Congress, please stop constraining distance education
Greg O'Brien
3x exit Founder/CEO, Digital Marketing executive, Professor, passionate team member and still hoping to be a professional cyclist
Do you remember the department of education's 50/50 rule? In the early 1990s, as online education was emerging, and growing, regulators implemented a rule that prevented a school from qualifying for federal student loans if more than 50% of its students were studying via distance education.
Fortunately, congress had the foresight to do away with this rule in 2006.
Now, there is a new proposed (by the DOE) regulation that beckons the 50/50 reg. The proposed reg is said to seek more information about students who are studying online. Taken alone, this seems to be a valuable mandate, as more information about how/where/when students are studying could have many positive applications.
That said, as proposed the reg implements far more intrusive, burdensome requirements of tracking and reporting of online students, relative to students who are studying on campus. Many of these seem at worst arbitrary, and at best an unnecessary overreach.
For example, these new regs would require that all "distance education courses take attendance". Hmmm, sound like 2nd grade? The reg also proposes to limit the use of asynchronous (recorded) learning, as it relates to counting toward course completion.
If these regs are meant to be positive for students, why not apply them to, well, all college students? Why not take attendance on campus in your psychology 101 lecture hall with 300 students (Milstein Hall anyone)? And why not prevent professors on campus from showing a video to students? (at NYU, in my MBA program, I distinctly recall one renowned leadership professor leaving the room for two straight lectures while pressing play on Shackleton)
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Of course, such changes to campus education would never occur. Faculty would not allow it. Congress would not propose it. Which all leads me to believe that these latest proposed changes seek to place further limitations on distance education. This at a time when advances in instructional design and technology are proving that well-built online courses and programs are driving higher learning objective attainment (see Dreamscape, Arizona State University , Labster and just ask Paul J. LeBlanc , Michael Crow, Dr Susan Aldridge , @ or Michael Horn )
Further evidence of such biases are evident in the gainful employment regs, first legislated by the Obama administration, then removed by the Trump administration, then re-administered by the Biden administration (Presidential ping pong anyone?).
GE regulates (by way of access to federal student aid) the debt to income ratio of college students, several years post leaving school. On its face, not a bad idea - your graduates should have a certain level of economic benefit relative to what they invested in tuition. However, the Biden administration chose only to apply these regs to career colleges (who enroll a disproportionately large number of online students). So, the reg is meant to help students, but only the ~6% or so of students attending such schools.
These latest proposed regs, as with several recent/prior congressional movements, are biased against online education, and seek to make offering, enrolling in and growing online education more burdensome for colleges and universities. At a time when there are 40 million adult Americans with some college credit but no degree, and millions of well-paying, unfilled employment opportunities that require a college degree, let's rethink this approach.
Higher Education Program Development and Analysis
4moStephanie Christmann, for sure. It is really hard to turn the ship towards online courses and programs if faculty do not want to explore it. I speak to the values of the faculty in a particular department of they are reticent. "You want to improve community access to your knowledge/courses/content/etc.? This is how you can do it." And I give them defensible estimates. That often turns heads and creates a foothold to work from. But it can take years to build that trust.
3x exit Founder/CEO, Digital Marketing executive, Professor, passionate team member and still hoping to be a professional cyclist
4moDean Nancy Coleman, Ed.D., I'd also be grateful for your thoughts here.
3x exit Founder/CEO, Digital Marketing executive, Professor, passionate team member and still hoping to be a professional cyclist
4moProvost Elliott Visconsi - I'd be grateful for your thoughts here?
Higher Education Program Development and Analysis
4moYour post hits on something I encounter quite a bit: the lack of expertise about and experience in higher education among entities that regulate (Dept of Ed, states) and provide services to (OPMs and the like) institutions of higher education. The taking of attendance in an online course is not a useful metric, regardless of asynchronous or synchronous modalities, because it is not an effective measure of student engagement, learning, and program completion and, thus, not a good way to gauge the prudent use of taxpayer dollars. Us on the inside look at proposals like that, smack our foreheads, and say, "Duh..." I look at the people who lead and work at these organizations and often do not see people who have had much time inside higher ed as faculty or staff. They can't all be higher ed veterans, to be fair, but they do need to be better informed as policy and regulatory proposals are being developed. And it's fair to ask who, then, is informing policy proposals if it isn't the higher ed professionals and experts who have invested their careers in the space. As Phil Hill and his colleagues have pointed out, there is a narrow band of voices - ie, think tanks - that have a seat at the table in reg proposal processes these days.