Education Is Not an App

The future of university teaching in the Internet age

Jonathan A. Poritz, Jonathan Rees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317436355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Whilst much has been written about the doors that technology can open for students, less has been said about its impact on teachers and professors. Although technology undoubtedly brings with it huge opportunities within higher education, there is also the fear that it will have a negative effect both on faculty and on teaching standards.

Education Is Not an App offers a bold and provocative analysis of the economic context within which educational technology is being implemented, not least the financial problems currently facing higher education institutions around the world. The book emphasizes the issue of control as being a key factor in whether educational technology is used for good purposes or bad purposes, arguing that technology has great potential if placed in caring hands. Whilst it is a guide to the newest developments in education technology, it is also a book for those faculty, technology professionals, and higher education policy-makers who want to understand the economic and pedagogical impact of technology on professors and students. It advocates a path into the future based on faculty autonomy, shared governance, and concentration on the university's traditional role of promoting the common good.

Offering the first critical, in-depth assessment of the political economy of education technology, this book will serve as an invaluable guide to concerned faculty, as well as to anyone with an interest in the future of higher education.

1
Introduction

False Flags

Google's business is not search. At least it is not directly search since Google doesn't charge for each of the several trillion search responses (Google, Inc. 2015) it gives to users each year. Nor is Facebook directly in the social media business, since it doesn't simply invoice its more than one billion users (Zuckerberg 2015) for helping them to talk to their friends online. Instead, these two companies have generated a combined market capitalization (in late 2015) of most of a trillion dollars (Yahoo Finance) by turning the questions users ask of the Internet, and their friendships, unfriendships, and snarky comments to each other, into a vast database of marketing research. In short, they are both in the advertising business.

As more and more education has been driven online, more pressure has been put on professors to flip, hybridize, automate, and/or MOOC¹ -ify their classes, it is appropriate to ask what are universities for? Is your university actually an institution of higher education? That is, is its highest priority the common good, built on the search for truth and its free expression? Or is it not really in the business that you thought it was?

By your university, we mean a college or university where you are faculty, staff, or a current or former student, or even one with which you simply have bonds of affection. If it is a private, for-profit institution, such as the University of Phoenix, DeVry University, one of the now-closed Corinthian Colleges, or any of the hundreds of other such schools, the answer is almost surely "no" as a matter of definition. A for-profit corporation's highest priority is the accumulation of profits, and it prioritizes the good of its shareholders over the common good—both as a matter of law, in fact.²

Non-profit institutions, both public and private, are at least freed from the gross profit motive in the construction of their identities. But other pressures, including financial, political, ideological, macro-economic, and demographic, can cloud our view of why universities exist. Nor can any explanation remain fixed and unchanging as the financial pressures on higher education mount and new pressures come into being. Just consider how fast the Internet has changed the world outside of academia already. The three-quarters of a trillion dollars of value in Google and Facebook stock did not even exist twenty years ago (apparently).

Our goal in this book is to explore how information technology (IT) has changed higher education (both for the better and for the worse) over the last twenty or twenty-five years. In the interest of transparency, we will not hide where we stand. Because we are both faculty members our interest is not merely in the financial viability of our employer, but much more in the health and sustainability of higher education as a whole, particularly its pedagogic and scholarly components. That's why we'll explore the impact of IT on universities from the perspective of the academic faculty. How can we use our experience and expertise to help make IT-related changes in universities benefit the real project of higher education, despite the ways that other forces (administrations, governing boards, politicians...) may seek to use IT as a weapon under some false flag or other (efficiency, student-centered, data-driven, anti-elitism, etc.)?

The title of this book is a metaphor from computer science. To explain, we have to look at the word app. This word was not widely used before 2010, when, however, it was voted Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society (ADS 2011). Rather computer users had the word program, as in computer program.

Perhaps what happened that year was simply that a faster, hipper generation wanted to talk and text about the application programs, or applications, which they loved, in contrast to the systems software (software being another fine synonym, though a mass noun, for program) such as the operating systems³ and hardware drivers which they mostly took for granted.

In fact, app had been in use since the 1980s, but the massive usage change started around the time (and perhaps partly because) of Apple, Inc.'s ad campaign for its iPhone 3G with tag line "There's an app for that."⁴ While the slogan inspired many amusing parodies, its serious purpose was to draw attention to the fact that the iPhone was not only a two-way radio with powerful sensors (GPS, camera, accelerometer, etc.) but also a general-purpose computer. Of course, preceding smartphones had also been universal Turing machines (UTMs)⁵ but Apple was making the point that all of this computational power and flexibility was in the hands of everyone who had invested in an iPhone, available for the collective genius of all programmers to make of it a tool which would have uses in every corner of daily life.

