BY VIV MILEY
Labor leader Kim Beazley launched his plan for a "knowledge nation" at the National Press Club on January 24. At its core is a proposal to establish a University of Australia Online which would enrol an additional 100,000 undergraduate students by 2010, each charged half the rate of the current HECS graduate tax.
Labor claimed the goals of setting up the University of Australia Online would be "to increase the number of Australians completing university degrees" and "to make Australia the world leader in online education".
While the proposal is still lacking detail and is surrounded in hype, it is clear enough already that the University of Australia Online is not the "revolution in social-democratic education policy" that Beazley proclaims it to be. It is just another form of distance education, strikingly similar to Open Learning Australia initiative of the former Keating Labor government. All that has really changed is the format by which the information is to be distributed.
The proposal does not even mean the establishment of a separate institution to deliver online courses, but rather the extension to existing courses offered at existing universities.
Online feasibility
The idea of online education is not a new one. It has been circulating in the US for years, where universities are either teaming up with private corporations or creating their own companies in order to deliver online education. The concept isn't new in this country either, with a number of Australian universities already moving some administrative tasks and course work online.
In Australia the biggest push for online education has come from the Universitas 21 consortium, a collaboration between 18 universities worldwide and the North American-based private "life-long learning information provider" Thompson Learning. The Australian universities involved in the project are the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne.
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Alan Gilbert is a dedicated fan of online education, quoted in 1998 as saying "Intellectual property will surpass the ownership of land, resources, infrastructure and even financial capital as the most dynamic commodity in the global economy". Most of the proponents of online universities use similar language, bringing terms like "human capital" and "intellectual capital" into the debate.
Preliminary results are considerably less rosy, however. A report presented by National Tertiary Education Union president Carolyn Allport to the Education International Conference held in Paris in December cited initial data showing take-up and drop-out rates for online education are very similar to those for distance education.
The NTEU paper also suggested that it would probably be unsuitable for undergraduate education for school leavers, as there is considerable evidence that both parents and students value the residential campus-based experience as "an essential part of the educative process of early adulthood".
While there is a myriad of commentators eager to herald the dawn of the new era of education, the material facts seem to prove otherwise.
Even high-tech companies still rely primarily on face-to-face teaching. Computing giant IBM still delivers around 85% of its training in this way. The same goes for the Motorola University here in Australia, which in 2000 set itself a goal of conducting 30% of training online.
Who benefits?
While Beazley has stated that the Labor party will "address how to raise the quality of on-campus education in subsequent policy annnouncements", the online university will not benefit the people it is supposed to: staff or students.
In a 1997 article titled Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, David Noble, the co-founder of the North American National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, cited several different universities that had either developed their own company or teamed up with business to provide online education, and analysed the supposed benefits for staff and students.
For staff, he said, the effects of online education can be devastating: "The use of technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible".
"Once faculty put their course material online, moreover, the knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material is taken out of their possession, transferred to the machinery, and placed in the hands of the administration. The administration is now in a position to hire less-skilled, and hence cheaper, workers to deliver the technologically prepared pre-packaged course."
"Some sceptical faculty insist that what they do cannot possibly be automated, and they are right," Noble continued. "But it will be automated anyway, whatever the loss in educational quality. Because, again, it's not what all this is about; it's about making money."
While Beazley claims that the plan will most help low-income families and single parents, evidence from the US shows that the majority of people currently taking advantage of online learning are working professional adults wishing to continue or gain further professional education.
The reason why single parents or those on low incomes are reluctant to undertake higher education has more to do with the high costs of both studying and taking care of their children — themselves the result of two decades worth of bipartisan cuts in student allowance payments and child care subsidies.
Labor's purpose in proposing the University of Australia Online may be far more cynical than its hype suggests: to distract attention away from its unwillingness to give proper public funding to universities and from its support for the galloping corporatisation of higher education.
If, as Beazley stated in his address to the press club, this "is an issue of national prosperity and social justice", why then must Australia, as the University of Australia Online fact sheet states, "stimulate the growth of a world's best online education industry in Australia because it will be a lucrative export industry"?
The ALP is not proposing a democratic extension of higher education to the sectors of the community that most need it. Rather it's proposing, along with the Coalition, a further push towards developing higher education into the next big money generator for business.
The education system would be a lot more equitable if public funds to higher education were restored and extended and if the real barriers to broader participation, such as lack of adequate child care and income assistance, were tackled. Such measures would also go a lot further in making Australia a "knowledge" or "innovation" nation.