Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

From UCLA to Columbia, digital Technologies have brought about rapid and sweeping changes in the life of the university-changes which will have momentous effects in the decade or more ahead. In the first book-length analysis of the meaning of the Internet of the future of higher education, Noble cuts through the rhetorical claims that these developments will bring benefits for all. His analysis shows how university teachers are losing control over what they teach, how they tech, and for what purpose. It shows how erosion of their intellectual property right makes academic employment ever less secure. The academic workforce is reconfigures as administrators claim ownership of the course-designs and by to lower labour costs in the marketing and delivery or courses. Rather than providing new opportunities for students the online university represents new opportunities for investors to profit while shifting the burden of paying for education from the public purse to the individual consumer. And this transformation of higher education is often brought about through secretive agreements between corporations and universities, placing public money at the disposal of private profit. Nobel locates recent developments within a longer-term historical perspective, drawing out parallels between interest education and the correspondence course movement of the early decades of the twentieth century moves to make the U.S. Department of Defense a major consumer of internet education, capable of reshaping major components of university life to meet its needs. An afterward discusses likely developments in the aftermath of the September 11attack on the World Trade Centre. This timely work by the foremost commentator on the social meaning of digital education is essential reading for all who are concerned with the future of the academic enterprise.