Crisis Needed to Reform Higher Education

Greetings from the National Library of Australia where Professor Bruce Chapman, architect of the HECS student loan scheme is speaking. He suggested that this radical reform was introduced due to a crisis in university funding. Professor Chapman argued that this contingent loan scheme (students only repay when their income reaches a specific level) was fairer than "free" university where the rich tended to attend. I asked Professor Chapman about vocational education and training (VET). He suggested that contingent loans could be relatively easily extended to VET (I will suggest this to the Senate on Monday).

Professor Chapman is speaking along with John Dawkins, former Minister of Education, Professor Linda Botterill, Professor Shirley Leitch at the 2018 Sir Roland Wilson Dialogue. A video will be available later.

Lower Fees for On-line Students at University of New England

The University of New England has announced that it will not charge on-line students a Student Services and Amenities Fee from 2014. As an on-line student myself at another Australian university I found it annoying that I was paying a fee for on-campus services which I could not use. However, I don't think that such fees should be scrapped altogether, instead the university should invest in services of benefit to on-line students and charge an appropriate fee, perhaps half that for on-campus students.

Professor Jim Barber, UNE Vice-Chancellor has proposed government change regulations to allow universities to unbundle services. He argues that on-line students are currently paying for services they don't use. However, it is not clear to me why UNE what regulations are stopping UNE further unbundle its services.

According to a media report Professor Barber wants to charge students an extra fee for optional tutorials. It is not clear from the article, but I assume this is referring to face-to-face tutorials and the Professor is still proposing to provide the on-line students with an equivalent to the tutorial on-line, for no extra charge. My experience has been that if you provide a good quality on-line course, then students don't want a face-to-face tutorial. There will be a small number of students (perhaps 10% to 20%) who need extra help, but the cost of that might be better built into the course fees.

Professor Barber  also claimed that on-line students were paying for the cost of lecture halls and this was built into the government endorsed quality standards. But there is plenty of research to show that on-line education produces results at least as good as face-to-face. It seems unlikely to me that  if UNE presents evidence of the quality of their education they cannot be penalized for not investing in classroom which are not needed.

Recently I enrolled in a North American on-line university. The fees are a few hundred dollars less per subject, than for the Australian equivalent. However, I selected the institution not based on cost, but for the relevance of the program and reputation. There have been some pleasant surprises, one being that a courier delivered my textbooks several weeks before the course was due to start. I had not realized that textbooks were included. Also the university provides an informal on-line forum for students to get to know each other, as it can be very lonely being a new student (on-line or on campus).

MOOCs Like Budget Airlines or Strip Mining

In "Clay Shirky Says MOOCs Will Matter, but Worries About Corporate Players" Jeffrey R. Young writes that on-line courses will be a boon for students and parents worried by high education fees (July 25, 2013, 2:24 pm). I expect that on-line courses, including MOOCs, will result in a disaggregation of fees, rather than a simple reduction. Budget airlines have a low ticket price, but then charge for extras which used to be included, such as baggage, blankets, drinks and food. The MOOC may be free, but then you pay if you want assessment, textbooks, or a human tutor.

As an example of this, I paid for two on-line courses at USQ, but at the end found I had to pay an extra fee to get a copy of my results. It had not occurred to me when I enrolled that my results were an optional extra.

MOOCs may also be seen as an efficient way for rich countries to pillage developing nations for their intellectual capital. MOOCs provide an efficient way to identify the brightest students to offer a scholarship to and extract them from developing nations, much as minerals are extracted.

ps: My MOOCs with Books Webinar is 17 September.