Amy Tan Gets It Right

Bush 41 tweaks W by calling him "Quincy" in reference to Adams 2 and Adams 6; John Adams served a single term as the second president of the United States and his son, John Quincy Adams, served a single term as the sixth president of the United States. History repeated itself in the denial of a second term to Bush 41. May history repeat itself in the denial of a second term to Bush 43. If this is a (fair & balanced) canard, so be it.

[x Slate]
Who are novelists voting for?

Slate asked a variety of prominent American novelists, ranging from Edwidge Danticat to John Updike, for a frank response to the following question: Which presidential candidate are you voting for, and why? Thirty-one novelists participated, with four for Bush, 24 for Kerry, and three in a category of their own. Authors cited a range of reasons, from a vote for Kerry "because I have a brain and so does he" (Amy Tan), to a vote for Bush because "we're at war, and electing a president who is committed to losing it seems to be the most foolish thing we could do" (Orson Scott Card). Here are their answers.

Dan Chaon

I'm voting for John Kerry, who seems like a decent fellow—perhaps capable of rising to the occasion. There is so much damage to fix, I don't know who can do it. In a different sort of election, I might have voted for a Green Party candidate, or some such, but I think the current time period represents a state of true desperation. And living in Swing-State Ohio, I feel like my vote really counts for something.

Like many people, I'm casting a vote for Anyone but Bush. Back in 2000, Bush seemed like a joke—a smirking, callow, old-money twit with a fake Texas accent. Now, four years later, he seems truly, frighteningly dangerous and completely without scruples. I'm alarmed by his administration's attacks on civil liberties, by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war, by the gleeful disregard for the environment, by the social policies—the tax cuts, which so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else; the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy; the reckless budget deficit … I have found myself recoiling from the newspaper, and I dread where another four years of his administration would lead us. I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed "Christianity," even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

By Bush logic, I should vote for him, since he gave me a hefty tax cut. In fact, the greatest increase in our deficit comes—not from the Iraq war—but the tax savings to the upper income brackets, on average more than $50,000 a year. To those who say Kerry is elitist, I counter there is no worse elitism than giving the rich more riches, while draining the rest of the country of monies that should go to schools, health care, the disabled, and support for the arts. Kerry would remove most of the tax cuts to the rich and give more back to the rest of the country.

What's more, the current president has done more to damage our civil rights, our environment, our standing in the world, our work toward the collective good, our sense of security. He has used orange alert fear to instill obedience, has redefined patriotism as a willingness to sacrifice constitutional law. How can I not vote for a candidate like Kerry, who respects the Constitution, who respects the need for health care, and who is strong and rational enough to defend our country but without arm pumping and high fives when the bombs fall on another country?

John Updike

I look forward to voting for John Kerry, a man of exemplary intelligence who was brave in war and then brave in protest of war. I don't look for him to reverse our course in Iraq overnight, nor to provide quick fixes for global or national problems, but there are certain things I am sure he will not do: He won't try to pack the Supreme Court and other judiciary with anti-choice judges; he won't push for an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment; he won't try to perform voodoo economics with tax cuts and a raging deficit. The present president has his virtues and his good intentions, but I'm not sure the United States can afford four more years of his administration.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Kerry, because I want to be proud of the way I'm represented, within the country and to the world.

Rick Moody

John Kerry.

I actually voted for Nader in 2000, because I live in New York state, and it was clear that Gore was going to take the state, which freed me up to vote my conscience. My conscience, at the time, dictated that American party politics were inherently corrupt, because of, e.g., our inability to pass meaningful campaign-finance reform. In 2000, it seemed to me, the Democratic Party was only marginally less corrupt than the Republican Party. It also seemed to me that Gore completely abandoned his core Democratic base in the general election. I liked Gore on some of the issues, but I thought he ran a shoddy, misguided campaign.

However, everything changed over the next four years. It became self-evident, I think, that the Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece. Well, that's not entirely true. Sometimes he didn't even bother to take bids. And this is not to mention a war based on outright mendacity, in which tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed.

