My A.T. Still University Experience

Blogging Is Not A Crime

2009-11-06T23:10:00Z

“I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations… I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.” — Kareem Amer

Today's image is of me, although you're spared yet another shot of my ugly mug in favor of the message I was conveying. As a blogger, I'm glad that I can write about just about any topic without much fear of recrimination from the government where I live. Now, it so happens that I usually write about educational topics, which aren't likely to be that controversial, but the principle is the same.

So when I heard about Kareem Amer, I felt like I ought to do something. This photo is of me at a protest in front of the Egyptian embassy in Washington, D.C. earlier today, organized by groups that support the immediate release of Kareem Amer from his prison cell in Egypt.

So, who is this guy anyway and why is he in jail? Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, better known by his blogging name of Kareem Amer, is a blogger from Alexandria, Egypt, where he was a law student who expressed his opinion as many people do, through a blog. What he said riled those in power in Egypt, however, as he wrote things critical of both Islam and of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. Eventually Mubarak's people figured out who he was and he was rounded up and sent to jail, so far for 1,096 days.

Now, I actually read a bit of what Kareem wrote, albeit in translation, and no, it's not exactly flattering to Islam. If that were my faith, then I probably wouldn't like him very much either. But there are a number of passages in the Qur'an that seem clear to me about whether being an unbeliever should be a crime, such as:

Allah says: “If it had been your Lord’s will, all of the people on Earth would have believed. Would you then compel the people so to have them believe?” — Sûrah Yûnus: 99

So while I'll be the first to admit that this is not my area of expertise, to me jailing Kareem for writing unflattering things about Islam seems not to defend the faith, but rather entirely un-Islamic. Besides, it looks to me like the real reason Kareem's behind bars is not anything he said about Islam, although that was used as an excuse. Let's be real here: The reason Kareem is in prison is that he stood up to the heavy-handed state of Hosni Mubarak.

I don't know whether I would be that brave, were I in Egypt. But I can at least say that as a fellow blogger I support Kareem's freedom of speech and hope that he's released.

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What's Wrong with For-Profit Schools?

2009-10-29T17:30:00Z

“It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.” — Juvenal

Currently on the forum there's a discussion about whether there's a big difference between for-profit and non-profit schools. A link was posted to this article in the Washington Monthly that takes for-profit schools to task, essentially calling them predatory and that they have conspired with evil Republicans to exploit unsophisticated prospective students in order to enrich themselves while leaving those students with unmanageable debt that recent legislative changes have made almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Whew!

And you know what? There isn't zero truth to this. Many schools are far more expensive than they need to be to break even, or even make a reasonable profit. Consider your typical online course. Let's say it costs you a thousand bucks. (I know, some are even more, but it makes the math easy.) And let's say there are twenty students in the course. Adjunct instructors don't usually get paid more than two thousand dollars to teach a university level course, so that's where two of the students' tuition is going. What about the the rest of the eighteen grand? Sure, there's overhead, you need to have support staff, and office space and computers and supplies for that staff. Preparing reports for the accreditors takes a lot of time, and you need people to help with that, okay. But does all that really cost nine times as much as the person who actually does the lion's share of work by teaching the students? Color me skeptical, but I say there's a heck of a lot of profit in there.

But before you start to think that I agree with the Washington Monthly that the profit motive is eeeeevil, let me add a few other ingredients into this witch's cauldron of debt creation.

First, non-profit schools often cost just as much as the most expensive of the the for-profit schools. In fact the most expensive ones cost even more: Check out the list of the 100 schools with the highest annual tuition rate. For a bunch of schools that are supposedly non-profit, don't those rates seem kind of steep?

Second, much of the blame lies with the federal student loan system. The left-of-center Washington Monthly blamed the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans, but there's no one in Washington with clean hands when it comes to this broken system. It was, after all, Democrats who sent the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to Bush's desk last year. And while that reauthorization did include a few baby steps toward making things easier for students, they did nothing to address the systemic problem that making it artificially easy to access student loans means that tuition rates will inevitably rise to soak up all that extra money that's become available. I guess they were too busy trying to protect their buddies in the entertainment industry, and I do use that term loosely.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, if for-profit schools are works of the devil, then why is it that they're also standing up to be part of the solution? As I've remarked before, companies like Straighter Line and for-profit schools like Penn Foster College and Andrew Jackson University are leading the way when it comes to providing solutions for students that are extremely low cost. In other words, the profit motive has more than one side — it leads some schools to charge as much as they can, yes, but it also leaves them vulnerable to other schools that come in and undercut them to attract their students away.

So no, there's nothing inherently wrong with for-profit schools. Some of them charge a lot, aided and abetted by Uncle Sam, and others of them see that situation as an opportunity to attract students by charging less.

Next up, I protest the imprisonment of fellow blogger Kareem Amer.

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The Chinese Ivy League

2009-10-28T19:00:00Z

“I am [in Asia] because this is the exciting part of the world. This is the future, and I want my children to grow up knowing Asia, and knowing things Chinese.” — Jim Rogers, global investor and self-made billionaire

I first got the idea that things were changing about four years ago, when I was working as an international student advisor for a small university in Washington, D.C. I got into a conversation with one of my Chinese students, and she told me that while it used to be that Chinese students would do whatever it took to remain in the U.S. after graduation, it was starting to be that many would prefer to return to China, where they found their professional opportunities were better, their stress levels were lower, and their standard of living was higher. I figured then that the next step would likely be that fewer Chinese students would want to come to the U.S. to study in the first place.

So now I've just read a recent article from Xinhua, China's official news service, that suggests that the Chinese are well on their way when it comes to developing a competitive higher education infrastructure. The article explains that they are forming an academic conference of their top nine universities to form a "Chinese Ivy League", whose members are streamlining their cooperation, and who by working together will be better able to compete against any other school in the world.

