Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Online Instruction Outsources Jobs | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Online Instruction Outsources Jobs | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:


Online Instruction Outsources Jobs

Imagine the perfect online teacher

Highly mobile, fully equipped, and ready at a moment’s notice to appear before a camera and teach.
Humor aside, the “perfect online teacher” is also the efficient answer to spiraling education costs. In both higher education and K-12, fulltime permanent teachers are major budget items. To reduce labor costs, both colleges and universities and K-12 districts have resorted to outsourcing.
Look at higher education. Replacing full-time tenure-line professors teaching undergraduates with part-time adjuncts–75 percent of all teaching in higher education is done by part-time instructors– and increasing the percentage of online courses in community colleges, four year regional universities, and non-elite institutions has occurred in the past two decades (CAW_portrait_2012). Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have yet to generate significant income for elite and non-elite higher education institutions, another venue for