By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Distance education threatens the privacy of students and professors because online class discussions can be monitored in ways that are impossible in traditional classrooms, argues David Noble, a history professor at York University, in Toronto, and a well known critic of technology.
Mr. Noble’s latest critiques of distance education, along with revised versions of earlier salvos that first circulated online, are collected in a new book, Digital Diploma Mills (Monthly Review Press).
Mr. Noble says the privacy of students and professors online is a particularly important issue in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, because “governments have vastly enlarged their powers of surveillance, and surveillance of electronic communication in particular.”
Some software packages for delivering online courses can automatically capture and store the texts of all online class discussions, or collect detailed information about what students look at online. That worries Mr. Noble, who says that if the material is stored and archived, it could be possible for law-enforcement officials to demand transcripts of class discussions.
“Certainly administrators and political authorities will be in a position to monitor any and all such activities as never before, remotely and discreetly, without permission or acknowledgment,” writes Mr. Noble. “And they will have ready access to extensive electronic records of course content and communications.”
Much of the new material in Mr. Noble’s book focuses on the influence of the U.S. government -- and particularly the military -- on the continuing evolution of online distance education. He worries that the program could lead the military to bring greater standardization to distance education.
In particular, Mr. Noble focuses on the U.S. military’s eArmyU, a $453-million program that will allow enlisted soldiers to take courses and earn degrees online through partner colleges.
The project was announced in 2000, just as some commercial distance-education efforts by colleges and companies were beginning to falter, says Mr. Noble. He argues that the demand for online education was not as great as colleges had anticipated, and he sees the government’s project as an effort to bolster the use of technology in education.
“Throughout the history of industrial capitalism the military has served as midwife and handmaiden to private enterprise, supplying taxpayer support for technical innovation and thereafter providing a taxpayer-created market for new processes and products,” he writes. One early example, he argues, was the use of interchangeable parts in muskets, “which became the model for the so-called American system of manufacturers.”
Mr. Noble worries that the military will champion a similar logic of standardization in higher education, which he says could come at the cost of academic freedom. The kind of model for distance education that the military supports, he says, will most likely “entail the familiar patterns of command, control, and precisely specified performance, in accordance with the hallmark military procurement principles of uniformity, standardization, modularization, capital-intensivity, system compatibility, interchangeability, measurability, and accountability.”
Mr. Noble’s essays critiquing distance-education efforts, the first of which appeared online in 1997, have been credited with sparking widespread discussion about who owns and controls the intellectual-property rights to online educational materials. Mr. Noble says he hopes his essays have made administrators stop and think before rushing into the brave new world of online learning.
But the essays may have been a mixed blessing for Mr. Noble’s reputation. An appointments committee at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, recently voted against offering him a prestigious humanities appointment, prompting supporters to assert that Mr. Noble was being blackballed because of his anti-technology views. But others say Mr. Noble’s habit of taking his complaints against employers to the media is unprofessional. (See an article from The Chronicle, December 21, 2001.)
His earlier essays, revised and expanded, are presented in his new book alongside more recent efforts, so that the book presents his interpretation of the complete political history of distance education.
Many distance-education leaders have taken issue with Mr. Noble’s writings in the past, saying that he has a habit of twisting the facts to support his political beliefs.
John Sener, an independent distance-education consultant, challenges Mr. Noble’s basic assumptions about what makes a good college course. Yes, small seminar courses are ideal, he says, but many traditional college courses are now taught by graduate students, and may have hundreds of students in each course.
“His definition of what education really is is very narrow and arguably elitist, and it’s not scalable,” says Mr. Sener. “My reading of it is that he would characterize most university classrooms as a commoditization of learning ... and I think he’s wrong.”
And Mr. Sener, who serves on the Council on Academic Management for eArmyU, disagrees with Mr. Noble’s basic arguments about the dangers of the military’s project.
“They have not said to any college, to my knowledge, This is how you teach a particular course,” Mr. Sener says. “As for the specter of the military coming in and dictating course content -- that’s just not happening.”
“I think he’s confused about the role the military is playing, and overstating the effect they will have on higher-education institutions,” adds Mr. Sener.
In much of his book, Mr. Noble’s recurring complaint is against the profit motive behind online learning. Today, he says, that gold rush seems to have ended.
“I think the phenomenon is over, and the phenomenon was caused not by the pioneers and well-intentioned people who wanted to use this stuff for teaching,” Mr. Noble says in an interview. “The phenomenon was caused by the smell of money,”
But now, he says, “there is no university anywhere dreaming of initial public offerings” for online-learning operations.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