Since it's now abundantly clear that Nader's reform message has been deracinated by his narcissistic Republican-financed campaign, I'm voting for the one guy who seems to be able to send Bush back to his pest-control cronies in the state of Texas. Hopefully, George can keep himself busy for a few decades clearing brush.

Joyce Carol Oates

Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an "honest politician" is someone who hasn't yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that's to say realistic expectations about public life.

Orson Scott Card

I'm a Democrat voting for Bush, even though on economic issues, from taxes to government regulation, I'm not happy with the Republican positions. But we're at war, and electing a president who is committed to losing it seems to be the most foolish thing we could do. Personal honesty is also important to me, and Kerry is obviously not in the running on that point, given that he can't keep track of the facts in his own autobiography.

Diane Johnson

I'm voting for Kerry. Because I'm not in the U.S. much of the time, I am apt to see current events as presented in the foreign press, and they differ a lot from the way things are spun here. From there, it is painful to see our country dragged through the mud because it has a leader who appears foolish, rash, and arrogant. Even the English, our supposed allies, sneer. Guns, the auto, torture, and war. One can't disagree with the things others say about Bush, but up till now, the rest of the world tends not to blame the American people (we didn't elect him).

After the election, who knows? I understand that lots of people don't care what the rest of the world thinks, but they ought to.

And, our world reputation aside, I find Mr. Bush embarrassing.

Jonathan Franzen

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages.

Judith Guest

I'm voting for John Kerry because I'm tired of feeling like an alien in my own country, tired of being at the mercy of an administration that, even as it tries to get itself re-elected, exhibits on a daily basis a stunning level of arrogance, ignorance, and dishonesty. Kerry believes in a government by the people and for the people—all of the people, not just the fortunate few.

For a president who preaches democracy, Bush has an appalling lack of trust in its main tenet. My heart aches for the lost children in this pointless and unsolicited war. I can't talk politics any more with my Republican friends; they keep insisting it's all a game. They don't see that when Bush won, it was all of us who lost.

Edwidge Danticat

Kerry.

Why? If we ask ourselves the trillion-dollar deficit question, are we better off than we were four years ago, the choice seems to me very clear. The war in Iraq, and earlier in Afghanistan, has united more terrorist factions than ever before, so we are not safer than we were before Sept. 11. We have bankrupted our children's future, neglected the environment. Our educational system has left more children behind than we can count. Our civil liberties are being eroded. We can't keep going like this for another four years. We need a new start, new leadership.

Chang-Rae Lee

John Kerry. Why? Because in every regard vis-à-vis the policies of this country I support John Kerry instead of George Bush. I would be voting for Kerry as a protest vote against the Iraq war alone, but even without that horrid mess, Bush and his handlers are heading us in the wrong directions in energy policy, the environment, civil liberties, tax issues, health care, education, judicial appointments—the list is endless. Cheney is also right when he said at the Republican Convention that this is a historic moment—I've never felt so keenly motivated as I am now, to help make sure the country doesn't re-endow what could prove to be a truly disastrous Bush legacy.

Jane Smiley

I am voting for John Kerry. Would George Bush steal the election if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence is that he has (disenfranchising black voters in Florida in 2000) and wants to again (attempting the same trick already this year). That such a man, an amoral prevaricator and ruthless opportunist, actually has supporters in his bid to wreck American democracy appalls me. I think that the coming election will result in a constitutional crisis of unprecedented danger. I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny.

Lorrie Moore

Are there really any novelists voting for Bush? I am tempted, since my vote is almost always bad luck, its recipients almost always losing.

Robert Ferrigno

Mark me on the Bush side of the ledger, a lonely side for this survey, I'm certain. Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking. I don't agree with Bush on shoveling free meds to granny and grandpa, or his antipathy to fuel conservation along with opening up the arctic reserve, but this is small stuff. I'll be voting for Bush because his approach to stopping the people who want to kill my children is the right one, i.e., kill them first. Kerry will dance the Albright two-step with Kim Jong-il, consult with Sandy Berger's socks, and kowtow to the U.N. apparatchiks who have done such a fine job of protecting the Cambodians, Rwandans, and the Sudanese. No thanks. No contest.

