The 'National Skills Lab' Is Wasteful and Worrisome

by Frederick M. Hess  •  Oct 6, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Cross-posted from The Enterprise Blog

http://www.frederickhess.org/2009/10/the-national-skills-lab-is-wasteful-and-worrisome

In an unfortunate development, the Obama administration is pushing to have the federal government get into the business of contracting for online college courses that Uncle Sam would then make "freely available" to students in the United States and abroad. This federal "National Skills Lab" would "invite" selected parties to create federally approved online courses in various unspecified areas and then encourage institutions of higher education to offer credit for them. The bill containing $500 million to procure and provide these courses has passed the U.S. House and is now before the Senate.

The proposal is wasteful and worrisome. First off, the availability of online courses is hardly a problem. There are hundreds of providers producing such firms and, in 2007, nearly 4 million college students were enrolled in online courses at nearly 1,000 different colleges and universities. Janet Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, says that new course development is not a "terribly high need," and worries that the money will be spent "reinventing courses that have already been invented."

Indeed, when asked by the Association of American Publishers to explain where courses were needed, Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter (a former community college bureaucrat) could only reply, "materials will be developed in areas where applicants and others have provided evidence there is a great need and potential for improving learning." That's a response that's hardly reassuring in its precision or transparency.

The measure poses a threat to academic freedom, breaking with longstanding policies prohibiting the U.S. Department of Education from exercising control over "curriculum, program of instruction … text books, or other educational materials by any educational institution." Once the Department of Education is sponsoring a freely available course financed with taxpayer funds, it will be difficult for all but the most expensive or distinctive institutions or providers to justify paying for an alternative offering. For the huge swath of the curriculum represented by general and introductory courses, it is not a stretch to imagine that federally sponsored courses would become a de facto national college curriculum.

So, the plan is for the feds to borrow another half billion so that the government can contract for vendors to produce courses that are already available, which the feds will then offer for free—posing risks to academic autonomy while undercutting private publishers. This is one laboratory only a mad scientist could love.

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