Campus Crisis by James D. Hardy Jr

Author:James D. Hardy, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

SCOCs

It is sometimes forgotten that students are actually real people, not just “users” within a vast electronic or campus herd. Individual students with specific problems make the academy run a bit less smoothly than deans and parents would like. MOOCs ignore students altogether, but SCOCs, which charge fees and offer academic credit, cannot. SCOCs, after all, are not just broadcasts that are picked up on Mars. They are narrowcasts: specific courses enrolling clearly identified students, offered by particular universities, granting degree credit, and costing a pretty penny. With SCOCs, the campus comes to you, but it is still the campus.

SCOCs do present unfamiliar problems. Let’s look at a few examples.7 Jane, an engineering student minoring in computer science, studies at a major state university. Registered for a full semester of courses there, she has paid her tuition and fee bill. The university owes her a semester’s education. Then comes the accident. The second day of the semester, she is run over by a drunk driver, suffering a broken hip and leg. Her person has become temporarily immobile, but her mind has not. Instead of taking the offered medical leave, Jane drops her five on-campus courses and enrolls in five SCOCs, two from Caltech, another from MIT, and one each from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. She assures her dean that these are accredited institutions. The courses are appropriate for her degree program, and four similar courses are offered at her own university. She asks the dean if she can get credit for the SCOCs, and if she can get a refund on her tuition. The dean passes the buck to the chancellor. And what does the chancellor do? Ahhhhhh.

Joe is enrolled at a small liberal arts college, which does not offer a couple of specialized courses that he wants. One is statistics and game theory. The other is in econometrics. He enrolls in two SCOCs offered by Harvard and Stanford. He does exceptionally well in both courses. Can he get credit for these courses at his college? And if he does, whom does he pay? His college, or Harvard and Stanford?

Sam is enrolled at a regional university, majoring in physics. He finds that three of the local courses are undistinguished, to say the least. Sam goes online and takes two MOOCs and a SCOC on theoretical physics offered by MIT and Caltech. Should Sam be allowed to substitute these MOOCs and SCOC for his own university’s courses? Again, whom should he pay for the two MOOCs and the SCOC?

Madison attends a small private university. She has taken two semesters of geology, enjoying them immensely. Madison takes three SCOCs: two on paleontology and one on paleogeography, which her school does not offer. She wishes to add these SCOCs to local courses in geology and use that as a minor. Should the provost allow that?

Provosts will also face the problem of superscoring, where students take less challenging MOOCs and SCOCs in order to replace more difficult local courses. Physics is never

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