I’m a firm believer that you should never write anything digitally that you wouldn’t want the entire world to see. A tweet, email, or Facebook status written in haste can come back to haunt you in unexpected ways. In a world where employers, family members, and selection committees regularly look into your online presence, it’s extremely important to cultivate an online identity that reflects who you are.
While it’s good to keep you digital nose clean, I often wonder if worrying about my digital identity keeps me from expressing the things I want to.
I didn’t have a good experience in my MA program. I wasn’t a good fit for the program and the program wasn’t a good fit for me. For a long time now I’ve wanted to write in detail about the things that didn’t work in my MA program and what I’ve learned from this experience. Whenever I sit down to write about this, I have a nagging thought – what if someone from my program reads this?
To be clear, I have nothing against the staff and faculty in my former program. In fact, I think they are all outstanding, intelligent people. My complaints stem from three things: how the program is managed, its length, and the assumptions it makes about MA students.
I’d like to have a forum to share my experiences, positive and negative, about my MA experience that could have the potential to benefit people considering enrolling in that program. Student evaluations help departments and programs shaped their decisions, but they do nothing to help students decide which programs and universities are best for them. Ideally I’d like to have a forum to share constructive feedback that could be shared with my program, my peers, and people considering that program. And I stress the word conductive but I’d like my opinions to be viewed as just that, without risking offending the fine people who run the program.
This brings me to the point of today’s post – are universities doing enough to embrace the groundswell?
For those that don’t know, the groundswell is a concept taken from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Digital Technologies. They define the groundswell as “a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need – information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power – from each other.”
An classic example of the groundswell would be Amazon reviews. Amazon has empowered its community of customers to write reviews for any products that the service sells – these reviews can be positive, negative, or anywhere in between. Customers have responded positively to this, writing million of reviews. These reviews are something that encourages people to use Amazon, they know that they can likely find review information on Amazon that are more akin to word of mouth, rather than the controlled, often misleading information they receive from traditional advertising and marketing. By allowing customers to voice their opinions, good or bad, Amazon has made its service appear more trustworthy in the eyes of the public.
Let’s contrast Amazon with an average university. If I’m interested in buying a book on Amazon, let’s take Groundswell as an example, I can read a description of the book written by the publisher, reviews written by professional book reviewers, and 143 user ratings and reviews, with each user review receiving a separate user rating of its helpfulness.
In contrast, if I want to take a course at a university I have only the official course description to help me with my decision. Groundswell costs $10.17 and can be read in a few days, the average Canadian undergraduate course costs around $700 and takes several months to complete.
Choosing a university even more difficult. An average undergraduate humanities degree costs about $4,700 a year. A huge amount of time and money goes along with committing to a university. Students should have the most about of information possible available to them to help aid their decision making – this information should include both information from the university, third parties like Maclean’s Magazine, and student/peer reviews.
For something like university housing it can be extremely difficult to find reliable information about its quality. I lived in the university housing during my MA. At the time I applied there was only a single picture of the front of the housing available on the university’s housing website and one picture of a room. The accommodation was a 19th century house that had been converted to students flats. Each of the roughly 30 rooms in it were dramatically different. People didn’t know what their room would look like before seeing it in person at which time they were already committed.
The room that I shared with my partner had a ceiling that leaked when it rained. Since we lived in England, it rain rather often. As I learned from talking to people who had lived in the room before me, that room had leaked for years and the university was either unable or unwilling to fix it.
When we left that room at the end of our degree we wanted to warn the room’s next residents about the leak but had no way of doing so. If I were given the option of writing a review of my housing experience, I would have written that I loved my room and accommodation, but thought it was inexcusable that housing services knew the room leaked and refused to take definitive action to address the problem.
Embracing the groundswell means taking the good with the bad. Not everything written on the internet will be positive, even if you have an outstanding service or product. It takes trust, both of your service/product and your audience, to embrace the groundswell. When universities don’t encourage transparency and support student voices I get the feeling that universities do not trust their students, that much of student feedback comes down to whining or senses of entitlement.
To a certain degree they are right to think this. Let’s turn to one of the most well-known forums for student feedback – ratemyprofessor.com.
At face value this site would seem to embody many of the principles I’m advocating for – students reviews, transparency, the wisdom of the crowd. Despite its potential this site encourages students to behave in a juvenile manner, asking them to rate meaningless attributes like “easiness” and “hotness.” The site itself is filled with ads for MTV shows and almost seems to encourage an adversarial relationship between students and professors category names like “professors strike back.” In short, this site doesn’t do much to be taken seriously and comes across more as a forum to discover which professors give the easiest ‘A’ than a resource to help students make important decisions.
While I feel like I’m trying to make a number of different points in this post, I’d like to conclude by asking a question – what do universities have to risk by embracing openness? Would some disgruntled students write overly negative or unfair reviews? Undoubtedly. Would universities risk showing cracked in their perfectly managed web façades? Certainly. Embracing the groundswell and living in a world of the social internet means recognizing that nothing is perfect.
I would rather know what kinds of problems my fellow students have experienced at a university before I make the life-altering decision to attend that university. It’s important to remember that many of the choices students make at any level of their education (undergrad, masters, or PhD) can be life-altering. A good experience or a bad experience can change a student’s academic or career trajectory. Choosing a university means choosing which city or even country you will live in.
These are decisions too important to be made without a wealth of information from a variety of sources.
-Ryan Hunt
twitter: @Ryan__Hunt
