Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [46]
This more flexible course structure can also help alleviate financial pressure on students and their families.
When this method of course design and distribution system becomes widespread, students no longer will have to take an entire course, but will be able to take or, in more precise terms, to purchase, any portion of a course—a single session, a few weeks, the entire semester. In education, as in other networked media, mass production is going to give way to mass customization in which students will have considerably more freedom of choice and power. But they will still need guidance. For this system to work effectively, the role of faculty members will change—they not only will teach but increasingly will serve as academic counselors, who advise students on designing courses and selecting programs offered at different institutions. In this arrangement, the professor-student relationship becomes considerably more collaborative. In the courses on media and technology that I have designed with undergraduates, I have found that such collaboration works effectively and is almost always mutually productive.
This reconfiguration of courses not only gives students more freedom but also creates the possibility of decreasing the time necessary to complete a degree, thereby lowering the cost of a college education. Students already can reduce that time by taking advanced placement classes as well as extra courses. But these measures are inadequate given the skyrocketing cost of college. Just as it is not reasonable for every course to be the same length, so it is not necessary to make every student spend four years in college to receive a degree. Rather than requiring all students to complete the same number of courses or to accumulate a certain number of credits, colleges and universities should require students to demonstrate the mastery of knowledge about a particular subject or in a certain area. The means by which the mastery of knowledge is demonstrated can be adjusted for different levels and in different fields. Instead of considering each course a separate unit that is assessed independently, evaluation could take a broader approach that would encourage the integration of a student’s course of study. As we will see in the next chapter, students should not only be required to develop competence on a specific subject but should also have to complete an interdisciplinary program focused on a particular problem or theme that complements his or her concentrated work. A student’s progress can be measured by conventional oral and written exams and papers as well as exercises in other media that are evaluated by faculty members in each of these areas. It would also be useful to have a culminating assessment that would require students to bring together the different areas, subjects and problems they have studied. While these exercises would be less frequent than traditional course papers and exams, they would be significantly longer and more substantial. The principle of evaluation should always be the same: the quality of knowledge rather than the quantity of courses is the measure of accomplishment.
To illustrate how a more open and flexible structure of knowledge might be created and what the shift from a closed grid to an open network might look like in practice, I will describe an undergraduate course entitled Real Fakes that I have taught at Williams. One of my aims in this course was to weaken traditional departmental divisions and disciplinary boundaries by bringing together writers, artists, subjects, texts and media that are usually held apart and studied separately. Real Fakes explored the age-old question of the relationship between the original and the copy in different historical eras and various media. Here is the catalog description:
Cloning, genetic engineering, transplants, implants, cosmetic surgery, artificial life, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, faux fashion, sampling, plagiarism, art