Bad and Pawlenty: iPad U as shiny silver bullet

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A Political Online Push (Inside Higher Ed)

     When Jon Stewart asked Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty last week for some examples of how he intended to administer “limited and effective” government, the Republican governor … took square aim at traditional higher education.
     “Do you really think in 20 years somebody’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about econ 101 or Spanish 101?” Pawlenty asked Stewart, host of "The Daily Show."
     “Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like it?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”
     …[I]n 2008, [Pawlenty] challenged the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) to more than double the percentage of credits it awards for online courses, setting a goal of 25 percent by 2015.
     But Pawlenty’s reprise of this overture last week on "The Daily Show" and several other news outlets marked the first signs that Pawlenty, a presidential hopeful, could make online education one of his talking points….
     This makes his portrayal of traditional higher education as an anathema to government efficiency, and of mobile-based online education as the cure, a potentially controversial flashpoint for the national conversation about distance learning. Indeed, Pawlenty's mainstage advocacy of online education comes at a time when several other state higher education systems, notably in Pennsylvania and Indiana, have sought to leverage online technologies to cut costs….
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     Some faculty members have found Pawlenty’s push distressing. Rod Henry, president of the Inter Faculty Organization, a MnSCU faculty union, says professors are concerned that Pawlenty’s drive toward online education might unduly increase their workload and compromise quality.
     Henry cited the widely acknowledged fact that online courses are more work-intensive to teach than face-to-face ones….
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     The University of Minnesota, as the state flagship, tends to have more independence than MnSCU. But when Pawlenty promulgated his plan for MnSCU in 2008, he did encourage a similar push on the University of Minnesota campuses. And with the governor now on the national stage, J.B. Shank, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, is concerned. And he says a lot of his colleagues are, too.
     Specifically, Shank says he is troubled by Pawlenty’s framing of the issue as a battle between pro-efficiency, pro-technology students of the “iPod generation” and stodgy, ivory-tower luddites who care more about self-preservation than lowering barriers to higher education.
     “Technophilic talk is a pernicious distraction,” he says, “because it allows for a certain kind of justification for not giving the university the money it needs to provide the kind of education it wants to provide.”….