From the Chronicle of Higher Education
April 12, 2010, 05:00 PM ET
Agenda for Open Online Courses Can Go Forward, Federal Officials Say
By Marc Parry
Washington ¬ Education Secretary Arne Duncan laid out the Obama Administration's open-education agenda in Politico last year: an ambitious plan to spend $500-million on developing freely available, high-quality online courses. This great course giveaway attracted both buzz and skepticism in education-technology circles.
It was all part of the president's landmark push to invest $12-billion in community colleges, a sum that got drastically reduced in the legislative sausage-making process that ended with an overhaul of the nation's student-loan system. So is the online agenda dead, too?
Federal officials insist it isn't¬although one community-college lobbyist is skeptical.
On a White House blog post about the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HR 4872), which included the student-loan changes, Brian Levine, deputy domestic policy adviser to the vice president, had this to say about online education:
"The legislation provides new funding for community colleges to develop online courses, build partnerships with local employers, and take other steps to help students get the skills and credentials they need to succeed."
Pressed for details on Monday, Hal Plotkin, a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Education Department, confirmed that the specific plan to spend $500-million on online courses was stripped out of the bill. And "to my knowledge," he said, the bill that passed doesn't explicitly mention open, online courses.
"As the White House blog accurately states, however, this legislation does enable us to move forward with our plans related to open online courses," Mr. Plotkin said in an e-mail message.
Exactly how this might happen, and how much might get spent, is fuzzy. Mr. Plotkin suggested some money for online courses could come from $2-billion that the reconciliation bill did include for community colleges. The money, which Mr. Plotkin said is intended to help dislocated workers, will flow through the Department of Labor.
"The Department of Education and the Department of Labor are working now to collaborate on developing the most effective way to use those resources, and our expectation is that we will be able to move forward with the agenda that Secretary Duncan has previously outlined," he said. Including the open online courses? "Yes."
Before joining the Education Department last June, Mr. Plotkin worked as a trustee for the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California and as a journalist whose lengthy résumé includes serving as a founding editor of the public-radio program Marketplace. His new portfolio includes open educational resources, and his remarks on that subject kicked up Twitter buzz during a talk at last week's meeting of William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grantees at Yale University.
In an interview, Mr. Plotkin confirmed one other tidbit that emerged during the conference. The Hewlett foundation, the dominant philanthropic player in open education, has entered into a formal agreement with the Education Department. "The department has accepted a gift of consulting services from the Hewlett foundation, which allows the foundation to provide us with advice and information as we move forward in this area," Mr. Plotkin said.
Before you get too excited, though, listen to another perspective on what's going on.
It’s "not inconceivable" that some of the $2-billion could pay for online courses, said David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges.
"But it’s not at all the thrust of this," he said. "It doesn’t appear to be much the intent of this new program. And it’s certainly not at all what was envisioned in the $500-million open online program. Nothing like it."
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