Tag Archives: outsourcing

Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College

The Chronicle: Some Papers Are Uploaded to Bangalore to Be Graded

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Outsourcing Language Learning

Inside Higher Ed: Outsourcing Language Learning

Almost a decade ago, Drake University stirred up controversy by eliminating its foreign language departments and thereby the jobs of faculty in French, German and Italian, even those with tenure.

Traditional lecture and language lab instruction was replaced with the Drake University Language Acquisition Program (DULAP): small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language acquisition and the use of several Web-based learning technologies.

Outsourcing push roils Boston College

The Boston Globe: Outsourcing push roils BC

Many students, faculty join workers fighting cost-cutting proposal

Custodians, groundskeepers, and other workers at Boston College have long felt a part of the BC family. When employees reach their 25th anniversary, maintenance staff and professors alike are treated to an elegant banquet honoring their longtime service and given a commemorative clock. Workers’ children, if qualified to gain admission, receive free tuition.

Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas

Inside Higher Ed: Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas

In Utah State degree program in Asia, “lead professors” (from Utah) design the course work and assign the grade, but “local facilitators” (from partner universities) deliver much of the course content.

Employees Revolt Over Layoffs at U. of New Mexico Press

The Chronicle News Blog: Employees Revolt Over Layoffs at U. of New Mexico Press

Employees at the University of New Mexico Press learned yesterday that three of their colleagues would be let go at the end of April and that nine more positions — in order fulfillment and customer service — might soon be outsourced. That kind of news is all too common these days. More unusual is what happened next: This afternoon, the employees issued their own press release, alleging that the press’s director, Luther Wilson, was partly to blame for the situation. They also questioned whether outsourcing could solve the press’s financial woes.

Revolt Against Outsourced Courses

Inside Higher Ed: Revolt Against Outsourced Courses

Here’s the pitch: “Can you really GO TO COLLEGE for LESS THAN the cost of your monthly CELL PHONE BILL? We can’t say that this is true in ALL cases — hey, you might have a GREAT cell phone plan. But maybe it’s your cable bill, electric bill, or your GAS bill. … The point we’re trying to make is that taking general education, required college courses just became A LOT more affordable.”

How affordable? $99 for a course. And if you take the courses offered by StraighterLine — in composition, economics, algebra, pre-calculus, and accounting — you don’t need to worry that the company isn’t itself a college. StraighterLine has partnerships with five colleges that will award credit for the courses. Three are for-profit institutions and one is a nontraditional state university for adult students. But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas.

There, even as professors are still pushing to get information about StraighterLine so they can evaluate it, students have taken a look and decided that they don’t like what they see. In articles in the student newspaper and in Facebook groups (attracting debates with the university’s provost and the company’s CEO), the students argue that StraighterLine is devaluing their university and higher education in general.