I was struck by a recent blog post by Cathy Davidson (of Duke U and HASTAC), and not just because it opens with this slide, the one she opens all her presentations with here lately. “That gets people’s attention,” she says. I’ll bet.

But what has to be at least as attention-getting is the title of her blog post: “If We Profs Don’t Reform Higher Ed, We’ll Be Re-Formed (and we won’t like it).” That, too, is bracing, but is it really up to profs to reform higher ed? That’s a question worth asking, since the problems Davidson lists are pretty formidable: that college educations are highly desirable but hard to get into, hard to pay for, hard to complete. This has lots of venturesome ventures and for-profits lining up to say their feet will fit the glass slipper, but how realistic is that really?

Something similar is happening in a recent “manifesto” released by (or at least under the auspices) of the American Council on Education. The manifesto (full title: “Post-traditional Learners and the Transformation of Postsecondary Education: A Manifesto for College Leaders”) concludes by calling for “a bottom-up entrepreneurship” that occurs from within. Too many distractions (disruptions?) are being brought to bear from without, or so says a recent article in Inside Higher Ed on the manifesto and its author, Louis Soares: “Much of the conversation about innovation in higher education is occurring outside of the academy, Soares said.  He would like to see that change.”

That sentiment is not hard to share, no more than the author’s conviction that “post-traditional” (read “adult”) learners represent a great (and largely) unfulfilled need on higher ed’s agenda. What may be a little harder to affirm is the ability of college leaders to re-set their agenda thus — or re-set it period. That may even be behind the way, according to the IHE article, “ACE issued a disclaimer with the report, noting that it reflects the views of Soares, and necessarily those of the council.”

There’s a certain tilting-at-windmills angle to these calls for higher ed faculty or administrators to fix the problems confront them. These are problems of cost and economy, shifting demographics, cultural change and value — things “outside of the academy.” To be sure, there are plenty of calls for change — and responses to them — coming from outside as well. So many, in fact, that if change is conceived as some sort of single (unitary if monolithic) construct, it also seems a juggernaut, creating that feeling that you either get on board or get run over.

This is not to say that standing still or sitting on your hands is a good idea. It’s not even an option. But when exhortations seem to suggest there’s one right way to go — and you need to head off in it — there’s a wonderful curative. You just need to think about how all-over-the-place current attempts at reforming or reinventing college seem to be. A moment that crystallized this for me was when a high-level CUNY administrator listened patiently to the description of what a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) was (with a nod to retention problems, shuffles toward credit and credentialing [and monetizing all that], far-flung demographics, etc.). “If that’s a solution,” he asked, “what problems does it solve for us?” Good question.

An answer of sorts is the latest update in who’s jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. “Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit,” The New York Times reports, though the new wrinkle is really that a commercial venture, Academic Partnerships, will recruit students for the free course for a share of the tuition they pay if they continue with the degree. Described as “a bold strategy” in the Times article, this try-then-buy ploy, with a commercial partner brokering that, is transparently more about marketing than pedagogy. Innovation as bait: doesn’t this return us to Davidson’s slide and the questions she provokes with it?

The Sloan Consortium has announced the new Babson survey of online education — the 10th annual. (Tony Picciano posted on this yesterday, sharing the executive summary; this post is more of an attempt to read past the latest gains (and losses) to what the long-term trends seem to be.) The survey report is titled “Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States,” but the kind of “changing” heralded in the title turns out to be more a matter of changing by inches than any changing of direction. In a time when discussions of higher education (and not least of all the role of online ed within it) are marked by calls for radical change –“reinvention” and “revolution” — the report of ten years of change seems an account of (even a rationale for?) incrementalism.

The growth rate in online enrollments (9.3%) is the lowest reported over the ten years of surveying. And the growth is not really due to institutional change. On the contrary, traditional academic culture takes pretty much the same dim view of online instruction it always has: “Only 30.2 percent of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education. This rate is lower than the rate recorded in 2004.” This significant lack of progress notwithstanding, growth continues because students seem to be voting with their feet, although strategic work on new ways to walk and new things to walk to seems minimal.

This is most striking when we look at the most publicized change in online instruction, the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The survey finds that under 3% of institutions have MOOCs while under 10% are planning to do anything along those lines. Most (over 55%) are undecided, while nearly a third (32.7%) say they have no plans for MOOCs.

