I'm on a roll now

So this university uses Blackboard. I can't begin to imagine how many millions of dollars they've spent on installing and maintaining this system, but I know that it's built on the same IT technologies like SAP and PeopleSoft that large corporations spend millions on, too. One instructional designer I know says it's because eLearning was created by the defense department to train fighter pilots and such. Small community colleges and inner-city schools can't afford this bloatware. There are great open source packages like Joomla and Drupal that can be used to build similar sites for next to nothing. It's no wonder large corporations are collapsing under their own weight.

More on education

So, rather than college, how about training? Those guys are out of control, too. A week long class costs $3000? So I take a class and a test and get certified? No, to be certified, you have to take five classes. That's $15,000. So when these recruiters - and there are flocks of them buzzing around the same 3 jobs - say get certified, I have to laugh. I have a masters degree, I've seen the certification materials and have already used these skills in my jobs, and they expect me to pay $15,000 to get a piece of paper that says I know how to do what I already know how to do? Get real.

Education is out of control

I took a part-time teaching job while I look for full-time work and the first week, I had several students ask me if they had to buy the textbook. Que the heck? I did a bit of research and the book bundle costs $250. You can't sell back your old books if they are updating the edition the next year, so there were no used books for them to buy, and no hope of selling theirs at the end of the semester. The books date quickly, so there's no reason to hang on to them, but no way to sell them via the school bookstore. I showed one student how to buy previous editions online. I told them to list them on craigslist and I would tell the next semester's students to look there.

And that's just books. Tuition at this school - by their own numbers - is more than $43,000 a year. So to get a bachelors degree, they either need lots of scholarships, their parents go in debt or they come out deep in debt. It would be different if we taught them how to learn. Then they could learn what they need to on their own for free.