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less to learn about computer business systems in their full glory as head explains these powerful programs pioneered by walmart p 3 bring the disciplines of industrialism to an economic space that extends far beyond the factories and construction sites of the machine age to wholesale and retail financial services secondary and higher education healthcare customer relations management and human resources management hrm public administration corporate management at all levels save the highest and even the fighting of america s wars if you ve never worked at walmart the time that you most likely encountered one of these programs is when dealing with a customer service representative who was clearly going by the book the computer is their book scripting their every interaction with you the same way that the computer tells the company how many calls it gets in which hours which then determines how many representatives to have waiting for calls at any particular time unfortunately head does very little in his book with higher education but it is easy to imagine a future in which power hungry administrators attempt to use technology to dictate both how and when we all deal with our students the students customers have a complaint handle it by the manual if professors aren t allowed to say anything controversial on social media how can we ever expect to be able to do so in class especially in online classes during which our every interaction with students can be monitored and searched even more troublesome however is the prospect of the just in time professor if moocish technologies really are used to unbundle us all what exactly will they be paying us to do somebody has to greet the students on the first day of class right make them feel at home somebody has to grade the final exams but what are we all going to do in between press play for some superprofessor s video taped lectures our bosses certainly aren t going to let us all sit back and do our research for the fourteen weeks until finals start this is exactly why that story about outsourcing the hiring of adjuncts in michigan just scares me to death for all the problems that adjuncts have which are manifold at least they are guaranteed work through the end of a semester if their hiring can be broken up on an as needed basis what s to stop schools from hiring them on an as needed basis during the semester get more workers when you need them like during finals don t pay for them when you don t this is the logical end to which faculty unbundling will bring us all tenured tenure track and adjunct alike perhaps you scoff at this notion but if the power relationship between faculty and administrations gets any more one sided than it is right now we are all going to pine for the good old days like they are now at the university of southern new hampshire as george siemens explain s when unbundling happens it is only temporary unbundling leads to rebundling and digital rebundling results in less players and less competition what unbundling represents then is a power shift universities are today an integrated network of products and services many universities have started to work with partners like pearson asu is among the most prominent to expand capacity that is not evident in their existing system rebundling is what happens when the pieces that are created as a sector moves online become reintegrated into a new network model it is most fundamentally a power shift the current integrated higher education system is being pulled apart by a range of companies and startups currently the university is in the drivers seat eventually the unbundled pieces will be integrated into a new network model that has a new power structure perhaps most faculty won t be unbundled and rebundled right out of their jobs but after this process is completed nobody will want those jobs anymore equally importantly what kind of education will it be if the human relationship between a student and professor is replaced by a business relationship between a student and a temporary worker who happens to have a ph d and perhaps more than a few that don t the kind of education you get at a for profit university now but pleasantly housed inside a semi public shell like at arizona state university online i guess all this means that i hate the future but as george suggests elsewhere in that same post the parts of a social system are less than the whole of a social system anybody who has the least bit of experience teaching can tell you that this rule applies to higher education in spades too bad nobody wants to listen to us while we get called luddites for sticking up for a sick system the powers that be go off and kill the patient in the name of progress which looks a lot more like profiteering to me share this print opens in new window print share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit more email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading comments 2 comments categories academia academic labor adjunct faculty moocs technology you are not special 20 07 2014 the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle through which modern industry runs and whose crowning point is the universal crisis that crisis is once again approaching although as yet but in its preliminary stage and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom upstarts of the new holy prusso german empire karl marx capital afterward to the second german edition 1873 why do established scholars who speak openly about other social and economic injustices refrain from allying themselves with those of us who are denied academic freedom by virtue of our identities as adjuncts asks lori harrison kahan in vitae how are we to explain this silence great questions but if you really want to make this point stick in the minds of most tenured and tenure track faculty i m not sure this line of argument is going to work instead i d explain how the adjunct problem really is every professor s problem drum dialectics into the heads of these mushroom upstarts and we ll all be better off together for this to happen it s essential to convince the people on the tenure track now that they aren t as special as they think they are the master at this line of argument is of course rebecca schuman unfortunately king cannibal rats on a festering ghost ship are unlikely to lend a hand until the moment they realize that it s time to swim to shore so now then is the time to point out that it might be time for all of us to paddle the burnt out hulk that we all occupy a little closer to shore than we are right now i ll let the numbers speak for themselves here s reason 55 from 100 reasons not to go to grad school in november 2010 the national science foundation reported that 49 562 people earned doctorates in the united states in 2009 this was the highest number ever recorded most of the increase over the previous decade occurred in the sciences and engineering but the nsf s report noted a particularly grim statistic for those who completed a phd in the humanities only 62 6 percent had a definite commitment for any kind of employment whatsoever remember that this is what faces those who have