Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
Most instructional designers will, in self-defense, define their role primarily as training faculty to do their own video production work with tools like Articulate or Camtasia. Many professors of non-technical subjects will be completely defeated by the complexity of these tools. But even if professors take some training and pick up some basic production skills, they will quickly realize they don't have the time to do this right. It would be far better to make use of economies of scale across an entire state university system (if not the national university system) to produce higher-quality multimedia courses at a much lower cost per student.
Imagine a common course like sophomore Western Civilization. At any moment, an army of early-career assistant professors of history across Texas are producing hundreds of hours of virtually identical lecture videos of their version of this course. Much of the content will be delivered with little or no audio editing or video editing — including sneezes, wheezes, filler words and all the rest. No one will have the time or skills to bring the production values to the next level.
What if the State Board of Higher Education assembled a team to create one exceptionally fine Official Texas Version of the sophomore Western Civilization course? The team would include brilliant subject-matter experts, the best graphic artists, senior instructional designers, professional film editors and sharp-eyed text editors, who could produce a 48-clock-hour video course of previously unimaginable quality. It might even include purchased footage showing relevant locations in Greece and Rome! The team would then have a continuing relationship to the course to assure it would be updated every few years as new scholarship emerges. This course would require considerable upfront investment, but it would be extremely cheap per delivery if it were used by even one of the three public university systems in Texas.
Lack of diversity, you say? No problem! If there are two credible scholarly opinions on why the Roman Empire fell, the course could include two professors with opposing views making their cases. Let them debate the point on camera. If there are three or more views, record a panel discussion. It is worth the effort since thousands of students will be profiting from the result.
Of course, there is such a thing as a legitimately unique local learning need. You would not want to prevent our SRU in the Texas Panhandle from teaching a locally relevant course in the history of the region. Similarly, we have certain special needs concerning the supervision of extremely small, rural and largely Spanish-speaking school districts. WTAMU is rightfully offering a program that may help to address those needs. What is far less certain is that only a local institution can understand such needs and develop higher education curricula to address them. The Texas Panhandle's need to serve large numbers of English-as-a-second-language students is not that different from the need in the Rio Grande Valley border school districts or many other districts across the country. By technologically linking school districts with similar interests to institutions of higher learning throughout the state or, even better, the nation, we could develop programs that have the cross-pollination of many ideas and are not so much driven by idiosyncratic or ephemeral local issues/personalities.
The Library
More money could be saved by eliminating that pointless anachronism, the campus library. Libraries at the more modestly funded SRUs are often nothing more than academic stage props: They exist because a university is supposed to have one. I recently visited the Information Technology section of the WTAMU campus library. Perhaps 80 percent of the books on the shelves were so hopelessly out-of-date that they would likely never be touched again except by another curiosity-seeker such as me. Many still have paper paste-in forms for rubber-stamp check-out in their back covers. Some had not been checked out in 30 years!