There are some serious flaws in the current system.

- PhDs in many fields exist only to train new PhDs.

- Distance education programs, which are available to people who live anywhere in the world, charge students out of state rates if they actually take advantage of the online program but live in another state. More, they require the full-time faculty to be on campus even a the students (and adjuncts) are not.

- The cost of the infrastructure in brick and mortar schools can is rising faster than the school’s ability to increase tuition, forcing those institution who lack significant endowment to make cuts into service areas by axing programs that don’t meet certain financial goals.

- Economic forces are changing the business landscape faster than universities can change curricula. As a result, jobs exist for which no credential is required (or even available). As the credentialing function of higher education erodes, the whole concept of college as we know it will have less and less relevance.

But the interesting question is, “What will take its place?”

I agree that without the funding from the Feds, the states wouldn’t have enough for schools and research. However, theoretically, if there was no federal DOE, our federal taxes would go down, and so states could then raise the state taxes as needed for these issues. In the end there’d be less bureaucracy, and we’d all save money.

But of course, that’s theoretical, and I understand what would really happen if the federal DOE went away is that our fed taxes would stay the same to fund other issues, and then state taxes would go up. Sigh! But it doesn’t keep me from wondering if we could somehow reduce the federal DOE–maybe scale it back to its original mission of only supporting research and statistics and not policy? It’s in policy that I think the DOE oversteps its constitutional bounds the most, because the Founders knew that in education, the decisions should be made by those closest to the students.

Great comment and insight–thanks!

One issue that’s problematic is how does the US fund schools and can we trust local district (even State) governments to treat it fairly. Absent Federal funding, how can a district that’s caught in the squeeze between falling tax base and rising school costs on top of crumbling infrastructure actually afford the free, public education they’re obligated to provide? Do we owe it to the nation to make up the shortcomings? Possibly.

It seems to me that if the Feds want equal (or overriding) say on local educational policy then they darn well better start ponying up and matching state/local contributions to education on a dollar for dollar basis instead of the paltry 10% they provide now. That would take the budget for DoEd up to around $600B a year and with that kind of resource allocation, we might actually be able to rebuild schools, provide some kind of reasonable compensation for teachers, and actually move Education forward.

But I’m not sure that students in higher ed are any different than younger students, in their feelings about authority figures intruding on social spaces. We may wish it were different, but in most cases I don’t think students perceive professors as peers/collaborators/co-researchers/co-learners/or anything other than a person who wields power over their grade.

Some students in grad school are able to work through this, but even then not all. But for undergrads, I think the research indicates students perceive the power relationship between them and their professors as very unequal. And I don’t see that changing any time soon, unfortunately, because the majority of a university’s culture and policies are designed to maintain that difference. Meaning individual attempts by some professors to break through the “unequal power” wall are likely to backfire.

Thanks for keeping the conversation going. I particularly appreciated your observation that:

“trying to force a CMS to facilitate student-centered online learning is like trying to facilitate this same kind of student-centered learning in a classroom with the chairs bolted to the floor, facing the instructor. It just doesn’t work very well, although you can do it with great effort. “

If we think about the goals of CMS developers (e.g. seamless integration with SISs, efficient course content publication, secure grade booking, etc.) we shouldn’t be suprised that CMSs do a good job with those sorts of tasks. CMSs have generally NOT been built with the facilitation of learner tasks and activities as their raison d’être, so we should likewise not be terribly suprised that they don’t tend to yield significant learning gains . . .

For that we’ll have to turn elsewhere.

I think Facebook might not be the best example, perhaps, either. Facebook is great for networking, and I could see students using it to quickly query and answer each other about their classes (e.g. “Jon, what’s up? Hey, did you figure out #6 of tomorrow’s Chem assignment?”). However, the deep discussion that an instructor might participate in would not be something that could happen on Facebook I don’t think. It’d be more likely to happen with people’s blogs. I could see a student perhaps creating one blog to do all their school talking on, and then wanting to be able to continue to use the same blog for all of their classes. This is more of the scenario that I’m talking about.

The important thing that I think Jon was getting at, and that I agree with, is that students should be encouraged to create personal learning spaces of some kind, and to be able to carry those personal learning spaces with them from class to class and beyond. A class CMS, then, would simply be the aggregator or organizer of these individual spaces–pulling them together for one moment in time, but not limiting them from continuing to expand after the course ends.

In response to the idea that educators should use the same tools the students are already using (Facebook, e.g.):

At first glance this doesn’t seem like a bad idea. When many of these initiatives are implemented, however, they often run into problems. Among other things is the phenomenon known as the “creepy treehouse.”

Yes, communication, community, relationships, and more are very important to students’ use of social media tools and websites. So it seems so natural to use them for education! But another important draw for many students is those sites are also places where the normal authorities aren’t around. In other words, at least part of the draw of Facebook is kids can be themselves, and don’t have to act the way their parents, teachers, or employers want them to act. Did your parent ever chaperone a high school dance, just so they could spend more time with you? This is the same idea. When professors use Facebook (or many other social media sites) for educational purposes, students feel more than it is only out of place. They feel it’s . . . creepy.

For more on the “creepy treehouse” see:
http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2008/04/0…

http://acrlog.org/2008/05/17/creepy-treehouse/

But what about two research conferences? That’s more my dilemma here. Specifically, I’m thinking about AERA this month (as you might expect). I have a presentation accepted at AECT that is the main foundation of my research right now, so I’d like to present it at AERA too. AERA is so big, that the likelihood of people that saw me at AECT seeing me at AERA seems very small. I’d love to share the same presentation again to get some more feedback from people and to cross-pollinate the ideas among some new folks. But on the other hand, I don’t want to be accused of self-plagiarism, and I haven’t seen any guidelines on navigating this. Which is why I’m asking for opinions. Thanks for yours!