Same Boat. Different Waters.


Judging by my email over the weekend, it appears that every foreign language department in the SUNY system is in the same boat as my own. I'm receiving numerous emails advertising courses that can be taken online, and asking me to tell the students here at UB about them. The SUNY system has begun to push online education in a major way, largely through OpenSUNY and #sunyonline. My understanding of the effort is relatively vague, but it appears SUNY wishes to centralize online offerings and has set up new protocols through which a student at one SUNY campus can enroll in an online course at another with relative ease. 

I don't think I'm off-base when I suggest that everyone on this Same Boat is under the same gun. From the very top of SUNY Central administration in Albany, down to the smallest of its 64 universities, colleges, and community colleges, everyone seeks to boost enrollments (and hence budget allocations) by expanding online education. No duh. There are only so many available butts on each campus to sit in our classrooms, and that total number of butts is shrinking rapidly. Therefore, the easiest way to boost enrollments is by reaching student populations that are not on our campuses. That's logical, right? Right?!?

Adding to this mix, I dare say that all departments across today's HEI spectrum are experiencing enrollment imbalances that they do not necessarily perceive as such. In other words, certain departments (one would guess in STEM disciplines, Sociology, Psychology) are highly enrolled, to the point of not being able to handle demand. Simultaneously, every other department is severely and chronically under-enrolled. Let's call it Same Boat Syndrome (SBS): the waters are incredibly choppy, so it behooves everyone on the same boat to distribute themselves equally to balance the ride; but instead seven-eighths of the passengers push to the bow, leaving the remaining eighth of us back to the stern and rather terribly sea-sick. Whether to the front or the back, it makes for a horrifying ride.

Getting more passengers to telecommute onto the Same Boat will not necessarily cure our SBS. Let's dispense with the allegory: Merely offering online versions of the courses and curricula you already offer face-to-face (F2F) will not save your department. The worst case scenario is that each one of the 64 SUNYs will offer the exact same curricula online, which only creates useless redundancy and even more useless competition for evermore scarce resources. And it also has the benefit of making the entire system less able to compete with the hundreds of other HEIs nationwide who are also offering the same exact curricula. Which is no benefit at all of course.

I have encountered no evidence that online pedagogy is any less effective than F2F. To the contrary, there must be evidence (which I will explore in subsequent posts) that there is no difference in effectiveness between online and F2F. Nevertheless, online content delivery is a different beast than in-person teaching. Let's cut back to the allegory: With all this climate change, the waters behave differently. You don't need the Same Boat. But you might need three or four of them. 

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