Impact of Colleges Teaching Online

Re “A Wary Academia on Edge of Cyberspace,” March 31:

I have a “bachelor’s degree by mail” in aviation from a fully accredited university. I retired after more than 20 years as a professional pilot with a perfect safety record. Much of my flying was hazardous. It included flying small airplanes solo across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before the days of low-cost long-range navigation aids and photographing multiple (dummy) warhead reentries from the air in the target zone.

Is the purpose of education to provide employment for people who want to teach, or is it to provide education for people who want to learn? Does society benefit more from full employment for instructors or does it benefit more from an educated populace?

RICHARD MILLER

Laguna Hills

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You are wrong to paint the opponents of the computerization and commercialization of education as a bunch of tweed-wearing, near-retirement fuddy-duddies. Resistance to the computerization of teaching is found at all ages and levels of the faculty.

The faculty who have the most to lose are at the beginning of their careers. In the U.S., more than 50% of new faculty jobs are temporary and part-time. New PhDs are increasingly being offered online courses at a low, flat rate, as administrators seek to cut the costs of delivering “educational product” to the bone. Woe to lecturers who live to learn from classroom interaction with their students! Too bad for students who want interpersonal discussion and advising from their teachers. Tough luck to professors desperate to hold their workweek to 60 hours: When e-mail office hours substitute for teaching assistants, the result is a speedup. And in the crunch, it’s adios undergraduate research paper and hello to computer-graded multiple-guess exams.

The transformation of education into “courseware” is not just about who owns the intellectual work of scholars, although that is a critical issue. At the core, it is about universities forcing faculties to produce standardized, mass-disseminated edu-product, ironically, offered at even higher prices.

SUSAN DAVIS

Professor, Communication

UC San Diego