The Devil is in the Details: Against SB 520

Watching Senator Steinberg?s press conference on the push to give credit for online courses, one can?t help but think that he is on the right path. After all, thousands of Californian students can?t get into classes, and MOOCs offer a new opportunity to deal with this problem in an efficient manner. Steinberg was also quick to stress that the faculty would have final say on which courses would be used, and so quality would be maintained. However, once one starts to look into the details of this deal, everything becomes much more complicated and problematic.

According to the outline of the new senate bill, three professors from each of the three segments would form a committee that would review classes and decide which needed classes would be put online for course credit. The first question to ask is who are these professors and what qualifies them to make curricular decisions for thousands of other faculty members. Also, how will they decide which courses to use and what defines a high-quality course? Moreover, is it possible to design classes that are appropriate for all three segments?

There is also the problem of who will get the revenue from the cross-system enrollments. Does the funding stay with the initial provider or does each campus get a cut of the action? A related concern is how do they decide when a class is over-enrolled, and will campuses be motivated to cut their lower-division classes so students will be forced to take less expensive online versions?

It is clear that this online move is being imposed from above, and it fails to take account the reality on the ground. As I have stressed with lawmakers, if you remove the bottleneck in lower-division courses, you will create a bottleneck in the upper-division. Moreover, these bottlenecks are in part caused by the fact that since too many students want to get into the same majors, lower-division courses are used to weed out lower-performing students. Also, many students come to college and university not fully prepared for higher education, and putting them into MOOCs will not help this situation.

Senator Steinberg has assured us that this new program will not be a substitute for public funding of higher education, but it is clear that the state is using online courses as a way to hide the chronic underfunding of all levels of education in California. Not only has the state reduction of funding for the UC system resulted in larger undergraduate classes and fewer course options for students, but the students now entering into the university system are the products of large classes and low per student K-12 funding. Online education will not fix years of educational neglect.

To voice your opposition to Steinberg?s Bill, please sign the UC Berkeley Faculty Association petition here.

UC?s Failure to Respect Shared Governance and Union Contracts Concerning Online Education

UC Santa Cruz is the only campus with union representation for its senate members, and since the faculty association (SCFA) has the right to bargain over local employment issues, it has determined that the university failed to meet its basic contractual obligations when it signed off on an online program without union approval. Meanwhile, UC-AFT is also in the process of filing grievances over a similar set of issues, and now we are moving to a confrontation that could have national implications.

In the SCFA Request for Information letter to the university, the Faculty Association points out that the recent deal with Coursera conflicts with several legal and contractual requirements. The first issue concerns who owns the intellectual property of a faculty lecture or class: ?In 2000, CUCFA successfully lobbied for legislation establishing that individual professors, and not the University, own the intellectual property in their live performances and course materials. . . Viewed within this legal framework the contract template that faculty will be expected to sign before their courses can become available on Coursera appears to put the UCSC campus in the position of becoming the publisher of this material on Coursera and other platforms.? In other words, UC is asking faculty to sign away their intellectual property rights.

The faculty contract with Coursera states the following: "I hereby irrevocably grant the University the absolute right and permission to use, store, host, publicly broadcast, publicly display, public[sic] perform, distribute, reproduce and digitize any Content that I upload, share or otherwise provide in connection with the Course or my use of the Platform, including the full and absolute right to use my name, voice, image or likeness (whether still, photograph or video) in connection therewith, and to edit, modify, translate or adapt any such Content.? So UC is using Coursera to get faculty to sign over their courses, intellectual property, and their IDENTITIES. Forgive me for being paranoid, but does this mean that if a faculty member signs this deal, they no longer own their own name, face, or image?

As the SCFA argues in its letter to the university, the UC should have first bargained with the union before it signed a contract with Coursera that changed the terms and conditions of UCSC senate faculty. This same problem is currently facing lecturers, where the UC has also failed to bargain with UC-AFT before it started several online programs affecting the terms and conditions of lecturers? employment.

SCFA has asked the university the following important questions: ?Was there a confidentiality agreement between Coursera and the campus? If so, at whose initiative was such an agreement undertaken? Who were the parties to this agreement on UCSCs side? If any Senate faculty were parties to the agreement, does the administration consider them to have been acting on behalf of the Senate? Was there any other form, official or unofficial, in which the Senate was consulted prior to signing the contract with Coursera? Has any member of SCFA's bargaining unit, other than administrators, signed the agreement needed to post their classes on Coursera?? The implication of these questions is that the university administration circumvented both the academic senate and the faculty union by making a deal with Coursera, and this deal may include a confidentiality agreement that would force the university to hide the details from its own faculty.

