Words of Caution: Preserve Education's Human Element

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar who teaches at New York University, hasmore than a few ideas on the subject of bringing professorial wisdom to theInternet. He has been an outspoken advocate of intellectual property rightsof educators venturing — voluntarily or otherwise — online, and recentlypublished a book on the subject: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise ofIntellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity.

While Vaidhyanathan is not hesitant to implement technology into hiscourses, even requiring students to turn in papers by posting them to theWeb, he preaches caution and restraint when it comes to putting coursematerial online.

"I have a lot of thoughts about electronic course material," he says. "Someof them are bullish and some are bearish. I think electronic coursework isimportant and essential for the mission of community colleges, for instance,to actually be able to reach constituents who can't drive across Montana orAlaska or Maine to get to a campus on a Tuesday night. It's also incrediblyvaluable for corporate training, for continuing education and so forth."

But Vaidhyanathan points out that there is not one central higher educationentity, and objectives differ based on course subject matter and teachingstyle. "There is actually great diversity in the role and scope and missionof higher education in this country," he says. "So what is good for givingsomeone an introduction to accounting online is not necessarily the best oreven a good medium for introducing someone to a course on the works ofMilton or Faulkner."

Vaidhyanathan is also quick to defend the traditional role of the teacher."We as instructors, and we as the university community, are unfortunatelylapsing into the very model of content providers," he says. "We don't thinkof ourselves in terms of the other metaphors that apply. For instance, weare performers. We are facilitators. We are tour guides. We are coaches andbest friends. We are so many humanistic things before and above being simplyproviders of information. And that's our value, and that's how we justifythese exorbitant costs that we charge our students."

In promoting the idea of universities as "content providers," we run therisk of diminishing the public service value of educators, he believes. "Ithink universities should consider themselves as sort of National Parks inour information ecosystem. We should be gearing our policies in such a wayas to provide maximum exposure for minimal cost. We should be giving stuffaway, because it¹s our duty. We¹re heavily subsidized.

"When you see a university like Columbia or Stanford put a lot of money intoonline courses, you have to be concerned. They are not acting as NationalParks in our information ecosystem. They're acting like amusement parks."Vaidhyanathan also believes that too much emphasis on streaming coursesultimately dilutes a university's brand. "When Columbia takes these majorinitiatives to do online education, they're making it clear that they don'tthink so highly of the time that a person gets to spend on campus atColumbia, having coffee with professors and fellow students," he says. "Thatis the true value of a Columbia education, not the data that flows throughan information pipeline."

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