Quality matters: making commodities and manufacturing knowledge in the virtual university

Jonathan T. Church, Arcadia University Churchj@arcadia.edu

Podcast/performance version of a paper delivered at the C-SAP conference, ‘The virtual university? Social science critiques of learning and teaching in the age of digital reproduction’, London, UK

The author

Jonathan T. Church is an associate professor of anthropology, and faculty in residence and liaison to Arcadia Online at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania, USA. He has researched and published on collaboration and changes of role identity in instructional design teams, intellectual property and the commodification of higher education, and the neoliberal management of knowledge by university institutional review boards. He also has extensive fieldwork experience in the Shetland Islands and has published on the political reimaginings of ‘traditional’ identity. His current research on the Shetland Islands is focused on internet usage and dialect revitalisation.

Abstract

From the vantage point of an ethnographically informed critical reflection, this presentation charts the subtle shifts taking place around the neoliberal management and control of knowledge in the production of online courses within higher education in the United States. Manufacturing the virtual university requires the collaborative production of instructional designers, information technologists, multimedia designers, and the professoriate now newly designated as the SME (subject matter expert). Within these daily collaborations the professoriate internalise a discourse regarding assessment, outcomes, quality, instructional design and pedagogical behavior that increasingly aligns their professional identities with processes of the marketisation of knowledge

Keywords

neoliberalism, faculty identity, instructional design, virtual university, assessment culture

Transcript

Editorial note: Small adjustments have been made to this published transcript with the author’s permission

Introduction

From the outset, let me point to two arenas of specificity regarding the creation of this essay. My ethnographic vantage point is mostly contextualised within the archipelago of institutions of higher education within the middle Atlantic region – one of the densest areas of universities, colleges and community colleges within America. I am hoping, of course, to say something of relevance to you today, but much of that relevance may not relate to the similarities between systems so much as to how larger neo-liberal trends of marketisation and commodification instantiate themselves with the local particularities of specific university settings within national trends of higher education (Canaan and Shumar, 2008).

During the process of constructing this essay, there have been numerous moments when I have been rather startled as to where I have arrived. You know those uncanny moments I think we all have when you leave your home in the morning only to arrive at your place of work with very little remembrance as to how one has actually got there. Well, I have had a lot of those moments during the last decade, where I have been a traditional teaching faculty member, a cultural anthropologist and an interlocuter within the daily work world of instructional designers and technologists. Let me illustrate this with three short vignettes as a way of presenting the major themes I want to address.

Three neo-liberal moments

Vignette 1

A decade ago I served on a technology taskforce along with members of another faculty that had been identified as ‘early adopters’: information technologists, librarians, the vice-president of enrolment management, and members of administrative and service staff. We drafted a strategic analysis of the university’s current and future technology needs that was submitted as a supporting document to the accreditation committee. From these meetings, a relatively rare consensus developed among institutional stakeholders that prioritised investment in information technology so as to lay the groundwork for a virtual university. At one particular meeting I was asked to imagine what type of university policy on intellectual property would increase faculty productivity. What type of default position on intellectual property would allow us to surpass the bricks and mortar restrictions of the actual university and build the foundations of the virtual one, the University of the Future?

The administration was roughly divided as to whether the actual university must own all the intellectual products of the virtual university because these products were the bricks and mortar of the virtual one. Only through investing in costly technological infrastructure, pedagogical support and faculty training would there be a virtual university in the first place. What would happen if a faculty member created web-based technology that was crucial to students successfully completing a major and, for whatever reason, this faculty member left? Could they really take this product with them? What would happen if they were recruited by the competition? Were faculty members really ‘free agents’? Shouldn’t the university own it all? Shouldn’t faculty be required to sign some form of non-compete agreement that had become so typical of hiring contracts in other sectors of the high tech industry before the dot com bubble burst?

Other administrators vehemently argued that there were so few technological ‘high flyers’ in the faculty that the problem wasn’t owning the products of those who were, but of bringing the other faculty members along, of changing the university culture. Here, I found myself interjecting in agreement: ‘If faculty were going to participate in the virtual university, sure they would need tremendous initial support of material resources from the university, but this participation required such a commitment of time, labour and learning from the faculty – often to their detriment in light of the traditional and conservative university culture as found in the system of promotion and tenure – that this type of behaviour, of entrepreneurial spirit, should be rewarded even more with protections of intellectual property. If not, then what incentive would faculty have for participation? Why should they invest?’

