Rethinking Hierarchies in Online and Blended Learning

I have spent the past two days reading two insightful texts. The first is Anya Kamenetz's  DIY U and the second is a working paper by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo entitled "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age."


Kamenetz's book brings many ideas about hierachies in post-secondary education to light, especially in relation to edtech. As she states, "tech upsets the traditional hierachies and categories of education" (2). This hierarchy is not simply within individual institutions but also between institutions. Kamenetz does much to ellucidate the position that community colleges find themselves in in the United States.

What she does well, in my opinion, is to reinforce how "community colleges have the greatest need for open content" (86) which I have been arguing for some time now. In fact since community colleges in America and Applied Arts and Technology Colleges in Ontario have been at the forefront of the expansion and use of open content and edtech, they have essentially flipped the hierarchies of post-secondary institutions on its head.

In terms of "reputation" (I use reputation in scare quotes because it is an arbitrary concept that has been perpetuated sometimes erroneously) and educational financing the post-secondary hierarchy in Canada looks like this:

In terms of ed tech innovation and open content availability, the hierarchy looks more like this:

Truly as Kamentz suggests, universities that are using online content are invested in using this content as "distance" education or "distance" learning (95).  Often these courses are not dynamic and require the students to log-on at a certain time every week instead of being able to access or work through course material at their own pace.

What Davidson and Theo's article made me think about was something I had not given much thought to over the past year. Would an undergraduate collaborative online course necessarily look differently than a graduate  collaborative online course (despite the level of the material covered)? Do undergraduates and graduates interact with the ed tech in different ways? This is something that I will continue to think about this year and I will definitely be revisiting this topic. My knee-jerk reaction to this would be that they would not necessarily be different and maybe that is the point. Yet, a doctoral student would definitely have more "way finding" or "social sensemaking" as George Siemens calls it, than an undergraduate or a high school student.

 In the end it could be an issue of collaborative points of interaction. An undergraduate interaction would allow for a smaller amount of collaborative dispersal, and a graduate interaction would be much larger.

This is of course up for debate and are just my initial musings on the matter. I would be interested to hear your comments; what is the difference between undergraduate and graduate level blended courses, outside of the level of content?