The crux of the matter is the challenge to the credit hour concept by asynchronous learning technologies which “unhook” the student from the professor in real time.

For those who believe that the student-professor relationship is essential to learning, this has been a dramatic shock to the system. Suddenly, the loss of real-time interaction has introduced a whole set of new demands upon the professoriate and the entire system of higher education. The concept of course as “what can be covered in a semester of three contact hours over fifteen weeks” has been thrown into question.

Of course, there had already been correspondence courses and independent studies which were also largely asynchronous, but they were “cribbed” upon the standard Carnegie unit course — indeed, the same “materials” and testing were often used in correspondence and independent study versions of the same course.

But with the new information technologies came the mainstreaming of asynchronicity and the mechanization of “test correction” and “explanation” — further challenges to the personalization of instruction by persons — and with the ironic potential of greater customization of content, time, and scheduling for the student than the “real-time” “seat-time” course.

Further, no longer the exception to the rule, online education is becoming an integral part of many, if not soon most, undergraduate students’ progress to a degree. Indeed, the Sloan Foundation was surprised to discover that its support and assessment of the then fledgling SUNY Learning Network revealed that the majority of the online courses were taken by students already on campus — indicating that the rationale of the users was not the same as the rationale of the planners.

And so, of course, whether traditionalists liked it or not, the practice of outcomes assessment began to be mainstreamed by administrations as these DL programs were being developed for their tuition revenue — managed by administrators in large part because most faculty would not take ownership of anything that undermined the uniqueness of the “seat-time” bond between the individual instructor, the course, and the student in “real time.” That there was a necessity to “equilibrate” the value of the “online” with the “real time” in the information age has been lost on a majority of the faculty who have had no desire to work in concert to “standardize” quality — and who believed erroneously that their academic freedom is an individual and First Amendment right, and not based in the traditions of the university, the collective faculty guild, and codified in contracts.

Of course, it is understandable that faculty would jealously guard the system they have always known. Indeed, it has been easy for both administrations and faculty to negotiate teaching workloads in terms of hours — the forty-hour work week has been the basis of the definition of full-time employment in most professions, after all. And time and expertise are what professionals “sell,” are they not?

However, as budgets tighten, administrations refuse to trim themselves for indeed, they literally “embody” the budget crisis: the exponential growth of administration in comparison to the full-time faculty sector, or even all of the faculty, has been documented nation-wide. And so, now, the faculty which, Luddite-like, have refused to take charge of the outcomes assessment necessary for these evolving technological paradigms, have left themselves at the mercy of administrators who have taken the “individual course” concept — so prized by the faculty — and turned it into a commodity for sale to students as work for hire by contingent faculty and/or online software programs.

Rather than viewing a course as a fluid and evolving search for truth — at the nexus of teaching and research — which is integrated in and takes its life from another dynamic system called a discipline of faculty — the majority of faculty have ironically left themselves naked before the forces of administration-imposed-and-controlled outcomes assessment and the future will not be “pretty.” Indeed, the demands which management will soon inflict upon collective bargaining (wherever faculty are organized) will likely be hitherto unheard of, and unimaginable, in the history of the university.

It is more than time to fasten our “seat”-belts — the dismantling of the Carnegie unit is going to be a very bumpy ride. Our “attendance” at the university as faculty may no longer be required….

As the OIG implies by its official warning letter to the Higher Learning Commission of NCACS, such abuse is perhaps most easily identified in the accreditation of some online for-profit institutions (cf. http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/auditreports/AlertMemorandums/l13j0006.pdf)

At issue, of course, is the default rate on Federally-funded student loans which, in the case of American InterContinental University Online, was over 10%. In short, this is one area where encouraging any and all to enroll results in the enrichment of a privately-held institution which, even without any attendance records, is entitled to keep 50% of the tuition so raised when the student drops out.

That said, how many of our “traditional” non-profit colleges and universities conduct summer and inter-session courses on campus for three weeks and three credits (or during the semester for four credits and only three contact hours)– where no truly credible case can be made that one hour of homework is assigned for every hour of Carnegie unit “seat-time” instruction?

Indeed, “attendance” is the new watchword of the day — and how higher education comes to grips with its disappearance as a traditional criterion of credit hour assessment is one of the most crucial developments to watch. The gradual erosion of “attendance”/contact in the face of verbal “quality assurances” will affect every aspect of higher education, including the definitions of both faculty and student “full-time” load.