ACE Suggests Online Learning Standards

The American Council on Education (ACE) is pushing for standards for recognizing online degree programs across different states. Implementing uniform national standards would protect students and make sure institutions provide a quality education.

Each state conducts oversight and regulation of its postsecondary education, but each also deals differently with out-of-state institutions. In addition, institutions that enroll out-of-state students online must adhere to a variety of agencies and requirements that can be cumbersome and costly.

In the paper A More Uniform Way of Recognizing OnlineDegree Programs Across State Lines, with SARA as a Focus, ACE suggested that the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) provide a solution because it would be similar to the way drivers’ licenses are recognized across different states.

SARA, administered by four regional higher-education groups, is a voluntary program that could help develop reasonable standards and quality for online programs, according to the report. It also found that participating in SARA could lead to lower costs for states and institutions, and, ultimately, students.

“The current process is too varied among the states to ensure consistent consumer protection, too cumbersome and expensive for institutions that seek to provide education across state borders, and too fragmented to support our country’s architecture for quality assurance in higher education—the quality assurance triad of accrediting agencies, the federal government, and the states,” the authors of the report wrote.

Council to Look at Online Standards

The Simon Initiative was launched by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to study technology-aided learning. Working in unison with the initiative, CMU has established the Global Learning Council, a group of educators, researchers, and technology company executives, to develop standards for online learning and identify best practices.

“In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion thanks to the development of technology about the delivery of education in a scalable way to large numbers of students across national borders,” CMU President Subra Suresh told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The missing piece is how much are students learning amid all this technology? The other piece is what are the metrics, best practices, and eventually standards, if you will, that are collectively developed and acceptable for those who engage?”

Carnegie Mellon has studied student interaction with learning software for decades and will provide access to that data, along with seed funding to support the work.

“Online education is now taking on an extremely prominent role internationally,” said Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities and a member of the council. “Yet even as online education expands rapidly and on an enormous scale, there is very little good research on the best forms of online learning, and, I might add, there are no good studies on what constitutes bad online pedagogy, of which there is a fair amount.”

New CDF digital format on the rise

From my archives of items to post:
According to  an article in the Library Journal earlier this year, there is a new digital format that will challenge the PDF. The CDF, or Computable Document Format, is a new standard that was released on July 21st by Wolfram Research, and it enables users to “interact with online documents, input their own data, and generate results, live.”

Comparatively, CDF allows interactivity and motion in a document, whereas in PDF, documents are static and unchangeable. CDF files behave more like apps than documents, and they allow users to make their own “knowledge apps”, of which more than 7,000 have already been created by researchers, educators, and students using an early version of CDF. CDF documents can currently be created using Mathematica 8 and distributed for free using the Wolfram CDF Player, which is required to view the CDF document. Currently, there is a beta CDF in an e-textbook currently on the market: Briggs/Cochran Calculus, and many other publishers are showing great interest in the technology. The CDF technology is on its way to changing the way that online documents and e-textbooks allow users to access, and interact with, information.

It will be interesting to see if this format can stand up to other developments, such as those around Epub3.