Summary: David Noble Digital Diploma Mills

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Summary David NobleDigital Diploma Mills

• Norm Friesen
• May 13, 2006

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A threat or a fad?
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David Noble

• Critique of online education from a social
  economic and historical perspective
• Sees online discussion forums and other
  technology as enabling fundamental institutional
  change
• These changes will weaken the universitys
  autonomy as a a place of independent and
  critical thought

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David Noble, cont

• A social historian has focused on the role of
  technology in the de-skilling and alienation of
  the labour force
• Has looked at how standardization and automation
  of labour has created significant problems for
  workers
• How technology supports a conservative agenda

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Faculty under Attack

• university teachers are losing control over what
  they teach, how they teach and for what purpose.
• erosion of their intellectual property rights
  makes academic employment ever less secure
• The academic workforce is reconfigured

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Business Models

• administrators claim ownership of the
  course-designs and teaching materials developed
  by faculty
• the online university represents new
  opportunities for investors to profit
• shift the burden of paying for education from the
  public purse to the individual consumer
• EMOs instead of HMOs (Health Maintenance
  Organizations)

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Business Models

• Online Universities to be run as corporations
• UNext
• Western Governors University
• Cardean University
• But there are successful examples
• University of Phoenix
• Private Universities? In Austria in Canada?

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Resisting the inevitable?

• E.g. Healthcare
• Are a number of different models, with mixtures
  of competition and regulation
• Too much competition is not a good thing
• Context determines technology use
• Institutions, tradition and technology interact
  in complicated ways. Technology does not
  overpower them.

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