Online Program Manager companies----They're heeeerrrrree!

[Wahoo Redux]

Well, somehow without a lot of noise our uni signed up with one of those "online program management" companies with its main office in a state 2,000 miles away.  The student newspaper actually published a pretty good article about the red flags involved.  This is hot on the HotChaulk / Concordia debacle.

The student newspaper used The Century Foundation as a resource to explain the red flags in the typical exploitative OPM contract----and guess what!?  We raised them all!

Then again, education evolves.  Maybe these companies aren't so bad.  There seem to be a lot of them around.

I don't understand why universities can't design these types of platforms themselves (don't we have buildings filled with computer science PhDs and C.S. graduate students and business schools with marketing experts and hungry young business-people vying for internships?) but I know absolutely nothing about how these work or what they do.

And there's talk of outsourcing our actual grading.

Anyone worked with "outsourced" grading?  I will admit that my least favorite part of academia is the grading, particularly as a writing instructor who must comment at length on oftentimes haphazard papers, and if I just designed curriculum and class presentation my days would be much easier...and I suppose I could "teach" a great deal more if other people were grading...and sure, we see a lot of grade inflation (our coordinator did an analysis of the grades in our department---a lot of amazing students)...but it also seems like a complete abdication of my responsibilities and eliminates what I am trying to get them to do from the equation. 

Then again, maybe outsourced grading would work?

Anybody have any experience with these things?

[marshwiggle]

The student newspaper used The Century Foundation as a resource to explain the red flags in the typical exploitative OPM contract----and guess what!?  We raised them all!

Then again, education evolves.  Maybe these companies aren't so bad.  There seem to be a lot of them around.

My (limited) experience with one here: The Concordia situation indeed seems messed up; the arrangement I've heard of involves the company doing market research to determine potential enrollment and I don't believe the university explicitly pays; the company gets part of the tuition revenue so that bigger enrollment means more money coming in to the university. (The company decides, based on their market research, if it's going to be worth doing.)

I don't understand why universities can't design these types of platforms themselves (don't we have buildings filled with computer science PhDs and C.S. graduate students and business schools with marketing experts and hungry young business-people vying for internships?) but I know absolutely nothing about how these work or what they do.

I see a couple of problems with this; first of all, universities are going to be hampered by their own ego-bias. A company that has to generate enough tuition to make money can't be driven by wishful thinking, while institutions do it all the time.
The second problem is that this needs permanent, ongoing expertise. Grad students and interns who are there for a year or two at most won't give the continuity necessary.

And there's talk of outsourcing our actual grading.

Anyone worked with "outsourced" grading?  I will admit that my least favorite part of academia is the grading, particularly as a writing instructor who must comment at length on oftentimes haphazard papers, and if I just designed curriculum and class presentation my days would be much easier...and I suppose I could "teach" a great deal more if other people were grading...and sure, we see a lot of grade inflation (our coordinator did an analysis of the grades in our department---a lot of amazing students)...but it also seems like a complete abdication of my responsibilities and eliminates what I am trying to get them to do from the equation. 

Then again, maybe outsourced grading would work?

What are grad students and TAs, if not outsourced grading?  In lots of big classes now, which are technically "face-to-face", almost none of the grading is actually done by the prof, so we're already there.

[Hegemony]

Outsourcing grading to another company, rather than to someone working directly with and under the professor, seems like educational malpractice to me.

[Aster]

Oh yay, a diploma mill. That's classy.

Concordia wanted to grow. For several years, HotChalk helped Concordia do just that.

Together they launched an online Master of Education degree program, branded with Concordia's century-old seal. Overall enrollment quadrupled between 2009 and 2013. The graduate student population grew twice as fast.

The small private college became one of the nation's largest providers of Master of Education degrees.

For HotChalk's "recruitment services," the school reported paying tens of millions of dollars. The payments added up to $62 million during the school's 2014 fiscal year – at 46%, representing nearly half of all tuition and other revenues Concordia brought in that year.