Within six months of this meeting I had drafted an intellectual property agreement that guaranteed members of faculty rights over their own intellectual creations, even the most mundane. This agreement received tremendous support from the administration as it was seen as the first step towards creating a virtual university. But I was left with a profound sense of disquiet and the disconcerting taste of my own words: ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, ‘incentives’ and ‘investments’. What had happened to the shared intellectual commons in this neo-liberal moment of my own internet dreaming?

Vignette 2

A few years ago I became the faculty member in residence at my university’s online distributive learning unit. As a gold-plated tenured faculty member, senior colleagues are willing to openly discuss their fears of teaching online. As one of ‘them’, senior and with a reputation of being a social irritant to the university administration, I am approachable. I was discussing two odd consultations with faculty I had had that day with my colleague, the dean of this administrative unit.

The first consultation that day was with a very senior colleague with few technological skills. He had required an enormous amount of instructional designer time and collaboration to even begin outlining the development of a course. When I asked about course goals, objectives, assignments and assignment rubrics for students, he shot me these quizzical sad looks. Not only was the technology a foreign language, but the language of outcomes and assessments was too. His concern was how to give the same quality course to students online as to those he had taught face to face for years. By this he meant something different than I. He didn’t mean the transmission of knowledge or subject matter expertise, but rather how would students experience a course with ‘him’ – a reputed master teacher. How would an online course not just be a course on a specific topic within English Literature, but a course imbued with his half-century of scholarly mastery. How would students get a taste of him and really savour that knowledge?

The second consultation was with a junior colleague from the health sciences. Her concern was how to make an online course interactive when the students had no prior disciplinary knowledge. A problem-based learning strategy, common in online learning for the health sciences, just didn’t seem appropriate. She wasn’t concerned about the ‘tastes’ of knowledge, but simply about whether she could engage students in such a way as to accomplish a clear set of articulated course goals and objectives. She was technologically astute and steeped in a professional identity of goals and assessment, but I was concerned that the course which she created would completely lack a sense of personalisation. I feared it would be too plain vanilla for the type of boutique market niches my university has. I tried to give her strategies to ‘spice up’ her course, and yet leave it modular enough so that another instructor could easily take it over in the future. As I discussed these two different cases with the dean, we lamented the distributive learning unit’s inability to refuse instructional design support. Online health sciences are a growing market and have more potential to generate revenue than a literature course, especially given our scarce resources. We discussed using the Quality Matters™ rubric, an assessment tool to help ensure that courses have the proper amount of modularity and personalisation, institutional branding and scalability, so that we have a ‘high ROI with our SMEs’ (a high return on investment with our subject matter experts) – another neo-liberal moment. What tastes of knowledge do we now season our universities with when we design courses like differently flavoured crisps?

Vignette 3

Barack Obama had won the presidential election just a few days before and I’m sitting at a banquet table in Orlando, Florida, listening to Terry Anderson give an interesting keynote speech about social software and open-source resources used for the collective and the networked construction of online learning objects. There seem to be over a thousand attendees this year at the annual Sloan Consortium conference. Sloan-C bills itself as a consortium of ‘institutions and organizations committed to quality online education’ (Moore, 2005: 1). As this is Orlando, the conference facility is huge, and I have a sore back and shuddering headache that comes from too much coffee and too many sessions. When I came to this conference a few years before, the major theme that dominated the conference was how to get faculty on board and how to gain institutional legitimacy for online learning. Like past years, many of the attendees are instructional designers or administrators of online programming at various institutions. There are relatively few attendees from elite universities, but many from state university systems and smaller private universities like my own. The informal theme of this past year’s conference was different. Rather than how to get faculty on board, the theme was what to do with them once they were: how should they be managed, and how should the quality of their pedagogical process be controlled. From specific conference sessions to hallway conversations, it is clear that traditional faculty is the problem. While they might know their subject areas, they often don’t have any expertise in teaching, and this lack is exacerbated in the online environment.

As I sit listening to Anderson talk about the need for open educational resources, I am struck by how odd his discussion of the formation of prodsuage models of intellectual property for the collective formation of an unruly intellectual commons seems in this environment, where most attendees are expressly competing with each other to get more student marketshare. Anderson’s inspiring vision of transformed pedagogy seems like a rallying cry, and the crowd listens raptly when he mentions a plethora of Web 2.0 tools to create networks and collectivities. His deeper vision of a profound emancipatory pedagogy, an open education for all, seems somewhat lost on most attendees; however, the moral cloak of being emancipators is held onto tightly by the attendees. As the talk ends, an instructional technologist turns to me: ‘This stuff is so cool; we just need to package it correctly.’ Another neo-liberal moment, where emancipation is seen as correctly timing the right product to market.

