A fast food approach to teaching and learning?

Publishers are now employing e-learning consultants to present their pre-formatted online learning courses. One publisher alone has around 150 courses, across all disciplines, available on WebCT and Blackboard (two of the many commercially available managed learning environments). Products are promoted as courses that can save an academic considerable time and expense in setting up their own online course.

Many textbooks have companion websites that provide free online study guides for students and academics to use as supplements for their web-based courses. Others have complete online courses with the full suite of class management, assessment, customising and progress-tracking tools supplied by WebCT and Blackboard that could be immediately used or readily adapted for use.

What are the implications of this move by publishers to provide pre-packaged information for academics to distribute to their students?

Universities have traditionally been the creators and providers of education. The pre-packaging of information allows publishers to provide and control knowledge. Is there a likelihood of placing too much faith in the product? Pre-packaged information often has the stamp of being "written by an expert". Pre-packaged information often has the stamp of being written by an "expert" and therefore may not be given sufficiently critical evaluation by the academic. And what happens to the academic's unique perspective of the discipline if there is too much reliance on packages?

"New innovations, new knowledge, and new applications of knowledge are essential features of large global corporations," writes Jarvis (2000, p. 23), who also notes that most of these developments are occurring outside of the traditional university research setting. Corporations are now founding their own universities. Traditional universities have to compete, not only with other traditional universities but also with these new corporate universities in the same market place, often with far less funding. If all universities can purchase the same pre-packaged material, what will differentiate one university course from another?

No one would argue that the development of quality learning material is time consuming and can be expensive. Off-the-shelf packages offer an appealing solution but will they create more problems than they solve?

• Jarvis, P. (2000). ‘Imprisoned in the global classroom’ revisited: Towards an ethical analysis of lifelong learning. In K. Appleton, C. Macpherson and D. Orr (Eds.), Lifelong Learning Conference: Selected Papers (pp. 20 27). Rockhampton, Australia: Central Queensland University.