Corporatization is diluting higher education
By a remarkable stroke of good fortune, I get to teach university courses online and live and travel wherever I want. Online instruction can never be as good as in-person classes, but online courses can be very good IF administrators and tech corporations don’t insert themselves between professors and students.
There’s a Lot Wrong in Education
There is, I don’t deny it. My previous article discussed the harm to students inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those lost years can never be undone, but we can do our best to help affected students catch up.
There are problems beyond the COVID-19 microgeneration. Students arrive at college less than fully prepared, and many of them are struggling in higher education. Students aren’t getting as much out of college as they could or should.
The right-wingers say that DEI is the culprit, which is BS. Diversity and inclusion initiatives benefit so many students, which is the real reason the right-wingers want to eliminate it. Well, that and they don’t want diversity, equity, or inclusion anywhere, period.
But there are real problems in higher education. They are real, they are easy to identify, and few people are talking about them. I won’t repeat all of the details so I can stay on target in this article, but you can read about them in the two links below. I can sum up by saying that all of these problems harm education by hindering the crucial ingredient of education.
The Crucial Ingredient that Makes Education Work
Engagement. Education is best when teachers are engaged with the subject matter, provide students with engaging course materials, and personally engage with the students. The more teachers are engaged, the more students will be engaged. Teachers can’t make a student care — the student has to make that freewill choice to engage with a course. Teachers can, through a lack of engagement, turn a student off from engaging. “If the professor doesn’t care, why should I?” is something I have too often heard my students say about other professors.
Engagement. Simple to state but takes a lot of effort to implement. Too many people are lazy, and professors are people, too. Some professors — being human, all too human — are susceptible to the temptation to take easy ways out.
Enter the corporations and their administrative enablers.
How to Monetize Making Education NOT Work
This is the sight that spurred me to write this article. It popped up on my course management screen this week when I went to engage with my students.
What the frell? AI has always been a gimmick, if not a scam. The bursting of the AI bubble can’t happen fast enough. AI doesn’t help anything or anyone except the tech bros selling it.
The tech bros want to push AI on us in every area of our life. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time an invitation to use AI pops up on my screen while I’m trying to do real work.
Because I hold education to be something sacred — especially the teacher-student relationship — that latest invitation to use AI nauseated me like finding a maggot in my coffee. Grading students by using an AI-generated summary?!? My nausea quickly turned to anger. At a time when lazy students are using AI to cheat on their writing assignments, professors using AI to cheat on their writing grading feedback would only make things worse.
This new feature invites instructors to be lazy and, worse, not engage directly with the students and their ideas. As I finished that previous sentence, a student e-mailed me asking about the feedback I had given on their last assignment. I wrote that feedback, and I wrote a reply to the student’s e-mail. That’s how it should be. I do my job. No AI is needed, and, in fact, AI gets in the way by inserting itself between the teacher and the student. AI would hinder the crucial ingredient of education — engagement.
If you are a teacher at any level of education, and especially if you are a college or university professor, you have one job: teach students. YOU are supposed to help students learn. No one and nothing else — YOU. That’s why you have the position you have — to help students learn. Everything else is secondary.
To any professor who has any inclination to use AI in their courses I say this:
DO YOUR FRELLING JOB!
You are supposed to be a professor, which means you spend the time and effort to engage with your students before, during, and after class time. Engage beforehand by designing your courses to encourage student engagement with the course and help them learn. Engage during class time by facilitating open discussion in class. Engage after class by personally giving students feedback on their course work.
If you use AI to generate assignments, materials, or grading feedback, you are no longer a professor — you are just a babysitter. The tech corporations and the administrators might prefer that, but you shouldn’t. They might be fine with harming education, but you absolutely should not help them.