already survived programs with very high attrition rates more than half of those who start phd programs in the humanities do not complete them see reason 46 the phd has been cheapened by its ubiquity every one of those disposable academics in your field would gladly fill your tenure track job at substantially less pay than you re making right now and why shouldn t they you probably aren t doing very much to help them so why should they help you moreover plenty of administrators would gladly fire you and replace you with an adjunct if they thought they could get away with it what s that you say you write articles do you too bad only three people read half of all articles and most of those university press books we all write aren t exactly setting the world on fire either adjuncts and people fresh out of grad school can do the exact same things that existing tenured faculty can do they even have books published at the same university presses that you do they re also likely to perform all the functions that you perform for much much less money at the same time and you knew i was going to get to this at some point moocs or as these guys stress the technologies that enable moocs can do the same job you do rather badly for a lot less money in the long run therefore university bosses who couldn t care less about what books you ve published will replace you with pre recorded lectures and an interactive web site without blinking an eye anybody with a basic understanding of organized labor knows the solution to all these problems join together help the people willing to do your job for less get the opportunity to do the job you do with you not instead of you for the money they deserve don t be a mushroom upstart be an organizer be a truth teller be a fighter and if your own liberal ideals aren t enough to motivate you to do such things just remember that you ll be better off in the long run too you are not special neither are your adjunct colleagues but they live with that fact every day the point is that you need to learn that too if we are ever all going to save higher education together share this print opens in new window print share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit more email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading comments 12 comments categories academic labor adjunct faculty class labor he s leaving coursera that s how it worked out 17 07 2014 please forgive me this post is going to be more than a little self serving but as one of the very few people who actually completed princeton professor and friend of this blog jeremy adelman s world history mooc i think i ve earned that privilege i found this month old daily princetonian article last night on the twitterz adelman agreed to teach the course for three years after which the university will conduct a thorough review of its performance he said that he will offer the course next fall on a new startup platform novoed that allows for greater student engagement adelman said that he considered the first year s course a failure version 1 0 failed i hadn t realized how much the rituals of two physical lectures a week were like the spinal cord of the course he said it was like this blah course adelman said he also found that students were not engaging in the online discussion forums with non university students and many were not watching lectures regularly waiting until right before the exams however he said that he made adjustments to the course that resulted in very interactive projects and high participation creating online blogs and project assignments that would be posted online version 1 0 was of course the mooc that inspired my 16 part critique of the class which you can find here if you scroll down i d heard a lot of the stuff in that article exchanging e mails with jeremy and talking to him briefly after our aha panel back in january but i never heard him describe that course i took as a failure before i actually think he s being more than a little hard on himself the fault here lies not with the superprofessor or the students but with the course design and i m not talking about the assignments which he has apparently tweaked and improved but with the whole xmooc oriented similarity to his ordinary face to face world history class if you must mooc says me then you really should blow the whole thing up and start the world afresh that means little or no lectures with respect to history this would make introductory courses an impossibility since students wouldn t know the content otherwise coursera would hate it but this structure could put the kind of global dialogue that jeremy loves so much front and center imagine a worldwide research methods course during which students could share their findings with each other or even a historiography course in which students explain how historians from different lands around the world have confronted similar historiographic problems i remember trying to explain cmoocs to jeremy somewhere in the comments here that i won t dig up i hope that helped indeed i m delighted to see that he s retained the rights to his own course thereby making it possible for him to migrate to a better platform than coursera for the kinds of really innovative pedagogy which he enjoys i look forward to hearing about the details of the new course indeed at this rate i may have to stop referring to jeremy as a superprofessor perhaps it s not the moocs themselves are the problem then but just the massive part or maybe even just the corporate part these days i actually think it might be interesting to design a non massive online history course that would supplement rather than replace other traditional history classes keeping to that principle would require what s left of moocs to remain in the hands of caring faculty like jeremy rather than the folks down the road at penn who have actually invested in coursera hoping to use west philadelphia as a base to colonize the world moocs as pedagogical experiments rather than moocs as weapons it could happen those nice canadian people have been trying to do things that way for years jeremy s canadian it all kind of makes sense now doesn t it share this print opens in new window print share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit more email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading comments 2 comments categories moocs world history mooc why most moocs are boring for nearly everybody involved 13 07 2014 white collar professionals too are subject to routinization and degradation proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals instantiated in a system or process and then handed back to a new class of workers clerks who replace the professionals matthew b crawford shop class as soulcraft p 44 this post has more views than any other on the history of this blog i have no idea why ok i think it s because it shows up pretty high on the results list when somebody googles coursera or udacity because it gets about 100 hits a day these days but why that post gets all the traffic as opposed to anything else that i ve written about moocs is indeed a mystery to me even though i consider it to be a ra...
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