In the meantime, while it wasn't my intention, I've been following the advice of global investment guru Jim Rogers, who when asked how to prepare for the future advises people to ensure their children learn Mandarin Chinese. As it happens, my twelve year old son is taking Mandarin Chinese as an elective at his school starting this year. I had initially steered him toward Spanish, thinking he'd be more likely to get use out of it, but he was insistent that Chinese was what he wanted to study, and thinking more broadly, perhaps he was right.

Now, I realize that just because there's an article from Xinhua, that doesn't mean that the end of the dominance of American higher education is at hand. And even the annual ranking of world universities from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a member of this new consortium, still shows that American schools still hold most of the top positions, and that their Chinese counterparts are still struggling to get into the top one hundred. But momentum may be on the side of the Chinese schools. And my son has suggested he'd be interested in attending university there rather than in the U.S. If he's not alone, then perhaps it's shaping up to be an interesting century for U.S. dominance of higher education — and I do mean interesting in the Chinese sense.

Next up, what's wrong with for-profit schools?

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Moving toward Cape Peninsula

2009-10-28T01:34:00Z

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.” — Arnold Bennett

This morning I called Johannes Cronje, the Dean of Informatics at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, to which I'm considering switching instead of continuing at A.T. Still University. Since the school is in Cape Town, South Africa, I had to get up early enough to reach him before they close up shop in the afternoon their time. For someone in such an important post he's very friendly and approachable — he joked that he was nervous to speak to me, as he knows that calls from the U.S. are hideously expensive. I reassured him that I was using Skype, an Internet phone service, and it cost so little that I could talk all day. The downside was that while the the call quality started off all right, it deteriorated markedly, so I may want to consider other options if I'm potentially making calls there frequently.

Anyway, we talked about the faculty member he had originally suggested I might want to work woth closely, but it turned out that he'd chosen that person in particular because he thought that I was specifically interested in health informatics. When I explained that I was more interested in topics related to educational informatics, he said in that case he'd probably connect me with a faculty person there named Pamela Martin. Either way, he told me that the first thing I should do is email him a one page document that briefly outlines my proposal for a research topic.

Fair enough. The thing is, that means that now I have to decide what topic I actually want to do. Like really this time. At ATSU I got sort of pushed into something that was conducive to my interest in veganism, but not at all to my interests in development studies, educational technology, open educational resources, or distance learning. This time it's all up to me, but that means I have to choose carefully, and to find some aspect of the interplay of all these topics that actually suggests a sustainable research question.

The other thing is that in addition to Professor Martin as a primary supervisor, and being backed up by Dean Cronje, he reminded me that I'd also need to find a local external supervisor. The unfortunate thing is that even though I've attended one university in this area and worked at two others, I still don't know any faculty members there who I feel would be right in that role. I need to find someone nearby with a doctoral degree who's keen on open educational resources, the developing world, and educational technology, preferably within a reasonable drive of here. That's no easy task, so it's time to start seeing who in my network might know the right person. Then again, I had to find two external reviewers for the program at ATSU, so I ought to be able to find just one for Cape Peninsula.

So anyway, that's where I am right now. We'll see that happens, but it seems that I'm moving in this direction more and more and considering returning to A.T. Still University less and less.

Next up, behold the rise of the Chinese Ivy League!

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Learning Foreign Languages By Distance?

2009-10-26T16:48:00Z

“Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it” — Christopher Morley

I've often thought that some subjects are more conducive than others to learning online or otherwise at a distance. I've said in the past that many people might prefer to learn subjects like math, accounting, economics, and even some aspects of computer science in a classroom, but that humanities, social sciences, literature, and the like are at least as easy to do online and sometimes easier.

My reasoning is that those subjects I think of as difficult to do by distance are ones where students are likely to ask a series of questions in a row to try to zero in on understanding of the material. Since most online and distance learning takes place asynchronously, meaning that the participants are not all online at the same time, a series of exchanges that might take five minutes in a classroom might take five days online. It's the other side of the coin to the convenience of logging on whenever it's convenient.

That asynchronous attribute makes another set of subjects an interesting choice to study online: foreign languages. In an opinion piece at Inside Higher Ed today, Dan Edelstein, an assistant professor of French at Stanford University, laments the decline of foreign language instruction at universities generally, and refers to a recent initiative by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to move their introductory Spanish courses online as a sign of this decline.

Now, we eLearners know that there are many faculty members who don't like much of anything about online study, and that's understandable, people natually fear new things that conflict with the old ways they've been using for so long. So are the misgivings about foreign language study by distance legitimate? I think to an extent that they are. Many of the naysayers make a good point, that an important part of learning a foreign language is the ability to be immersed among others who are also speaking it. That's tough to do with a text-based model of online course that consists mostly of readings, discussion boards, and written examinations.

But that doesn't mean that foreign languages can't be studied at all without physical proximity. I would suggest to schools that are considering teaching them online to make better use of multimedia so that students get a real sense of how the language is supposed to sound, and to require students to participate in live audio online chats among one another and with their instructors using headsets. It's not that difficult to add these additional elements to online courses, especially since in most cases a headset can be purchased for less than twenty dollars and is as easy to use as simply plugging it into one's computer.

So for written languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and the like, I think there's no reason for them not to be studied online, even asynchronously. And I'll even maintain cautious optimism that modern conversational languages can be learned effectively online, so long as instructional designers and faculty members break out some of the newer tools in the eLearning toolbox.

Next up, I move a little closer to switching from ATSU to Cape Peninsula.

Image courtesy of Slugger O'Toole

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