In light of Senator Steinberg?s recent push to have UC students take courses with online providers, everyone should be concerned about the level of secrecy in the current deals with Coursera.

Outsourcing UC

Senator Steinberg is pushing a bill that will potentially outsource many of the University of California lower-division courses to outside course provides like Udacity and Coursera. Here we see one of the clearest examples of privatizing a public good. The state cuts the UC budget for years, and then the same people who cut the budget say we should now turn to online education to deal with the mess. Of course they add that faculty will have a say, but the question is which faculty, and can they stop a plan that is supported by the university president, the governor, and now the legislature?

As I told people in the governor?s office and various legislative staff, there is no evidence that this will save money or move people through the system in a more efficient manner. There is also ample evidence that the students who need the most individual attention will end up having their courses online. I have urged the Academic Council to fight this move, but it looks like the senate is either being co-opted or pushed aside.

This move is a recipe for administrative bloat and the further undermining of shared governance in the University of California. Already people are questioning the value of a UC degree, and so we must ask, who will fight this change?

Report from Little Hoover: Standing in Front of the Online Train

The dominant take away from the Little Hoover Commission Hearing on Higher Education Funding and Online Education is that many stakeholders believe that most problems in California higher ed can be solved through distance education. Presenters argued that online courses will lower the cost of instruction and make it possible to enroll more students and graduate them at a much higher rate. Daphne Koller even argued that large online classes are better than small classes because when you have the students do the grading and the feedback, the quality of the responses goes up and the time for responding goes down. This is the ?wisdom of the crowds? argument that is fundamental to the ideology of crowdsourcing.

During the UC online presentation, we learned that the university wants to move quickly to place many new courses online starting next Fall. The goal is to rapidly increase the ability of students on one campus to take a course on another campus. There is also the idea that students can take outside MOOC courses and get credit for them by taking an exam or asking for transfer credit. Once again, the stress was on taking care of the gateway course bottleneck.

As I mentioned in my testimony, if you reduce the course congestion in lower-division courses, then you will run into congestion in the upper-division major courses. In fact, one reason why many students cannot graduate on time is that they are weeded out of popular majors. I also pointed out that a recent study has shown that the students who do the poorest in online classes are new students and under-represented minority students, and these are exactly the students UC, CSU, and community colleges are targeting.

I added in my testimony that the state has reduced the UC budget by $1 billion, and we raised tuition to cover that loss, and we also increased the size of classes and the faculty-to-student ratio. Now the state is saying that our expanded courses are not as good as online courses, and so we have to do more with less by shifting to a questionable mode of instruction. Meanwhile, the first presenter of the day argued that the new normal is that higher education will be squeezed out of state budgets, so we have to ask students to take on more of a burden, while we exploit various federal aid programs and tax breaks.

In response to this new normal, we need to push for free public higher ed and a rededication to instruction as a core mission of higher education. This does not mean that we should move away from research; rather, we have to find a more transparent and robust way to support this needed social and economic function. Unfortunately, the fascination with online education only blinds people from seeing the realities and solutions facing public higher education.

Little Hoover Hearing on Higher Ed

I will be testifying on Tuesday, February 26 at the Little Hoover Commission?s public hearing on issues facing California?s higher education system. The hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. on the campus of Long Beach City College, 4901 East Carson Street, Building T, Room 1100, Long Beach, California. According to the hearing agenda, ?the Commission is interested in exploring how institutions such as the University of California and California State University can control costs and increase college affordability; the role faculty can play in increasing time-to- degree completion while maintaining quality and high standards; and the development of online education and the impact that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, might have on costs and degree attainment.?

I have been asked to testify on the following issues: ?The principal drivers of increased costs at the university, including sponsored research, graduate and professional education, the increase in the number of administrators, and athletics and campus amenities; The impact, if any, on faculty and potential faculty hiring from UC?s intended promotion of UC Online Education; Whether online educational initiatives such as UC Online can help increase student access to classes, cut the time to degree and ultimately increase the number of graduates; Online education?s overall ability to contain costs and increase affordability for students attending a UC campus; How online education should be incorporated into UC; Other issues concerning the current support for increasing the use of online learning in higher education.?

Here is the schedule for the hearing:

9:00 ? 10:-00 a.m. Panel One: Student Aid and Postsecondary Financing
David Longanecker, President, Western Commission for Higher Education

10:00 ? 11:-00 a.m. Panel Two: Going Online: MOOCs and Beyond
Daphne Koller, Co-founder, Coursera and Professor, Stanford University Sebastian

Thrun, Co-founder, Udacity and Former Professor, Stanford University

Dean Florez, President and Chief Executive Officer, Twenty Million Minds Foundation

11:00 ? 12:-00 p.m. Panel Three: Going Online: UC and CSU
Keith R. Williams, Interim Director, UC Online Education and Senior Lecturer, University of California, Davis

Ruth Claire Black, Executive Director, Cal State Online

Robert Samuels, President, University Council-American Federation of Teachers
and Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles

12:00 ? 1:-00 p.m. Panel Four: The Role of the Faculty
Robert Powell, Chair, University of California Academic Senate and Professor, University of California, Davis

Diana Guerin, Chair, California State University Academic Senate and Professor, California State University, Fullerton.

