More often than we care to admit, we build our university’s claims of honor and excellence on a cult of exceptionalism: a belief that we are cut above the rest, but still in service of the public; exempt from the excesses of corporate or partisan agenda, but not all that much, really. These two principles are more aspirational than indicative of the way things are, not least in the UP administration. Their self-glorifying myth can so quickly falter in the face of shocks and disruptions, as the pandemic now proves true.
On February 28, when, at a systemwide faculty summit, UP Vice President for Academic Affairs Cynthia Rose Bautista presented the “contours of the UP academic roadmaps” post-pandemic and talked about “quarterly semesters,” “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), and “stackable credentials,” our administrators unwittingly posed an existential question: What is a UP education for?
The buzzwords Bautista threw around, including “digital badges,” “micro-master’s,” and “nano-degrees,” have lately gained popularity, representing alternatives to on-campus access points to a degree. She reportedly expounded on how, going forward, UP could maintain “relevance and suitability” and build capacities by “‘intensive learning’ through ‘less intense’ structures of study.” All this sounds edgy and catchy but conceals how politically corrosive and pedagogically dubious this zeitgeist of reform can be.
Riding on the waves of educational technology, or ed-tech, is not exactly the problem for the same reason that quick technological fixes and new experimental degrees are not the solutions. The problem consists in how they themselves often derive from new variations on the same banking model of education that state universities like UP claim to forswear: faux-progressive innovations that reduce students to mere passive consumers and potential laborers, teachers to mere content producers, and the university to an elite marketplace for ed-tech companies’ latest product line of gimmicky tools and platforms.
So far, UP has partnered, as a “campus customer,” with Coursera, a California-based MOOC provider that, among other things, offers universities wholesale licenses to allow their students to enroll in credit-eligible courses. Worth well over USD1 billion even before the pandemic, the company has positioned itself as a leading expert in data-driven, AI-powered online learning. It boasts machine learning tools on its platforms, such as personalized browsing, learner skill-tracking, and smart review materials. It has also recently diversified into online program management (OPM), fronting the costs of building technical infrastructure for degree-granting programs that its university partners would otherwise have to cover.
This business model allows OPM providers like Coursera and Udacity to take a percentage of management and student fees to compensate for their up-front investment. It appeals to universities that wish to cut costs while generating revenues and practically outsourcing administrative and teaching functions to OPM providers. Alternatively, universities can farm the job out to lecturers or staff hired on precarious, fixed-term or temporary contracts, reinforcing a longstanding trend of casualization and deprofessionalization in higher education.
To be sure, the UP administration has not yet confirmed any definitive OPM plans to realize radical forms of credentialing and certification. We also do not mean to ascribe bad faith to Bautista, who, presumably like other university administrators, might have been motivated by no ill intentions in extolling models of disruptive education. But, in finding the correct expression of their mandate, they may be entrusting the fate of future scholars, faculty, and staff to vested interests beholden only to global venture capital.
No business would, of course, profess that its sole purpose is to rake in profits. Predatory commercial interests hardly make for a good marketing pitch. Instead, during a press briefing in November last year, Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda underscored how the company could help Filipinos upskill and reskill for in-demand jobs, especially during the pandemic. One feature of Coursera for Campus, for instance, enables students to join cloud-based guided projects, which the platform claims can help them “build job-ready skills with real-world tools” in under two hours.
“The question is: How can we create the kind of educational capacity and access so that people who will be displaced by automation and technology can get the skills to land new jobs? The way to create that educational access, we believe, will be dramatically furthered by online learning,” Maggioncalda said.
His mention of “access” and his cheery, techno-deterministic spiel somewhat resonate with the noble vision of distance education. With economies of scale, online courses make it possible for people burdened with, say, day jobs or child-rearing responsibilities to learn flexibly. This premise—the same motivation for founding the UP Open University in 1995—is egalitarian as it is persuasive: Universal quality education is a right, not a privilege.
The argument becomes muddled, however, when public-private partnerships hold this mission of mass education in thrall. In appreciating a degree only for the labor market value of its promised products—competitive graduates and workforce productivity gains—a university loses sight of the very democratic project of building an intellectually enriched, critically informed, and politically conscientious citizenry.
Till now, however, so gripping is the meritocratic myth that a degree—one from UP, no less—is only worth the plum job prospects it guarantees. But any credential can only give you a leg up. It hardly sets you up for success as quickly as it does those who are already several rungs higher on the economic ladder.
While UP could go on to claim MOOCs and stackable credentials to be more accessible stepping stones, especially for underserved students, all it would do is shortchange them the full worth of taxpayers’ money. It would deepen the demographic divisions further: on the one hand, students who can afford to go the entire stretch of a four- or five-year degree and learn holistically beyond the curricular; and on the other, students trained short-haul to focus on acquiring the skills and know-how they need in the industry.
To begin with, UP has no business trading in just skills development, doling out degrees piecemeal, and perpetuating a fundamentally flawed market-oriented mindset. For as much as we complain of burnout or disdain coursework, we know there is more to our strife than its vocational impetus. We recognize how our humanistic education at the university, for all its flaws, has at least given us fresh perspectives to see the world in all the good, the bad, and the ugly. We learn to ask not what our education is for, but for whom it is. Then we go out into the world and try to make even an incremental difference for the better.
But, away from our professors and peers, we have watched the pandemic dilute the expansive goals of higher education. Already we can make out what MOOCs, once normalized, would resemble—writ-large versions of ossified interactions in the online classroom, cookie-cutter discussions depleted of the rich exchanges, especially in humanities and social sciences, that algorithmic teaching-learning environments cannot quite capture. Despite their personalized options, automated interfaces are, by nature, impersonal, distancing us even farther from the crises and chaos wracking the larger society we purport to serve.
We stand to lose the most in these times of turmoil and transformation, when we are too psychologically unmoored and physically beat to resist, as administrators introduce a techno-instrumentalist imaginary of university education and hold it up as an inevitable pathway to post-coronavirus recovery.
Nothing is final yet about how much all this talk of MOOCs and stackable micro-credentials will come to pass. But an honest and collegial dialogue with faculty and students may be the first step to rethinking what genuine equity-focused policymaking in education means, to reimagining the university’s place in a world adrift. Otherwise, the costs of our compromises will play out beyond the programmed pedagogic bubbles we are still stuck in. It is not enough to harp on honor and excellence while many forces bent on extracting profit and power from this “new normal” similarly pay lip service to building back better.
We might as well knock the whole building down ourselves and start from the ground up. ●
