terrapinsanity.com

Interim Provost Ann Wylie just rolled out the Blended Learning Initiative, one of the last of the ideas initiated by the bean counters in her predecessor’s operation (and itself a sign that she has not yet flushed all the non-academic bean counters from her own administration.) It is another academic disaster in the making.

First, just what the heck is “blended learning” and why is it here? From the web site, we don’t actually learn what it is, but we find it “involves a combination of face-to-face and online interactions, built on a rich collaboration environment that includes a variety of information sources such as multimedia data, social technologies (such as blogs, Wikis, Twitter), simulations, and visualization for individual and collaborative learning and for team projects.”

Whew! That all sounds cutting edge and zesty, but let’s cut to what is really going on: reducing expense of content delivery in courses, and by that we mean, spreading the biggest expense – faculty time and attention, as it should be – across more students. Engagement – quality time shared between top students and top scholars at the flagship – will be reduced as students interact more with software created by those scholars (or more likely staff that is less costly) and teams (which is to say, students will lead each other through experiences that once involved a faculty member.)

It used to be that parents, paying top dollar for what should be top experiences, became agitated upon learning that content delivery was a job for not the faculty but the faculty’s teaching assistants and graduate students. We think they won’t be any happier to learn their tuition checks will soon buy only a virtual faculty member and tweets. (We’re eager to know how junior English fares when conducted in 140 character chunks.) In the long run, why pay top dollar for College Park when you can get the same on-line experience for less at UMUC?

Okay, so there really are some innovative educational approaches apart from traditional methods that could be tried in some classes, and we look forward to seeing if campus can bring some of them along. Unfortunately – and this is the real basis for our cynicism – none of this scales, and all of it is today driven by the bean counters.

We know of several cutting-edge practices being pioneered here (interestingly, none of them represented in this Blended Learning albatross) that have the effect of giving students more value out of each unit of professor time – but that is because of the professor, not the technology! These are gifted scholars who can materialize a mesmerizing presentation out of thin air, and do more with a simple piece of chalk and stone slate. Let these faculty pour themselves into crafting superior lab experiences and it all becomes better. But what percentage of our faculty are in this league?

Provost Wylie just rolled out an initiative that was demanded (and launched internally) by her predecessor’s bean counters, under the banner of excellence promised by a few gifted scholars, but without any consideration of how this can’t scale to implementation by the rest of us in College Park, who will be spread even more thinly. Its like pointing to a high-end concept car as evidence that super performance is possible, and then using this evidence as justification to ration gas to the rest of the aging delivery fleet.

There is a pattern. Farvardin’s Gen Ed program featured several cost-saving (even if shallower) measures that don’t scale. Mandated volunteerism, for example – students garnering credits for work as interns, appropriate to their discipline, are thought to be a way to cash a tuition check where some bureaucrat elsewhere (instead of an expensive faculty member here) delivers the content (if there is any.) That should take a small percentage off the top of our Gen Ed load, they thought. And I-series – another advertising program that was patterned on the work product of a handful of gifted scholars, but based on a business model which can’t be sustained – is in the process of showing us that inspired courses once offered to only a handful of students can become pretty pedestrian once you need an army of ordinary faculty to offer it to huge sections open to the masses.

Bean counters want more with less, and like all the temp staff occupying offices over in Central these days, Wylie accommodated administrative and political over academics. Sadly, get past the advertising hype and you’ll see that we will do less with less.