It is of course no surprise that something so new as MOOCs would seem a far way from gaining acceptance, but the incremental change in perceptions of “traditional” online instruction does not bode well for dramatic changes in acceptance of new modes of teaching and learning, whether they be MOOCs or anything else. Even at institutions where online instruction exists to the tune of fully online programs, faculty acceptance peaks at 38.4% (as compared with that overall figure of 30.2% quoted above). A majority of academic leaders believe lower retention rates are a problem for the growth of online instruction, and those who believe a major reason is a lack of discipline on the part of online students has actually gone up from over 80% half a decade ago to 88.8% today. (This is another finding that does not bode well for MOOCs, by the way.)

What really makes this lack of change striking is that other battles seem almost won. The long-standing debate over comparability, for instance: it turns out that a substantial majority of academic leaders believe online education is “as good as or better than” traditional instruction. But a second glance is that the gains have been gradual and indeed incremental. “In the first report of this series in 2003, 57.2 percent of academic leaders rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face. That number is now 77.0 percent.” Actually, a wider look at claims of gains seems to follow this pattern: “When this report series began in 2002, less than one-half of all higher education institutions reported online education was critical to their longterm strategy. That number is now close to seventy percent.” Over a ten year period, critical gains of that kind amount to about 20% — in other words, gains of about 2% a year.

Whether small, steady gains amount to dramatic changes in the long run is perhaps one of those things determined by the eye (and patience) of the beholder. What is clear is that change the press is fond of hyping with headlines about Campus Tsunamis and Revolutions are to be taken cum grano sails. As Emerson once said, “The years teach much the days never know,” and we should be grateful for the longitudinal view these ten years of surveying represent.

It’s been a big year for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), indeed the Year of the MOOC. No one has done a better omnium gatherum of what the year has brought in the way of MOOCs than Audrey Watters. Her excursus on “The Year of the MOOC” reminds us just how new a phenomenon the MOOC is, at least as it has come into focus in the public eye. Watters gives a timeline of what happened when: in January, Sebastian Thrun, after his famous success with an AI course enrolling over 150,000, announced Udacity, the first of the entrepreneurial MOOCs; MITx opened enrollment in February; Coursera launched in April; in May, Harvard joined with MIT and MITx became EdX, which Berkeley joined in July, etc.).

At least as usefully, Watters offers (just below that timeline) “The Forgotten History of MOOCs,” a reminder that all these headline-grabbing moves (mostly at/by elites that had heretofore done little with online education) were preceded by other epochal experiences in open online ed. The real ur-MOOC was a 2008 course called “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” offered by Stephen Downes and George Siemens; practicing what it preached, the course, taken by a score of University of Manitoba students for credit, was also available free and online, and a couple thousand signed on.

As Watters notes, Downes has since distinguished between “cMOOCs” — those holding to the connectivist principles of that first course — and “xMOOCs“; the latter are not just massive but massively resourced, entrepreneurial, and, for better or worse, the focus of the most attention. Pundits like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have seen them as the disruptors and even saviors of higher ed, but analysis of enrollments suggests that most of the people taking them are not college students but professionals in the field, other adult learners, and especially international lookers-on. Most who offer them don’t offer course credit, and most of those who take MOOCs don’t complete them. (Tony Bates, drawing on Downes’ distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs, notes “current xMOOC completion rates of 10% or less.”)

Touted as forces of disruption, they have themselves been disrupted, changed in telling ways. In addition to an impressive list of elites (including Princeton, Duke, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins), Coursera has been gathering unto itself an impressive stash of venture capital, and so has also been the focus of most of speculation (sometimes more than speculation) about the monetizing of MOOCs. Besides having their openness as well as their free-ness questioned (see “How Open Are MOOCs?“), these putatively free and open courses have been harnessed in interesting ways — to institutions using them for credit, to grants and experiments. They are part of a move to “Freelance Professors,” and even a move from “MOOCs to MOCCs” (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses).

