By Nanette Asimov

The California Senate leader’s new proposal for approving online courses suitable for public colleges and universities — an idea that captured national attention last week — is a bust, says the very group considered critical to the process: faculty leaders from the University of California.

“There is no possibility that UC faculty will shirk its responsibility to our students by ceding authority over courses to any outside agency,” Robert Powell, chairman of UC’s Academic Senate, said in an open letter to faculty about the proposal unveiled last Wednesday by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento.

Under Steinberg’s bill, SB 520, nine professors who serve on a newly formed California Open Education Resources Council would evaluate online courses and decide which to approve for credit. The idea is that such classes would alleviate overcrowding in up to 50 popular courses across the state’s community colleges, California State University and UC.

Steinberg’s office touted the proposed “online course accreditation framework” as the first of its kind in the nation. The Senate leader gave an early tip about it to the New York Times, and such online education rock stars as Sebastian Thrun, founder of the online-education company Udacity, participated in the news conference. But no one from Steinberg’s office spoke with UC faculty.

“We were not consulted in the writing of this legislation, which purports to address course access problems experienced by students in public higher education,” Powell wrote in the letter.

It’s not that faculty leaders are concerned about the snub. It’s that UC’s method for approving courses is rigorous, complex and involves many layers of faculty evaluators. By contrast, under SB 520, the nine-member California Open Education Resources Council — including just three UC professors — would be expected to do the work of approving courses. And that’s in addition to its primary job, which is to select free or low-cost e-textbooks to replace expensive hard-copy texts that many students can’t afford.

The council was established for that purpose last year by Steinberg, who is usually regarded by faculty as a champion of higher education. The council consists of three faculty members each from UC, CSU and the community colleges.

To Powell, the idea of asking them to approve classes is all but ludicrous.

“I don’t see how I can get support for that from the faculty of the University of California,” he told The Chronicle. “If I tried, the faculty should ask me to step down” as chairman of the Academic Senate.

His letter, co-signed by vice-chairman Bill Jacob, identifies two other problems the faculty have with Steinberg’s bill: Overcrowding doesn’t affect UC as much as it does CSU and community colleges, and the faculty are loath to hand over development of courses to outsiders.

“The clear self-interest of for-profit corporations in promoting the privatization of public higher education through this legislation is dismaying,” says the letter from Powell and Jacob.

Rhys Williams, an aide to Steinberg, said the support of faculty is crucial.

“It’s important,” he said. “Very important. Because, ultimately, it’s the faculty who will be leading the way on this.”

Williams said it wouldn’t be companies that would have control over course content, but faculty themselves.

As for the problem of having the skeletal California Open Education Resources Council do the heavy lifting of course approval, Williams said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

That means the conversation isn’t over yet. UC faculty and Steinberg were scheduled to meet Wednesday to talk it all over.

— Reach Nanette Asimov at [email protected]

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