Authored by Republican State Sen. Jim Banks, the bill SB 179 would require students who begin high school in 2013 and later to take at least one for-credit course online as part of the state’s Core 40 diploma. Technology and dual credit options for courses would be provided by Ivy Tech Community College.

SB 179 passed 38-12, according to a state house news release.

In a phone interview, Banks said that while he authored the bill, the idea came from the state’s superintendent of public instruction, who had made the mandate a priority for his office. Banks admits now, as he did on the floor of the Senate, that he at first was skeptical about the idea of mandating online education. But the more he worked on it, he said, the more he realized this is exactly the type of education reform he believes the people of Indiana are looking for.

While the bill passed by a large margin in the Senate, it did not pass without some initial controversy, he said, primarily because it is not a suggestion for schools and students, but a requirement. And school corporations, or districts, will not receive additional funding to integrate the technology; it must come from existing resources. But Banks said he believes it will not cost school districts any additional money because of the opportunities the community college is providing. Plus, more than 70% of Indiana’s schools already offer online learning in some form, he said.

While some have questioned whether the use of online courses would promote truancy, Banks disagrees. Though students can choose to work on assignments at home, and while specifics may be left to individual school districts, the idea is that students will be in a computer lab working on their online course for a class period as they would for any other course.

Banks said there are several benefits: classrooms will be less crowded, students who learn better online can choose to take more online courses, students can earn dual credit through the community college, and students will have access to courses, like foreign language courses, that they have interest in and that meet state requirements but aren’t offered at their high schools.

For Banks, who is currently pursuing an online master’s degree, the necessity of understanding online coursework and its role in higher education cannot be overstated.

“It’s very different from my undergraduate degree, which I earned in the traditional classroom. I miss the class discussion, but I appreciate other things, like learning on my own,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re still reading, writing, and submitting assignments… I think the importance is teaching kids how to work on their own.”

Though he said he does not like to speculate about what will happen in the Indiana House, but he believes the “positive reception” and “significant bipartisan support” in the Senate will be reflected in the House vote.

Kevin Cormier, instructional technology specialist at UNB, was part of a committee of students, staff, and faculty members from the university’s two campuses. The committee was formed a year and a half ago to plan the university’s next step once the version of Blackboard’s system that it currently uses is discontinued in August 2013.

After meetings and a bidding process, the committee selected three systems. During a demo period, students and faculty tested each and voted on a favorite. Cormier said the response was, “overwhelmingly in favor of Desire2Learn.”

The learning system met and in some ways exceeded all the requirements the committee gathered from students and faculty: the ability to record student audio (and soon, video), a mobile app that can be tailored to the school, a high-quality survey tool, an easy way to transfer grades from the system into the university’s transcript programs, and reception to UNB’s specific needs. For example, Cormier said, the engineering department’s desire for a better math equation tool for multi-step equations. Desire2Learn, he said, was happy to pass the school’s request onto the production team. Other competing companies said there was nothing in the works to address their request.

Another selling point for the company: it’s Canadian. Which, Cormier said, wasn’t necessarily a requirement, but it has its advantages, especially to students from New Brunswick, as Desire2Learn is the learning platform adopted in the province’s K-12 school system. So while there will be a learning curve integrating the new technology into both the online and physical classroom—nearly all of the university’s courses have an online component, he said—most of the orientation will have to take place on the instructional end, as students are already familiar with the technology.

UNB launched a pilot program to test the system and familiarize faculty and staff before the new Desire2Learn system is fully launched in May.

“The response has been great,” Cormier said.

So despite the slight cost increase to the school, which students will not see reflected in their tuition or fees, Cormier said selling administrators on the system was easy.

“They were on board immediately,” he said. “We gave them three options and they basically told us to pick the one that we think is best for the school and for the students. We feel like we did just that.”

Graduation rates are measured in two ways. The federal government tracks student completion through its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which, according to the release, only measures the progress of “traditional students,” or those who attend Phoenix on campus directly after high school. Traditional students, however, make up only 27 percent of the university’s undergraduate population, so it prefers what it calls a modified graduation rate. The university’s modified rate analyzes the entire student body and the percentage of students who complete at least three credits then complete a degree within 150% of normal completion time.

