Interact with the AFT’s Technology Review

The union’s latest technology resource reflects the evolving nature of technology use and innovation on campus. Technology Review: Key Trends, Bargaining Strategies and Educational Issues provides an overview of the way technology affects cost, academics and governance for faculty and staff in the classroom and in student service areas. It also looks at distance education from both the academic and bargaining standpoints, wrapping up with an exploration of the pedagogical and union implications of distance learning.

The Review features the work of two notable contributors to this page, Tom Kriger and Cynthia Villanti, who wrote the September and October technology commentaries. Also, it looks at key union issues such as academic control, class size and compensation, through case study analyses of how our unions handled matters at the University of Massachusetts, Suffolk Community College and Mohawk Valley College.

The Review comes to readers in a binder. This allows the AFT to provide updates and expansions as more locals negotiate innovative language and respond to the changing demands of technology on the workplace. The Review also has a clever system of icons to guide the reader to other aids and resources, both within the binder and at Web sites or organizations in the real and virtual worlds beyond.

To order Technology Review, go to www.aft.org/higher_ed/.

Burying the bad news

A U.S. Education Department (ED) report on a pilot program created to test whether distance education provides opportunities for fraud has, itself, raised questions about deception.

The report on the Distance Education Demonstration Program found that the 50 percent rule is not necessary to safeguard program integrity. (The rule stipulates that federal financial aid cannot follow students attending institutions enrolling more than 50 percent of their students in distance education programs.)

The department recommended eliminating the rule because it “has uncovered no evidence that waiving the 50 percent rule, or any of the other rules for which waivers were provided, has resulted in any problems or had negative consequences.”

But in 2001, one of the carefully selected institutions participating in the pilot, the Masters Institute, shut its doors with no warning and left students who had paid for classes high and dry. The ED report only mentions the Masters Institute in a footnote. Many feel that the Masters experience is evidence that the 50 percent rule is necessary, but apparently ED disagrees.

When the Chronicle of Higher Education questioned the assistant secretary for ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education about the omission, she commented, “The real problems with Masters existed long before they got into the demonstration program.”