Paved with Good Intentions (UPDATED BELOW)

On Wednesday, April 10 the Senate Committee on Education will hold hearings on both Darell Steinberg's SB520 and Marty Block's SB547.  These two bills are the most prominent of the flurry of activity in the Legislature concerning Higher Education, “bottleneck” courses, and online activities.  As with other bills out there neither SB520 nor SB547 grapples with the systemic issues confronting California Higher Education (especially for the severely under-resourced CSU and CCC) but instead attempt to ride the MOOC wave to address the issue of access to courses.

Steinberg's SB520 has garnered the most attention and is the most complicated.  SB520 builds upon Steinberg’s previous legislation (SB1052 and 1053) passed in 2011-12.  These laws established a framework for the production of online textbooks for lower division courses across the three systems.  SB 1052 and 1053, created a California Digital Open Source Library and a California Open Education Resources Council.  Under SB1052, the COERC (I suppose pronounced "coerce") is required to, among other things, ensure the:

• "[d]evelopment of a list of 50 strategically selected lower division courses in the public postsecondary segments for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials shall be developed or acquired pursuant to this section." 
• "creation and administration of a standardized, rigorous review and approval process for open source textbooks and related materials developed or acquired pursuant to this section."
• and "establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013."

The Council would be made up of 9 faculty representatives from the 3 systems (each system sending 3). 

There are legitimate concerns raised about expecting 9 faculty to be able to manage this function.  Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they could, in fact, identify the most important bottleneck lower-division courses and determine those courses where the basic textbooks seem to be the same.  Given that the proposed textbooks would be modular in form, faculty in courses would retain control over the materials used in their classes.  Moreover, Steinberg appears here to be trying to use public pressure to encourage private textbook providers to lower price.  Whether the state should be providing funds for private publishers to produce these books is something that could be debated.  Still it seems that Steinberg fashioned a focused tool that may help students with an obvious problem: the costs of their lower-division textbooks.

SB520, on the other hand, relies on digital providers to manage a series of disparate issues.  First, it proposes to extend and modify the California Virtual Campus (originally established in 1999).  The CVC was designed both as a repository for existing online courses (it serves as a sort of portal for students) and also as a mechanism to bring together "stakeholders" in higher education together "to facilitate ongoing collaboration and joint efforts relating to the use of technology resources and high-speed Internet connectivity to support teaching, learning, workforce development, and research."  Steinberg proposes to extend the term of its legal basis from 2014 to 2017

But he also proposes to do much more.

The heart of SB520 is the linkage of the California Virtual Campus  to a new California Online Student Access Platform overseen by the California Open Education Resources Council.  Under Steinberg's proposed legislation the Open Education Resources Council would identify the 50 lower-division courses (across the three segments) that are "consistently impacted" and oversee a process by which online courses would be reviewed and approved and then placed in the California Online Student Access Platform.  At that point the legislation declares:

Students taking an online course available in the California Student Access Course Pool and achieving a passing score on the course examination shall be awarded full academic credit for the comparable course at the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges.

SB520 also declares as a legislative finding that "California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework allowing students in online courses in strategically selected lower division majors and general education fields to be awarded credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems" and commands the COERC to offer "an efficient statewide mechanism for online course providers to offer transferable courses for credit."  

The creation of a "statutorily enacted" online platform through which private providers can secure a public market for their courses does at least two things.  First it removes control over the curriculum from the Senates of the three public sectors; second it effectively leverages public resources to secure the investments of private venture capital.   As Chris and Bob Meister have recently pointed out, SB520 not only falsely implies that MOOCs can compensate for the decline in public funding for Higher Education but follows a classic pattern of venture capital reshaping public institutions by using them to secure protected entry into a particular market.  

Indeed, SB520 is a venture capitalist's dream: it opens up a potentially never ending public market for their wares and provides needed legitimacy for their products.  Online providers will be able to concentrate on producing individual courses that will meet whatever standards that COERC may approve.  They will not have to undertake either the process of ongoing evaluation (that will be provided by COERC) or manage the insertion of their courses into larger programs and general education systems (that cost will be borne by public higher education).  Moreover, by insisting that these courses be MOOCs ("open to any interested person.") SB520 encourages the development of a secondary market for the MOOC providers while effectively eliminating courses geared to specific campus populations.  In effect, SB520 provides public funding to minimize costs for private providers; it is another transfer of funds from the state to corporations.

Most of the attention on SB520 has been on the threat to the authority of the Senates (Steinberg seems to have thought that having Senate appointees to the California Open Education Resources Council would prevent that issue from arising).  And that threat has led to a good deal of push-back ranging from the faculty petition organized by the Berkeley Faculty Association to the critical letter offered by the system-wide Academic Council.   One danger of this emphasis on the authority of the Senates rather than on the legislative interference in the form of teaching is the potential for complacence in response to Marty Block's SB547.

SB547, to be sure, avoids some of the problems of SB520 because it is much simpler:  it commands the Academic Senates of the three segments to identify "high demand transferable lower division courses under the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum" and to develop online versions of those courses to be offered in 2014.   It suggests that funding will be provided in the annual budget (although there is no command about how much that funding will be or what costs will be included).

But as with SB520, Block's proposal insists on the rapid deployment of a teaching medium that, initial studies suggest is profoundly unsuitable for students without previous academic success (see studies on Virginia and Washington.  MOOC proponents will, of course, insist that the medium is experimental and that the technology will enable them to improve their ability to teach all students.  That may well be true.  But the future possibility does not justify the present commitment of resources and legitimation of a particular vision of education.  That it is also a remarkable political intrusion into the nature of teaching (with potentially the same effects on the classroom as the introduction of the testing regime has had in K-12) cannot be ignored.  Although I do not doubt the good intentions of either Steinberg or Block, their proposals subordinate the integrity of the curriculum in the interests of the venture capitalists behind Udacity, Coursera, and other digital start-ups. 

Locking in online courses as the only possible solution to the problem not only avoids confronting the larger crises brought about by state disinvestment in higher education but also institutionalizes a particular form of online classes. 

It is encouraging that both Senator Steinberg and Senator Block are attempting to address the real financial pressures facing students and their families.  It is also important that they recognize the importance of improving transfer rates and helping the CCC resume its important role in fostering social mobility in California.  But their approach through the mandated production of online courses misses the boat.  Steinberg's bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block's overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.  It also allows the Legislature to avoid confronting the question of why bottlenecks have grown.  It would be good if Steinberg and Block turned their attention to that issue.  They might find that it led them back to the crucial problem that the State has created: the continual under-investment in California Higher Education.

UPDATE: The hearing on SB520 and SB547 has been postponed till April 24.  I'll keep you posted if anything else changes.  (h/t Eric Hays)