What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia? 380
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Would such a University give out degrees? I'm not sure such a thing would hold much clout. I would have to stoop to actually getting to know a potential hire from this university rather than stare at their GPA and 'work' experience!
I'm not so sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend
I would guess that they are working a 2nd job to make ends meet. Not for the "love" of teaching.
Re:Degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
Your sarcasm aside, this actually would be a big problem. After all, think about how wikipedia works as a research aid--you can't cite wikipedia, but it works well because it links primary sources. With a major, accredited University, a diploma means that some level of validation has already taken place--that's what accreditation is for. Without that, you'd have to research each candidates classes individually, probably by talking to the professors.
If this ever does become the norm, there will definitely be a huge increase in HR positions. I wonder if we can start a rush for MBAs with this information, like the rush for CS degrees when the internet was going to be the "next big thing"...
Jaw-droppingly bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The lack of real expertise on some (many?) subjects, the petty squabbles to protect inconsequential fiefdoms, zero accountability.
I fail to see how a wiki model could remove all that from universities.
Boom. Roasted.
Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The future is the University of Phoenix? The one that has one of the highest default rates on student loans because it's graduates can't get jobs?
Sure. That's the future.
If we were really talking about the Wiki-ization of Universities I would image we would have boards of experts to decide who the professors were. It might resemble a university bureaucracy.
Phoenix Model (Score:5, Insightful)
consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
What about the research (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missing The Point (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that learning does not go on, just that most people use it to get a degree to get a job. This current trend is historically unusual, it used to be that most people who went to college would go to be cultured and educated. That was when learning resources were more difficult to acquire than they are now. Now there is a wealth of information on every subject that makes independent study as feasible as college, as projects like khan university and this show.
Middle Age Universities now?? BAD IDEA (Score:5, Insightful)
In the middle ages interested (and I mean wealthy) people would be able to grasp multiple areas of expertise (think leonardo da vinci).
Since then things have gotten a WHOLE LOT more complicated, i.e., Would we want civil engineers building bridges if they could skip structural courses?
Professional expertises are narrower and narrower and with that the margin for freedom in terms of what is required to finish a degree is smaller.
The world is more complex, society is more complex, and while there is certainly some wiggle room for each individual the bottom line is that highly specialized workers require a highly specialized, structured, education.
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because a dying profession [npr.org] uses Wikipedia in a way that is irresponsible, it does not validate Wikipedia as a primary source of information. So, I hope your post is sarcasm.
Um, how about we don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Run universities like Wikipedia? So you can have tenured nazi's running around like they own certain subjects wholesale, like some Wikipedia admins do? So "truth" is only relative to what the most powerful group of professors (admins) that give a damn about the subject matter?
No thanks. The USA has one of the best university systems in the world, flaws and all, but running it like Wikipedia would just insure that the most incompetent and most vocal (who are often the same) will have an even larger voice.
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Did they just show up for 120 hours, or did they actually pass all their graded assignments, and pass enough of the assignments in enough of the courses that the faculty determined them to have a reasonable knowledge of the craft?
Re:Degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people ONLY work...in order to get money. There just are not that many altrustic people in the world. I mean, if I won the lottery tomorrow, and never had to work every again, I would not.
The door would not even come close to hitting me on the ass out of the workforce on my way to somewhere tropical with a lifetime of rum drinks and beach babes in my future.
I'm definitely NOT in the minority here on this one.
That being likely a given, who exactly is going to be devoting enough time to plan coursework, do testing, and dedicate the time required for in-depth research? Who's going to pay for the facilities/equipment for research?
I dunno....I know many here give WAY too much credit for the human spirit, and doing work purely for the pleasure and satisfaction of the work itself. I think that is a very small number out there.
Sure, much of the college system out there sucks due to things like tenure...profs more interested in publish or perish than teaching students, but I sure don't see this as the remedy for the current systems' problems.
University is not about learning per se. (Score:5, Insightful)
The businesses I've been in cared about the degree because it showed
1) you could finish a 4+ year project
2) which had lots of jerks along the way and you didn't melt down
3) that had ridiculous hours at times
4) that had absolutely inflexible deadlines at times and you made them.
5) you had to communicate a lot with others.
---
Other that than, I can't count how many times someone is moved laterally away from their degree within 18 months of being hired.
Re:Degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the number of lawsuits against "University of Phoenix" - which is really just a big fucking degree mill - when people found out that their degrees were non-accredited in many cases, this is a key point to consider. "Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
Re:Degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I think it would be nice to hand someone their resume back filled with [citation needed]s.
Re:Missing The Point (Score:2, Insightful)
It would be great, except that for quite a while now college has not been the best way to learn, it is about getting a proof of effort. It will take a long time for a wiki-style university to be widely accredited.
