By snoadmin
When there is limited space in a print publication, stories that do not fit are piled online. In California, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) has proposed a bill to apply the same treatment toward students. Under the proposed legislation, students who can’t take a class because it is full would be rerouted to online courses.
Senate Bill 250 would require the Cal State University and the California Community College system to give students the option of taking online courses through private, for-profit organizations which will apply to their degrees. The bill is controversial and has gotten some attention this week, to say the least.
Proponents say this bill is a means through which to address the issue of the highly competitive atmosphere during class registration, brought on by the insufficient number of classrooms and professors to address the large number of students in the CSU system.
Opponents, like Jim Mahler of The American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931, counter this with the concern that the bill opens the door to privatization of public higher education.
While both are reasonable arguments, what happened to the Latin origin of the word “university?” A simple Google search clarifies that the word comes from the Latin phrase “universitas magistrorum et scholarium,” which essentially means “community of teachers and scholars.”
If students are now free to sit at their computers in the confines of whatever black hole they’re sleeping in and earn school credit upon completion of an online course, where is that sense of community? This bill would essentially redefine the idea of a university.
This outsourcing of instruction interferes with the quality of education represented by the diplomas awarded to students who participate in it. There will be no way to gauge the weight of one student’s degree against another’s if they both take advantage of this bill by completing online courses from different online resources.
Students in the CSU have been hit with so many cutbacks and limitations in terms of pursuing their degrees that it’s no big surprise that the next move would be to kick us out of the classroom and sit us behind a computer.
The creators of the bill have implied that the online courses would more than likely be general education classes, rather than upper division major-specific classes. Proponents of the legislation present this idea as positive, but they ignore that general education classes taught by the university are crucial to a well-rounded education.
When potential employers ask for a student’s resume they look not at a transcript but the university from which a student graduated. It’s hard enough to get a job, and it might get harder if this bill passes and decreases the value of a CSU degree.
It may sound enticing to take classes at home in your pajamas, until you think of the implications.