Under the school’s modified system, graduation rates for 3-year associate degree completers increased to 34% in 2011 from 32% in 2010, and among 4-year completers increased from 35% to 36%. Alternatively, bachelor’s degree rates declined from 33% to 31%.

Student satisfaction surveys, administered at the end of each course, showed scores of at least eight, on a 10 point scale, in each of five categories: overall satisfaction with the university, instructor satisfaction, instructor feedback, curriculum, and learning experience.

Using the national Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills, Phoenix seniors compared favorably to students at other schools. University research shows that upon graduation, Phoenix students’ salaries increased at a higher rate than the overall national salary increase. According to the ETS Proficiency Profile, Phoenix seniors slightly underperformed students at other schools in academic proficiency and progress.

Of students who participated in the university’s first new voluntary student orientation, 80% chose to enroll at Phoenix, and 20% chose not to enroll and incurred no debt. Students who completed the orientation completed their first courses at higher rates than those who did not.

The full report is available for download online.

The New York Times January 2012 expose of lax practices in California revealed that the state has failed to monitor schools like Frederick Taylor University, which is an unaccredited online university that has been charged with unethical practices. The university offers MBA degrees for $5000, considerably less than the $40,000 – 100,000 average estimated cost of an MBA. This sounds like a great bargain, but for many students, the failure of the state of California to vigorously fulfill their state college evaluation requirements means that the $5000 they’ve spent on tuition at an unaccredited college may not get them the high-paying job they hope for–a potentially costly problem. Why? Many job recruiters and employers are suspicious of graduates from unaccredited schools, and worry that they may not have actually learned the skills their degrees represent. The article reports that many states, including California itself, even refuse to hire graduates of unaccredited schools for civil service jobs.

Frederick Taylor University is not alone in its unaccredited status in California, the state with the highest number of unaccredited colleges. To some people, the recent and aggressive role the federal government has taken in monitoring online and for-profit colleges has overshadowed the important role that the states play in the process of assessment, evaluation, and monitoring of the quality of higher education programs for residents of their states. There does not seem to be much being done at the state level to separate the legitimate online colleges from the diploma mills.

Why is Accreditation Important?

Accreditation is an important issue in the growing debate over the efficacy of online learning. The USDOE states that “the goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality.” Accreditation, therefore, is the process in which a college or university is reviewed for quality by national and regional educational agencies, which send faculty and administrators from other colleges to examine every program and all of a college’s student and financial data and the credentials of the faculty, and the financial integrity of the school, among other aspects of the college. Accreditation, then, is the process by which colleges ensure both their public reputations and guarantee the federal government that federally-financed student loans have been used ethically. To most colleges, accreditation is seen as a beneficial process.

But one 2010 study by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) found that “how states authorize postsecondary institutions to operate within their boundaries is one of the least well documented topics in higher education today. No two states do this the same way and jurisdictional boundaries among the state agencies that perform these functions are sometimes uncertain.” There is no indication that this has changed at all in the intervening two years. This means that accreditation and monitoring still varies from state to state, an issue that has become problematic with the advent of online colleges that operate in many different states across the country even though they might have offices located elsewhere.

What Role Should States Play?

Some states are very aggressive in their policing of higher education institutions, however. Most of these states are in the Midwest and Sun Belt, and they have a history of reluctance to license online schools to operate in their states. To many people, the solution to the diploma mill problem is the use of state oversight laws to make sure that the citizens of their states are protected from fraudulent companies that lure unsuspecting students into buying degrees or enrolling in bogus programs that will cost them both financially and professionally.

But not all states have been open to an increasing role in higher education oversight. For example, while the relationship between the federal government and state governments has of course been notoriously challenging throughout American history, many states like California, have been either happy to sit back and let the USDOE take care of regulation, or have been so short of funds that they cannot pursue the kind of vigorous oversight necessary to properly ensure the integrity of the colleges operating in their states. This means that citizens in their states are continually victim to the predatory practices of diploma mills.

