Hidden Information?

After seeing the title of an article today: “Accreditation Actions Increased During Financial Downturn”, I was looking forward to reading a report with some good data, on what should be an important educational topic topic (http://chronicle.com/blogs/bottomline/accreditation-actions-increased-during-financial-downturn/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en).

 

After actually reading the article (although well written), I noticed it was missing something very important, the actual report itself. Apparently, “the report is available only to Moody’s subscribers”. So my question is: why withhold great information like that from the general public?

 

There is a tendency in educational research to ‘archive’ data, rather than widely disseminate it. A lot of great information is just sitting somewhere, locked away, as if in a cave gathering dust, almost like the gold of Fort Knox, and that is a shame. There is a great blog article by Ben Baumberg, which further addresses some of these questions titled “the harms of hidden research” http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/the-harms-of-hidden-research-part-ii/, but my point is simple: release the information because people want to know; people need to know.

 

As an educational professional, when I hear information like “the number of sanctions from national accrediting agencies increased by nearly 50 percent from 2008 to 2011” (Chronicle December 18, 2012, 1:48 pm), I want know why because this information could be useful in helping students.

 

We are trying to help students right?

Dr Flavius A B Akerele III

The ETeam