The creation of procedural morality: quality as control

For almost a decade, my daily professional life within the American academy has been situated between being ensconced within a traditional academic department and being an interlocutor among instructional designers and technologists. If the early administrative dreams of the virtual university were ones of digital diploma mills where the professoriate were simply ‘work for hire’ regarding intellectual property (Noble, 1997), by the turn of the millennium these dreams had melted away. The reality of transferring traditional courses to the online environment confronted the fact that by the end of this process there simply wasn’t much actual property to own. What became clear from the marketing vantage point is that students, like heritage tourists, were purchasing an online experience of the presentation and interaction with expert knowledge, not merely the subject matter expertise of the professoriate.

Facing the McDonaldisation (Ritzer, 1993) of higher education is a pressing problem for administrators. How does one ensure the coherent ‘branding’ of a university so that the consumer perceives the ‘value added’ of attending a particular one and doesn’t only respond to price sensitivity? How does one market the symbolic pedigree of the university when modularity leads to plain vanilla pedagogy? Without going into detail, I want to make clear that this issue is quite dependent on where any particular university falls within the competitive and symbolic universe of higher education in the United States. Many community colleges use price reduction as their marketing strategy and brand opportunity (plain vanilla is good because it is cheap), while small liberal arts colleges must maintain a pretence of symbolic eliteness by fitting information technology into their mission statement and brand identity, value-added boutique marketing. As administrators pushed for accountability and quality control, they have also attempted to support faculty pedagogical production through creating a cadre of instructional technology professionals to guide faculty in ethical practices that maintain brand identity. The administrative desire for instructional technologists to collaborate with faculty on the instructional design of courses is seen as promoting the ‘ethical behaviour of faculty’ by ensuring a high quality education for students as indicated by surveys of student satisfaction. In many institutions like my own, to create a plain vanilla course is not only perceived as indicating that one is manifesting lazy and unprofessional behaviour, it is also symptomatic of professionally unethical behaviour. Often instructional technologists suggest that, while many faculty members may be wonderful instructors and facilitators of learning, these members don’t actually know what they are doing or why it might work within a given situation. Faculty members are subject matter experts, but not educational experts. They need support and ‘professional development’.

In the contemporary virtual university, manufacturing knowledge now requires the collaborative production of instructional designers with expertise in online pedagogy, information technologists with infrastructure expertise, multimedia designers, and the professoriate now newly designated as the SME (subject matter expert). Online pedagogical experiences require not just the presentation of knowledge, but also the particularities of institutional branding, the strategic production of online student interactivity, the leveraging of appropriate technologies and the assurance of assessable quality control so that courses are both replicable and scalable and often packaged within ‘programmes’. Courses have become collaboratively produced modular platforms that are piloted by the SME and then turned over, in many cases to adjunct faculty.

The recent widespread adoption of information technology within everyday pedagogical practice has led to a tremendous push by administrations for best practice standards and transparency within the faculty production of online courses. Administrations have often rhetorically requested placing ‘students’ needs first’, appealing to faculties’ ethical responsibilities as professionals as a point of leverage by which to procedurally audit the creation of these experiences to guarantee both quality and instructional branding (Church, 2008).

It is at this crucial intersection that instructional technologists have been able to insert themselves as ‘experts’ and symbolic equals to SMEs by using rubrics of measurable quality to assess the ongoing construction of an online course. One of the most significant rubrics emerging as a national standard is Quality Matters™, a review process that originated within the University of Maryland system so as to formulate strategies to insure interinstitution quality assurance among various branches of HE within that state system. Now a fee-based service provider, Quality Matters™ trains online branches of institutions to utilise the rubric in a constant peer-review process. In other words, Quality Matters™ formulates a quality assurance rubric and trains institutions to train faculty members to peer review each other’s courses. The whole point of the exercise is for members of faculty to learn how to assess their online pedagogical objects according to the language of instructional design that both create conditions of self-assessed quality assurance and self-directed market orientation. Like so many other rubrics of best practice in HE, Quality Matters™ is often used as the daily charter by academic administrations and units of distributive learning to establish a procedural morality for the formation of faculty professional identities.

