Reviewing Lynda.com

I have submitted a course to Lynda.com with a view to reviewing how it works.  I continuously survey the opportunities for teachers to teach, what I call student-employed college instructors, or the German call privatdozents, or is it privatdozenten?  I filled out the form on this their "call for teachers" page.

Here a week later and no reply.  Every time I look at one of these sites I check out their "press" or media link and my heart sinks when I see "round two financing" or whatever because it can be accurately translated "screw the instructors."  When education becomes a business, someone has to get screwed, and the easiest target is the instructors, because they are the only ones who care, so they will compromise on money.

Lynda.com is not unique in this, it is baked into capitalism.  Education is like medicine, it is not quite a market event.  It is certainly an economic event, but not adaptable to a profit model.  Education works best on the cooperative model, like medicine.

There are various versions of lynda.com out there, straighterline, etc... made possible because the present alternatives are so bad.  But things are changing.

But in USA we have the false dilemma of "business model" vs "socialisr model" in both education and medicine.  And that is why education and medicine is so backwards in USA, very expensive and poor results.

If you disagree regarding expensive and poor results, then you are unaware what both can be, if freed from state intervention.

In the meantime, I'd love to see an "education" website answer a potential instructor within 24 hours.  But then, why bother?  It's about the money.

Feel free to forward this to three friends.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Here is a list of myths on online education...  some are debatable, and one in particular struck me...

Unmotivated students fail whether a teacher is watching him/her or not. While eLearning does not require a student to be in a certain place at a certain time, it still offers them access to the teacher and other classmates for help and support.

The old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is applicable to this myth. Students lacking the desire to succeed will fail no matter how robust the program or the teacher. Placing the blame on eLearning is foolish. eLearning is simply the catalyst for delivering information, it cannot be responsible for a student’s work habits.

Course completion is an issue.  This presumes the courses are asynchronous, which I think is something of an error in delivery.   I think course completion is best addressed by offering synchronous courses.  The idea that a big benefit of online education is that is can be asynchronous is one idea that should be challenged.  I believe something like 99% of online courses are asynchronous.   I believe when 99% are snchronoous, we'll see most of his 30 problems solved.

Brown v Accreditation

Former senator Hank Brown demonstrates how USA education has been in decline as accreditation has been ascendant. With all of the accredited risible schools out there, the accreditors are going after UV:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently filed a complaint with the Department of Education decrying SACS's interference with the University of Virginia governance powers and processes established by Thomas Jefferson himself. Anyone who knows American history, and regrettably few students do, would realize that Jefferson would be mighty upset to learn that a bunch of federally empowered bureaucrats are overstepping their authority and interfering with the internal governance of his university.

And this is very odd.  At City College of San Francisco, serving people since 1900, is under attack for not having enough administrators, according to the accreditors. How would they know?  By what metric do they measure this?

It is time for the University of Virginia and presidents and boards across the country to say no to this meddling, and it is time Congress recognizes what a failure the system of accreditation has been. Over the years, accreditation has increased costs without protecting quality. A new, transparent system of quality assurance is needed to protect the public—before it's too late.

The solution is to return to the system in which the students pay the instructors directly, and rate their instructors online for all to view.  There is ratemyprofessor.com but that is the wrong approach with confidential reviews which are too often poison pen letters.  A rating system would have to be by adults who sign their names to the review and verified they actually took the course.

55 and Older 100% of Net New Job Growth

So People are preferring hirees in my age group?  Better yet, get self-employed as an instructor...

Note that 100% of the job growth since the recession is in age group 55 and over.
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#im8BHg2JcULPxcug.99 

Straighterline.com is close to it...

Inside higher education highlights two programs, with the delightful opening

"Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2GqMXDr5V
Inside Higher Ed 

The article highlights Straighterline and Udemy.com.  the more interesting to me is straighter line, especially reading this quote in the article:

Smith calls the new course offerings an “eBay for professors,” who can now “hang out their shingle” with the company's help. “It used to be that students paid professors directly,” Smith said. “We’re rebuilding that model, but with a baseline for assessments.”

I've inquired after this point, because as far as I am concerned, I am the only one advocating students pay instructors directly, a resumption of the medieval model.  Straighterline has confirmed he refers here to the medieval model, and the article comments sections takes up this point.

I search constantly to find someone doing the revolution in education right, and this is pretty close.  But to my mind accreditation is the Berlin Wall of education, and although straighterline is not accredited, they are associated with schools that can get the students credit for classes taken with straighterline.

Now Straighterline gets criticized for some iffy content, to which the CEO has responded.  To my mind this is no big deal, since innovations are always pretty junky at first.  Think about the first Apple ... yeccch!... computers and their products today.    That will get cleaned up over time.

What is far more interesting is the CEOs defense of his courses, after being trashed by Inside Higher Education, this in the comments section after the article:

The course taken by the writer has been reviewed and fully recommended for college credit by the ACE Credit service, a service to whose recommendations more than 1000 colleges profess to adhere. This course was reviewed by DETC. This course was reviewed by the College Board’s AP service. Our partner colleges, who award transfer credit for our courses, have been given complete access to the courses. What is the appropriate way to evaluate courses – a single student’s perspective or course-level reviews conducted independently by dozens of professors, dozens of accredited schools and several higher ed associations?

Unfortunately, the standard used by most colleges for the award of transfer credit, the presence or lack of regional accreditation, is not only insufficient to determine course quality but is also unavailable to us. Despite the fact that credit (and courses) are the unit of academic currency in an age when students can take courses from anyone at anytime, individual courses cannot be accredited, only degree granting programs. This means that colleges can offer, and accept for transfer credit, taxpayer-subsidized courses of wildly varying and indeterminate quality under the umbrella of accreditation. If industry-wide course level, outcome based standards existed, we’d be thrilled to follow them. Unfortunately, such standards are always resisted by colleges and accreditors alike, resulting in entirely subjective decisions about what constitutes college credit. Such subjectivity lets colleges keep those with threatening business models out without having to examine their own standards of course delivery.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/16/review_of_straighterline_online_courses#ixzz2GqUji5iK
Inside Higher Ed 

Correct!  Since the basis of accreditation is whimsical, yet it is mandatory for qualification for student loans, that which drives up the cost, and then with cheap money flowing to the schools they ladle on admin on top of admin, with payola to textbook makers, it is clear accreditation is the problem.

My quest continues:  unaccredited education, where students pays the instructors directly.

Read especially the comments sections in both articles.