Sat-is-fac-tion.

Before this blog turned into all-ed tech, all the time, I wrote a lot of posts about academic labor issues. To me, the question of whether to go to graduate school in the humanities falls into that category since the issue of whether you can support yourself when you’re done is probably the best reason to avoid going. Unlike Chronicle columnist William Pannapacker, I have never told a student, “Don’t go.” I have nonetheless always tried to explain to potential history grad students the economic realities they will face when they’re done. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t.

If you read the same stuff I do online, you’ve probably seen Pannapacker’s latest in Slate. However, you may not have seen this eloquent response to it by an underemployed English Ph.D named Jonathan Sench. Don’t get me wrong. I think I’m on Pannapacker’s side in just about every facet of this issue, but stuff like this just gets me all choked up:

Then in the fall of my junior year, the director of the college honors program – who’d accepted me into the program as a sophomore – called me to his office and asked me what I wanted to do when I was out of school. I told him that my plan had always been to become a high school English teacher. He asked me how that was going. Well, I said, my preparation was going along well, I’d spent a lot of time in classrooms becoming prepared and I found the coursework a little too easy.

He asked me whether I found it satisfying. This was the first time in my life that anyone had ever asked me whether the work I was doing was satisfying. There’d been jobs that I liked, like delivering flowers. There’d been jobs that paid well, like construction. There were jobs that didn’t pay well and that I didn’t like, like washing dishes. But no jobs were ever particularly satisfying to me. I didn’t know how to respond to this question about my chosen profession. My idea about teaching was that it could be satisfying and that it was within reach. I’d seen people from my church or my mom’s friends’ kids go on to be teachers. I’d imagined that one day being a teacher would allow me to stop working with chemicals and heavy machinery, to read, to influence children positively, and to live a life that involved owning a house. But was I finding it satisfying? Was that even a rabbit hole worth going down?

If there’s anything I disagree with Pannapacker on, it’s his notion that getting a tenure-track job in the humanities is like winning a lottery. Winning a lottery pays a lot more. I do, however, find being a professor to be extremely satisfying, which is precisely why I am now convinced that I will never teach online. [You just knew I'd get around to that eventually, didn't you?]

I remember when speaking in front of a live audience made me nervous. It still does under certain circumstances, but never in front of students. I particularly enjoy leading discussions because you never know where it’s going to go or what the next question is going to be. Spontaneity is key to a good discussion. Perhaps my fondest teaching moment was when one of my students threw a Coke can at another because she was so mad at something he said about the history of slavery.* I enjoy lectures precisely because, like a stand-up comedian (which I am not) I can see how they react to what I’m telling them. For that to happen, I have to be able to see the whites of their eyes.

Yes, I’ve seen the claims that online classes are better for shy students and I don’t buy it. If someone is afraid their ideas are stupid, why would it make a difference if they’re written down rather than spoken? I know plenty of people who talk far better than they write. What advantages do online classes offer them?

Certainly, online classes offer plenty of advantages to the university. Besides being cheaper to put on, they allow your employer to expand the potential labor pool to just about every underemployed Ph.D. on earth. I live in Pueblo, Colorado which has many good qualities, but alas there aren’t a lot of Ph.D.s walking its highways and byways. Send my courses online, and it doesn’t matter whether the professor is situated in Pueblo or not.** The more people willing to do your skilled job for less, the less money you’ll make doing it. And like I just said, winning the lottery pays a lot better.

Besides, I spend to much time in front of a computer as it is. Why on earth would I ever want to spend more if it gives me no satisfaction?

* Don’t worry, she missed. It was the thought that counted.

** The professors are in one place, the students are in another, the administration is in a third place counting all the money. Sweet deal, no?

“Those evil-natured robots, they’re programmed to destroy us.”*

So you thought I was kidding about replacing professors with robots? Here’s step one, as reported by Nashville Public Radio (via Tenured Radical):

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving Tennessee a $1 million grant to help college students take the most efficient steps to a degree. The grant will fund a new computerized advising program….The computer software looks at students’ transcripts and experience and suggests areas the student may be interested in – and the courses to take to follow that path.

TR adds:

When the neoliberal education professionals adjunctified higher education, I always wondered how they were going to solve the problem of not having full-time faculty available to actually meet with students.

It may take a while to get to robo-professors, but Bill Gates does have an awful lot of money.

