The Campus Tsunami!

Dear Commons Community,

I am just back from giving a talk to colleagues at Lehman College on blended learning and what do I see in the New York Times but a column by David Brooks on online learning in higher education entitled The Campus Tsunami.  Essentially Brooks echoes President John Hennessy of Stanford who summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”  What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Brooks comments and asks questions:

“Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?

If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?”

His conclusion:

“it will be easier to be a terrible university on the wide-open Web, but it will also be possible for the most committed schools and students to be better than ever.”

A must read for those interested in online education!!

Tony

President Obama Issues Executive Order Protecting Veterans from Unscrupulous For-Profit Colleges!

Dear Commons Community,

President Barack Obama signed an executive order yesterday designed to protect veterans, current members of the military, and their families from deceptive marketing practices that some for-profit schools are using to target them for their military benefits. In his speech, Obama promised to put an end to recruiting strategies that he said “swindle and hoodwink” our troops and their families into making decisions against their best interests.

Here are a few of the recruiting habits Obama highlighted:

  • “They’ll say you don’t have to pay a dime for your degree, but once you register, they’ll suddenly make you sign up for a high-interest student loan.”
  • “They’ll say that if you transfer schools, you can transfer credits. But when you try to actually do that, you suddenly find out that you can’t.”
  • “They’ll say they’ve got a job placement program when, in fact, they don’t.”

Obama highlighted a particularly egregious case: “One of the worst examples of this is a college recruiter who had the nerve to visit a barracks at Camp Lejeune and enroll Marines with brain injuries — just for the money. These Marines had injuries so severe some of them couldn’t recall what courses the recruiter had signed them up for.”

Other scandals involve for-profit schools that have  used dishonest tactics to lure troops and veterans. The Student Veterans of America(SVA) recently discovered that, in an effort to appear “veteran friendly,” several schools established fake SVA chapters that were run by for-profit school administrators.

Obama said that it is time to put an end to scams and to follow through on the promise to give troops “an America that will forever fight for you, just as you fought for us.”

Thank you, Mr. President!  We also need an executive order for the for-profit colleges who scam non-veterans!

Tony