Pre-packaged courses also make assessment of some kinds (i.e. assessment of course materials and what they “deliver”) easy, since, like textbooks, they’re created and regularly revised to meet whatever standards are out there (whether or not those standards particularly aid learning). Of course, if the standards are complicated enough, that will create additional pressure for those of us who prefer to create and regularly revise our own courses to give up and join the army of drones shepherding students through the pre-packaged product (or, I suppose, join the other army of drones creating said product; somehow I doubt the bulk of that work pays, or will eventually pay, much better, or be much more interesting, though I’m sure it will be touted as another “opportunity” for un/underemployed Ph.D.s to use their talents).

As far as I can tell, the only solution to the problem of not being sure who’s actually taking the class is the one nicolec mentions: include some exercises administered in some sort of face-to-face testing center, and make them worth a significant amount of the grade. That’s not ideal for writing classes, but I could make it work (e.g. give them some source materials they haven’t seen before and a basic citation guide but no access to the internet, and require them to write a well-structured essay properly incorporating/citing the materials). Of course, even that approach isn’t foolproof (witness Ted Kennedy’s adventures as an undergraduate). Though I realize the value of universities’ certifying role, and the need for it not to become totally debased, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to impersonation: if students are going to cheat themselves out the education for which they’re paying, I’m not sure it’s my job to prevent them doing so.

And, from the limited evidence I have (an alumni panel in which I participated at my Ivy-League alma mater a year or so ago), I’d say thefrogprincess is right: the executives at the for-profits (I met two, including a president) espouse an odd combination of idealism, entrepreneurship, and noblesse oblige, and seem to actually believe that they are bringing education to the masses. However, I didn’t get the impression that they were planning to send their own children to their own institutions. Some of the profits from the for-profits will undoubtedly go to sending junior to hir parents’ ivy-covered alma mater, or, alternatively, a SLAC that caters to hir particular needs and interests.

My department is also in the process of creating some new Ph.D. programs. It hasn’t been done thoughtlessly; they’re in quite specific fields for which there is substantial demand outside the academy, and/or in which TT job openings do, in fact, outstrip demand, at least at the moment. However, in the case of the largest program (rhetoric and composition), the TT jobs which our graduates will fill will probably be at least partially administrative ones, and will involve supervising adjunct and/or grad-student exploited labor,which raises some questions about where the exploited labor is going to come from. MFAs in writing are one answer; we produce a lot of those (and consider that degree a terminal one, eligible for tenure in TT slots, but also,like the Ph.D., nice to see in holders of non-TT slots when accreditation and/or ranking time comes around), and tend to trade graduates back and forth with a couple of other local programs when in comes time to hire contingent labor. I suspect that the rhet/comp Ph.D.s may eventually end up in a similar position, with the expectation that they’ll have tenure-track jobs available well into the future another example of bubble-think. While at the moment our Ph.D.s in rhet and comp may indeed go out into TT jobs that involve supervising adjuncts and/or other grad students, at some point those positions are going to be filled, mostly with relatively young people, but the university will still need grad students to teach classes (and the faculty our program and others have hired will need students to teach — and rhet/comp scholars don’t generally want to teach 4 sections of freshman comp themselves; it gets old after a while, and, besides, it interferes with their research. Like scholars in other fields, even those who are dedicated to teaching core courses also want to teach advanced undergrads and grad students). So I suspect that, despite all good intentions, our rhet/comp Ph.D.s will, in a decade or two, be swelling the contingent labor pool.

The one piece of good news, as you point out, is that students looking for online classes have far fewer geographical constraints than those looking for traditional ones, so the competition among programs will be fiercer. Maybe market forces will actually work in favor of quality, or at least a more distinct separation between high-quality programs and online diploma-mills? I’m not going to get my hopes up, but that certainly would be nice.

That’s the way it is now.

So, in effect: teach the standard survey and you have signed away your rights to ever teach it anywhere else, ever again … or so it seems!!!