There was an interesting article in Newsweek a while back on the question of whether robots are costing American jobs. I’m not sure I buy their conclusion, but I did find this interesting:

It’s not that robots are cheaper than humans, though often they are. It’s that they are better. “In some cases the quality requirements are so stringent that even if you wanted to have a human do the job, you couldn’t,” [Jeff] Burnstein [president of the Robotics Industry Association] says. He cites General Motors, which uses robots to lay a bead of sealant on windshields, because humans can’t do the job as precisely.

Who thinks this advisor program will be better than an actual advisor? Raise your hand! I thought not.

The key takeaway from that distinction ought to be obvious: there are good technologies out there that make life better and there are bad technologies that make life worse for everyone except the people who are making a pretty penny selling them to unsuspecting consumers who think the future is always now. That’s why I want to start throwing furniture when I read something like this:

[F]or our students there is a definite “cool factor” we can’t ignore if we want to be successful teachers in the modern classroom. Whether first-year assistant professors or senior scholars, showing that you can use and understand the technologies of the world that students live in buys you credibility and respect for everything else you want to teach. I say this as someone who has read thousands of student evaluations and discussed this issue with many administrative colleagues. A mathematics professor gives this example: “If a student comes to you asking for help in using their graphingcs calculator and you reply, ‘I never learned that,’ they instantly feel you don’t respect them and are out of touch.”

Although anybody who’s taken up reading this space in just the last month might be surprised to learn it, I am not a Luddite. I have a blog, for Pete’s sake. On this blog, I’ve written quite carefully about how I use PowerPoint and the wonders of Zotero. I enjoy reading the people I follow on Twitter more than I do any news site on the web. While I’m on Facebook, I now kind of wish I could get off – which is precisely the point. I distinguish between good and bad technologies, while the logic of the last quote is that if all the kids are doing it – whatever it is – then we professors ought to be doing it too.

Despite what you may read in the Chronicle, I’m not the only one out there who approaches all the hype about ed tech with some skepticism. Here’s Lora Helvie-Mason, whose excellent post is more about personal technology, but I think the sentiment there is still the same:

In my opinion, the trick is to balance the innovations with the pedagogy and purposeful intent to enhance the work we do as educators (and to avoid getting overly captivated by the glistening new technology that is continually available without first considering what it brings to the educational environment).

[emphasis in original]

I can’t wait to see the evil robots try to make that kind of distinction.

* Darn the Flaming Lips for disabling embedding on my inspiration for the title to this post.

“I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

Well, sort of. I am starting to feel a bit like the Peter Finch character in “Network” in the sense that whenever I write about online education or technological pedagogy in a cynical manner, my ratings go up. Besides, how can you not help but get mad when you read stuff like this (via Ray Schroeder’s Twitter feed*):

Students increasingly expect to use mobile devices, social networking sites and other tools to find information in class. And faculty have to look for different ways to incorporate these powerful computing tools into educational discussions.

I hear that second graders increasingly expect to get more recess time and that their teachers must give it to them or else they’ll be swept away by the tide of history. OK, maybe that’s unfair since college students are adults, but since when do students get to call the shots about how they’re going to be taught? If they want better food in the cafeteria, I’ll sign the petition. If they want to get university clothing made in sweatshops out of the bookstore, I’ll march with them. However, under no circumstances will I let them spend my entire class period fiddling with their phones. Sheesh. Next thing you know they’ll be punishing professors for enforcing rules about plagiarism. Oh wait…

While I’m in full Peter Finch mode, let me just note that stereotyping academics in order to cram technological de-skilling down our throats doesn’t help my mood:

“At the heart of every faculty member is a curious kid who’s a little geeky and really fascinated by the world around him or her,” [Gardner] Campbell [director of professional development and innovative initiatives at Virginia Tech] said.

Or perhaps we’re all just a bunch of “self-important, delusional jackasses.” While both those stereotypes undoubtedly apply to some of us [I freely admit that both those comments describe me to at least some extent.], there’s no way they apply to all of us. But if the public comes to believe that we are all just a bunch of self-important children, the few prerogatives that we have left will quickly disappear.

In other words, once the war on secondary school teachers is over, they’ll be coming for the college professors next. Heck, if you’re adjunct faculty, they probably started coming for you while you were still in elementary school. You just didn’t know it yet. Therefore, when I read something like this:

So most faculty resist new technology to a point because it doesn’t make sense to them…

I see the first stages of an infantilization campaign afoot. “College professors? They don’t know how to teach. All they care about is all that research that nobody is going to read anyways. Technology will save us all, and at a cheaper price too!”

