

[TheGratefulNet]

as an abused tech sector employee, I can EASILY see the value of unions. in software, we have none. none. and we suffer for it. no, we are not physically wipped and the doors are not locked to keep us in; but there are ways of being a slave beyond the obvious.

at this point, we are slaves and going down, down, down, like the former middle class. we're all going on a race to the bottom and the corp masters laugh all the way. the 1%. you know; the ones that suppress the bad press about them, etc .

we need unions more now than ever. the separation of classes is one reason and the laughter of that 1% is the other obvious one.

woody guthrie's ghost is ashamed of the de-evolution we've had in the last 50 or so years. the corps have had laws built for themselves and the consumer/worker based laws are ignored or over-ridden.

anyone against unions is basically a corp THUG, these days.

or an spoiled child.

or a republican.

(but then, I repeat myself)

Re:Unions College educated people

[cfulmer]

And exactly HOW are you enslaved? By being allowed to go to work in leans and being given health plans and 401(k)s? If your job is so bad that you think you're actually a "slave," then find a different job. Even in this economy, there's good work for geeks who've kept themselves up-to-date. Heck, MOVE if you have to.

WTF!?!?!

[sirwired]

Runaway inflation? What planet are you on? Inflation has been quite low for YEARS now. The only significant price increases have been in fuel and food, both of which are commodities with little labor input. And the size of the unionized workforce in the US is at historic lows.

"A L33T bunch of buttheads demanding regular increases in pay"... I don't think raises in line with increases in labor productivity per dollar of labor input are exactly unreasonable. Certainly their CEO bosses have no problem giving themselves raises for the same thing.

"deserving no more than nice people like you or I." What, are you mad because increased bargaining power enables them to make more money? In exactly the same way that companies negotiate the prices of anything else they buy (or sell) in quantity? And I like regular raises too...

"the cost of their highjacking [sic] industry gets passed on to you or I." I'm not sure how collective bargaining qualifies as "hijacking." Just like employers threaten to close plants if labor costs are too high, why can a union not do the same?

"we pay for the extra poor workmanship of UNION BABIES to get wealthy while we languish under inflation." Yeah, tell that to, say NYC-based ironworkers... unionized, and famous the world over for an incredible work ethic and craftsmanship, all under conditions that would make most people crap in their pants. They earn a lot of money, and deserve every dollar. Tell that to US coal miners, the most productive and safest in the world.

Yes, unions are not perfect. Some of them are unreasonable and produce an environment that drives their employers into bankruptcy, a situation in which nobody wins. Some unions are corrupt, just any collection of entities have some that are not as good as others. But to say that the very idea of workers banding together to put themselves on an equal negotiating plane with their bosses is the root of all evil is going a bit far.