Okay then, I'll just go to this self-taught neurosurgeon. What could possibly go wrong?
College isn't necessarily useful in some fields of study. In others, it's damned well quite necessary. If you want to do interpretive dance for a living, then skip college. That liberal arts degree will get you minimum wage just like not having the liberal arts degree. If you want to be a doctor, then you need to go to school for it because, licenses and such aside, human lives are put pretty directly in your hands. In other fields, it's completely dependent upon how a person learns. Some people are great at learning through self-taught methods. Others do much better in a physical classrooms where they can work with the professor and classmates. The "college is not the best way to learn" argument is a very tired and ignorant blanket statement. It all depends on what you want to do and how you want to learn it. Some people do learn best in college.
It doesn't help that a lot of kids going into college are lazy dipshits and don't really go to learn. They go to get a degree because they think it'll guarantee a great job when they graduate. Then they get a hard lesson in the real world.
Universities are not just for teaching (Score:5, Insightful)
Practical Work (Score:5, Insightful)
How does that work in such a college.
So guy shows up on campus and says he's a electrician and he's going to teach anyone interested. All kinds of students flock over looking to learn a trade. He's got a whole bunch of references, but half of them don't answer the phone and at least a quarter of the rest are just references that lead to the other references.
He explains that this course is just a stub and hopefully some better electricians will come along and make it better and safer. But hey, let's go and get you your ticket!
Re:Jaw-droppingly bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Errm, isn't that what working in a corporation is all about?
Cause professors WANT to work for free! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, because research doesn't cost anything, and professors don't really want to be able to afford to buy food.
People don't have day jobs at UofPhoenix because they want to have two jobs. They have day jobs because UofP pays shit and this is the only way the faculty can make ends meet.
Re:Degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is worse than that. Let's look at theory of *whatever*. I do a lot mathematics. How many theoretical mathematicians would this new uni support? I'm guessing not a lot. So, if we were to have this back when number theory had no practical applications unlike as it does today in security, we'd probably have no number theory upon which to base our computer security that underlies our new web based companies like Amazon and countless others. How do we measure that loss before the loss can be seen?
What about physics? Quantum theory was developed because a lot of physicists and mathematicians thought it would be really neat to understand nature in a deep level. There were no applications obvious at that time yet it underlies much of modern electronic computation. Why would they get funded to do their research? How about Einstein and relativity...the use of which makes GPS actually work. No obvious use, why would yer basic Joe Gimme-a-Job schlump take a course in relativity?
How about philosophy? Descartes had some pretty neat algebraic ideas...no one ever conceived of them before him and in their original text, they are very obscure. Yet much of modern mathematics is built on algebraic theories. I cannot imagine him getting a job. How about the logicians who worked on philosophical logic? Some of that spawned modal logic which in turn spawned Floyd-Hoare logic and the whole notion of proving programs correct with respect to some mathematical specification. It is used intimately in security arguments. How do we fund the philosophers now? How do we predict which philosophical theories will be of use in the future? What about Aristotle? He invented logic. How does he get funded when the common man couldn't see what use it would ever be as short-sighted as they were that they couldn't see modern computers?
The basic problem with numb-nuts ideas such as wiki-university is that it is spawned by Business School Product who can see no value in anything that doesn't immediately translate into increased sales of widgets. It pretty much consigns humans to no greater intellectual curiosity than what Business School Product can put a price on. And that price has nothing to do with any future value. It is a prescription for consigning the human race to extinction; it would merely become an experiment it how short term gain will doom long term sustainability.
Re:Missing The Point (Score:5, Insightful)
The undergraduate portion of an MD's education is mostly just qualifying that person to get into medical school. It's the specialist school, the clinicals, the internship, the residency, and the board exams that make someone an doctor. It's not the premed certificate.
Re:Wasted $80K (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you? Yes. Will you? Almost certainly not. The percentage of the population with the intelligence, ability, and drive to learn a complex discipline on their own is extremely small- low single digits. That's if you can even figure out what to study- there's an awful lot of self taught programmers out there who learn a language but never make it to data structures, much less higher level study. Which is why there's so many shitty programmers out there- too many of them think learning the language is all there is, when that's the lowest level of competency there is. Oh, and lets not forget that you have to learn it correctly- reject the outright wrong information out there (or worse, the partially correct) without picking up sloppy habits or deeply ingrained misunderstandings. Even most intelligent people fail that.
Now try that on something truly difficult- civil engineering? Medicine? Law? Physics? No way in hell.
Re:Degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
Would such a University give out degrees? I'm not sure such a thing would hold much clout. I would have to stoop to actually getting to know a potential hire from this university rather than stare at their GPA and 'work' experience!