The tide has turned in another way: an increasing number of commentaries and analyses are highly critical of MOOCs. Much of this turns on the appeal the represent to the advantaged, to those that already have learned how to learn (essentially as autodidacts). This is not just the theme of “The False Promise of the Education Revolution,” the lead/cover story of the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but of recent articles in The Atlantic, The Economist, and others.  (The lead-in to the article in The Economist –“creating new opportunities for the best and huge problems for the rest” — seems the soundbite least likely to be embraced as a slogan by the xMOOCs.) Some critiques have a distinctively dystopian flavor, like “The End of the University as We Know It,” in the January/February 2013 issue of The American Interest.

All this said, MOOCs remain the most potential-rich instructional resource to come along in a long time, perhaps since the invention of the printing press, and it would be unwise to presume that this year has seen that seam played out or diluted beyond recognition. The potential of MOOCs to offer a newer, richer instructional content in dramatically scalable ways may be the biggest thing to hit higher ed since textbooks, even as it opens new possibilities for new kinds of interactions between student and instructor, student and student, student and content. That potential is no more fully realized than it is exhausted. Expect better (if not bigger) things to come from these Massive Open Online Courses.

A colleague sent me a very interesting article. (Thanks, Bruce.) “Coursera will profit from ‘Free’ courses” its title declares. That’s not entirely new news. I noted some time ago that a freedom of information request had made the Coursera contract an open book, complete with 8 (count ’em, 8) ways of monetizing its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But this piece, actually linking to the contract, enumerates and describes the ways, and speculates on more ways to make money from MOOCs with other, better(?) business models.

The discussion includes news that commercial learning management systems like Blackboard and Desire2Learn are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. The idea, suggests the article (drawing on thinking about possible business models gathered at quora.com), is that the MOOCs from these commercial providers would function as loss-leaders or teasers — a taste of online instruction that would make users/learners want more (and pay for it).

None of this is surprising. With Coursera investing $22 million in venture capital (and it has been around less than a year), it is going to want to make that money back sooner or later — and sooner rather than later. It could do that through corporate sponsorship, certifications, partnerships (like its rival edX has already forged with the UT system), and so on.

One particularly compelling business model outlined in the article is the “freemium-to-premium” approach:

Freemium – Where you split the learning options along the lines of Bloom’s Taxonomy and make free those courses that target “Knowledge & Understanding” learning outcomes but charge a premium for those follow-on courses that target higher cognitive skills like “Applying, Analyzing, Synthesizing, Evaluating and Creating”.

What’s especially compelling about this is that, if you know your Bloom’s Taxonomy, the split between remembering (at the bottom) and analyzing, evaluating, and creating (at the top) is actually a spectrum, ideally a continuum, and you shouldn’t put walls — especially paywalls — between the learning objectives/opportunities.

Another configuration, designed less with profits and more with pedagogy in mind, would be a grand and glorious variant on the flipped classroom, where the instructional content is contained (and consumed) in something MOOC-like, but the critical inquiry and individualized, point-of-need instruction happens in a cozier, more interactive, and (yes) more traditional classroom environment. I’m not sure how you’d wring profits from such an arrangement, but I think we all can see how it could help make effective learning happen. And isn’t that the real point of courses, however massive or open or profitable?

 Late last week, after all the attention given to MOOCs (massive open online courses), something new(?) made the news: a consortium of 10 schools the Chronicle of Higher Ed described as “highly selective” and Inside Higher Ed described as “elite” announced that it would be providing (regular-sized) online courses for credit. Since online courses have been providing college credit for decades — this has been done both by no less estimable schools (Penn State’s World Campus comes to mind) and by larger consortia (like the Educational Technology Cooperative of the 16-state Southern Regional Education Board or SREB), the question is what’s really newsworthy here.

There are several possibilities. One is simply that, in the wake of all this interest in MOOCs, anything they seem to have inspired is more news about them. And news of this new consortium fits. “The elite-branded, massive courses now being rolled out through Coursera and edX have set the stage for the 2U consortium,” says Steve Kolowich in the IHE article, “but the online courses from the consortium will not be MOOCs.”

What will they be then?  “The idea is to replicate not only the content and assessment mechanisms of traditional courses,” continues Kolowich,”but also the social intimacy.” Hmm. In other words, they will be much like the courses that for years have been offered by UMass Online, the SUNY Learning Network, University of Maryland University College (UMUC), usw.

