Texas Students Could Be Required to Seek Off-Campus Learning Options

[marmar]

Texas Students Could Be Required to Seek Off-Campus Learning Options
By Marc Parry


A Texas higher-education panel is recommending that students be required to complete at least 10 percent of their degrees outside the classroom, through options like online courses.

The proposal is one of several online-learning ideas in a new draft report prepared in response to Gov. Rick Perry's call for higher-education cost-savings recommendations.

The report also recommends that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board be given authority to create a new institution to offer associate's programs online.

"If the University of Phoenix can be successful" providing online programs, "the question needs to be asked: Can the public sector do the same?" said Bernie Francis, a member of the committee of education and business leaders that the coordinating board established to produce the report. Mr. Francis, chief executive of Business Control Systems, stressed that he was offering his own opinion and not speaking on behalf of the committee.

It would be unusual for a state to mandate that college students take online courses, according to several national distance-learning experts. But there are other state and campus efforts now under way to shift instruction online. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, for example, announced a new push to have 25 percent of all system credits earned through online courses by 2015, nearly triple the 2008 level of 9.2 percent. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Texas-Students-Could-Be/25935/

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. It's money, not religion.

Online can be even cheaper than using adjuncts.

[Hannah Bell]

3. told ya so. Corporate-provided, for-profit, on-line ed.

it is to weep.

[tammywammy]

4. Don't most universities provided their own online system?

And these are public universities they're referring to. So how would it be a "corporate-provided, for-profit" online education?

I've done a few online courses through the local community college as well.

[MadHound]

5. Content,

How long before universities, high schools, whatever simply start buying the content for corporate vendors? Undercutting the cost of professors, more and more ed facilities will turn to these content providers, thus putting the transmission of knowledge into the hands of the few and corporate.

Sure, they'll broadcast this content over their own internal network, but the content itself will come from the same place, no matter the school.

Like much of the rest of the education field, higher ed is also being divided into a two tier system. The few and the elite will continue to be taught by the best and brightest, while the rest will make do with online, corporatized education experiences.

[Hannah Bell]

6. yep.