While insightful, this comment points out the main problem with a University education:
It isn't to teach or educate people but rather to come up with a method to allocate "union cards" to various professions and to restrict entry into those fields. If along the process somebody actually picks up some of the knowledge necessary to engage in that profession perhaps might have some use in society, but don't let anybody fool you into thinking that the role of a University has much if anything to do with actually passing knowledge along.
There are some professors who do enjoy sharing the knowledge that they have, and sometimes (rarely) an entire department of like-minded people do get together too where their students actually do pick up some knowledge that is useful to whatever it is that they are studying. There are also a whole bunch of professors who have an ego the size of the Moon and mostly want to show off their intellect at the expense of their students, or professors who don't have a clue about how to even teach in the first place (as if a PhD included a component about how to pass on the knowledge they've acquired over the years).
Any time a profession is talking about raising standards and insisting upon credentials like certificates or degrees, it is to throw out potential candidates in a job screening process. Perhaps a degree shows some persistence to get through the bull that some professors throw at you, and there is a certain aspect to life in general where you need to deal with bureaucrats and people who are out to tear you apart and kick you when you are down. I suppose the conventional university process does a good job at forcing people to deal with that aspect of life, and those that don't are thrown to the waste heap of society in spite of whatever intelligence they may posses or other skills in life.
Re:We can already start building this now... (Score:4, Insightful)
We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think the percentage of people who are willing to enroll in a university out of desire to earn money at a career is far greater than the percentage who are interested in being intellectuals.
I have one friend who is currently enrolled in a creative writing degree at a university and who professes a desire to be a published author... and who reads about four books a year. Will he succeed? Maybe not, but if not it's hardly because he lacks opportunities to practice intellectualism. Similarly, the number of my friends who hold strong opinions on politics far outstrips the number who can honestly claim to regularly read newspapers and magazines, beyond a few things they find on the Web.
On the other hand, other friends have just recently completed their degree programs -- some of them advanced degrees -- and now, so burnt out from their academic study that they've lost all passion for their subjects, they look forward to taking a couple years off as professional bartenders. These are very smart people, but to them the thought of spending the rest of their lives pondering the finer points of some bit of classical knowledge is about as exciting as becoming a tax accountant.
The link between education and the romantic notion of "intellectualism" in modern America is tenuous at best -- but that's just what it is, a romantic notion. Real people's lives are much more dominated by real-world concerns, and I highly doubt pulling all the beer taps out of the pubs is going to change that.
Start small, base on MIT ESP and Tufts ExCollege. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people forget about the basic research performed by most universities, which is absolutely necessary to the academic industry and flows into every aspect of the rest of the world (especially including tech, medical, and military). A good deal of the criticism on the current system comes from a lack of understanding of basic research [blogspot.com] and its part in academia. While the Wikipedia-style likely has merits for far more than we currently expect (it was equally ill-received when proposed for encyclopedias!), it can't fit into our current paradigm of research universities while retaining the current organization of journals and how they handle submissions (which is another point of contention that needs a serious upgrade [wikipedia.org] of its own).
Therefore, perhaps the part-time lecturer model is preferable as a starting-point. However, due to its for-profit (not to mention anticompetitive and controversial [wikipedia.org]) nature, Phoenix is not an appropriate role model.
Take a look at examples that are already far closer to Wikipedia, like MIT's ESP [mit.edu] and Tuft's Experimental College [tufts.edu].
Re:Jaw-droppingly bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in a PhD program doing some climate related stuff which is highly dependent on computational fluid dynamics. I'm modeling the fluid dynamics of the North Atlantic to better help us understand its carbon uptake and transport.
The computational resources alone are waaaay out of most people's league. Without a grant for tens of thousands of dollars to put together a Rocks cluster with a high-bandwidth back end and many terabytes of high RPM storage and scratch drives, the work I'm doing would run in little better than real-time on your average desktop. No use in modeling 80 years of ocean circulation if it takes you that long to do it!
The experts I have access to far exceed what I can find on the internet. I got flown to France this spring for a conference with the rockstars of my field. I talked shop over a bottle of fine wine with the guy who wrote the seminal textbook for my field. I had lunch overlooking the harbor with a guy who wrote major parts of the IPCC climate models that the US uses.
While I agree with your first major paragraph, I have to completely disagree with the second. If I wasn't going to a major university, I wouldn't have had these chances. I wouldn't have tens of thousands of dollars of computation hardware at my fingertips. I wouldn't have known about some of the people I've met and learned from. I wouldn't have been granted a $1600 Euro plant ticket to go rub shoulders with the giants of my field.
I've learned more from Wikipedia (no, not the sources... the actual wiki pages) than I could ever have lerned in college. If the information is out there, why pay for a professor to present it to you when we now have a machine that presents it to us for free?
