With apologies to HP Lovecraft. And MOOCthulu.
If you are unlucky enough to have any kind of budgetary authorisation powers in a university you will most likely spend a fair part of your day dealing with people who want to sell you stuff (their insidious voices a constant backdrop, never ceasing as your mind turns and turns without respite) .
The remainder of your day is probably spent dealing with people who are convinced that there is a crisis of some sort, that requires immediate action. This would be most of the staff and students of your institution, and a wide range of excitable journalists, bloggers and policy wonks (those strange, pale-fleshed, siren-voiced aberrations against nature) .
By “day”, I am not referring mainly to your working day. Even during your limited time away from your desk and meeting rooms one and two, it is likely that you will keep seeing things (even those squamous creatures that infest your dank fitful dreams, drawing you ever nearer to the nameless dread lurking beneath the inky black waters of your softly-evaporating soul, calling to you repeatedly and clearly across the starless night, come to us, come near to us, let us embrace you and make you more than human, and whose dimly glimpsed forms still twist and squirm at the edges of your scarlet-rimmed eyes…) that give you the impression that the world will end unless you authorise that invoice.
Don’t you wish you could make it all go away? (Don’t you plead in the darkest moments of your pre-dawn torments that you would offer anything to MAKE THEM STOP! MAKE IT ALL STOP!)
A range of international companies are now offering what can only be described as “online learning in a box”. They provide and maintain a platform, develop online marketing, devise and produce course materials and assessments, even provide staff to teach. And they even give you money.
And all they ask in return is your soulinstitutional branding rights.
These companies are starting to become more aggressive in their sales techniques. If a senior manager is being unresponsive, they will go around them to others. They will make vague, non-specific promises – show case studies that are at best related to reality.
I don’t want to name these companies (as to name them would be to summon them, dragging the nameless dread from the elder times from their seabed bower, where they lie dead, dreaming…) but I do want to enumerate their demands.
For firstly, they demand to have possession of your institutional brand, for the purposes of selling their online courses. And do not be mistaken. These are their courses, not yours.
For secondly, they require that you agree to any daemonic aberration of a course that they happen to come up with that might “sell”. They will use their staff – who may also teach courses for other “institutions”, their resources, their tools.
For thirdly, they will design banner adverts of horrific countenance (some of which will animate) and plaster these all around the web. You may already have branding guidelines – prepare to see them swept away.
For fourthly, they will react with a less than complete delight when you realise how easy it actually is to run your own courses and begin to do so. For alas, you will no longer have the right to.
For you see, they are the high priests – you are a novitiate – you see only the immediate advantages, they understand the long-term value of what you are giving them freely and without reservation. Ask yourself who has an online learning operation you admire – chances are they are running it themselves.
Invest instead in your own people, your own capacity, your own understanding. Use the statutory seven-day cooling off period to educate yourself online: read, research and ask your expert networks. If you don’t have an expert network, ask someone else’s.
(For the day and the hour are coming where the Elder Gods will rise and lay waste to your pitiful existence, the soft choking darkness will engulf your body and the dim red lights behind your eyes will pulse to an ancient rhythm… Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! )
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