Well, I’m not buying it. So while I have not yet reached the stage of opening my window and screaming at the world (Ah…if my office only had a window!), if this technological stuff is the only thing that gets me motivated to write blog posts I plan on continuing to listen to my inner-Faye Dunaway for the foreseeable future.

* I make this attribution here because if you’re really interested in this technological stuff (that means you MfD), you really ought to be reading it too.

The Devil is in the details.

Uh oh. It seems that Historiann linked here, which means that traffic at this blog is in the process of quadrupling for the day. While my first inclination is to go back and check my last ten posts for typos, I’ll just note that evidence of the current hobbyhorse of mine to which she is referring can be found here.

Conveniently, I’m interested in the same article that she is, which I saw yesterday too. If you’re not arriving here from her place, it’s about the tendency of those taking online courses to drop out at a greater rate than in those closes given face-to-face. However, I didn’t really think of it as interesting until I saw this early this morning:

I had made an off-hand (i.e., unresearched) claim that online higher education is simply inferior to a traditional, in-person experience, and used Franklin (which offers both traditional and online versions of several of its undergraduate and graduate programs) as an example of the difference. Dr. Decker wrote to me, insisting that I was wrong, and that outcome assessments showed the two versions of the educational experience to be indistinguishable. I found his adamant assertion both interesting (Dr. Decker is a graduate of Grinnell College and a Wharton M.B.A.—you can’t get more face-to-face than that) and provocative. He clearly underwent a conversion of sorts, and he’s now a firm believer in online learning. Grateful for his prompt, I decided to do my homework and make a more considered argument. Maybe, as a humanist, I’ve just been socialized to assume that traditional pedagogy is superior to any teaching and learning that could be done online. What I learned has at least tempered my skepticism.

That’s dated from July 12th, about a week before this new study came out. Famous last words, eh? I should note that the author of those words, Frank Donoghue, is also the author of one of the best books on the plight of today’s professor ever written. It just goes to show that even the best of us can get swallowed up by the hype.

In order to avoid such a fate, I’d suggest it’s time to ask, once again, is our children learning? When attempting to answer that question, always remember that the Devil is in the details.

I suspect that the studies that Donoghue has seen meet all the expectations that today’s educational assessment experts want in a piece of propaganda. I’m guessing they’ve been peer-reviewed; that there’s a control group; that both groups have been given the same surveys and multiple-choice tests; that there’s a lot of math involved.

How exactly does this apply to what I do all day? The only tests I give my students are in survey class and even they are all essay tests. How should I quantify good analysis? Most of my classes involve extensive, face-to-face discussions about documents and books. After those discussions, my students write papers geared specifically towards those books. Working together in small groups, we discuss those papers extensively in class, sometimes over the course of multiple drafts. If I’ve assigned a research paper, I’ll walk them over to the library myself, where are expert librarians show them where to find sources.

I can’t wait for someone to explain to me how all of that can be done better online. Better yet, I can’t wait to see the study comparing my approach to the entirely online version of the same class. My guess is that anyone who cared enough to duplicate that kind of pedagogy online would find their students dropping out of the course like flies, particularly since it seems they have a tendency to do so already.

It’s faculty! Soylent Green is faculty!

Over the weekend, I saw this story about a crazy band of kids near Pittsburgh who are putting a show on in the old barn out back starting their own college. When I tweeted that story, Jonathan Dresner (who is apparently the Kevin Bacon of all historical tweeters) pointed me to a similar, entirely intellectual exercise that Tim Burke wrote a long, long time ago. I wish all these folks well in their respective endeavors, but I’m afraid Burke put his finger on the problem right out of the starting gate back when he wrote up his vision of college for the 21st Century:

I’m serious about it: if you happen to know where there’s 500 million dollars lying around, I’d very gladly try to be part of building this institution for real.

The main problem here is not that Burke would have trouble finding $500 million lying around (although he would). The problem is that even if he could find $500 million dollars lying around, anyone who might give him that kind of money would not be interested in the same kinds of things that Burke cares about; most notably actually teaching anybody anything. In a capitalist system, investors want a return on their investment and crazy notions like actually teaching people things like the liberal arts are not a real priority.

