Accrediting Bodies Consider New Standards for Distance-Education Programs

Distance learning has taken the higher education field by storm in the last decade with many online colleges and universities to which students can attend and earn their four year degree without ever stepping foot into a traditional collegiate classroom. Not even mention the number of traditional institutions, such as NDSU, that rely on IVN and online courses for distance education students. When the web grew and began to dominate the higher education field, students’ opportunities to earn college credit, along with college degrees, rapidly and dramatically increased. However, as this means to attaining an education has been popularized, the question remains is the education one earns online equivalent to that earned in a traditional college classroom?

In September of 2000, Dan Carnevale wrote an article in The Chronicle to address this very concern and acknowledge what accrediting bodies are doing to evaluate and ensure quality education is being produced and received in the online classroom.

The article explains that the six regional accrediting bodies have been struggling over how to evaluate distance education, as the classroom is very personal and usually is in the student’s homes. However, it goes on to explain that the accrediting bodies have created a set of standards that shifts the focus away from the faculty and traditional classroom and moves it to the individual student, their abilities, and of course their interests, performance and school work.

The accrediting bodies laid out regulations and standards that considered “… a number of factors, including: whether faculty members controlled the creation of content, whether the institution provided technical and program support for both faculty members and students, and whether the program had evaluation and assessment methods for measuring student learning.” The reason such strict standards needed to be agreed upon by all accrediting bodies is because unlike traditional classrooms, online and distance education programs cross many state lines – meaning a student in North Dakota could be enrolled in a college in Texas, but never even come close to the Lone Star state. Thus, in order to provide consistency and fairness, the bodies have agreed that an outlined standard would be the best means of ensuring consistent and quality online and distance education programs across the country.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? However, there are a few objections or contentions with the aforementioned standards. The most prominent contention is that because the focus of online education has become the student, their interactivity online, and their ability to learn, the accrediting bodies have naturally raised the bar for online courses far above that of the traditional classroom. For instance, in order for an online program to become accredited they must prove that the student is learning, producing their own work, interacting with their peers, meeting course standards, and that the professor is in fact controlling the content being broadcast in the course. However, in the traditional classroom, a program relying on lecture-based learning can also be accredited without the addition of the interactivity component. Thus, there are some critics who say that the proposed standards or regulations for online or distance education programs are too strict and in fact hold online programs to an unobtainable goal or standard.

Online and distance education has expanded and grown over the last decade. When the first set of distance education course standards were created in 1996, the focus was primarily on televised courses, but now hundreds and thousands of students are enrolled in online courses everyday and the standards need to be constantly updated to ensure quality education is still upheld and no “diploma-mills” become the predominant means of education across this country.

I am intrigued to see where the standards will go next as our country and the education system continues to evolve and change with the ever-updating and advancing technology which we rely on so heavily.

Carnevale, D. (2000, September 8). Accrediting bodies consider new standards for distance-education programs. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Accrediting-Bodies-Consider/11731.