But wait. What was that about 2U? Maybe that’s the noteworthy bit. What’s that exactly? The Chronicle article notes the consortium will be “using software from 2U, an education-technology company formerly called 2tor.” More than an LMS (it does involve design support and connective tissue for the consortium as well software),  2U does not displace the participating campuses’ own faculty (or, apparently their “highly selective” admissions and pricing), which raises real questions about the howling hyperbole of a headline Forbes came up with for 2u”s role in this venture: “Private Company Solves US Education Problem.”

The fact is that the consortium does need help (if not a national solution) because top-tier schools do so little with online education, or did till MIT and Harvard begat edX and Stanford profs begat Coursera and Udacity. Interestingly, this new top-tier consortium doesn’t seem very clear on why they are doing online ed. The Chronicle piece, which concludes with a bulleted list of the 10 schools involved, is all about how the online courses would benefit their study-abroad students — so much so that, though these remain the principal examples, there is now a correction of sorts: “This article was updated. An earlier version said that the courses were primarily designed for study-abroad students.”

So we have a mixed picture. These schools are offering online courses with paid help and unclear motives (except that others are getting headlines for doing it — why not us?). If they are really doing anything new besides charging more and being pickier about their students than most, it’s hard to say what, so that comments on the IHE article include snipes like “What I don’t get is the spin game and how some of these institutions are recasting or rehashing old programs as something new – and do it with a straight face.”

On the plus side, they’ve redirected attention from those massive open online courses that don’t offer credit (yet) but are mostly free (for the time being) to the online courses that do earn credit, are taught by regular college faculty, and do charge tuition — just like other online courses have been doing for two decades. It’s more the Emperor’s Borrowed Clothes than the Emperor’s New Clothes, but it’s good to see the attention redirected from MOOCs for a moment, almost like a positive backlash to those elephants in the room.

MOOCs are in the headlines again — not just in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, but in The New York Times and USA Today. The reason for all this attention? The American Council of Education has agreed to look at the viability of giving college credit for MOOCs, or at least engaging in research and then recommendations to that effect (hopefully in that order).

This probably  won’t come as a surprise to anyone –at least as a point we would get to eventually. That we got here so quickly may be another matter, especially when you realize that Coursera, the platform on which the ACE review will focus, was launched in April of this year.

But there are other interesting wrinkles. As the IHE article notes, “Most MOOCs from high-profile providers such as Coursera, EdX, Udacity and Udemy feature upper-division material aimed at students looking to hone their skills or who are merely curious.” The ACE review promises (or perhaps provokes?) a turned corner, something evident from the way its own press release — “ACE to Assess Potential of MOOCs, Evaluate Courses for Credit-Worthiness” — was placed in the category of “Prior Learning Assessments.” ACE, in other words, sees the potential of MOOCs-for-credit as a run-up to regular college attendance and degree completion.

So does Coursera, apparently. Here’s Daphne Koller, one of the two co-founders, as quoted in the Times article: “If you’re a random student from another country, what are your chances of being admitted to a university here? But if you can show you’re a motivated student who’s completing five courses and done well on the proctored exam, I think a university would pay attention.”

Another harbinger of changed directions (and the focus of another IHE article published today) is a project funded by the Gates Foundation and conducted by Ithaka S+R: the approach here, focused in the University of Maryland system, is explicitly a hybrid approach: according the the IHE article, “The new study will seek to compare student success in traditional versions of courses against alternate versions that ‘wrap’ MOOCs in the accouterments of a normal course — particularly opportunities to interact with live instructors.”

It’s too early to start placing one’s bets, but this venture, I would guess, is really the one to watch. MOOCs, at least at this point, are less courses than assemblages — sometimes very rich assemblages — of instructional content. I’m reminded of another technological revolution in human history that seemed to hold the same promise/threat of change, and on the same scale: the invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. Professors feared they would be replaced then too, but books didn’t replace them: on the contrary, they made them seem all the more useful, though that took a while to sort out. Now we have a similar situation (but also a much faster pace of change), and it will be interesting to see how things sort out with this turn of the wheel.

At the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver last week, Clay Shirky did the big keynote. Though you wouldn’t know it from its title (“IT as a Core Academic Competence”), it was all about openness. The coverage given it in the Chroncile‘s blog — “The Real Revolution Is Openness, Clay Shirky Tells Tech Leaders” — makes that pretty clear.

