The following is a Forbes article on a vision for higher education.  I follow up with a critque of this "vision."

SUNY Signals Major Push Toward MOOCs and Other New Educational Models

March 20, 2013, 4:55 am

By Steve Kolowich

The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money.
The plan calls for “new and expanded online programs” that “include options for time-shortened degree completion.” In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY’s Empire State College.
The system will also push its top faculty members to build MOOCs designed so that certain students who do well in the courses might be eligible for SUNY credit.
Ultimately, the system wants to add 100,000 enrollments within three years, according to a news release.
Even before the SUNY announcement, it had already been a big week for nontraditional models for awarding college credit. The U.S. Education Department on Monday said it had no problem with spending federal student aid on college programs that give credit based on “competency,” not the number of hours students spend in class.
Empire State College’s prior-learning assessment programs operate on a similar principle. Students who can demonstrate that they have acquired certain skills can get college credit, even if they did not acquire those skills in a college classroom.
The new SUNY effort will aim to copy the Empire State model across the system, said Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor.
“This resolution opens the door to assurances to our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.
SUNY is just the latest state system to use novel teaching and assessment methods to deal with the problem of enrolling, and graduating, more students.
Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington have enlisted Western Governors University, a nonprofit online institution that uses the “competency” method, to help working adults in those states earn degrees. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are building programs aimed at helping their own adult students redeem their on-the-job skills and knowledge for credit toward degrees. And California may soon use MOOCs to deal with overcrowding in some courses at its public colleges and universities.
Ms. Zimpher said the prior-learning expertise at Empire State would make it possible for the New York system to undertake the new effort without calling in outsiders.
“Usually when you have an outside vendor, it’s to deliver something that you don’t know how to do,” she said. “In our case we actually know how to do this, and we know how to do it well.”

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                                       THE LIMITS TO EDUCATIONAL EFFICIENCY

       With the “real winners” in the “coming revolution in higher education,” there will also be real losers.  The real question is whether the real winners are worth the cost in terms of real losers.  More specifically, the question is whether what is lost in this so-called revolution is worth losing it.  But what is that which will be lost?

       To answer that question, however, what the author of the above Forbes article values, intends and finds expendable with respect to education has got to be considered.  The highest values here, of course, something called educational “productivity.”  This should stop us in our tracks immediately to ask the question whether this is even the language within which such a problem as “educational revolution,”(like to or not) should be discussed.  But before we ‘reach for our guns,’ let’s not lose sight of a value underlying the productivity interest.  That value would be “efficiency.”  Thirdly, our author seems to value “high quality pedagogy,” which we can’t argue with.  But of course for him/her/them such pedagogy will come from Berkeley, Cambridge or MIT.  There doesn’t seem to be much room here for we poor, ignorant smucks who teach at community colleges.  But Kolowich shows his hand in the following paragraph:

    “ Institutions of higher education reflect the labor markets they serve, and in most countries there is tremendous pent-up demand among both students and private employers for a new kind of education. Both sides of the labor market, as well as national governments focused on long-term economic growth, want education that is less expensive, responsive to changing economic conditions, and delivered to students at their pace. “

       This new “business model” of education is an instrumentalized education.  It is one that serves business and industry.  Of course our anonymous authors give lip service to the Humanities by invoking ‘Shakespeare’ as one of the offerings in the new educational revolution, but of course, the professor must come from Cambridge.  This is education with efficiently packaged modules to impart profitable knowledge, useable knowledge.  This is education is service of the profit motive.

Our author pays lip service to such “rebundling” of education in the interests of “local demand.”  Again of course this is business demand, industry demand, market demand.  But the real concern for localities is not whether such ‘education’ serves the economic needs of local economies.  The real concern, or, more real concern, is the loss of community education and local educators who can lead the processing of such mass education at the level of local political needs, democratic needs and scholarly needs.

Once we have whittled down the international faculty to the truly great minds who can teach us all, who is left to lead local discourse as to the virtues of such globally centralized if not elitist education.  The educational “big brothers” who will conduct universally applicable education will not be personally interested in nor apprised of the local issues, whether economic or political.  Nor should they be.  But neither should they be permitted the privilege of speaking for the applicability or relevance of knowledge, whether economic or humanistic, to my real local community or other real local communities.  Kolowich emphasizes “critical national needs” and international needs places the primacy of local need in the shadows of the driving force of globalism and macroeconomic forces that leave localities either jumping on the bandwagon or perishing. 

There seems to be no political issue here at all.  It seems that educational revolutions can take place which unilaterally transform local educational “needs” and interests without consulting local voices.  Education is revolutionized technologically as if this interpretation of educational technology is universally applicable and beneficial without consideration for its “localized” meaning and effect.

Only the “rock stars” of education will be given the right and privilege to educate “us.”  The big loser here will be locally interpreted and practiced education.  That is, an education which can take account of the need for community education as political education in the interest of local power and self-determination will be crushed under this Orwellian vision of “mass” education.  Unfortunately it will likely be a mass education which will create masses, masses indifferent to local uniqueness and integrity.  Just as mass democracy occludes the nature of democracy, mass globalized education will drop education out of the picture of genuine learning, discourse and the contextualization of such learning within places and times and for real people.  

       The so-called winners will be the presently disenfranchised masses of third world countries which “the markets” want to colonize.  Such ‘colonization’ will be at the expense of real, local community autonomy, self-understanding and self-determination. 

       The global educational village will become the global educational reservation or concentration camp.  My advice to all you professors who are not “rock stars” in celebrity academia is to get your resumes out or start taking some of these new online courses from some really efficient teachers.  Then you may get a new job in the highly educated mass market of the brave new economy.