Jennifer Egan

I'm voting for John Kerry. Not just because the Bush administration has plunged us into an opportunistic war that has needlessly killed thousands, wrecked the economy, widened the chasm between rich and poor, savaged the environment, tried to mess with our Constitution, swatted away the international community, and caused me to wonder whether I really am an American, if being American means having to embrace a man like George W. Bush as my proxy, the avatar of my wishes and beliefs in the wider world—not, finally, for any of those reasons, but because I believe that John Kerry might be a great president. I hope to God he wins.

Russell Banks

I'll vote for John Kerry. His election won't reverse our nation's rush to establish a fascist plutocracy, it's too late for that. But it may slow the process enough to let us over the next few decades build a viable alternative to the two nearly interchangeable parties that together in the last few decades have essentially stolen the republic. It's the only way we can avoid the necessity down the road of a Second American Revolution—a thing I'd dearly love to see, but I clearly won't live that long.

Daniel Handler

Anyone who reads my work knows that I favor de-escalation rather than inflammation of violence, the discouragement rather than the display of avarice and careful contemplation over rash action. For these reasons and more I am voting for Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards.

Roger L. Simon

I am a registered Democrat. I disagree with George W. Bush on gay marriage, stem-cell research, a woman's right to choose, and, to a lesser extent, a host of other issues, but I am supporting him unreservedly for president. We are in a protracted war with Islamofascism and I do not trust John Kerry to lead us in that war for one minute. Also, I think my party has been hijacked by a cult of know-nothing isolationism out of the 1930s. But if they win, I hope the hell I'm wrong.

George Saunders

I'm planning to vote for John Kerry, four times. Once for me, and once each for Jerry Smith, Jerry Smith, and Jerry Smith, three African-Americans in Florida who, unfortunately for them, have the same name as Jerry Smith, an ex-felon, and therefore won't be allowed to vote. So I'm going to level the playing field a bit.

No, just kidding. I am going to vote for John Kerry because I am deeply disappointed in the vision of America being advanced by the Bush administration. Let's think of this in terms of Huck Finn. Huck is generous, concerned about the suffering of others, generally pleased with life, and interested in it. Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, is obsessed with a highly conceptualized view of the world, and imposing this view on others (the Sunday school picnic, Huck, Jim), regardless of how this imposition might actually affect them. Huck is bold, curious, flexible. Tom is, at heart, afraid of the world, suspicious, ego-driven, incurious, and rigid. Our nation is engaged in a struggle to decide if it is going to be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. Is John Kerry, then, Huck? No, but he is more Huck-like than our current president, who, in an attempt to answer a complicated question ("What to do about terrorism?") with a simple answer ("Exterminate the brutes, or some of the brutes, or some other guys who basically seem similar to the brutes, or who are, at the very least, pretty brute-like themselves") has led us into one of the bigger and more tragic Sunday school picnics in recent memory.

Jodi Picoult

I'm voting for Kerry. In my opinion, too much about Bush is dead wrong—from the reasons we went to war with Iraq to his take on a woman's right to choose to the No Child Left Behind Act to the disservice he's done to our environment. The way he interweaves church and state frightens me, too—I think the founding fathers of this country went to great lengths to keep that from happening. And I think that globally, people think much worse of our country than they did four years ago. Under his leadership, I think this country has not just fallen into recession ... but regression.

A.M. Homes

Richard Nixon, because I found him so fascinating the first time around I'd be curious to see what he could do from the beyond … ?

Thomas Mallon

I'll be voting for President Bush. His response to the 9/11 attacks has been both strong and measured, and he has extended a once-unimaginable degree of freedom (however tentative) to Afghanistan and Iraq. I am unimpressed by the frantic vilification that has come his way from even mainstream elements of the Democratic Party. The rhetorical assault is reminiscent of—though it far exceeds—the overheated opposition to Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984. Back then the intellectual establishment told us how repression and apocalypse would be just around the corner if the American "cowboy" were kept in the White House for another four years. Well (as Reagan might say, his head cocked to one side), I remember a rather different result from RR's second term. And I'm hopeful about another four years under George W. Bush.