Well, actually not all programmers. The day before the iPhone 3G was launched, Apple opened its App Store, and since then all programs which users want to run on their iPhones (also iPads and some other Apple devices) must come from the App Store. This is because the operating system for these devices, iOS, runs only signed code—programs which come with a piece of cryptographic metadata called a digital signature.⁶ That is, unless you first jailbreak your phone, meaning that you or someone you hire (maybe in a dark alley, since the legality of jailbreaking has varied quite a bit with time and place) breaks the security of the iOS it is running to allow it to run even non-App Store software. (Note that while the legality of jailbreaking is a complex question, Apple declares that it voids the warranty since it is an explicit violation of the End User License Agreement (EULA), that multi-page document everyone pages through unread and clicks "OK" when activating a new device.)

As a consequence, anyone who wishes to sell or even to give away an app which will run under iOS, must register with Apple, pay for the iOS software development kit, submit their finished project for approval (not always granted, and sometimes rescinded for reasons which seem suspiciously like Apple itself wants to make money that way), and give Apple a portion of their sales—both up front, and for any sales made through in-app purchases—all in order to get Apple's digital signature on their app. iOS devices indeed implement universal Turing machines, but their universality is under the control of an Elder Sibling, not the actual owners of those devices.

There are certainly other software ecosystems than iOS⁷ and we did skip over some important details in the iOS story above. Nevertheless, the word app exists solely to draw the distinction between two kinds of software: plain old programs, which presumably try to turn the power of that universal Turing machine in your pocket or on your desk into a tool that you control, and apps, which exist in a controlled and monitored environment and should not be expected to be free to do your bidding.

Apps are the serfs of the society of computer programs. Every time you ask for an app to perform a task (read a PDF, access your gradebook, etc.), you are saying you want to perform the task, but only in exactly the way predetermined and controlled by, and for the profit of, a third party who has interests aligned in a completely different direction from yours. This is not what we do in higher education; seek constrained truth for the advantage of specific powers that be. It is not something we should allow edtech in service of higher education to do, either.

Nothing Is Inevitable

Universities are always in a state of change. They build new buildings. They start new degree programs. They hire new presidents, who are often determined to make a permanent mark on a campus before moving on to greener pastures. What has really driven the recent spate of technologically-induced changes in American higher education has been fear of what Clayton M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School calls disruption. In 1997, Christensen wrote The Innovator's Dilemma (Christensen 2013), in which he described the process by which industry leaders were undercut by upstart firms in a wide range of industries.

In 2011, Christensen and his co-author, Henry J. Eyring, applied the same reasoning to higher education. "[T]he standard model has become unsustainable," they write in The Innovative University (Christensen and Eyring 2011). "To avoid disruption, institutions of higher education must develop strategies that transcend imitation. They must also master the disruptive technology of online learning and make other innovations." That argument has been picked up by technological enthusiasts of all kinds. In 2012, Sebastian Thrun, the founder of the MOOC purveyor Udacity famously told WIRED magazine (Leckart 2012) that "In 50 years ... there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education." Christensen, not to be outdone, predicted in 2013 (Suster 2013) that half of all American universities would go bankrupt in the next fifteen years.

Of course, Clayton Christensen was hardly the first observer to predict the imminent demise of higher education as we know it. "The collapse of higher education's business model has been predicted many times before," writes the higher education reporter Jeff Selingo in his 2013 book College Unbound (Selingo 2013), "Yet more colleges have opened their doors than closed them in the past 50 years." Indeed, by some measures—Nobel Prizes and patents but certainly not accessibility or affordability—the American system of higher education is the best in the world. If it can't survive the onslaught of new technology, what does this mean for higher education throughout the world?

What makes the American system of higher education particularly susceptible to disruption is not its weakness, but the strength of its opponents. Despite having experienced educational successes over more than a century, the United States is full of people who are opposed to the very idea of public education, or even public money going to subsidize education of any kind. Combine those opponents with the kinds of changes that the Internet has brought to other industries and the time appears to be ripe to cripple a successful system for no sin of its own. This does not mean that American higher education is perfect or that it and other systems around the world can't benefit from the kind of changes that technology can bring. However, to use it as an excuse to remove the good things while trying to fix the bad things would be the height of folly.

Online education is simply the newest weapon in a long series of attacks and it is hardly the one that does the most damage. (That might be the systematic defunding of American higher education which has been going on for decades now.) Online education is different because of the number of university faculty members who have happily agreed to participate in a practice which damages the institutions they love. Some of these faculty do so for the same reason that administrators and edtech startups do—to help themselves or their careers. Others who simply believe that the future is online are responding accordingly.