What is less clear these days is what we mean by openness. And that’s increasingly important. An odd indication of that was a display in the middle of the registration area at the conference: a rectangular mat of astroturf was marked “The IT Landscape” and three “real estate” signs planted in it read “MOOCs” and “Openness” and “Analytics.” (Whoa, I thought. Just three things? Was someone stealing the signs?)

Whether there are other prominent trends, I think we all recognize not just the importance of these, but their complexity, the ambiguity and ambivalence around them. It’s not hard to see that “analytics”  — use-tracking, data-crunching, and the like — is rich and vareigated, and the recent NY Times piece on MOOCs (see my blog entry last week) stresses a growing sense that MOOCs come in vastly different sizes, flavors, and  valences. But isn’t open, well, an open-or-shut deal?

No. In a consumer culture that taught us all, at a very early age, that “free” almost always meant “strings attached,” we’re finding that open doesn’t always mean wholly open. This varies according to what we put the word “open” in front of — words like “access” and “standards” and “source” — but we shouldn’t get lost in the weeds. Some restrictions on just how open things are matter more than others, because some things are matters of flow and principle.

A big one — it was certainly big in Shirky’s keynote — is not just what “open” means you have access to but what you can do with it. For some people (I count myself one), the idea that you are on the ‘net not just to look but to do is key, the Web  2.0 difference, the difference between passive consumption and creative re-production. In what Lessing has taught us to call a “remix” culture, the ability to use what we find and even repurpose it is critical.

Which is why one response to Shirky’s keynote — an article appearing the day after in Inside Higher Ed— is worth noting. In “How ‘Open’ Are MOOCs?” author Steve Kolowich reports Shirky as saying that “the most provocative aspect of MOOCs is not their massiveness; it is their openness.” “Or their lack thereof, ” continues Kolowich, and then goes on to cite the terms of service from the big MOOC providers: edX ‘s statement that “All rights in the Site and its content, if not expressly granted, are reserved”; Coursera’s restriction that, beyond personal and informal use, users may not “copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives [sic] works of the material”; Udacity’s similarly worded prohibition that its users “may not copy, sell, display, reproduce, publish, modify, create derivative works from, transfer, distribute or otherwise commercially exploit in any manner the Class Sites, Online Courses, or any Content.”

This is not the point to get all huffy and suggest that these entities, having invested so heavily in their free (but only to a point) offerings, have no right to say as much. Openness is more a spectrum than a state, and I find one of my earliest entries on this blog, over three years ago, was a meditation on how open the CUNY Academic Commons should be. (The consensus-determined answer can be had with a quick scroll to the bottom of this or any page on the Commons: the default is licensing under Creative Commons; just which license can be confirmed with a click.)

What makes the restrictive terms of service from the major MOOC providers a real issue may be their role, less as massive open online courses, than as conspicuous  (“massive”) elements in the universe of open educational resources (OERs). Here, it seems, they are not on the most open end of the open-ended spectrum, restricting not just the use of materials but also the capacity of their courses to count for anything. “You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera,” Kolowich quotes from that company’s terms of service, “or use any Letter of Completion as part of any tuition-based or for-credit certification or program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera” — this to explain why Antioch University had to enter into a contract with Coursera to count any of its courses for credit.

Again, the issue is not whether Coursera had a right to do what it did when it “drew a line on the extent to which the company would allow outsiders to use its resources without paying to do so” (as Kolowich puts it). The issue is whether we are all fully aware of how not-so-open are some massive open online courses whose openness is declared in their label and encoded in their acronym. And this seems especially consequential in light of a survey Kolowich reports on but doesn’t actually mention by name: Growing the Curriculum: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education (November 2012). The survey shows that 65% of the chief academic officers surveyed thought OER could save money for their institutions, but when Kolowich asked Jeff Seaman, one of the survey authors, if any were aware of licensing issues or any restrictions on openness, his response was telling: “‘Not mentioned,’ said Seaman. ‘Not on the mindset at all of these chief academic officers. The idea of who did it, how I can use it, what the permissions are for use, can I re-purpose it — never appeared in any of the examples that they described.'”

Hmm.

