Useful Information From Nick Carbone
Subject: [TechRhet] Harcourt College Criticized
Date: 8/28/00 11:41 AM
Received: 8/28/00 11:45 AM
From: Nick Carbone, nick_carbone@hotmail.com
Reply-To: TechRhet@egroups.com
To: TechRhet@egroups.com
A while ago, maybe a year or so, maybe longer, back when most
of this list was conversing on ACW, we got on the subject of Harcourt
College, a division of Harcourt publishing. As usual, we decried
its course-in-a-box approach, and other relative evils. Anyway,
by way of an update, the State Board of Higher Ed. in Massachusett's
recently contracted with Harcourt College to offer online degrees.
Harcourt College is being examined by an accreditation team (which
is lead by, because of his experience in creating a degree program
that uses online courses, no doubt, Paul LeBlanc, president of
Marlboro College and the Marlboro Graduate Center <where I
teach an online course>, and more to the point, a longtime
member of the C&W community).
That's the background in a few strokes.
I wanted to call your attention to a piece in today's Boston Globe
(http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/240/metro/Learning_needs_a_human_faceP.shtml)
written by Ellen McNamara, a local columnist here. She goes after
the whole enterprise. Here's her start:
***************************************
Remember correspondence courses that promised you the equivalent
of a Harvard education ''from the comfort of your own home?''
A new brand of the old hucksterism was legitimized last week when
the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education gave degree-granting
authority to the first for-profit, online college in the Northeast.
Harcourt Higher Education is a subsidiary of the Newton-based
publishing conglomerate, Harcourt General Inc. It is not affiliated
with any accredited college. It has no track record in teaching.
It's a start-up, gambling that there is profit to be mined in
the public's infatuation with new technology.
You don't have to be a computer-phobic Luddite to have some doubts
about a university without classrooms and a faculty without faces.
The rush to embrace this virtual college - the board approved
a November start date with little input from educators - reflects
the kind of thinking that has elevated the standardized test to
god-like status. The Internet, like the MCAS, is a tool to supplement
traditional education, not supplant it. Computers are an efficient
means of delivering facts to students, just as standardized tests
are a handy method of retrieving them. But education is more than
information gathering.
********************************************
I've only excerpted the first few paragraphs here, but I thought
her criticisms are worth noting because they combine two types
of complaint. One, is against online learning in general--colleges
do it because it's cheaper, it trivializes learning, it can't
replicate meeting face to face, the Stoll/Noble school of critique
(she in fact quotes Stoll). The other is against Harcourt, a publisher,
for attempting this in the first place, and this second line of
critique is similar to the kinds of criticisms many of us made
on this list a while back. We rejected the course-in-a-box approach
this represents, that fact that all courses use Harcourt books,
and that the curriculum is not designed by faculty.
I'm kind of curious to see how this venture goes. There seems
to be more and more outsourcing (how's that for an ugly term)
of teaching these days. I recall reading somewhere that some schools
outsource their remedial programs to outfits like Sylvan (though
some U's have always outsourced that to Community Colleges and
still do). It's an interesting trend, and I'm not sure what the
balance is. How much of the trend is because faculty are too slow
to change and how much of it is because new technologies seem
to make it possible for non-traditional entities--like publishers,
testing service companies, and tutoring outfits--to enter into
the teaching business.
I almost said enter into the course design _and_ teaching business,
but publishers, at least, have always been in the course design
business to some extent. Most textbooks either imply, support,
or suggest, a course design. There are some books, such as the
various guides to writing (St. Martin's
Guide by Axelrod and Cooper, Prentice Hall Guide by Steve Reid,
Writing the Information Superhighway by Butler and Condon, for
example), which can in fact be used as a course scaffold that
a teacher can, if she wants, follow almost page by page. Still,
the difference in this mode of design is that publishers usually
seek or find good classroom teachers (Axelrod & Cooper, Reid,
Condon and Butler in this example), and help them recreate for
the college market what they do. It's not altruistic to be sure,
but at least it's in part faculty driven.
Though I suppose Harcourt will claim all its courses were designed
by practicing teachers too. But somehow it feels different, what
they've done. Though I'm having trouble articulating precisely
what the difference is. I wonder where the distinctions really
are and how to tell them apart. Both as a teacher, and as someone
who now works for a publisher.
Nick
nick_carbone@hotmail.com