Will developments in Internet-based communications technology turn professors into the functional equivalent of ice-delivery men or travel agents? We do not know whether the Internet will make professors obsolete, but then again nobody else does, either. Yet this fact has not prevented the rise of a cottage industry of pundits who gleefully suggest that faculty in every department of the modern university are somehow heading for the scrap heap. Some of these pundits seem to welcome that possibility because they expect that the cost of a university education will decrease, with fewer professors collecting what they perceive to be hefty salaries, and they think that's good for society. Some of these people seem to welcome this possibility because they just hate university professors. We are perceived as elitists, and everybody likes to watch elitists get their comeuppance, except the elitists themselves.

As the 2012 saga surrounding the University of Virginia Board of Visitors' attempt to fire President Teresa Sullivan clearly demonstrated, faculty are capable of mounting fierce resistance to unwanted technological changes under the right circumstances. The emails leading up to Sullivan's initial firing demonstrate that UVa's Board of Visitors was Steeped in press clippings that treated the transition to online education as an inevitability (Jaschik 2012). That attitude goes a long way toward explaining the Board's now legendary heavy-handedness: they wanted to ride the crest of a wave that supposedly well-informed people were all telling them is already coming.

For technology companies that stand to profit by disrupting higher education, treating the transition to an online future as a fait accompli serves as a very effective business strategy. By continually reinforcing the idea that traditional higher education is way behind the times, they gather public support for costly online initiatives that might not otherwise go forward. Education reformers have been looking for ways to replace teachers with teaching machines for almost a century now (Ferster 2014). The opportunity to restructure universities around the Internet might prove irresistible to even the most traditional administrators.

Equally importantly, the rhetoric of higher education's inevitable decline infects faculty with a sense of learned helplessness. Why try to fight the inevitable when we have so much else to worry about in our busy lives already? (Because the fidelity of higher education to its true mission and the professional lives of countless university employees are at stake.) Leave educational technology to the private, for-profit companies and your university administrators and many faculty may very well not like the results because faculty and students have different interests from administrators and edtech companies.

Ever since the 1970s, the ranks of the professoriate have been increasingly occupied by adjuncts, faculty with no job security, given few (if any) benefits and earning as little as a few thousand dollars for each course they teach. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the longest-active and most successful organization dedicated to the health of higher education and the working conditions of faculty in modern history, more than 50 percent of professors today work only part-time (despite teaching the equivalent of a full-time course load) and 76 percent of all faculty work off the tenure track (AAUP 2014). While we certainly recognize that some administrators care about the quality of the education that their universities provide, the widespread use of adjunct faculty suggests that monetary concerns trump discussions of quality. This is not to suggest that adjunct faculty are inferior teachers by definition, but anybody who has to worry about putting food on the table, or has to commute long distances between campuses to make a wage on which they can barely get by, will have a difficult time giving their students all the attention that they deserve.

Certainly, the subject of adjuncts is a book by itself. When you consider the possible effects of educational technology on classroom teaching and you wonder why professors in the United States don't do more to maintain control over their own classrooms, you should remember that 76 percent figure because we aren't going to repeat it in every single chapter. However, with respect to the intentions of administrators towards faculty, the important thing about those adjunct faculty members is that their presence is an effect of the same forces that make edtech so dangerous to tenure-track faculty. Only 24 percent of university presidents who responded to a 2011 Pew survey said that they would like most faculty members at their institutions to be full-time and tenured (Taylor et al. 2011). While adjunct faculty have been around since the early 1970s, the current state of educational technology makes the all-adjunct university more possible than ever before. Any administrator willing to replace traditional faculty with adjuncts is probably willing to replace faculty altogether.⁸

The notion that many university administrators who don't care very much about educational quality would like to replace full-time, tenured faculty with technology should not be controversial. After all, technology does not require a salary. Technology will not talk back at meetings. Technology does not demand a say in running the university. Even if that educational technology requires humans to run it, the deskilling associated with this "tsunami" will allow universities easily to replace trained professors with less-skilled machine tenders. Because those machine tenders can, in theory, be drawn from anywhere on the planet with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Online Education: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• 3 MOOCs
• 4 Free/Libre/Open–Source Edtech
• 5 Unbundling
• 6 Electronic Taylorism
• 7 Social Media in the Classroom and Out
• 8 The Zero–Marginal–Cost Education
• 9 Conclusion: Higher Education in a Digital Age
• Appendix: Jonathans’ Laws
• Bibliography
• Index