From ivory tower to academic sweatshop

After a few dot-com-era bumps, online education is back and bigger than ever. But so is corporate influence and bottom-line pressure.

By Alex Wright

Read more: Technology & Business, Education

Jan. 26, 2005 | As he walked into the gloomy, windowless auditorium inside Denver's Colorado Convention Center, Geoff Hunt remembers thinking, "God, there are a huge number of people here."

Hunt, a history professor at the nearby Community College of Aurora, had accepted a friend's invitation to attend the University of Phoenix graduation ceremony for its Denver-area students. Hunt was keen to take a closer look at Phoenix, the for-profit juggernaut whose booming distance-learning programs were changing the calculus of higher education at schools nationwide, including his own. Outside the Aurora faculty lounge, dark rumors were swirling of state bureaucrats talking up a troubling notion: the "professor-less classroom."

Hunt listened intently as the commencement speaker, a Phoenix professor who had recently been named Faculty of the Year, gave a speech describing how Phoenix had transformed her role as a professor. "She defined her job," he remembers, as "delivery of chapters."

That phrase, Hunt says, "just sent chills down my back."

Hunt isn't the only faculty member feeling the chill. As distance learning grows into a $5 billion a year market -- up 38 percent in 2004 alone -- virtual classrooms are no longer the sole province of dot-coms and for-profit schools like DeVry and Phoenix. Top universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Duke now offer full credit for online courses. On campuses nationwide, distance learning is moving out of the pedagogical fringe and into the institutional mainstream.

While faculty continue to debate the educational merits of online teaching (a recent national survey found their opinions roughly divided), most agree that distance learning is here to stay. To some optimists this is an unqualified good thing -- a chance to increase access to educational opportunities and to break down the hierarchies of traditional university bureaucracies. For every worried Geoff Hunt, another teacher is happily working at home, content never to see the inside of a lecture hall. But others are more alarmed and are beginning to wonder whether their jobs will ever be the same.

Just as the Internet brought wrenching operational changes to many corporations, so online learning is triggering a seismic shift in the academic power structure. Those changes stretch far deeper than the visible presentation layer of courseware, online discussions and multimedia presentations. Distance learning is changing not only teaching methods but also the shape of the curriculum itself. As schools reach out to a market composed largely of professional, career-minded students, they face growing pressure to cater to employers' agendas; in some cases, even wiring themselves into the corporate information technology (IT) infrastructure. If a company like Lucent underwrites online courses at a business school, it expects a direct return on its investment.

"Universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation," writes York University professor David F. Noble, a vocal critic of distance learning. "Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education."

Next page: When a college education becomes a "product"