Digital Diploma Mills

Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

I've been reading one of the early articles by David F. Noble (Canadian historian & famous/notorious opponent of e-learning) published in FirstMonday back in January 1998. It makes a very clear statement of the case for one of the claims about e-learning that the course asks us to consider:

"It will lead to the commercialisation of all education".

Noble argues that the introduction of e-learning to Higher Education is both a vehicle & a cover for the take-over of universities by corporate capitalism. Unable to maintain their industrial dominance in the post-oil-crisis world, claims Noble, developed Western nations have turned to education as their new arena for profit-making activity.

He sees this as a two-phase development:

1. the commoditisation of universities' research function

(through new partnerships between academic & corporate interests, the conversion of laboratory discoveries into patented products, the shift of funding from education to research - with a corresponding rise in class sizes, reduction in teaching staff & narrowing of the curriculum)

2. the commoditisation of universities' education function

This is where e-learning comes in, as a supposedly cheap fix for the problems caused by the first phase. According to Noble, four separate interest groups are promoting e-learning for their own, profit-driven purposes:

• vendors of e-learning hardware, software & packaged 'content'


• corporate training specialists, who see it as "yet another way of bringing their problem-solving, information-processing, "just-in-time" educated employees up to profit-making speed" (p.5) - preferably at public expense


• university administrators, who see an opportunity to make savings on premises & staff, assert control over the academics & maybe even become vendors themselves


• "ubiquitous technozealots" (p.6) who see computers as the answer to everything

Consequently, Noble goes on, universities are no longer considered as places of education, but as production sites:

Teachers are de-skilled and reduced to the status of factory workers, working long hours, constantly monitored and losing ownership of the course material they produce, which can be sold on to other institutions, where cheaper people can be employed to deliver it. Any who protest are dismissed as "obstructionist", "standing in the way of progress" (p.9)

and markets:

Despite evidence that "students want the genuine face-to-face education they paid for, not a cyber-counterfeit" (p.10) universities are forcing them to become consumers of e-learning, & even using them as guinea pigs in "thinly-veiled field trials" (p.11) of educationally unproven products.

Noble concludes gloomily: "Quality higher education will not disappear entirely, but it will soon become the exclusive preserve of the rich and the powerful."(p.12)


Noble has continued his crusade against e-learning in the face of institutional opposition. A trenchant - if necessarily biased - account of that opposition is given in this excerpt from his 2001 book version of Digital Diploma Mills.

So, is he a lone voice of sanity crying in the wilderness, or as one right-wing (Zionist) opponent put it recently, a "flaky academic extremist", embodying "a strange hybrid of Marxism and crackpot Luddism"?

The counter-argument is my next task!