Technology At City University of Seattle

Having come from many jobs in the IT Field over the last 22 years I saw employers in the IT Industry focus on Rock Star employees. It is common knowledge that to become a fulltime employee at some of the software companies and in some startups you need to be in the top 10% or even top 1% of programmers or managers.

Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution makes the excellent argument that if online colleges (for profit or not for profit) want to succeed they also need to focus on Rock Star instructors. I know that I have some very stringent quality standards when it comes to instructors, and we follow those quality standards all the time. While we might make an exception for people, we do follow our instructional quality standards all the time or with the understanding that quality scores need to come up. We also solicit comments from students on a regular basis to see how they are doing.

What Alex proposes, along with dissent and counterpoints from others is that colleges, especially online colleges need to start focusing on the “Rock Star” instructors that they have and only hire “Rock Star” instructors in the future. While this is a good thing for those instructors are truly “rock stars” much like the business focus, it leaves 90% of the population at a college wondering what is going to happen next. We have seen negative effects in the general programmers pool (those who are not rock stars) in terms of company loyalty and other soft assets.

Arnold Kling though says that we should simply eliminate the bottom 25% of teachers and replace them with new hires. Most companies do something similar, but the simple statement does not take into effect politics, social influence, tenure and other issues that influence decisions in Higher Education. Simple on the surface, but once tenure and politics along with social influence start being part of the equation firing the bottom 25% becomes problematic. This is where for profits and private non-profits can excel in relationship to their state funded peers. This is why it is easier for us to hold up the performance standards and keep our “rock stars” while removing the bottom 25%.

Education is an interesting process, and while all colleges have their own issues internally, the bottom line is that education is about passing on knowledge from one generation to another generation. We have had “Rock Star” instructors since Greece (and probably before that, but not recorded) with Socrates and Plato, to Abelard in the middle ages, and through today. We know these names and who they are because they challenged the status quo in education, they appealed to the younger audience and had an enormous influence on future generations. The only way that colleges and instructors are going to be able to have the same kind of impact is to adopt the technology and use the technology that our students have grown up with.

We might remember when the internet was nothing more than four nodes, but our students have grown up with the internet. They use the internet like we of the Baby boomer generation and below use the TV and Radio. It has always been there. A good healthy mix of WebEx, audio podcasts, video, text, and IM can have a huge difference in a classroom setting. Students are used to many of these tools, and will ramp up quickly to those tools they don’t know. If you are not using them to teach then you are missing all the ways that people learn. This is the one drawback to online education that any instructor can overcome by using the same tools that students are using.

What is your take on this, more rock star or more use of tools that students are using? I am all for tools, and have been working hard with our educational technology group to develop and deliver to all the ways that students learn. Do we need more “Rock Stars”?

Related articles by Zemanta

• And the next decade of education? (guardian.co.uk)
• Elearning++And+Learning+Management+System[1] (slideshare.net)
• Bridgepoint Education Chooses Pearson eCollege’s Online Education Environment to Serve Their Students and Faculty (prweb.com)
• K-12 Online Learning to exceed 10.5mm students by 2014 (personanondata.blogspot.com)