The number of academic leaders who view online learning as on par with face-to-face
instruction fell from 71% in 2014 to 63% in 2015, according to the Online
Report Card—Tracking Online Education in the United States. Just 29% of the
administrators surveyed said faculty members accepted the value of online
education, the lowest percentage since 2004.
A group of students is challenging the idea of online
education in court, suing George Washington University for the quality of its
online master’s degree program in security and safety leadership. The students
allege the program failed to provide the same level of instruction and
interaction as the traditional classroom version of the program. The suit claims
instructors were unresponsive and barely involved in facilitating the
student-center coursework.
The suit also refers to a May 2013 letter to the
university president signed by 11 students complaining about the quality of the
program. The university issued an apology at the time, but has done nothing
more about the online course, according to a report from Inside Higher Education.
“The
misrepresentations are designed to present the program as something that is
not: a credible, longstanding program, with courses and content specifically
designed for the online learning environment,” the complaint reads. “In
reality, at the time the plaintiffs applied for the online program, there were
not graduates to the program and the ‘content’ mostly consisted of scanned-in
PDFs of textbooks (with blurry pages and sentences cut off) and PowerPoint
slides taken from in-class courses, without any narration or explication.”
