CLYDE BEATTY, ED.D.

It's an anonymous whinge at College Misery, but if true, it suggests there is something wrong with online higher education.

I've been being trained to teach online. I'm interested on a few levels--new online teaching techniques dovetail nicely with my research, and--oh yeah--it's extra money. Once I get all the extra money I need, though, I will never be doing this again.

My school's entire online system has been developed to be easy to assess. They swear up and down it's to improve student learning but I'm calling bullshit on that one.

You have to develop a ton of course objectives, and from each of these has to have a number of assignment objectives. You cannot assign ANYTHING that is not directly measurable. You are NOT allowed to use verbs in your objectives that don't come from a predetermined list. MOST of those words are completely unspecific to disciplines, and NONE of them are specific to mine.

You have to remind students at every step which objective they are meeting, which supposedly improves their learning. You also have to provide explicit directions EVERY time you use a feature of our CMS, and are NOT allowed to ask students to go back an assignment or three to look if they've forgotten in the week (accelerated pace) since you used it last.

You are NOT allowed to use the discussion board feature for anything I've ever used it before. I've been told the things I wanted to do are "too advanced" and "Cannot be done" even though I've done them. This frustrates me to no end.

I give you the Gebel-Williams Criterion:  if a chimpanzee can be trained to carry out the resulting assignment, it is not higher education.