Occupying
Knowledge and Learning
Edward Renner
The communication technologies of the 21st Century have threatened both the time-honored ways of delivering education and its social and cultural purposes.
The debate over delivery is whether the digital technologies
and online applications are actually a means for enlightenment. Many do not
embrace the new technology because they believe them to be a “shoddy imitation
of the class room experience.” Or, that it is the millennial mind that needs to
be fixed, certainly not their teachers.
The debate over purpose is whether online is primarily a
financial tool to create new revenue streams by video recording lectures to
reach distance and nontraditional students, or an opportunity to systemically restructure
the substance and nature of higher education.
The Educational Divide
These internal debates over delivery and purpose have
created an educational divide that rests on false either/or distinctions
between live classes and online material, rather than the complementary aspects
of how to most effectively use the technologies for teaching and learning. These
debates go to the core of how, not whether, the roles, functions and
responsibilities of higher education have changed as a result of the digital
revolution.
The new communication technologies are neither a second-rate
educational experience nor a cheaper commodity. To view them as such is to
diminish their value. Failure to embrace and use their potential is to cling to
the dead idea of a 500 year old concept that lectures and books are still the
primary currency for teaching and learning. Both have been replaced by the new
communication technologies, binding delivery and purpose together into a new 21st
Century entity.
The divide is paralyzing change, while higher education is
failing to come to terms with unsustainable increases in tuition and the need
for wider and more successful access.
A Void Waiting to Implode
The public debate over financing higher education grows more
urgent every day. When the student loan bubble bursts – as it surely will –
higher education will be required to reposition itself, if it has not heeded
the warning and done so proactively.
On the nontraditional side there is no such confusion. The commercial
on-line and for-profits have both a marketing advantage and a clear strategy.
Their products are practical, job centered, and non-critical. They are not part
of the liberal elite, and their negotiable content better serves the
preservation of traditional social values.
Education as a commodity fits the bill of state legislators who are
feeling the political heat of rising costs of public education as austerity
measures causes state revenue to be replaced by tuition increases.
The competition for educational dollars will only continue
to grow in the face of continued financial constraints. This transfer of title
to greater standardization, less physical structures and lower cost is well
underway.
However, contrary to its manifest appearance, the real story
is not about the healthy democratic process of government oversight finding a
balance between consumer protection and corporate profits. It is about the role
and function of teaching and learning in the 21st Century as the
instrument of human progress. This is no small issue. The ownership of both knowledge
and learning has replaced economic growth as the gatekeeper of the human
condition.
There are only two ways the merger of delivery and purpose
can go: Either there will be a further commodification of knowledge with the
for-profits competing with public institutions for the educational marketplace,
or traditional institutions of higher education will re-invent themselves to
actually serve the dual role of centers of public knowledge and to provide
massive open online learning opportunities.
Owning Knowledge and Learning
The Occupy movement provides a conceptual context for the
unification of delivery and purpose into a new 21st Century entity
in which lectures and books are replaced by the power of the new digital
communication technologies. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) can be widely
inclusive of the general public and still personally responsive and
individually evaluative of registered students.
One of the purposes of my MOOC “Forums for a Future” is to
expand the physical, social and temporal boundaries of the class to be able to include
the parents, extended family and social network of the students so they may
share their educational experience with significant people in their personal life.
This simply inflates and enriches the reach of the course at little extra cost.
In addition, because the course is online and fully public and self-paced, anyone
is free to drop-in, or to fully participate. Finally, any existing public
interest group – such as church discussion group -- can create their own
section by physically meeting together at a set time or in virtual space. If
they wish, they can invite university students to drop in, or even to participate
with them; this is something students who have completed my course may do for
credit as facilitators, or as paid participant observers for evaluation. In every
variation, there are interpersonal interactions among self-selective groups who
are able to use the opportunity provided by an open door classroom to tailor
their participation to suit their own unique needs as learners.
The new technologies have given us the opportunity to
restructure both how (the delivery) and what (the purpose) we teach as the
counterforce to education becoming simply another commodity. It is time to close
the false distinctions of the educational divide and to occupy both knowledge
and learning as the new role and function of public higher education in the 21st
Century -- as the essential instrument for the enhancement of the human
condition.
Good
education is both disruptive and essential for democracy. The content and who
controls it does matter.
Edward
Renner teaches in the Honors College at the University of South Florida
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