Thank you so much for saying that, Sallymom.
I'd go even further and state that with that additional 60% on the campus, "education" in lower-division coursework has often been reduced to buzzword bingo and busy-work that those 60% can manage...
and with workflow that the erstwhile faculty in charge of monsters like introductory writing or comm courses can also manage... (meaning scantron exams, etc.)
and the result is quite predictable for the kids on this board. We've seen some of this first hand. It's been maddening to have a kid who can learn at a (true) university level, but who is trapped in coursework that expects scarf-and-barf feats of rote memorization instead of critical thinking and deep understanding.
Someone up-thread noted that the MOOC/online experience could be used in introductory coursework. I know of several campuses where this is being done already-- well, sort of, anyway.
The gist of it is that students enrolled in a large intro course at an institution (let's call it UCLA for argument) which has historically had a huge failure rate in that course [i]has now created a "flipped" system where students use the MOOC as a sort of preparatory/review feature PRIOR to attending their first (large) lecture in that course.
It's still pretty experimental, but results have been somewhat promising-- students who do complete the MOOC tend to not fail the course, so that part works. At least, maybe it does. Maybe it's that the MOOC is helping, and then again, maybe it's that the students who are self-motivated enough to complete the MOOC are those more likely to succeed in the course to begin with, and this just helps them out some.
Hm.