I don’t want you to think I’m writing entirely about for-profit education here. You don’t have to start an entirely new college from scratch in order to recognize that anyone with capital to invest in education (including the public sector) now expects a return on that investment sooner rather than later. As one of those “sky is falling” articles explained just recently:

The bottom line is that we’re likely to face a future where students and their families pay a lot more of the cost of a college education out of pocket. Without grants and loans as a safety net, students are probably going to make different choices than they do now (read: less expensive choices). We’re likely headed toward a future where smaller, struggling colleges need to move to new models of doing business, while elite, wealthy colleges continue to support the current model.

Why is it that whenever I read the Chronicle these days I feel like I’m living through a scene out of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine? If we all cower in the corner and administrators get to remake the university unfettered by the interests of the professoriate, they are going to eat us for lunch. Soylent Green is faculty! Our salaries will be gobbled up by infrastructure costs that aim to make our universities competitive in the 21st century and they’ll tell the students that they’re implementing the latest in educational technology even as that technology destroys the value of the education they provide.

Unfortunately, nobody is going to hand the faculty $500 million to remake the university from the ground up because in their view we are the cost center. Here’s my pal Music for Deckchairs summarizing Dean Dad better than Dean Dad originally made the point:

As Dean Dad explains, universities are currently having a problem with something called Baumol’s cost disease. In any service industry where the value or benefit of the service provided doesn’t increase much over time, but the delivery cost has to rise in step with the overall labour market, then something has be done either to manage those rising costs, or to justify them. Casualisation is a familiar strategy to try to cut back on actual costs while delivering the same service, ideally concealing the strategy itself from the customer.

Our job then is to be like Charlton Heston and tell the truth. We don’t even have to tell them that Soylent Green is faculty. We just have to explain why Soylent Green isn’t particularly nutritious. Seriously, the primary reason that I don’t go totally Luddite on this entire profession is that if given the opportunity, I don’t think the average bean counter is going to remake the university very well at all.

If I remember my English labor history well enough (and it has been a while since I last read my E.P. Thompson), the Luddites started breaking machinery not just because the power loom was driving them into unemployment, it was driving them into unemployment while producing more of a superior product. Raise your hand if you think the academic equivalent of an automatic checkout machine is going to be a superior product? I don’t think so. When only eight of the jobs expected to see the greatest growth between 2008 and 2018 require a college degree, getting an actual education when you go to college will be more important than ever if you want one of the few good jobs left in America.

If faculty fight academic deskilling and technological unemployment not just for ourselves, but for education’s sake, maybe – just maybe – we can actually save higher education better than the people trying to make a buck off of selling our corpses to the highest bidder.

Why take history classes when you can Google anything?

My dean, a guy who I usually love to death, said something at the online education summit I went to a while back that really got on my nerves. He told a story about a student who asked him, “Why do I have to drive in all the way from La Junta just to watch a video?” To the Dean, this is an excellent reason to implement online education immediately. To me, this is a good reason to ask, “Why is someone showing videos for an entire class period?”

Yes, there are good reasons to do such a thing. I’m doing it a couple of times to break up the two-and-a-half-hour per day summer survey course I’m teaching at the moment, but now I’m wondering if I took the wrong approach entirely when I tried to think of the best retort to the Dean’s argument.

Here’s my new one: Since when do students get to decide when they do and don’t have to go to class? After all, if we let them watch videos at home, why can’t they just stay home in La Junta and Google everything they’d learn in history class? Why not just reda a lot of books and skip college entirely? This post on Nick Carr’s Rough Type was my inspiration for this epiphany:

The study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia University; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard. They conducted a series of four experiments aimed at answering this question: Does our awareness of our ability to use Google to quickly find any fact or other bit of information influence the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” The findings suggest, the researchers write, “that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology.”

To me, this is just added justification for my decision to chuck my survey textbook. After all, you can look up just about any historical fact you want on Google and get a pretty decent description of what you’re inquiring about if you’re at all discriminating about picking the web pages where you get your information. It would be cliché for me to note here that history is about more than facts as a retort to argument, so I won’t pursue that angle. Indeed, I still teach a lot of specific facts in my survey course, but to me other aspects of our discipline are much more important.

My method has always been to pick out a few facts that I think are particularly important so as to narrow the known universe of specific facts that they have to know – between four and eight or so from each lecture. Then I’ll quiz them on those terms five times during the semester, and cover the whole semester’s terms as part of the final. To me, this easily beats picking something off page 243 of an 800 page textbook and expecting them to be able to spit it back to me. I have no doubt that my students prefer it this way too.