Conclusion

As Canaan (2008) has persuasively argued recently, neo-liberalism in HE within the UK takes on ontological grounds as it is produced by the daily citations and reiterations of auditable practice by which one acts out one’s professional subjectivity. What quality assessment procedures do is require the constant production and repetition of normative forms of auditable evidence about teaching, research and administration. They make us do what they want us to become. For Canaan, following on from Judith Butler (2004), the repetition created by managerial fiats and procedural moralities from above forms the grounds of their resistance because, in the performative constitution of a certain form of professional identity, these require the exclusion of one’s other identities, one’s other subject positions. That is why our evaluative reports to our masters above always have that ‘as if’ quality (Garcia, 1999), as if one really ever acted the way our self-evaluations say one did: not likely. For Canaan, there are grounds for hope and resistance to the manner by which the quotidian of neo-liberalism structures our professional subjectivity within that which is excluded. Canaan has hope because there are grounds of identity within each of us, and places to establish collaboration between us by which to set an emancipatory compass and strike a different orientation to pedagogy and social justice.

I am much less hopeful, and maybe that is because of the exceptional conditions of neo-liberalism within the US academy, mandated less by the state than by the marketplace. As I have suggested elsewhere (Church, 2008), in the construction of professional identities, especially for faculty, neo-liberal discourse couched in terms of the ‘ethical self’ acts more like a gyroscope than a compass in orienting the production of knowledge towards the manufacturing of property. For in the globalised and reterritorialised world that neo-liberalism has wrought for more than quarter of a century, individual identity is tied to institutional demands, individual anxieties and imaginative struggles with fashioning a professional self. Within the increasingly audited and assessed conditions of higher education in the US what is so terrifying about this gyroscopic orientation is how seamlessly inscribed the logics of marketisation have become the daily measurement of striking the right balance in the formation of a professional identity and pedagogical practice.

I see this every day as faculty members anxiously deal with their insecurities as they come to our ‘shop’ to learn how to get online. Using Quality Matters™ as a design standard and a baseline for a project management timeline, we have them take an online course on the principles of instructional design so they know what is like to be an online student and so they learn a discourse of goals, objectives and assessment. We give them a design template and a modular unit plan. We sit with them every step of the way. We lessen their tremendous anxieties, their sense of being out of balance and out of control, by giving them a set of strategies and tactics, not just technologies. We teach them how to teach online, and we teach them that they didn’t know how before. We tell them that their end-product will be of high quality and appropriately institutionally branded, and it is. Survey ratings of student satisfaction, of engagement and of interaction are extremely high. Our faculty members are grateful that their peers have helped them become better instructors and often mention that teaching online has positively changed the way they teach in their traditional classrooms.

To keep our balance in such changeable times, and hence to return to the gyroscopic metaphor mentioned earlier, most members of faculty, including myself, have internalised a discourse regarding assessment, outcomes, instructional design and professional behavior that aligns them with processes of the marketisation of knowledge regardless of political persuasion. Rather than see the neo-liberal governance of the university as administrative fiats from above (the compass), I have tried to show, from one vantage point, how neo-liberal governance intertwines with what Lemert and Elliott (2006) suggest is a new individualism, of flexible orientation and reflection on practice that is oriented towards the market. Through the utilisation of peer-review processes, like the Quality Matters (QM™) rubric, the logic of successful pedagogy as the output of high quality marketisation of knowledge is being internalised within the professional identities of many of us who teach, and who teach others how to teach, in an online environment.

References

Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, London: Routledge.

Cannan, J. (2008) ‘A funny thing happened on the way to the (European Social) forum: or how new forms of accountability are transforming academics’ identities and possible responses’, in J. Cannan and W. Shumar (eds.) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, London: Routledge.

Canaan, J. and Shumar, W. (2008) ‘Higher education in the era of globalization and neoliberalism’, in J. Cannan and W. Shumar (eds.) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, London: Routledge.

Church, J. (2008) ‘Managing knowledge: intellectual property, instructional design and the manufacturing of higher education’, in J. Cannan and W. Shumar (eds.) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, London: Routledge.

Garcia, A. M. (1999) ‘Multiculturalism: an ‘as if’ phenomenon’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 12 (3), pp. 299–310.

Lemert, C. and Elliott, A. (2006) Deadly Worlds: The Emotional Costs of Globalization, New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Moore, J. (2005) The Sloan Consortium Quality Framework and The Five Pillars, Sloan-C™: Needham, Massachusetts.

Noble, D. F. (1997) ‘Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education’. Available at: www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issues31/noble/index.html (accessed 29.4.2009).

Ritzer, G. (1993) The McDonalization of Society, Pine Forge Press: Thousand Oaks, California.