Archives for October 2011

More and more people are taking online courses today and doing well with them. For subjects that lend themselves to the format, the courses allow students to take courses more conveniently and they allow universities to save money. It’s a win for everybody.

Unfortunately, not everybody sees them that way. Even though they’re good for colleges and students, the union representing nearly half of the lecturers in the University of California system has won veto power over the university offering any more online courses. You see, universities obviously exist for the purpose of providing jobs to union members, not to educate students in a convenient and efficient way.

The new contract between the American Federation of Teachers and the UC system has a clause that prohibits any of the UC campuses from adding online courses that would result in “a change to a term or condition of employment” of any lecturer without union approval, according to the union’s president. He’s quite happy about it, of course.

Bob Samuels, the president of the union, says this effectively gives the union veto power over any online initiative that might endangers the jobs or work lives of its members. “We feel that we could stop almost any online program through this contract,” Samuels told Inside Higher Ed.

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Since this site launched on May 13, we’ve now had visitors from 138 countries, which truly astounds me. I compiled a few stats about where everybody’s coming from and what they’re using to get here.

The 10 countries that are most heavily represented have been the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Finland and New Zealand. Just as an example, this is a map of the cities in the UK that have sent visitors.

The 10 most active U.S. states are Texas, California, New York, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. On the flip side the states with the fewest visits have been Vermont, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Hawaii, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Rhode Island.

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Many people who’ve tried to organize libertarians or anarchists will tell you it’s like trying to herd cats. Sheep might blindly follow a leader, but cats all know what they want. It’s the same way with this crowd. Each one of us believes he knows everything — which is frustrating for those of us who really do know everything.

Yes, I’m kidding, but only a little. For those of us who want individual freedom, we’re frequently our own worst enemies. Even though we’re in a tiny minority — roughly 10 percent of the population — we’re so fragmented among ourselves that we seem to be even smaller minorities than we are. What’s even worse is that many of the people within the 10 percent do more shooting at each other than anyone else.

Part of the problem is that you can make so many (very different) rational arguments for how to pursue individual freedom. I’ve certainly run the gamut, so I’m familiar with most of them. You can make pragmatic arguments to get what you can through the existing system. You can make semi-pragmatic, but still principled arguments to try to transform the existing system through a third party. Or you can make principled philosophical arguments against the coercive state as a whole. Some people even combine bits and pieces of the different arguments. What they rarely do is overcome their differences in approach to work together for very long.

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