Gary Shteyngart

Kerry.

I've been living in Italy for the past year so news of the election filters in through the occasional guest from the States and the lifeline that is the International Herald Tribune. Here's what I've heard and read about: the intimidation of elderly black voters, a successful attack on a decorated war veteran's bravery engineered by a team of cowards, and the mounting possibility that the American electorate, particularly the struggling working class, can in the end be duped by culture wars and evangelical hokum.

Being away from the United States for an extended period of time, even while surrounded by the beauty of Rome, a writer starts to miss out on our country's brilliant diversity, the rhythms of spoken American English, the back-and-forth of a crowded diner early in the morning. But living here in the shadows of a medieval theocracy on one side of the Tiber and the remains of a long-fallen empire on the other, one looks up the latest Gallup Poll numbers in the Tribune and wonders if the dark ages are imminent for our country as well. Even the Italians, who to be fair have elected their own homegrown monster Berlusconi, shake their heads and wonder what's become of us.

Jim Lewis

I'm not convinced that the political opinions of a novelist are any more significant than anyone else's, but as a citizen, a libertarian leftist, and a yellow dog Democrat, I'm pleased to say that I'm voting for John Kerry. Give me an hour and I can tell you all the reasons why, starting with John Ashcroft, who has defaced the Constitution; and Colin Powell, who lied to my face about weapons of mass destruction; and Bush himself, who's simply a disgrace. Moreover, I like and respect both Kerry and Edwards (as I didn't like Gore or Lieberman).

I should add, too, that the Republicans I know can't stand Bush, either, and I'm predicting that, barring an October surprise, Kerry will win.

Vendela Vida

John Kerry: If he doesn't win, I'll have to be Canadian for the next four years.

David Amsden

I'm voting for John Kerry. This will be my first foray into the voting booth, actually—for the most part I find politics alienating, difficult to process. I'll save the bulk of my anti-Bush rant for late-night bar chatter, and simply say that a cousin of mine spent a year fighting with the Army in Iraq. He was a harder man when he returned, tweaked, difficult to relate to. His stories were crushing—did you know that there are giant spiders that creep up on sleeping soliders at night? That this is the sort of thing that causes nightmares, even more than random mortar fire?—and didn't exactly bring hope that anyone understands what's going on over there. Does Bush care about any of this, the nuanced ways his global policies affect individuals—how this, really, in the end, is what politics is all about? Yeah, I believe he does, but I don't think he's got the gumption to talk about it—or, for that matter, anything—honestly. For all his swaggering bravado, the guy has no real backbone, no confidence in anything but his squinty little grin, which is frightening.

But why Kerry, aside from his status as Democratic Other Guy, which, frankly, would be enough for me this year? Well, I like his stoicism—he seems smart, and serious, and sort of boring, and exactly like the kind of man I can't relate to, which is what I want from a leader. I don't understand why we're so keen on having someone who seems cool and perfectly personable—I have friends for that, late-night TV, strangers in parks. Really, though, the clincher came when I stumbled across some excerpts of Kerry's Vietnam journals. I couldn't help but think: the writing, the writing, the writing. It was hard and real and surprisingly beautiful, which, for me, was something I could believe in.

Elizabeth Hardwick

I will vote for John Kerry, the political scene is distressing just now—vacuous speeches on both sides. G. Bush seems triumphant, but it's a long, long way to November!

Nicole Krauss

I'm voting for Kerry. I've just discovered that, through some unsurprising accident of the Board of Elections, I'm actually registered to vote in two different counties. So I'm considering voting for him twice. I really think it's not alarmist to say that if Bush is reelected to another four years, it may be the end of life as we know it. Certainly it will be the end of life for many species, including huge numbers of the species Homo sapiens. Nothing has ever caused me such sustained anger, fear, and sadness as the current administration, and the future they're driving us all toward.