The hearing is open to the public.

No Salary Increase for UC

President Yudof sent off a letter yesterday informing faculty and staff that there would be no salary increases in 2012-13 despite the passage of Prop 30 and the governor?s plan to fund three years of UC budget increases. Here is Yudof?s main message: ?It is my hope that the passage of Proposition 30 last fall, and the proposed reinvestment in UC in the Governor's budget proposal last month, mark a turning point for our university. After several difficult years, UC appears to be headed on the path to financial stability. Unfortunately, we still have a way to go before the University stands upon a firm financial foundation. As you know, since 2008, UC has been forced to absorb nearly $1 billion in State funding cuts. Re-balancing the University in the wake of those cuts is still a work in progress, and one that requires many of the ongoing measures that helped UC survive the last few budget cycles. As a result, I very much regret that we will not be able to implement systemwide salary increases for UC staff during the current 2012-13 fiscal year. This includes Chancellors and senior leadership.? The first thing to point out is that Yudof?s claim that there can be no salary increases because the UC has had to deal with a billion dollars of ?state budget cuts? is simply not true. As I have previously written, tuition increases over the last five years have far outpaced state reductions. What may be true is that the state has not met the UC?s desired funding, but Yudof?s letter is false and misleading.

We were told about this letter during a meeting at the Office of the President where we were discussing bargaining over the lecturer contract. Lecturers have been negotiating with the university since March 2012 over salary and other issues, but the university refused to discuss any economic issues until after the vote on Prop 30. Once Prop 30 passed, we were then told that the university cannot discuss economic issues until we signed off on pension and retiree healthcare issues. Now we are being told that even if we agree to accept reduced retiree benefits, there is still no money for salary increases. In other words, the university has been bargaining in bad faith, and they have proven once again that they do not accept the basic foundation of collective bargaining.

We are left with no choice but to go to the governor and the legislator to show them that the university believes that none of the money from Prop 30 and the multi-year funding agreement should go to undergraduate instruction. Moreover, according to the university?s own budget documents, virtually none of undergraduate student tuition is going to faculty salaries.

Surely at a time when students are going into massive debt to pay for tuition increases, they and their parents will be interested in the fact that the university does not think that tuition should go to support the faculty doing instruction and research. Parents and students might also be alarmed by the following statement from an Associated Press article: ?As of May, there were 2,129 UC retirees drawing annual pensions of more than $100,000, 57 with pensions exceeding $200,000 and three with pensions greater than $300,000, according to data obtained by The Associated Press through a state Public Records Act request. The number of UC retirees collecting six-figure pensions has increased by 30 percent over the past two years, according to Californians for Fiscal Responsibility, an advocacy group that has analyzed UC pension data.? Virtually all of these pensions will be going to administrators, coaches, and medical faculty with no direct connection to undergraduate education. In short, UC is cutting core faculty and staff benefits and freezing their salaries in order to support the high wages and pensions of the highest compensated UC employees.

State Senate Hearing on Higher Ed: Online Program, Budget Goals, and Accountability

The recent California State Senate hearing on higher education provided some news and many interesting discussions. Patrick Lenz announced that the UC will be holding all day meetings with senate faculty on online education April 13th and 25th. He also added that the UC did not think the move to online courses would save money in the near future. However, UCOP is looking to create more courses for the summer that would be available for cross campus enrollment in the Fall.

Nick Schweizer from the Department of Finance stated that the governor?s basic strategy is to increase funding for the UC system and hold the university accountable to certain outcomes, which have yet to be announced. When pressed for details, he discussed increased graduate rates and a shorter time to degree. He also added that online education could play a major role in reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. One possibility is to use a virtual community college to allow students to take all of their courses online before they transfer to a UC. A related strategy would be to make it easier for students to get credit for outside online courses by using the exam-for-credit program.

While access and affordability were the main themes, legislators had a hard time seeing how the issue of educational quality connected to the governor?s proposals. The real problem is that since there is no real agreement on how to measure and compare student learning and the effectiveness of teaching, everyone falls back on the countable measures of credits and degrees generated. This same problem is evident in President Obama?s new college scorecard, which defines ?value? by the net cost, the average debt, the graduation rate, and the loan default rate.