The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a
coalition of faculty groups, has released a report that claims the rhetoric
behind online learning is more about making money than academic results.
“Promise” of Online Higher Education: Profits states that the expansion of online education in general and massive open
online courses (MOOCs) in particular, is being driven by corporations at the
expense of students or public interest. It also recommends that terms used to
describe online formats should be re-examined to better help students and
institutions make informed decisions on their usefulness, according to a report in Campus Technology.
“Increasingly, online higher education is big business
with huge profits being made by many private companies,” the authors of the
paper wrote.
“We are told repeatedly that students will benefit from the rush toward online
learning, but we must ask who’s benefiting more: Students? Or investors and
companies?”
To illustrate, the report points to companies such as
Coursera, which recently announced it had made $1 million in profits from its
massive open online courses. There are a number of other firms generating
“robust” profits from converting traditional degree programs into online
versions.
The report “shines a light on how leaders in government
and in our colleges and universities are being enticed by snappy slogans and
slick sales pitches into making decisions that benefit investors and
corporations instead of the students we’re supposed to serve,” said UCLA
history Lillian Taiz.