The commercialization of education seems to be an attack on the last bastion of the public sector. For many, the role of private companies in health care was, and still is, unacceptable. Yet there is no doubt it has happened, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on where you live. So, it would be naïve perhaps to think that education is in a more privileged position and the same could not happen in that domain. Indeed, venture capitalists now eye the education sector covetously and see it as the next big target. In the year 2000 some $2.9 billion of venture capital was invested in education and training start-up companies (Eduventures.com,
2001). True, the e-commerce bust has seen this investment slow somewhat and some of the shine has come off the optimism, but the sector is still attracting a good deal of finance and attention. There is certainly more drive and, significantly, more money behind the move to involve commercial organizations in education than there ever has been before. And large sums of money tend to have a way of fashioning the output those behind the money desire.
There are a number of reasons that education and commercialization make for an uneasy marriage. Many of the models and practices applicable in business do not transfer easily to education. For instance, the notion of students as customers is fraught with uneasy implications in education. In a commercial relationship customers are not assessed as they are in education, they cannot fail as they do in education. The idea that ‘the customer is always right’ would make marking any form of assessment very difficult. The notion of academic freedom is similarly difficult to marry with a commercial approach. Commercial pressures and constraints could seriously threaten this liberty. These are wider issues, however, and beyond the scope of this book. I want to focus here on the role the Internet plays in this debate.
Let us be clear before we apportion blame to the Net: it did not start this process. Global cultural changes have meant educational establishments have generally become more accountable and more businesslike in the way they operate. Despite the reservations mentioned above, the ‘customer centred’ approach has been adopted by many universities in response to a broader customer culture. Many vice-chancellors would argue that they have to operate as a business now, but do so in an unusual market which is much at the whim of
governments and politicians. One could view many of the established educational practices as evolving not from pedagogical or student support considerations, but rather as sound economical models. Ellington, Percival and Race (1993:64) for example say of the traditional lecture, ‘one of the reasons why the lecture has retained its dominant place in the educational and training scene is that the method appears to be highly cost-effective, since it enables high student/staff ratios to be achieved’. Online education, because it requires changes to established models of teaching, support, assessment and use of technology, naturally forces universities to examine the financial viability of such a model.
This does not mean that it is any more (or less) concerned with profit than traditional forms of education, but rather that we have become so accustomed to these assumptions in the established processes that often we do not notice them. Gaining access to the education market was always difficult for commercial organizations. The process of becoming an accredited university that can award degrees varies between countries, but is nearly always difficult and protracted.
This gives private universities a problem: they need a successfully working educational establishment in order to gain accreditation powers, and yet few students will want to study at a place that is not accredited. The private university needs to employ academic staff and have a campus in operation all the time that it is going through this process. Unlike for other businesses there seems to be little chance of starting small and building up gradually, using the previous year’s profits to sustain growth. With a private university the organization has to go directly to the fully established model. This requires some brave and considerable financial backing. Hence the number of private universities has remained relatively small.
The Net changes some of these dynamics. First, because the students and the academics are not located physically on campus, an online university does not need to invest vast sums of money in building a campus with specialized rooms for lecturing, laboratory space, social areas, and so on. It will need a headquarters, but any standard office space will suffice for this. Second, again as a corollary of the academics being located anywhere, there is no need to employ them full-time. A wide range of courses can be offered by employing academics on a part-time basis to deliver the courses online.
This is precisely what the University of Phoenix has done in the United States (with greater or lesser success, depending on your point of view). Last, because the costs are lowered by these factors, the online university can appeal to students as an economical means of study, particularly if they wish to study part-time while working and cannot attend a campus based university. So the online university can appeal to a different group of students on different grounds, whereas the private campus-based university was competing directly with the traditional universities. The online university still has to negotiate successfully the rigorous accreditation process, and it will have to invest a lot of money in its technical infrastructure and in marketing, but it begins to appear as a more attractive and viable business model for investors. The Net therefore can lower the cost of entry to the market, although in the next chapter we will see that this is not always borne out—but for now let us assume it does.
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