![]() ![]() 4 Of course, there are particular courses and groups of students with enormous educational value and a minimum of teacher-student interaction-and whenever they appear, opportunists try to use them to discredit the important role teachers generally play.Ī recent audit of online college Western Governors University, and the political response to it, have been just that. Giving short shrift to teacher-student interactions reduces the quality of education. ![]() Students learn best when teachers gauge students’ understanding and prompt reflection and discussion that builds on their understanding. Teachers-real humans who know the subject matter-do matter in education. Sign Up When Exceptions Become Crowbars: Western Governors University And now, for-profit opportunists want to use the example of WGU to toss out the distinction Congress set in 2008. This method of separating wheat from chaff seemed to work fairly well that is, until the case of Western Governors University (WGU). The requirement was quite modest, since the interaction does not need to be face-to-face or even live the interaction can be feedback on paper or responses to comments on an online bulletin board. If it did not have regular-and-substantive-interaction, it would be treated like an old-style, low-expectation correspondence school. 3 If a school’s online program involved “regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor,” then it would be treated, for federal aid purposes, just like a course at a brick-and-mortar college. So, how can Congress give a green light to colleges that want to offer effective, high-quality versions of education-at-a-distance, while keeping in check those programs that amount to little more than giving students a glorified electronic textbook?Ĭongress drew a line in 2008 between the good and dangerous versions of online education, based on the level of teacher-student interaction. While today’s online education programs (which were originally classified as correspondence courses, because they are conducted at a distance) are seen by visionaries as a way to expand college access, in the wrong hands they can also be a gateway for massive fraud. The digital age, however, has presented a dilemma for the regulation of long-distance learning. In response, Congress has taken action to stop the flood of taxpayer dollars that were being used for sham degrees: in the mid-1970s, it capped the amount of aid for programs conducted wholly by correspondence at half of the usual Pell Grant, and, in 1992, it made an entire school ineligible for aid if the majority-half or more-of its offerings were correspondence courses. Beginning in the 1970s with correspondence schools that took taxpayer dollars to do little more than send students videos or study materials in the mail, 1 for-profit schools have for decades aggressively misled students in order to siphon off government education subsidies. For-profit long-distance education has certainly developed quite the reputation.
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