Richard Dooling

More than any other election in recent memory, this one reminds me of Henry Adams' observation that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.

The left-wing political road rage directed at George W. Bush for being dumb and lying about the war reminds me of nothing so much as the right-wing obsessive invective directed at Bill Clinton for being smart and lying about sex. Rush Limbaugh versus Michael Moore, and let the man nursing the most unrequited rage win. The DRAMA and spectacle of the election will be fascinating to watch, but novelists, even more than actors, should be political agnostics.

Thomas Beller

I'm voting for Kerry.

He isn't afraid of America. He understands that you can love your country and criticize it, too. In fact criticism, in the sense that it is articulated thought, is a form of love, at least when it comes to your country. (This logic may work less well with individuals.) I recently came across a copy of The New Soldier, a book that documents the Vietnam veteran antiwar movement, and, though he looked a lot less cool, a lot less tough, than most of the other guys pictured, his remarks were compelling. He seems to have sublimated most of that anger, which, though it's frustrating sometimes on the campaign trail, may be a positive development, because beyond a certain point of anger, you stop thinking, and being angry is the only comfortable point from which you can act.

The Bush-Cheney gang are the angriest guys in the country; fear is their weapon against thought, in whose light they do not look plausible as government. Bullying and slander is their modus operandi.

I saw the face of the Republican Party the other day at the Saratoga racetrack. It was the last day of the races, and a small woman with a big hat walked through the crowd carrying a handmade sign, written in script: "Little Old Ladies in White Tennis Shoes For Kerry," it said at the top and beneath it, "The best bet of the day." She moved through the crowd, a big smile, holding the sign over her head. I watched as she passed an old-young guy, mid-30s, already well-paunched, gold watch, smoking a cigar. He looked at her, at the sign, and then bent forward and spat out a nasty remark in her ear. I was too far away to hear it. But the way he shook his head after he passed her, his body language, maybe just the watch, I was sure it was nasty. She, however, didn't flinch—which in a way I took to be the best political news of the week.

Copyright © 2004 Slate

Blast From My Past

For more than 25 of my 32 years in harness at the Collegium Excellens, I was involved in distance education. From 1974-2000, I either developed or coordinated telecourses (pre-recorded video courses supported by text materials and a study guide) for thousands of students. Most of the students were employed or homebound and a telecourse allowed time-shifting so that the student did not have to juggle an on-campus course and job- or home-conflicts. Early on, I was a True Believer. The telecourses—especially those courses produced by video professionals (writers and TV people)—were better organized and richer in content than the traditional courses offered in the same fields at the Collegium Excellens. Most of the professors at the Collegium Excellens were fugitives from K-12 institutions. They now were teaching in college and the last thing they could admit (to either themselves or others) was that a prerecorded video course was superior to the stuff they were offering in the classroom. On more than one occasion, I offended one of these pretenders by pointing to the superiority of the telecourse I was offering them over their traditional content. Sometimes, the truth hurts. It is a dirty little secret of beginning college courses that the content of a survey course is so broad that NO professor can possibly claim expertise in all of those areas of study. That is why—that at elite institutions (Harvard?)—most survey or beginning courses are NOT taught by the most senior members of the faculty. Those superstars are teaching courses in their specialties, NOT broad, more general courses of study. The nature of beginning courses demands that the teacher borrow (actually steal without attribution) material from textbooks other than the one assigned in the course. The students have no idea that they hearing another textbook's author's words and attribute what they are hearing to their professors' brilliance or expertise. In a two-year college, especially, this common fraud feeds the ego of the teacher.

