- The administration wishes to increase revenue, which comes primarily from tuition.
- The administration supposes that the students are looking primarily for credentials, to be gained as quickly as possible.
- The administration infers that students prefer online courses.
- The administration considers that students who cannot get the credentials as quickly and conveniently at UMUC will enroll with competitors instead.
- The faculty thinks that it would be good to get paid better to teach.
- The faculty thinks that it would be good to see the occasional student face to face, and for more weeks per class than eight.
About thirty years ago I took classes at UMUC, for I wished to learn about computers, about programming mostly. I think it was only the last class I took there that was supposed to have a distance-learning component, for the benefit of students at other sites; but it didn't work well and may have been dropped. The classes I took were all at the campus in College Park. I did not in fact acquire a credential--I think I could have with one more class. But I did learn a certain amount about programming and generally about computers.
A few years later I taught one course there several times. These were not online classes. I discovered, as most adjuncts must, that the payment for the first class or two, reckoned against the hours one spends, amounts to something less than minimum wage. I enjoyed the teaching even so.
The only persons I ever met, not heads of departments, that I knew to make or have made a living as UMUC faculty were a couple of accountants, who had previously taught for the school in Europe at US military bases. The instructors for my classes were working engineers or programmers, with the occasional graduate student. Generally they were good to very good. Most must have made far more at a day job than they did teaching. I sympathize with the adjuncts there now; but as far as I know the reliance on adjuncts is not new at UMUC.
The last time I thought about UMUC before the Post's story was some months ago. Out of curiosity to see where ESL students might advance their education, I looked up the tuition and fees at some local community colleges. I tried to look up the tuition for classes at UMUC also and could not find the information--the school site offers a "Time and Tuition Estimator" for the cost of a degree program, but does not make it easy to find the price per credit hour. Thirty years ago, UMUC was not so coy.
I was an adjunct in the English department at UMUC from 1999 to 2009. When I began, it was truly charming: I got to teach upper-level medieval literature classes on the College Park and Shady Grove campuses. They were the exact counterparts of the classes on the books at College Park, and I tried to make them at least as challenging. I got to write my own syllabus, choose my own books, and run my classes more or less as I saw fit.
ReplyDeleteOver the course of my decade there, the face-to-face classes got phased out in favor of "hybrid" classes, followed by standardized, eight-week online courses. No more 14 weeks devoted to Chaucer; no more 14 weeks devoted to the thousand-year evolution of the Arthurian legend; and so on. And no more final exams, only "authentic assessments." There was a constituency in our region for those traditional, face-to-face classes, but the university didn't much prioritize the interests of actual Marylanders.
Toward the end of my time there, the school moved to a shiny new corporate headquarters. I was asked to come in and create COGs (Curriculum Outcome Guides), the outlines for the sparse online versions of the courses I had been teaching. It was an odd feeling, building the robot that would replace me. These COGs had to include a statement of "workplace relevance." We had to throw together these online courses in a matter of hours. Curiously, I got paid more for that work than I ever did for teaching. Come to think of it, I saw catering carts rolling around that building with food that probably cost more than I made teaching.
This is the short version. Someday maybe I'll write the long version, but I hesitate because it would sound a tad too gripey. There were the superficially progressive administrators who would lecture me about "market rates" when I asked about raises in pay, and the one who mocked me when I asked about academic freedom. And then there were all the administrators with PhDs who were going along with every top-down initiative simply so they could stay in what I suppose they still thought was education. Then there were the other adjuncts who told me I needed to get with the program when I defended face-to-face classes, but who looked at me with confusion when I told them I had my first modem in 1986 and had a fair amount of experience with the pros and cons of online life.
The up side, I suppose, is that I got to see the final few years of a university providing working adults with an affordable, traditional education. Most of the folks in the English classes weren't there primarily for a credential, but they had no place in the university's business plan by the time I split.
This is largely what I inferred from the story in the Post.
DeleteThe same rage for credentials that drives UMUC at the less expensive end of the market leads to absurdities like the recent scandals at the expensive end over admission for athletes who weren't. I think that it is well for those who go into this cynically, or anyway with eyes open. I do think it is a shame for those who might have wanted better and never found that it was available or heard that it could be.
I wrote my rant before I read the actual article. Oh my gosh—I was treated like a freak in 2009 when I complained about the problems that are now apparent to everyone.
DeleteThis, from some unrelated union guy, strikes me as unfounded: "Students who sign up at UMUC are looking for a different experience. They are there because it is eight weeks, online. They want to get a degree to get a better job, and for them, that’s all that really matters." They're there because it's an affordable option with a state-university name that carries less stigma than many of the for-profit colleges do. To my knowledge, nobody asked the non-traditional college students of the state of Maryland what it is they wanted. Students are stuck following the business plan; the business plan is not necessarily a response to student demand. I regularly filled the rosters with smart, thoughtful Marylanders who would drive 90 minutes or more one way each week just to study Beowulf or Chaucer in a room with other people who gave a crap.
When we had to come up with a mission statement for the English department, the room was a flurry of catch-phrases: "Cultural literacy!" "Social justice!" When I expressed concern that the former had a politically conservative tinge to it and the latter was freighted with leftward inclinations, everyone looked at me like I was nuts. When I pushed for clear, precise English rather than business jargon, I was hopelessly alone. I was the only person in the room without a Ph.D.
UMUC was in something of a different position from most universities. It was founded to provide higher education to American military personnel overseas. Its original mission hardly allowed for anyone but the footloose to teach there. It is true that UMUC has for many years had physical plant of its own. On the other hand, it doesn't have a superstructure of academic stars teaching a seminar now and then.
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