The new federal regulations of October 2011, however, are a game-changer: it doesn’t matter if a state is vigorous or lax in its use of oversight of college quality, because states now have to play a greater role in the process.  As explained in InsideHigherEd, Richard Garrett of Eduventures believes that the USDOE’s refusal to clarify certain interstate issues means that “states will probably take the occasion to bolster their existing positions on what it means for an online college to “operate” inside their borders. In other words, states will have to be more clear about what their regulations are, and more vigorous in their pursuit of violators of those mandates.

The states better hurry and get on with it, too—enrollments in online colleges keep increasing, as do the number of lawsuits from students alleging fraud by diploma mills. It might be in the best interest of the legitimate online colleges to apply some political pressure on the states in which they operate, to get them to more vigorously go after the diploma mills that often tarnish the reputation of legitimate colleges.

My student’s complete misunderstanding of what “fair use” meant opened my eyes to the fact that today’s students confront an enormous amount of information about how and what to cite in their research, information that has been made more complicated by the constant references on the internet to “Creative Commons” and “Fair Use” doctrines.

Why Do Students Need to Know About This?

The advent of the internet means that students now have fingertip access to millions of different kinds of source information. As a result, students and even faculty have been unsure about how to use this information. While students can be charged with plagiarism, and fail a course or get expelled from school for such offenses, an even more serious possibility is legal trouble for using sources without citation or authorization. It is very common, for example, for students to cut and paste images, text, and other online sources into their assignment submissions without crediting the creator. What students don’t realize is that this is not only an academic error that can result in a failing grade, it can also be illegal.

Most legal cases about unauthorized uses of sources involve the music industry and illegal downloading, or over content created by famous artists and used without authorization by other famous people, like the band Survivor’s current lawsuit against Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich for using their song “Eye of the Tiger” at his public events. But it would not be surprising for students to become the targets of such lawsuits. After all, students across the country have been sued for downloading music inappropriately. It is entirely possible that students who use music in their presentations could be sued for copyright violation if they don’t get permission or pay for the right to use the music if it is under copyright.

What is Fair Use?

Fair Use is a limitation on the exclusive rights of an owner of copyright to the material. As explained by the U.S. Copyright Office, some material can be reproduced without violating copyright, if it is used for teaching, academic scholarship and research, news reporting, commentary or criticism. Such use is permissible because one of the factors considered in determining what kind of use is “fair” is that “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” It is also fair use if the work is substantially changed or altered, either to appeal to a different audience for different purposes (i.e., satire, homage, etc.) You can get a sense of how Fair Use works by examining the examples provided by the American University Center for Social Media.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is an organization that allows artists, writer, photographer, or any other content generator, some control over who uses their work. According to the website, “Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation…The infrastructure we provide consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional ‘all rights reserved’ setting that copyright law creates.”

This means that individual content-producers as well as large corporations can maintain their copyright control over their work but still allow the work to be used in limited ways. Creative Commons calls it a “‘some rights reserved’ approach to copyright.” Students and educators can therefore use materials through Creative Commons that might not have been available in the past, because the creators have worked with Creative Commons to establish guidelines and procedures for the use of their content. Creative Commons provides plenty of examples of proper usage on their website.

What Does All This Mean for Students?

Many students, and indeed some faculty, think that using Fair Use or Creative Commons material means that they are ‘covered’ and do not have to worry about plagiarism. This is completely false. No matter what kind of material you use, or how you use it, you must always cite it! That means citing who created it, when it was published, where you got it, and every other standard citation requirement. The work, or content on which your work is based, was not created by you, so you must provide proper credit to the original creator even if the work is openly available.  Academic regulations are distinct from copyright law, and will still be employed even if your use of the material is legal. The rule of thumb about academic work still stands: If it isn’t your original work, you must cite it.

