Open Education: A Study in Disruption - Softcover

Van Mourik Broekman, Pauline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783482095 ISBN 13: 9781783482092

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014

Synopsis

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives? Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised 'pirate' libraries and 'free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the founding co-editor of Mute, for which she continues to work as contributing editor and publisher. She has written and spoken widely on culture and technology, the politics of institution-building and publishing magazines in the "digital era." Gary Hall is director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at the Hybrid Publishing Lab-Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany. He is also co-founder (in 1999) of the open access journal Culture Machine, a pioneer of OA in the humanities, and co-founder (in 2006) of Open Humanities Press, which was the first open access publisher explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory. He is the author and editor of several books on digital culture and the idea of the university, the best known of which is Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota University Press, 2008) Ted Byfield is associate director, Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, New School University, United States. Shaun Hides is Head of Department of Media and Co-director of the Disruptive Media Learning Lab, Coventry University, UK. Simon Worthington is a research associate at the Hybrid Publishing Consortium-Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Open Education

A Study in Disruption

By Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides, Simon Worthington

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon Worthington
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-209-2

Contents

Preface, 
1. The University in the Twenty-First Century, 
2. A Radically Different Model of Education and the University, 
3. The Educational Context, 
4. Open Education, 
5. Open Education Typologies, 
6. Towards a Philosophy of Open Education, 
7. Diverse 'Disruption', 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

The University in the Twenty-First Century

There are at least two reasons it is important to experiment, critically and creatively, with the institution of the university at this particular moment in its history. In the chapter 'The Rise of the Global University' in his 2009 book, Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross predicts that it is only a matter of time before we see the beginnings of a global university on the 'model of the global corporation' such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Elsevier, and Pearson. He proceeds to present a somewhat gloomy vision of the future for universities if, in their drive to be ever more business-like and profit-orientated, they continue to follow the corporate model:

In this labor-intensive industry (the majority of education costs go to teaching labor), the instructional budget is where an employer will seek to minimize costs first, usually by introducing distance learning or by hiring offshore instructors at large salary discounts. Expatriate employees — assigned to set up an offshore facility, train locals, and provide credibility for the brand — will be a fiscal liability to be offloaded at the first opportunity. If the satellite campus is located in the same industrial park as Fortune 500 firms, then it will almost certainly be invited to produce customized research for these companies, again at discount prices. It will only be a matter of time before an administrator decides that it will be cost-effective to move some domestic research operations to the overseas branch to save money.

As far as the domestic record goes, higher education institutions have followed much the same trail as subcontracting in industry — first, the outsourcing of all non-academic campus personnel, then the casualization of routine instruction, followed by the creation of a permatemps class on short-term contracts, and the preservation of an ever-smaller core of tenure-track full-timers, crucial to the brand prestige of the collegiate name. Downward salary pressure and eroded job security are the inevitable upshot.

As Ross's account of the U.S. domestic situation suggests, we should take care not to console ourselves too quickly with the thought that such globalised corporate scenarios belong to an as yet still distant future. In fact just one year after the publication of Nice Work If You Can Get It, an article in the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education detailed how the director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston was outsourcing the grading of undergraduate papers to Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., whose employees are mostly in Asia:

The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task — and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's [teaching assistants] can. The graders working for

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783482095
• ISBN 13: 9781783482092
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126