“...if you are at an institution that believes professors have a responsibility to be public intellectuals, and if your main concern is getting your ideas out to the broadest audience possible, then this kind of Web publishing is certainly an intriguing option worth considering.” — Douglas J. Amy
Fellow eLearners, allow me to pull back the curtain a bit and let you see what life is like for some of your faculty members, at least those at traditional institutions.
I came across a very interesting article this morning, and I thought it was especially timely considering that I'm still waiting for this term's textbooks to arrive. The author, Dr. Douglas Amy of Mount Holyoke College, makes the case that more faculty members should consider taking advantage of non-traditional publishing methods in order to get their ideas out to the general public.
Most faculty members at traditional universities are on what's called the "tenure track". That means that they get hired on as full time faculty members with the idea that if they perform well as researchers (teaching is of secondary importance here) they can expect after seven years of getting a status called "tenure" which basically means they can't be terminated for any reason other than gross malfeasance. The rationale for tenure is that by protecting professors from dismissal, they don't have to be afraid to pursue research on controversial topics, and that this academic freedom will lead to better results for society as a whole because real problems will be the focus, rather than just topics that are politically correct or otherwise safe.
This means that tenure track faculty members, those who don't yet have it, but are trying to get it, have every incentive to do as much as they can that will earn them tenure, and not to waste any time on things that won't. The things that tend to have a lot of importance when the tenure decision is ultimately made are whether the professor had a lot of articles published in academic journals (which are arcane publications that no one other than professors actually read, and often not even them), and to a lesser extent whether they presented papers at academic conferences.
The idea is that by writing these sorts of articles and presenting at these conferences, the professor is becoming noteworthy in his or her field. If they succeed in developing this noteworthiness, they're worth granting tenure. If not, then they're not. That's why the system is often referred to as "publish or perish".
One of the problems with this system is that there's no emphasis on actually reaching everyday people with useful information. Dr. Amy had every incentive to write a special kind of academic book called a monograph, one he knew from past experience that nearly no one would read. Instead he took the same material and put together a web site that had the same information, but in a way that anyone who's online would be able to access.
The problem is that these sorts of projects, however useful, don't carry much weight for those faculty members who are trying to get tenure. Higher education has done a pretty poor job adjusting its tenure system to account for the rise of the popular Internet when something that will be read by tens of thousands of people is less important than something that will be read by a few hundred, if that.
As an eLearner, an interesting aspect of this to me is that many schools that have online programs do so through the use of adjunct instructors — people who actually do stuff in the real world but also teach on the side. For them, this sort of project makes a lot more sense. They're not playing the tenure game in the first place, so they have nothing to lose by sharing their expertise through accessible means rather than behind the closed doors of academic journals. Could it be that our often maligned adjunct instructors might be more useful for advancing ideas than tenured and tenure track faculty at traditional universities?
Next up, I try to clear things up about those law schools in California that offer distance learning.