The Education Supplement of the New York Times this Sunday had a long feature article on “The Year of the MOOC.” The supplement cover has an albino rabbit, its pink eyes framed by the Os in MOOC, staring out at the reader  — the implication being that these MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are multiplying like rabbits. Point taken. Anyone who has ever had an albino rabbit, however, knows the lack of pigment in its eyes can cause poor eyesight and vision problems, problems not unlike some noted in the article.

The medium is still the lecture…. Feedback is electronic. Teaching assistants may monitor discussion boards. There may be homework and a final exam.

The MOOC certainly presents challenges. Can learning be scaled up this much? Grading is imperfect, especially for nontechnical subjects. Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20 people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.

Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it.

All that said (and I had noted such problems in one or two or three or four earlier posts), the sense of excitement is palpable. Laura Pappano, the author of the article, incarnates it in Nick McKeown, one of a pair doing a Stanford-based MOOC on computer networking: “Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, ‘We’re both very excited.’ Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works. “We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,’ says Dr. McKeown.”

There’s nothing wrong with feeling our way. In fact, one of the refreshing things about this overview is the way it captures the frontier spirit and ad hoc mash-up that is the current state of MOOC-dom with headings like “WHAT IS A MOOC ANYWAY?” and “WORKING OUT THE KINKS.” Increasingly, MOOCs come in different styles and “flavors” (a word taken from one of the other headings), something a lead graphic tries to capture:

_{Clockwise, from top left: an online course in circuits and electronics with an M.I.T. professor (edX); statistics, Stanford (Udacity); machine learning, Stanford (Coursera); organic chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana (Coursera).}

Also, a sidebar not available online but only in the paper supplement presents a comparison chart of how the major players among the MOOC offerers (“The Big Three”: edX, Udacity, and Coursera) differ by such critical considerations as assessment, academic integrity, and social interaction.  In fact, one of the points of the article is the growing need to discriminate among MOOCs in terms of their “flavor” and quality. Duke prof Cathy N. Davidson is quoted as saying, “We need a MOOCE — massive open online course evaluation.”

I said in an earlier post that it would be a wrong to mistake MOOCs with online learning generally. As important as it is not to generalize from MOOCs to all of online learning, it’s be increasingly important not to generalize MOOCs as a uniform category, mistaking one for another as if they were like, well, so many white rabbits. We’ll see better practices emerge, better breeds, interesting mutations. Here is an area where the hype is actually outpaced by the changes wrought almost daily, an area to keep an eye on.

The culmination of Open Access Week at CUNY was a series of presentations at the CUNY Grad Center on Friday the 26th. And while it’s wrong to settle on one day in a whole week of events, still more wrong to highlight just one presentation among many, I’m going to do it anyway. Jill Cirasella of Brooklyn College (and of the UFS Open Access Advisory Group) gave a presentation that explained “Why We Need an Institutional Repository.” That explanation (available with a click on the afore-offered hyperlink) is 36 slides of compelling information and argument everyone should take the time to go through. But let me highlight a few of the main points here.

As Jill notes, one of the reasons we need an Institutional Repository (IR) is because we said we do. The University Faculty Senate passed a resolution in support of “”the development of an open-access institutional repository for the City University of New York” in November of last year, and the full text of that resolution is available in a report posted by (guess who?) Jill Cirasella.

The reasons for having an open-access IR (like the resolution’s whereases) are many, and they include the observation that most universities (especially universities anywhere near the size of CUNY) have them. But this is more, much more, than a matter of keeping up with the Joneses.

As Jill’s presentation makes compellingly clear, there are may potential benefits to CUNY, including raising its profile and strengthening its reputation, and doing so not just in the academic world but in the wider public realm. That would of course be away of doing the same for its faculty, but it would also make their collaboration easier and more productive, even as it would make it much easier for them to share materials with students, who would in turn be spared textbook costs while  improving their information literacy. Libraries as well as students would save money by purchasing less of what doesn’t get used while having more (open) access to what does.

