The Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of 13 major research universities mostly in the Big Ten Conference, has released a position paper indicating that its members are attempting to share courses and digital resources without handing the keys over to outside technology vendors.
As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, the group is contemplating building "its own online infrastructure" by building a common "framework" for their collective online materials.
The paper doesn't go as far as to reject the possibility of the use of outside entities, but it seeks alternative options as part of a broader skepticism toward delegating these services to outside companies.
At the forefront of this debate are names like Coursera, which has recently sealed a number of deals that are establishing it as a platform for credit-bearing courses that are offered to students enrolled at multiple campuses within a public-university system. Coursera is rapidly becoming a behemoth in the education-technology industry, developing a reputation beyond the world of MOOCs that it has acted as a pioneer within.
The paper cautions against techno-utopianism, and argues that companies like Coursera provide tools that don't have innate value:"The ability to project a course online such that hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands can tune in is not, in and itself, a means for extending educational opportunity to millions of potential 'students.'"
"While new and cost-effective technological capabilities make certain changes in higher education possible," say the authors, "it does not necessarily follow that such changes are desirable, or would be endorsed or utilized by our existing students, faculty, or community members."
The consortium's collective resources make retention of ownership over distribution channels possible, the paper notes.
"There is a rather widespread concern about the notion that the core of our academic mission, on the teaching side, is being essentially developed by for-profit companies," said Lauren Kay Robel, provost of Indiana University at Bloomington, in an interview with The Chronicle.
Ultimately, the paper leaves contracting with an outside vendor an issue requiring further deliberation and exploration of options.