https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2019/03/18/trump-is-trying-to-change-the-meaning-of-instructor-and-its-not-good/?utm_source=FACEBOOK&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Valerie%2F#1223291144a6
On the best days, it feels impossible to
keep tabs on Trump’s policy constructions and demolitions. It’s
happening everywhere you look and in places no one is looking.
In higher education, in the Department of Education (ED), it’s not
that no one is looking, it’s that few people understand the scope and
impact of the proposals now under consideration there. And too few
people are talking about them.
“People have a general expectation for what a college is doing, what
it should be, what it means to be authorized, accredited, what a credit
is, what a teacher is,” said Clare McCann,
Deputy Director for Federal Policy, Education Policy at New America, a
policy think tank. “The proposed changes being considered weaken all of
these things at the same time and can fundamentally change what a
college looks like.”
That’s not hyperbole.
ED is currently undergoing what’s called negotiated rulemaking –
negreg for short – seeking public comment on a smorgasbord of proposals
to change the meaning of terms in education, literally rewriting what
colleges can do, what degrees mean and how students will be taught. One
of the proposed NEGREG rules would change the very meaning of
“instructor.”
“Now,” McCann said, “if you’re a distance education program, those
usually doing online education, you’re required to have regular and
substantive interaction between a student and the course instructor.”
That “regular and substantive” part is in the existing rule. As are the “interaction” and “instructor” parts.
In the rule under consideration now, ED wants to weaken the
definition of “instructor” according to McCann, who’s sat in all the
public meetings so far. “They want to define instructor as instructional
team,” she said. And a team could include people such as course
mentors, advisors, course designers, even other students. The impact
would be to, “make it so a subject matter expert does not need to be the
one interacting with students in online classes,” McCann said, “Your
instructor could be almost anyone and it would essentially create an
incentive to not hire experts to teach because experts can be
expensive.”
And there’s the crux of it.
Since actual, quality interaction with a teaching professional costs
money, many providers of online education would like to not have to do
that – you know, actually pay a teacher who knows what she is talking
about.
The trend to hire cheaper teachers for online courses isn’t new. A
year ago, a marketing document released by Arizona State University, one
of the leaders in online education, gave that game away.
To prove that online programs were good for schools, ASU wrote, “Some
universities and community colleges among our case study institutions
use more adjunct or part time faculty – who tend to be less costly to
hire than tenure-track faculty – … to teach online courses.”
The difference is that, until now, schools that wanted “less costly”
teaching didn’t have federal rule-makers in their corner proposing to
change what a teacher is. Indeed, under the proposed rule, they won’t
have to worry about “less costly” teachers because, for any given class,
they won’t have to hire teachers at all – just “instructional team”
members, whatever that means. Maybe it means an hourly, outsourced
“facilitator” to check off that a student has posted in a chat room or
watched a video. Or maybe even the IT staffer who runs an army of teacher-bots to nudge online engagements.
If ED moves forward with the “instructional team” change, it, quoting
McCann again, “is basically allowing online self-study, making it
possible to get through an entire program without ever even talking to a
professor,” she said. “From a quality perspective, it’s hard to imagine
it could offer the learning experience students need.”
That’s the trade-off. The rule would allow profit-seeking
institutions or revenue-hungry schools to cut their costs in online
programs by lowering teacher quality – boosting their profits and
marketing budgets. But that will impact education quality, which is
already a highly questionable commodity in online settings.
It makes sense that the online for-profit schools and the
in-name-only non-profit ones like University of Phoenix and Grand Canyon
University would love the rule. Most of them are in the high-volume,
low-quality education game already and getting permission from the
federal government to spend even less money on actual teaching would be a
windfall. That’s clearly what President Trump and Education Secretary
DeVos want or they would not have proposed the rule.
But strangely silent thus far on this “instructional team” scheme are
schools such as Purdue and Arizona State and University of Pennsylvania
– schools that have tied their mainstream brands to online programs.
Also largely silent are those who insist online programs are top-notch.
The last thing anyone in either of those places should want is the race
to the bottom on online quality and reputation and cost that this
proposed rule would accelerate.
(Update 3/22/19) A spokesperson for Grand Canyon University
reached out to clarify that the school is a non-profit institution and
that it has not taken a position on the proposed rule change related to
instructional teams.
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