Now, telecourses are dinosaurs. The Internet has sent video courses to oblivion. However, distance education is distance education, not matter the medium. When I supported a telecourse, I supplemented the prerecorded content with material of my own devising and made that material available to students via a Web site. Again, the protests against online courses are grounded in ego-protests that college teachers will lose prestige. If those college teachers will do the work to add their own components to online courses developed by others, they will have the best of all worlds; a win-win result is the best way to go in any situation. If this is (fair & balanced) pedagogy, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
More Professors Teach by Using Other Colleges' Online Courses
By DAN CARNEVALE

New efforts help institutions trade curricula, but some faculty members are wary

John R. Marks, a professor at Zane State College, doesn't have enough spare time to convert his classroom courses to a form that could be delivered online. And the college, a two-year technical institution in Ohio, doesn't have the resources to develop as many online courses as it would like.

So Zane State officials decided to buy a couple of ready-to-deliver online courses from Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa. Now Mr. Marks teaches the courses -- on treatment of wastewater and drinking water -- as if they were his own.

"I simply did not have time to do the online development myself, and I think there are a lot of faculty out there who are in that situation," says Mr. Marks, who teaches in the departments of environmental science, safety, and health and of parks, recreation, and wildlife. "Why develop my own from scratch if there's something else out there?"

Many colleges that want to beef up their online course offerings are beginning to use online course materials developed by other institutions. Smaller institutions, especially community colleges, often cannot afford to develop distance-education materials -- which experts say are expensive to do well. And some colleges have an extensive selection of courses that they are willing to share with other institutions.

Now the haves and have-nots are beginning to swap or arrange to buy for-credit online courses. Proponents say that sharing online materials can help colleges save thousands of dollars as they create online-education programs, and several groups are now pushing the concept:

• Last month a nonprofit group called the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, in California, started an effort to create the National Repository of Online Courses, which will allow courses to be traded among institutions.




• The League for Innovation in the Community College has helped many institutions exchange courses through a project called Specialty Asynchronous Industry Learning, or SAIL, which was started last year.




• Carnegie Mellon University spun off a for-profit subsidiary in 2002 called iCarnegie that sells online courses to colleges so they can deliver the courses to their students. Carnegie Mellon is also developing an Open Learning Initiative, which provides free ready-to-deliver courses to other institutions.




• The Learning House, another for-profit company, has also been selling online courses to colleges.

But some faculty members object to the idea, arguing that professors should take an active role in developing the courses they teach.

And there are several logistical obstacles to the practice, officials say. So far, there are few ways for college officials to find out what courses are available or to publicize their own materials. Also, requirements about what material belongs in certain courses vary from state to state and college to college, bogging down the free marketability of these courses.

Exchange Programs

Some colleges find that buying online courses from other institutions is the best way to create extensive online-education programs. At Zane State College, which until June was called Muskingum Area Technical College, Mr. Marks is using the online materials he purchased from Kirkwood to teach a hybrid course. Students still show up in a classroom for lectures and labs, and they go online to learn other material and take quizzes. Mr. Marks uses the lecture time to answer questions or clarify lessons and to take students on field trips, such as a recent visit to a nearby water-sanitation station.

Kirkwood Community College hosts the courses on its computer servers, and the Zane State students log in from a distance. Mr. Marks says he has full control over the courses, teaching the lessons in any order he pleases -- and cutting some material that he feels is not relevant.

"Instructors have the ability to individualize it," Mr. Marks says. "I was able to maintain control over the course by going to the hybrid format."

Zane State pays Kirkwood $50 for every student who takes the course, a cost the college passes on to the students who enroll. Mr. Marks says he doesn't know how much it would cost to develop the course in-house, but he estimates that the college saves thousands of dollars by outsourcing.

He emphasizes, though, that the biggest saving is in his time. It would take him months to develop a course, and while doing that he would not be able to teach as much. "I have virtually no time in my current role as a faculty member to develop anything like that," he says. "It's not like teaching in high school where you have substitutes who can take over."

Douglas C. Elam, project manager for environmental technology online at Kirkwood, says the college provides online courses to hundreds of institutions, most of them using the material on a noncredit basis. "We should share each others' curriculum as much as we can," he says.

So far, Kirkwood has not used course materials from other institutions on its campus, but Mr. Elam says the college is evaluating some materials from other institutions and may do so in the future.

