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

Re:Those lousy teachers

[ArcherB]

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!

Nice Red Herring! Wow! That is textbook! I'm impressed.

Let me help you out here. It's a red herring because the conservative case against unions is not that unions are made of lazy freeloaders, although, there are those that take advantage of the system. The case against unions is based on a resistance to paying more for labor than is necessary and paying for labor that is no longer needed.

Think of it this way:
Let's say you are the server administrator in a mid-sized company. Your servers are all running Windows NT4 on Pentium III processors. In order to remain competitive you need to replace your systems with new, top of the line systems running a proper Server OS. Once word gets out, your old P-III's throw a fit and lock down all of your data, effectively shutting your company down. They demand that they stay in service until their power supplies give out and to be rebooted no less than two times per week with Microsoft patch Tuesdays off entirely. New systems that come online to replace those retired systems must also run Windows NT4, and may not have any more RAM installed than existing systems.

What do you do? Do you force your boss to pay more for outdated equipment or do you pull the plug on the whole damn server room and move your business to "the cloud" based on servers in India? What do you think your shareholders will tell you do?

If you didn't get it, here is the key.
Pentium systems = Teacher's Union
NT4 = Current Teaching methods
RAM = Salary
Shareholders = Taxpayers