Northwest Education Law Blog : Northwest Education Lawyer & Attorney : Williams Kastner Law Firm : Tacoma, Seattle, Portland

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Employers are viewing online degrees more favorably, reports Industry Market Trends. Reuters reported that online education grew 13 percent last year, and nearly one-quarter of students now take some online college courses. Adult, mid-career professionals, in particular, are participating in online learning.

A survey of human resources professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 76 percent view online university degrees more favorably today than they did five years ago. In addition, 58 percent of respondents said individual courses taken through online universities are as credible as traditional university courses. Of SHRM's respondents, 95 percent said there is no difference between tuition reimbursement between employees studying through accredited online universities and those studying through accredited traditional universities. [The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Transcript]

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A group of distance education leaders today plans to discuss how current state-by-state approval and licensing protocols are hampering online colleges, and how those policies might evolve to accommodate colleges that educate students in many different states via the Web. “American labor’s competitive edge requires work force education that avoids entanglement of online and distance educational providers in a duplicative web of processes in order to offer their services,” says a report from a task force assigned by the forum to study the issue.

That report is expected to be the focus of today’s meeting here. Its authors argue that the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

This, says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College (which founded the Presidents’ Forum), can be “sort of a pain in the butt"; more to the point, it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

To remove these anchors from the necks of online colleges seeking a presence in each state, the task force proposes that regional accrediting organizations and their member states reach a common ground on “a specific template of state standards to which all parties would reference their individual requirements.” Under such a system, online colleges would only have to seek the approval of a single accrediting organization and a single state, just like brick-and-mortar colleges -- except they would get to enroll students from all over the country. The system would be based on “reciprocal judgment"; that is, state governments and regional accreditors would have to trust each other that their accredited institutions were on the level.

Solving the discontinuity between state licensing agencies could be the key to getting regional accreditors to trust one another’s judgment, according to Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization. If professional licensing agencies in different states can align their standards, curricula designed to prepare students to meet those standards will necessarily become more similar, Contreras wrote in an outline for a talk he is planning to give today at the Presidents' Forum meeting. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Online education is a growing industry in the United States with estimated revenues of $12 billion at a dozen or so for-profit companies that provide primarily online learning.

Here are some facts and statistics:

- Of more than 18 million U.S. college students, 3.9 million were enrolled in at least one online college course in fall 2007, an increase of 13 percent from 2006. Traditional on-campus enrollment increased 1 percent over that period.

- 85 percent of students who take courses online live in the same region as the campus offering the course.

- 15 percent of kindergarten through high school students may be educated online by 2011, up from 4 percent in 2006.

- 87 percent of children aged 12 to 17 use the Internet. Two-thirds of nursery school children use computers. Just about every U.S. school is connected to the Internet.

- 70 percent of public high school students graduate. Two-thirds of graduates are seen as unprepared for college.

- 47 percent of drop-outs said a major reason for leaving school was "classes were not interesting" and they were "bored." Eighty-eight percent of drop-outs had passing grades. [Reuters]

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H1N1 flu may have two surprising symptoms: innovation and empathy. At least that’s the hope of University of Michigan officials, who are encouraging faculty to make broader use of technology to help sick students keep up with class work.

As faculty create syllabuses for the coming semester, Michigan officials want them to consider the possibility of an outbreak infecting large numbers of students in the coming months. That means finding ways to work with students who may be absent for days by putting greater emphasis on distance learning tools like listservs, e-mail and Web-based teaching platforms. To that end, the university’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has laid out a series of guidelines to help faculty prepare for what could be a challenging year of illness.

“If the circumstances actually come to a head where a lot of students can’t make it to class then I could picture people who had been reluctant and not using these kinds of techniques and tools will be more receptive, and might have a very fast ramp-up getting familiar with them,” said Ed Durfee, a professor of computer science and engineering who regularly posts his PowerPoint slides online. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Logan Stark's classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn't need to sweat getting the best.
It was practically guaranteed.

That's because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It's a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

The government would pay to develop these "open" classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project's free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The plan coincides with Mr. Obama's goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won't happen simply by moving middle- and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

The site promises that students can stop using "lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.

While the Web site attempts to distinguish its service from cheating, it also advises students on how its services could make it easier for them to get away with turning in a file they know won't open. "This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper. Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! - Corrupted-Files.com is!" [Inside Higher Ed]

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Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, scanning fingerprints and installing cameras in the apartments of online students to ensure that people are who they say they are.

At least not yet.

The recently reauthorized Higher Education Act required accreditors to monitor the steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work. The language in the law had left distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. The distance educators feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.

But proposed federal regulations about implementing the law, worked out this May, would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations.

Still, while colleges may have dodged an immediate bullet, what had been more of a “back burner” issue will now be “front and center,” Mr. Lokken said. In the future, as identity-verification technology evolves, the expectation is that accrediting agencies will require more than simple log-ins and pass codes. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]