Cut price education?

There is a discussion kicking off right now over on the TES pages. It's about the front page story covering the announcement that some colleges are planning to offer 'cut price' qualifications that rely on a combination of podcasting, online learning and remote self study. If you can manage to manoeuvre your way past the journalese and read between the lines, you might just surmise that this decision has been made due to budget cuts and economic expediencies, rather than as a decision to enhance the quality of the experience. Call me a fool, but I would rather offer no courses at all, than put my name to a course that is inferior due to cost cutting. But let's put the quality issue aside for one moment and consider the economics of this plan. 


Do the leaders of these colleges really believe that shifting learning activities completely over to online distance learning mode will actually cut teacher time and save money? From my own professional experience, I would very strongly suggest that when online learning (in any of its forms) is conducted appropriately, teacher workload actually increases rather than decreases. Adrian Prandle, education policy advisor at the teaching union ATL gets it right when he says: 'Developments such as podcast learning should be in addition to time with lecturers, not instead of it. What is important with projects like this is that they have input from those in the classroom at every stage.' We live in tough times, but whichever way this 'project' is viewed, it is simply false economy.

Just how was the decision to offer 'cut price education' arrived at? Are the managers of these programmes so naïve they cannot see that teachers will need to be on call to answer endless queries and address never ending concerns from remote students? Are the managers of the colleges so lazy, so complacent that they have failed to check the online learning and distance education research literature? It is bordering on the myopic if managers think they will be reducing the costs of education by hiving learning off into a distance delivered, online experience. Forget the many, many hidden costs for a moment and consider this: It is an established statistic that 30%-50% will be the expected attrition rate for the majority of distance education programmes, worldwide. Will colleges who wish to cut the costs of their programmes stomach such a dropout statistic? I think not.

Image by Steve Wheeler


Cut price education? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.