Cost Savings

Proponents of the idea argue that course swapping will catch on quickly once colleges realize the benefits.

A college can save money by purchasing online courses instead of sinking the resources into developing them, says A. Frank Mayadas, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's grant program for online education, which is financing projects to help spur the exchange of online courses, including a $225,000 grant to Project SAIL.

"In order to get to the next level of scale, you're going to have to look at sharing," Mr. Mayadas says. "Sharing is going to become more and more important."

Mr. Mayadas says nonprofit colleges are applying lessons learned from for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. He says that that institution has become successful, in part, by having content experts develop online courses, and then training other adjunct professors to teach them.

"There was an idea that this was a great thing to do from practically the very beginning, and it has been slow to take off," he says. "And it has been slow because it's not in higher education's nature to buy things. They tend to handcraft things."

Rhonda Epper, director of online program development at the Community College of Denver, says her institution has been able to buy and sell courses, letting the college expand some online programs while helping others expand theirs. The Denver college teaches a public-security management program that it got from Kirkwood Community College, and it is providing nursing courses to Central Arizona College.

The Arizona college is paying $1,000 for two-credit courses and $1,500 for three-credit courses per semester. That is compared to the $10,000 that the Community College of Denver spent to develop each course. The college that purchases the courses can customize them as professors see fit, but the institution isn't allowed to resell the courses to anyone, Ms. Epper says.

Buying the courses proved much easier than developing the courses in-house, she says -- and the quality was just as high. "The primary motivation for us is solving immediate needs for work-force and training development," Ms. Epper says. "We don't have to spend the resources to develop a new program if it's already developed."

Threatening Faculty Roles?

But some professors don't want nonprofit colleges emulating for-profit enterprises. The American Association of University Professors, a faculty union, is opposed to having faculty members teach courses they did not create.

Donald R. Wagner, who was chairman of AAUP's distance-education committee, says having professors teach online courses they did not create undermines their role at their institution.

"It cuts to the heart of what a faculty member is," Mr. Wagner says. "When an institution of higher education hires a faculty member, the faculty member is supposed to teach, participate in university affairs in some way as a form of service, and participate in scholarship."

Mr. Wagner is also a professor of political science at the State University of West Georgia and is its director of special programs there, including the distance- and distributed-learning programs. He says that he is not concerned about the use of the purchased material for noncredit courses, which do not intrude on the role of professors at colleges.

But for-credit courses should continue to be developed by the professor who plans to teach them, he says. Even if the courses are online and professors gets additional help in development, Mr. Wagner says it is important for the professors to be involved throughout the creation process. Otherwise, he says, the quality of teaching could suffer.

"If it's something you haven't developed yourself, you're simply a talking head," Mr. Wagner says. "It may be a cost-saving measure in the short term, but in the long term it reduces what the faculty member is."

Mr. Mayadas says he has not heard much opposition to course-swapping at campuses that have tried it, however. But he notes that the concept is still new and has not been widely discussed. "Occasionally you'll hear grumbling within institutions," he says. "You'll hear more grumbling if it begins to become a significant trend."

Sally Johnstone, director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, says the professors who are most opposed to buying online courses are not the ones teaching at a distance, so she doesn't expect too many complaints in the years to come.

"The reality is most traditional faculty are not the primary folks who are teaching online," Ms. Johnstone says. "It's not a big issue for them. It's not in their classrooms."

But it can be difficult to exchange courses when different states and institutions have different requirements about what the course content covers, says Mr. Elam of Kirkwood Community College. For example, although the principles of wastewater management are the same everywhere, some states have different requirements about what should be included in public-college courses that cover that topic. So when Kirkwood sold online courses on that subject to Zane State College, Mr. Marks had to add some material to meet Ohio's requirements.

Mr. Elam says the red tape can be burdensome, but not prohibitive. "You just have to jump through all the hoops," he says. "As time moves on, people will become more accepting of it."

