Do you still remember the lockdown? The education department seems to want to forget about those times with all its might. COVID has forced us to adapt, find new ways to do daily things, and popularize remote education. However, COVID seems to be mostly in the past, and some orthodoxies desire to reverse all the progress and bring us all into the metaphorical 2014. Is it even possible? We do not know, but we know that the educational department is taking the first troubling steps to make remote learning much more uncomfortable.
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Key Takeaways
- The Education Department proposes new regulations requiring colleges to get approval from accreditors and state officials before setting up virtual campuses, aiming to improve oversight and ensure student outcomes.
- Colleges must report whether students are fully online or hybrid and implement attendance tracking for distance education courses, which could complicate compliance and administrative processes.
- The proposal reverses a 2020 rule allowing asynchronous learning activities to count as valid clock hours, citing concerns over the quality and effectiveness of such education methods.
What Does the Department Want to Change?
According to the department, all it does is check that students receive value from their online education programs (it sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it?). We all heard about modern negative trends in the quality of education.
“The various changes will help the department “better measure and account for student outcomes, improve oversight over distance education and ensure students are receiving effective education,” according to the proposed regulations.”
Well, aren’t we hearing something like that all the time? So, they announced the first big change: colleges would have to get approval from accreditors and state officials before they could set up a virtual campus to host all of its online or correspondence programs. We don’t know about you, but for us it sounds like an enormous bureaucratic red flag, and a legal basis for subsequent complications.
Just over 3,700 colleges and universities provided some kind of online or hybrid course in 2022–23. However, as it stands, federal reporting rules do not differentiate between traditional on-campus programs and online or hybrid ones. Additionally, the department cannot determine the amount of government funding allocated to distance education programs. The government recommends new reporting criteria about virtual locations and remote education enrollment to fill that data vacuum.
And, as always, when the government “recommends,” everyone will most likely choose to follow.
“The reporting requirements would require colleges to break down whether students enrolled in a distance education course are fully online or hybrid, though the specific details have yet to be determined.”
But that is not all. The next step is to include attendance tracking in all proposals for distance education courses. This should help to figure out when students drop out of programs more precisely, except research courses for PhD dissertations.
The withdrawal date is vital for determining whether the school or the student is responsible for repaying the federal government for financial assistance. According to the department, the plan will simplify the calculation for schools and enable students to pay off any remaining balance when they withdraw.
“Implementing the attendance requirement will be complicated and likely require more systematic changes to institutions’ learning management systems and other software. The department is underestimating the difficulty institutions will face in complying, they say.”
An institution is expected to dedicate around 10 hours to the first implementation of the attendance requirement and then 10 minutes per day to recordkeeping. According to the organization, over half of the schools that provide online courses also track students’ attendance. It all sounds like a big pile of problems for colleges and universities, but we know how it works and who will probably feel all the backfire (sorry for spoilers, but most likely it would be average students).
“Institutions can often easily determine when students stop attending because a school’s systems can often identify when students submit assignments or interact with instructors and students during lectures and course discussions,” officials wrote.
Another vital modification in this package is that it undoes a rule change from 2020 that recognized asynchronous learning activities, including watching a taped video, as valid clock hours for a distance education course. To prepare students for a specific job, clock-hour programs are often shorter and more career-focused, with an emphasis on practical training.
Officials stated in the proposed regulation that the 2020 change “puts students and taxpayers at risk,” referring to its monitoring and compliance activities. According to officials, students receive a “substandard education” because “asynchronous learning in clock-hour programs has often consisted of playing videos, reading assignments or scrolling through pages.”
You see where all this is going, right? Someone at the top thinks that students aren’t getting enough academic workload while remote learning, which should be changed. By the way, do you wanna know what teachers think about AI cheating in college?
The Bottom Line: Is There A Better Solution?
Well, yes, almost any solution is better than this alarming course of action. Opponents of the plan argue that the government is reacting to certain poor practices with overly broad and needless judgments (as it, to be honest, always does).
“They’re right that there’s some really bad practices out there, but they’ve also said themselves that there are institutions that have spent a lot of money and spent a lot of time and effort in order to make sure that they’re right,” said Russell Poulin, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies, or WCET. “There needs to be a better solution than this one.”
We really hope they will hear you, Russel! Instead of blindly streamlining procedures, Poulin and others at WCET argue that the planned changes will make schools’ ability to offer remote education more cumbersome. For instance, just “counting noses” won’t cut it when meeting the attendance requirement.
When it comes to online courses, it’s not enough to know if a student has checked in or not; active participation is equally crucial. They added that faculty members analyzing student files will have to make that determination and that assessments of academic involvement may differ based on the design of the course.
The ongoing debate still continues and no actions have been taken so far, but it all must look really disturbing for students. We will continue tracking the situation and hope for the best. If you want to know more about critical education changes, consider reading what school principals think about integrating AI technologies!
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