My responsibility when teaching history this way is to pick the best facts I can. Notice how I didn’t say “most important,” I mean the best facts I can. The terms I pick are all designed to be indicative of larger trends, so hopefully they’re easier to remember. As Carr explains:

If a fact stored externally were the same as a memory of that fact stored in our mind, then the loss of internal memory wouldn’t much matter. But external storage and biological memory are not the same thing. When we form, or “consolidate,” a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge. The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more. As Emerson understood, the essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but “the cohesion” which ties all those facts and experiences together.

Students have to go to lecture so that I can explain to them what those associations are, or better yet, they can make more personal associations entirely on their own. I dare you to find an evil robot professor who can do that well, let alone any piece of pedagogical software.

It’s certainly not going to happen if all you do is show movies.

“Time is but the stream I go a fishing in.”

That is the Henry David Thoreau quote on the t-shirt I snagged at Walden Pond a couple of weeks ago. I love it because it’s both historical and philosophical at the same time. It also reminds me of why I’ve always admired HDT. The guy refused to live at the pace that everybody else kept.

Noted higher educational contrarian Richard Vedder, on the other hand, doesn’t want me to be able to live this way:

In professions like architecture, medicine, or accounting, practitioners typically show up for work by nine in the morning and work to after five in the afternoon with a short lunch break, increasing their hours during busy periods (e.g., medical emergencies for physicians, tax season for accountants). They take three weeks or so of vacation a year. In short, their work schedule resembles that of blue-collar workers, non-professional office staff, and even most government workers.

Why shouldn’t professors be held to the same standard? Sure, they need to be out of their offices to teach classes and occasionally to attend scholarly meetings (most of which are largely expensive anachronisms in this day of electronic dissemination of knowledge), and also to attend meetings (of which there are vastly too many owing to our peculiar system of “shared governance”). Rarely these days do they need to be in the library, given advances in the online availability of scholarly resources. Yet, the typical faculty member at a moderately high-quality university spends, I suspect, no more than 10 hours a week in her/his office–often for only 35 weeks a year.

Any community college professors or adjuncts reading that last bit must be laughing their asses off right now. I ask for no pity in noting that Vedder assessment is laughably wrong in my case too because people like me generally drive ourselves.

Still, Vedder’s piece also strikes me as pretty good evidence why bean counters should never be placed in charge of higher educational institutions as they know nothing about quality control. Teaching more classes (or more students in the classes that you already have) invariably means you can’t teach the students you have nearly as well. Vedder seems to think there’s a huge chunk of time in our days during which we’re all drinking mai tais at poolside. Since there isn’t, something’s gotta give and given a choice between family who are forever and students who are temporary, which one do you think most of us will pick?

My department has successfully argued for and gotten a 40-student cap in survey courses not because we’re all lazy but because we’ve found that anything higher is way too impersonal. The more that I get the chance to talk with them rather than at them, the more likely it is that they’ll keep coming back for more. Good teaching doesn’t scale up.

Which leads me, yet again, to the topic of distance education. Who says we have to be in our offices in order to be working? One of the reasons I don’t want to teach online is that I prefer as much as possible to keep my work at work and my fun at home. Why on earth should anyone teaching online be expected to keep banker’s hours? Vedder’s interest in online libraries and videoconferencing demonstrates to me that his interest in keeping our butts on the seats in our offices is nothing more than pure spite.

If you’ll excuse me now, since my class is done for the day, I’m going to go a fishing for a while.

I’m not afraid of ladders. I’m afraid of falling.

I went to our Provost’s online education summit a couple of days ago and I’m pleased to announce that the evil plan to replace us all with robots has not kicked in…yet. It felt like I was the only cynic in the room, but I pressed on anyways.

When I asked the Margaret Soltan memorial question about people taking your online classes for you, I actually got a couple of responses. The first was a good one. If you’re teaching via video hookup, that can’t happen. But what percentage of online classes are taught via video hookup? I didn’t think the second response was nearly as good. Yes, hybrid classes prevent these kinds of security problems, but hybrid classes aren’t the issue here. Heck, I teach hybrid classes now.

The thing that I found most interesting about the entire two-hour experience was the number of times various advocates of online education invoked student demand as the reason to move gallantly forward into our online future. Students want to learn in their pajamas, gosh darned it, so we need to give them that opportunity! I couldn’t help but wonder if we in higher education would seemingly all be thinking this way if state universities around the country got the financial support that they deserve. Since they don’t, we have to cater to student demand in many ways we might not do so otherwise, including offering everything online.

