Thursday, April 8, 2004

(W)resting on Accreditation Pillars

I'm beginning to understand the accreditation process as an exercise in abstraction.  We take our best, most descriptive account of the institution's functions and mold them rhetorically until they match the accreditation pillars.  It's not a process to be taken lightly.  Abstracting is complicated.  Often it involves collaborative writing efforts, slippery language and raptures of statistical data.  When the bean-counts start whirring around, I'm out. Abstracting to verbiage is one thing; matching imaginative institutional narratives to numbers and bar charts is much less appealing.  And it's never merely a project of abstracting until the accreditation criteria match; it's followed by an adaptive unraveling, a denouement, maybe, through which the institution is reinvented into an improved replica of its pre-accreditation body. This part takes years, and it's a road afflicted by hills, curves, chasms.

I was asked twice in recent weeks to serve on various accreditation committees: one for the division of online learning (DOL) and one for the something else I can't describe exactly (partly because I haven't heard about it in a few days and it was a passing conversation).  The division of online learning is abstracting itself toward "accreditation pillars," but I'm having trouble discerning what, exactly, accreditation pillars are. And this explains why I really should be picked last for accreditation teams.  I find the abstraction and return to be wrenching--incredibly mind-bending.  Pillars: I venture that they're evaluative criteria; they're the abstract terms we aspire toward.  Explain how we meet them and we effectively prove the structure of the Acropolis that is our University.  

The division of online learning is handling much of their interchange in the *new* CMS platform--eCollege.  It's too early for me to have a critical relationship to the interface.  I find George Williams' adaptation (via Palimpsest) of Liz Lawley's MT courseware much more attractive.  The MT design is friendlier than anything I've seen in VCampus or, in these few days, eCollege.  I look forward to trying it out, perhaps in the fall since it won't be used where I'm teaching now any time soon.  One of our holdups on the DOL committee has been the lack of an explicit institutional stance on IP.  I keep pointing toward Creative Commons as the smart, responsible solution--for University-wide content, including the stuff coming out of DOL.  That it's an incredibly hard sell affirms the power of corporatization and privatization to reduce such ideas to granules.

So, in fairness, I need to peel the sign off my back that reads, "Will gladly serve on your accreditation committee."  It's not that I'm ungrateful, rather that I really struggle with the wiggles toward abstracting the institution.  Something to work on: *learn to say 'no' politely.*

Posted by Derek Mueller at April 8, 2004 10:10 PM to Distances