XplanaZine

Academic sweatshops can be eliminated, and it can happen in ways that will actually improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness to academic units and educational content / solution providers. The next several years will see a huge change in the way that online course content is housed and administered, and it will also see increasing pressure to provide maximum flexibility in terms of access and delivery modes. If the academic sweatshops, existing as they do now, are not eliminated, academic units will not be able to keep up with evolving needs.

This article is going to be brief because I can easily go on and on with this topic, and I’d rather break it up into digestible chunks.

You might ask me, “Susan, have you actually ever seen an academic sweatshop?”

The answer is, “Yes. I’ve seen lots of them.” I’ve seen many of the kinds that Rob Reynolds refers to in his article on academic sweatshops, and points out that they are fairly ubiquitous. He also points out that universities have traditionally been places where labor has been exploited under the guise of “apprenticeship.” Graduate students have been most shamelessly tasked with working for pennies, but assistant professors seeking tenure are often pressed into long, unrecompensed hours of labor. This is bad, and we’re not even touching the issue of adjuncts.

I agree with Rob — these are unintentional sweat shops. I would never claim that a college or a university is one of the notorious windowless shops where workers try to escape through barred windows, only to break their legs as they drop down multiple floors to hard asphalt.

Instead, you’ll find the following scenarios throughout colleges, universities, educational software and instructional material providers.

Subcontractor of a subcontractor sweatshop: Somewhere along the line, you’ve probably wondered where all the nice learning objects, companion websites, and educational software gets developed. If you visit the corporate offices, you’ll tend to find cubicles and smooth, funky desks with high-tech chairs, and even perhaps a dot.com holdover — a daybed and pillows next to the wireless node. You marvel that such a small team can produce so much material, until someone tells you that they are helped by their “teams” or “implementing partners.” What this means is a subcontract. The subcontractor tends to be successful at obtaining contracts, and, as you well know, “opportunity clusters.” This results in a need to add skilled workers, but from where? Here is where a subcontractor layer gets added. The original contract may have been generous, but each subcontract iteration results in less money to divide out to the subcontractors. Forget benefits. Forget even providing the workers with a laptop. A small subcontractor team will work a week on something that pays $1,000 gross — unless they find there is a way to subcontract yet again — not to India — they’re already getting to expensive — but perhaps to a team in Pakistan or Malaysia . I’ve visited software development firms in St. Petersburg , Russia , and other places, and I hear the same story everywhere. “We’ll do it this one time for experience, but we’re really working for nothing. Perhaps the next contract will be better.” The next contract often never comes.

“The Apprentice Sweatshop” — Graduate students in the centralized learning services office, or in departments: Years ago, when being a graduate student meant having to learn your craft by practicing on students in intro classes, or proctoring and grading tests from large lectures, the work paid poorly, but at least it was enough to cover books, tuition, and a one-bedroom apartment in a converted old Victorian house next to campus. Your job didn’t require a significant investment in equipment, software, connectivity, or peripherals. Paper, pens, pencils, and a good backpack were all you needed. Now, the average graduate student is pulled into departments or in central online services units, and asked to develop or update courses and/or learning objects. Now, however, the job requires the student to have invested an average of $5,000 in simply having the tools and skills for the job. To make things worse, the graduate often receives no more than around $1,000 per month for 20 hours of work per week. Tuition waivers are often partial, and with the rapid escalation of tuition, this requires students to obtain more loans. So, ironically, the student is, in effect, subsidizing academic units through student loans.

As opposed to classic textile sweatshops, however, there is no cruel overseer or cigar-chomping robber baron at the helm. Instead, you see pale and harried department chairs hand-wringing over the budget and the need to accommodate the burgeoning demand for online courses, but without the right kind of long-term additional investment in infrastructure or staffing. At the end of the semester, when they’ve managed to pull off another miracle, they have managed to mask, yet again, the real circumstances. Such heroics are self-defeating.

Solitary Sweatshops: Online Adjuncts. It is my belief that in the future, semester-by-semester “hired gun” adjuncts will no longer exist. Nor will the adjunct online instructor who is reduced to spending hour upon hour in mindless and repetitive tasks, thanks to a hopelessly inadequate LMS and instructional design that mixes variable with non-variable content, requiring fiendish levels of repurposing and updating every semester.

Distance education providers will learn to appreciate their online faculty. The learning curve is just too steep and too time-intensive to train your best people, just to see them over-commit as high-quality online instructors become increasingly difficult to find. Scarcity is due to the high and ongoing investment in technology and training that is necessary for an adjunct to be successful with each generation of learning management systems, and new computers, software, and portable content delivery devices (iPods, PDAs, etc.).

What we may see are consortia of universities, colleges, or departments that will enter into a teaming agreement to share resources (course shells, LMS licensing fees, infrastructure), and which, with new economies of scale and predictable flows of income, will be able to offer 3 - 5 year renewable contracts to “contract professors.” The professors will have rank, but it will have more to do with whether or not they take on mentoring and supervision duties, and the skills they master. In addition, I suspect that they will include participation in a 401(3)b retirement savings plan, plus health and dental insurance. Further, the consortia will pay for their contract professors’ ongoing training, and will provide software, PDAs, and discounts on laptops.

Get Rid of Bad LMS Design. Perhaps the quickest way to a sweatshop is to use a horrible learning management system that does not archive in any sort of effective way, does not integrate with online support services (the Oracle database, or whatever is being used), does not allow group uploading of files, and requires absurd levels of clicking between screens. I won’t name names, but I will say that the two biggest purveyors of learning management software should be ashamed. I won’t go into detail, but if you talk to individuals who are preparing courses and course content for delivery through an LMS platform, you will hear them describe the absurd level of time-consuming and confusing tasks involved just to put together an ugly, text-only course.

Refuse to Use an LMS without Learning Object Repository Capabilities. Reusable content is the only solution. Technology’s job is to make the task more efficient, not to add to and complicate the job! Desire2Learn’s new version promises such capabilities. This is wonderful, and could facilitate the formation of academic consortia and teams.

Don’t Silo! Share and Team. How many times have you been in a college or division-wide meeting and have heard individuals describe the tasks that are going on in their units — identical to the ones going on in your unit. The wheel just gets reinvented — over and over and over again. Isn’t it funny how the quality never improves in such situations? Instead, each time the wheel is updated or reinvented, there are more errors and flaws.

Map Tasks, Identify Task Families, then Streamline. Sweatshops often result because of maladaptive division of labor. Either there is not enough division of labor, and one adjunct professor is knitting everything together by hand in his or her little virtual cottage industry; or, there is too much division of labor, and it becomes tempting to get into the subcontractor chain. In order to accomplish appropriate division of labor, it’s necessary to know what tasks are being done, when, and by whom. Then, after mapping and classifying tasks, identify task families, then coordinate for economies of scale.

Identify Bottlenecks, Seek to Eliminate Them. Bottlenecks occur in expected and unexpected places. For example, there may be a bottleneck in the learning services division, due to inadequate staffing and work flow analysis. There may be bottlenecks resulting from ineffectual support services (financial aid counseling, course template production, mal-integration of support services, over-reliance on outdated open-source software, etc.

Expose Facades of Automation. It is surprising how many times what seems to be an automated function is not that at all. Although a student may fill out a form online, there is no guarantee that the information is really going into a relational database where the information automatically populates itself. Instead, a human being is busy re-entering data into forms.

I feel myself starting to rave, and I think I should stop for now. This topic is inflammatory, yet it is necessary to step back and look at the processes rather than begin to rant about the evils of globalization or the corporatization of higher education. It’s time to address the processes. We’ve already established the problem.