Students are paying thousands of dollars for online courses they believe are run by prestigious universities but have actually been outsourced to for-profit companies that use aggressive recruitment tactics and refer to students as “customers”.
A Guardian Australia investigation into the tertiary education sector’s growing use of external companies to run online courses has found that some have used out-of-date prerecorded lectures and involve “no actual [live] teaching”, according to one academic. Assignments are marked by gig workers who also oversee online “discussion boards”, which take the place of tutorials.
