Three interesting stories in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed. Each has implications for discussions of new media, online education and open source.

1: Newspapers are dying. Are universities next?

The first, by Kevin Carey (policy director of Education Sector, a Washington Think Tank) is titled “What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline.” It begins with this rather scary question: “Newspapers are dying. Are universities next?”

I’d like to invite discussion of a novel and rather disturbing development in online education, one that may have implications for the work many of us do, and quite possibly for rhetoric and composition more generally. And I'd like to suggest that this development requires, among other things, thinking seriously about open source initiatives within the field of rhetoric and composition.

I’m talking about the launch of StraighterLine, an alliance between the largest online tutoring company (Smarthinking), one of the largest media/publishing companies (McGraw Hill), the largest learning management company (Blackboard), and a number of partner educational institutions. As the company’s CEO, Burck Smith states, their goal is nothing less than 'to transform higher education. They plan to take advantage of the current financial crisis to persuade academic institutions to outsource developmental and general education classes. For as CEO Smith suggests, 'Higher education is in the throes of a perfect storm––budget cuts, surging enrollments, lower endowments, increased competition and needier students.' (see the webinar http://chronicle.com/webinars/smarthinking, and the company site, http://www.straighterline.com/institution/)