In fact, there are so many reasons to do have an IR (reasons which should be considered with Jill’s fuller treatment of them, complete with graphs of expenditures and quotations from reports) that the only real question might also be the obvious head-scratcher here: why haven’t we set one up already? The short answer: we want to do this right. This isn’t the first or second time I’ve talked about an IR for CUNY in the last few months, and the one thing I keep returning to is the other no-brainer besides doing it: doing it differently. Too often IRs are static dumping grounds or the digital equivalent of vanity presses. We have an opportunity to learn from what has been done — and to do better. One great chance for us is to modify the essentially static nature of the Institutional Repository (the name itself signals something staid and inert) by tying it to the dynamism of the CUNY Academic Commons.

The Commons is itself an example of what we need to do. It was not the first of its kind, but it was so clearly the most innovative that it has become an award–  and grant-winning exemplar, now completing a plan to make its ways of working more available to others. Its Commons In A Box project has institutions lining up for their “box,” from other schools to a huge professional organization like the Modern Language Association. We can, at least potentially, have a similar effect on the world of IRs, islands on information too often unvisited. We have the means to network ours with our constituencies’ needs and interests. But we do need to get started.

Scott Jaschik, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed, gave a talk at the CUNY Grad Center yesterday. Titled “Today’s Big Higher Ed Debates (and CUNY),” it promised to treat such topics as “the 2012 elections, affirmative action, and the completion agenda.” (MOOCs and online ed figured prominently in the treatment of that last.) If this seems almost a miscellany, Jaschik’s conclusion stressed that these things did have a powerful common theme: higher ed is not in control of its future, and that is more powerfully true than ever before.

Regardless of who wins in the upcoming election, the underfunding of higher ed will continue — though probably be much worse under Romney and a Republican congress, while Obama will invest strategically, preserve some “entitlements” (like Pell), and maybe do even more if congress is constituted to allow that. Either way, we’ll need to do more with less, and that “more” will include more accountability (“Politicians love that,” quoth Jaschik) with less control over how we do the accounting and less in the way of rewards for hitting performance goals.

Affirmative action is pretty much a one-story issue, turning on a case currently before the Supreme Court. With Elena Kagan recusing herself, a prospective majority of the justices have a history of going against AA.  If UT loses, the opponents of AA stand ready to file hundreds of suits across the nation. The landscape could change pretty radically and pretty quickly, with schools forced to accept new determinations of whom they should admit.

Finally, there’s the completion agenda, which Jaschik says is mostly about cost, and about alternatives students can vote for with their feet. The prime catalysts for changes here are MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses offered by prestigious schools for free, if at no small cost for the schools offering them (Harvard and MIT put up $60 million for EdX). The attraction (or at least publicity) they have already exerted has been quite apparent over the past year. What’s new is the way big publics are bending that way, with UT’s sign-on to EdX as the recent dramatic example. The point here is that folks are not just jumping on a trend, but modifying it — creating consortia, ensuring credentialing, defining forms of payment, even granting credit. Things are moving fast on that front. Ditto the aggregation of Massive Open Online Courses into Massive OpenOnline  Curricula, or at least mix-and-match possibilities.

Pressed in the Q&A, Jaschik saw the long-term future as a two-tiered dystopia: with a de-diversified student population, even in the defunded publics, the most well-prepared (affluent) students will have all the advantages, while the rest, to avoid being shut out, will scramble for low-cost, DIY U ways of getting their higher ed.

My response? Having heard so many predictions and seen so few come true — the wait for the long-promised end of the world as we know it and my own personal rocket pack  will be a while yet — I think forecasters of social and technological change tend to focus on some things and not others in a world where everything is overdetermined (at least causally). The trends Jaschik outlines are clear, but so are countervailing ones: the plateauing of online ed (see what has been happening to the University of Phoenix and its parent Apollo Group lately), real if maddeningly slow progress toward equality (and legal assurances thereof), and my own personal favorite, institutional inertia (compare change in the world at large to change in the academic world over the last century).

This is not to say that Jaschik is wrong. He’s right about current trends, but no one can see well into the future. (Anyone who bet big on how Facebook had been trending before it went public knows this all too well.) If we don’t like what Jaschik sees ahead, and we should certainly resist the triumph of tiering, then resistance is in fact what is called for — steps in other, better directions. I should say what those might be, as well as why I’m not sure MOOCs are the answer (for one thing, in the ones this career pedagogue has taken, I’d fail myself), but that’s grist to the mill of another blog entry. Let’s just say, for the nonce, that if controlling the future is simply refusing to change, that’s not a real option.