That shows a lacking of your college program, or a failure on your part. As an undergraduate, I learned a ton from a professor who had retired, but still had a full machine shop in the bottom of the main science building as his "office". He didn't teach a class, but he taught more than most of the other professors there. Again, I agree with your first major paragraph. But although that is true, it doesn't mean that a college education is without merit. No offense, (to you and all the rest) but what you're saying more likely applies to CE than to most other college degrees. There's more philosophy and code on the internet than you'd ever be able to get through. Most code can be run on your average desktop. Outside of mainframes, there's not much you can't model (slowly) on affordable hardware.
Just don't apply that to college as a whole - I'm sure that you can learn just as much English Lit online as you can in school. However, there are many fields where that's simply not true. Trust me...I wouldn't be suffering through graduate school right now if I could do this outside of it. I had a decent job, decent pay, and a lot of free time before this. I gave all that up for the things I've described. I'm not about to be running hundreds to thousands of gigaflops at home, with tends to hundreds of terabytes of storage. I can't easily get access to that on the internet. I can't get personal access to the people who are leaders in my field. Sit on a picnic table with them and pick their brain. That's what college can give you. If you can get what you need to do your job on the internet, great. Not everybody can.
Re:Degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
But that is the ORIGINAL MODEL for the University... the students hired the teachers... they weren't cattle to be passed around.
To be honest, most university undergrad degrees have less "hands on" instructor time than the degree you would get from Phoenix. You can sit in a class with 100+ other students to learn 200-300 level classes just as well as sitting at home in the quiet and learn them. The whole problem is that the University "System" exists to support the PhD level work which (combine with sports teams) brings in the Executive "business". Undergrads are just there to fulfill their State funding requirements and provide a "fee" base to buy research toys with.
The majority of workers are employed by small business (that's less that 75 employees) and modern universities have almost nothing to offer regular business owners anymore. Would a small business want somebody from university or somebody from Phoenix, Baker, Davenport, ITT, etc. Do YOU want to learn from a professor that's sat in a lab for 20 years (but worked for Nasa launching the Moon rocket) or do you want to learn from a Sales guy that teaches in between meetings with customers right now? Or how about learning business from a guy that actually started his own business and uses it to feed his family?
No, what you got in CE (Score:5, Insightful)
Was a solid, theoretical, background. If you don't recognize the value, well maybe you just need to work for more time.
I work for a CE department and we see older students quite often. Not people who are changing careers or the like, though that happens, but people employed as engineers, being sent by their company. The reason is they are good workers, smart, etc, but they never learned the theoretical electronics background. So they run in to problems they have trouble solving, or solve sub optimally because while they know some of the practice, they don't have a good grasp on the theory.
Also don't think the "Putting up with bullshit, doing as you are told, and sticking with something for 4 years," is useless either. That is part of what companies want. They want someone who understands that work isn't fun it is, well, work. That it isn't about doing whatever strikes your muse, it is about doing what you are asked to do, and following through on things in the long term.
However if you really think you learned more for Wikipedia than your university courses then it says one or more of these three things, none of which reflect well on you:
1) You suck at learning. You did a bad job paying attention in class and trying to grasp all you were being taught. You need things broken down for you in to small, media-size chunks and put in simplified terms for you to be interested.
2) You are lazy at learning. You just wanted to do the bare minimum, memorize what you needed for tests without much understanding, just what you needed to coast by. You didn't bother to learn anymore, or use any of the amazing learning resources you had (like the professors).
3) You chose a really shitty school. Means you either lacked the acumen to make a good choice or the drive/ability to actually go to a good one.
If you really think you learned more off a wiki than in school, that says some rather poor things of you.
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Do YOU want to learn from a professor that's sat in a lab for 20 years (but worked for Nasa launching the Moon rocket) or do you want to learn from a Sales guy that teaches in between meetings with customers right now? Or how about learning business from a guy that actually started his own business and uses it to feed his family?
But going to school is all about the experience! You know, proving you're willing to waste years of your life listening to people who've never done anything practical talk about things that don't interest you so you can get a piece of paper that proves you're one of the elite. Why would businesses possibly want to hire someone who finds that too boring to finish? It's important that managers never hire someone who would challenge their nice, safe ideas about how the world should work.
Re:Phoenix Model (Score:3, Insightful)
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
What does the status of the university itself have to do with the professors they employ?
Re:Degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
Because the Wikipedia article can be changed. You would trust Wikipedia over NBC, but would you trust it over a peer reviewed science journal? The whole point of my comment was that main stream media should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source. Sure, they can go to Wikipedia as a starting point, but they should then go to the material sited in the Wikipedia article as well as other more trustworthy sources and site THOSE.