Connecting Colleges

So far these course exchanges are being brokered by nonprofit organizations studying the trend and for-profit companies. Stella Perez, director and senior consultant for online initiatives in charge of the League for Innovation's Project SAIL, says the purpose of the program is to help colleges find each other so they can exchange courses, and it even helped the Community College of Denver and Zane State College find institutions that provided online courses. "SAIL is about a college-to-college connection," she says. "What we want to do is bring colleges together."

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation financed the program with an 18-month, $225,000 grant. Ms. Perez says the league has just submitted a proposal for a three-year extension.

Currently SAIL has helped foster 18 matches between institutions, with more than 35 courses being swapped. Ms. Perez says it can be difficult to get past the attitude of "not our kind, dear," at institutions. But SAIL has been able to overcome that attitude by focusing on specialty courses -- ones that are not widely available, like archive management for museum studies, heating and air-conditioning repair, and funeral directing. Courses in these topics are less likely to step on toes at any college, she says.

"Most people don't have a funeral-directing program that they're trying to upgrade," Ms. Perez says. "It's not English, and there's not a million ways to teach it."

Last month, the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education received a $1.5-million grant to create its online repository to help colleges looking for ready-to-deliver online course content find institutions willing to provide it.

The grant came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has financed several higher-education programs, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project, which makes course materials available free on the Web, though the materials are not designed as ready-to-deliver at other institutions. "There's no question that there's a huge hunger out there for more quality courseware and more quality materials," says Eric Brown, communications director at the foundation.

The Monterey institute, which works to improve the quality and availability of online educational resources, will concentrate on finding college-level online courses and, with a little tinkering, distributing them to colleges, as well as to high schools that need online Advanced Placement courses.

Gary Lopez, executive director of the institute, says the repository would not act just as a virtual warehouse for courses. The institute will also work with colleges and other organizations to fine-tune and help disseminate the courses.

"Our job is to find them, make them useful for students, and to distribute them," he says.

The institute will spend tens of thousands of dollars refining courses to make sure they are ready for widespread distribution, Mr. Lopez says. In order to break even, it will require colleges and organizations that can afford to do so to pay to use the materials. But he says the institute would keep the prices as low as possible.

"We're not looking for anybody to line their pockets with this," he says. "Basically our purpose is to be a break-even organization."

So far, the University of California College Prep outreach program has agreed to provide courses for the repository. And the institute has found at least one customer, the Illinois State Board of Education, which plans to use the materials for online Advanced Placement courses for the state's high school students, he says.

Money to Be Made

As for making money off this new phenomenon, Learning House has a head start. Learning House, based in Kentucky, offers about 90 courses on a variety of topics, including criminal justice, social work, and health care. The company leases the courses instead of selling them, meaning colleges can use them but they do not own the rights to them.

Denzil Edge, president and chief executive officer of Learning House, was a professor at the University of Louisville before he started the company with his wife. He says his customers are often professors who have been told by their administrators that they have to start teaching online. "I've had grown men cry in my office because some administrator tells them they have to go out and build these courses, and nobody tells them what to do," he says.

So Mr. Edge builds the courses for them. He hires content experts and technology personnel to construct each course, which typically costs $35,000 to $55,000 and takes about 300 hours of work, he says. Then he leases the courses to colleges, charging them a percentage of tuition and fees that the colleges make.

Midway College, in Kentucky, became a recent customer of Learning House. This fall the college began providing two of the company's online-education degree programs, in teacher education and in nursing. Midway plans to offer two more -- in organizational management and in health-care administration -- this spring. The college pays Learning House about one-sixth of the tuition -- which can cost about $390 per credit hour -- that it generates through the courses.

Although he would not give specifics, Mr. Edge says the company is doing quite well. "I usually don't talk about profit, but we're way beyond the seven-figure-per-year," he says. "We're very much in the black."

He expects his business to continue to do well as more colleges start buying online courses. "The fastest growing market is obviously the adult-education market," Mr. Edge says. "Small colleges are really being hit because the demographic is changing in their face, and they don't know what's happening."

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education