In Texas, this kind of attitude has finally created some pushback. Margaret Soltan herself titled a post with part of this most excellent quote from a report by a dean at UT-Austin arguing against Governor Rick Perry’s market-oriented reforms:

The business-style, market-oriented approach embedded in such recommendations would drive top students and faculty members away from UT and diminish its standing among major universities, the report says. Moreover, it says, the recommendations overemphasize the student’s role as “customer” at the expense of the more vital role of “learner.”

“The higher education experience is not akin to shopping on iTunes or visiting Banana Republic,” the report says, adding that “the campus is not a marketplace.”

Online education would not exist if it weren’t for the need (not the desire, but the need) for universities to seek out new student markets. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, unless it becomes a vehicle for excessive pandering.

I’m not afraid of ladders. I’m afraid of falling. I’m not afraid of online education. I’m afraid of what online education will become if we in public higher education continue in our current “the student is always right because we need every warm body we can get” mode.

By the way, at the end of the meeting the Provost asked for volunteers to join an online education task force to implement his evil plan discuss the future of online education at our university. I volunteered, notorious do-gooder that I am. I figure there really ought to be a cynic on that committee to keep them honest. But as I don’t expect that committee to even get its membership finalized before the start of the fall semester, I hereby promise to write about something other than online education in my next post. So help me, God.

Anybody got any good history topics worth discussing?

A machine that would go of itself.*

Last week, I took a question from Dan Allosso, “What’s to stop us from teaching online?”, the wrong way. I read it as a point about credentials, when what he really meant was this:

I’m looking at a very bleak market for traditional employment. I’ll have a PhD, I’ll have teaching fields, and possibly most important, I’ll have the all-important “platform” that agents and editors look for when processing non-fiction queries. But I probably won’t have a teaching gig. What’s to stop me from going direct to the market, with my own content on the web?

The answer to that question, Dan, is absolutely nothing. You can historicize all you want online (and I can think of a few people who’ve gained some prominence doing so), but the operative question should be how much are people willing to pay for Dan’s well-informed opinions. Unless he can get a bunch of people in other disciplines together and get that group accredited, the answer to that last question is almost certainly not enough money for Dan to live on. That’s because having a Ph.D. in history makes you labor, not management.

The people who can bring a bunch of scholars together and make a university out of it, oftentimes shadow universities only marginally connected to their original bricks and mortar institutions, are administrators and unfortunately many of them are thinking much bigger than any of us mere content providers. Follow me as I take you down the dark path of contemporary business advice literature.

Have you ever read The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss? I can’t find my copy at the moment so I can’t quote any of it here, but it will absolutely crack you up if you can make your way through it. For my purposes here, this is my summary of Ferriss’ plan for making it in life:

1. Find something that people want to buy.
2. Outsource sale of said product to a web hosting company somewhere.
3. Outsource your personal life to Your Man In India.
4. Check your e-mail for only four hours each week.
5. Go surfing while the money rolls in.

This plan won’t work if you’re teaching online courses. As the Deseret News explained a few days back:

Weber State said at least right now, it takes as much time, if not more time, out of the professor’s day to teach an online course. Not only are the teachers often in constant contact with students, answering their questions and concerns, but they are also vigilantly adding more interactive tools to their classes.

The operative phrase in that paragraph is “at least right now.” At the moment, it takes more time to teach online classes, but this suggests that someday we can look forward to the four-hour work week when professors can sit back and let the classes essentially teach themselves. Leaving aside the question of whether students will actually learn anything those classes (which strikes me as a rather big aside), the problem with this scenario is that once we’ve reached the point when the classes can teach themselves, why are they going to have to hire professors to teach them in the first place?

In short, it’s administrators who are putting Ferriss’ philosophy into action, not the faculty. Education is their product and faculty are the outsourcing service at the end of the telephone line. While they’re out learning how to surf or skydive, we’ll all be staring at our respective computer screens praying that we still have a job next semester.

Think this won’t happen to you? You say they can’t teach music online? That’s where faculty productivity evaluation enters into the equation. If you can’t teach it online, they won’t want to teach it. Besides, those humanities students with their petty humanist complaints about justice and the like take far too much time away from learning how to skydive.

* With apologies to Michael Kammen.