Baum had previously served as executive vice president over the Minneapolis-based online university’s five colleges, and will now oversee the school’s day-to-day management, academic quality, financial performance, accreditation, and governance of the university. Baum has worked in higher education leadership for more than 20 years at Walden, Virginia Tech University, and The Catholic University of America.

Baum is also a clinical psychologist and has held executive positions with the American Psychological Association, and has held membership positions in the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, and the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology.

Walden’s former president, Jonathan A. Kaplan, who has been president since 2007, has now been appointed by the school’s board of directors as chief executive officer. As CEO, he will be involved in the school’s strategy and performance, and will hold greater responsibility within the for-profit Laureate International Universities network, of which Walden is flagship.

Funding opportunities have presented themselves several times in the history of programs at historically black colleges in the University System of Maryland, such as Morgan, Bowie State University, Coppin State University, and the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, and in Richardson’s 26-year stint at Morgan, he said, according to a Trice Edney News Wire story featured in the Seattle Medium.

Richardson said the state has favored historically white colleges in the system — University of Maryland-College Park, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Salisbury University, and Towson University — by allowing new programs to be offered at those schools rather than at historically black ones, and to allow “unnecessary replication” of programs offered at historically black colleges, causing their enrollment to decrease.

The lack of funding, he testified, kept schools like Morgan from reaching its potential and from fully carrying out its mission. Legal action, brought by the Coalition for Excellence in Maryland Higher Education Inc. against the Maryland Higher Education Commission, was first filed in 2006. The coalition seeks an estimated $2.1 billion to make the historically black schools “comparable and competitive” to the traditionally white schools. The trial began Jan. 3.

Post University announced today it has named O. Alton Barron, MD, as the new chairman of its board of trustees.

Dr. Barron will succeed Mark Jennings who has held the position since 2005. Jennings will remain on the board, along with the other seven members of the current nine-person University board.

Dr. Barron has been an active member of the board’s finance and operations, and student life and athletics committees since he first joined the board in 2005. He is past director of research and member of the education committee of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, assistant clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, a senior attending physician in the department of orthopedic surgery at St. Luke’s, and an attending hand/shoulder surgeon at the CV Starr Hand Surgery Center, all in New York. He has held fellowships at Roosevelt Hospital (hand surgery) and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (shoulder surgery) in New York, and Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he earned his medical degree and completed his orthopedic surgery residency. He holds a B.S. in Engineering from University of Texas, Austin.

Licensed to practice medicine and surgery in the state of New York and is board certified by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery, Dr. Barron is has been published in scientific literature on many orthopedic surgery topics.

Dr. Barron will assume this new role on Feb. 1 in time for the March 1 board meeting to be held on the University’s Waterbury campus.

– Staff Writer

While there is no one magic solution to reforming schools, many districts around the nation have sought to level the playing field by adding more time to the school day or school year to more closely match those of other nations. While some changes have been more successful than others, what is clear is that the school year that worked for students decades ago simply isn’t practical for today’s students. Read on to find out some of the biggest reasons many are moving to extend or rearrange the school year for American students.

1. Flexibility in the length of high school could help students better prepare for college.

   For high school students performing at the high and low ends of the spectrum, some reforms to the school year could be a good thing. In some communities, highly-motivated students are being allowed to finish their high school course work in only three years, rather than four. This opens up opportunities for them to take on internships or get some of their general education requirements for college out of the way, and keeps them challenged and motivated rather than bored in classes that are too easy for them. Of course, some high school students aren’t ready for the challenges of college and the working world when they’re only 16 or 17. Other school districts are proposing programs that offer students a five-year high school program, with students graduating not only with their diplomas but also with an Associate’s or two years’ worth of college credits. With a tough job market out there, anything that equips students with more skills to make it on their own is probably a good thing, and greater flexibility in the length of high school could be one way to accomplish that.

2. Students do better with a shorter summer break.

   Summer break may be fun for students, but it doesn’t do their grades or test scores any favors. In fact, studies have found that students often regress over a long summer break, forgetting as much as two months of information in science and math. Many schools around the nation have begun switching to year-round schedules which still allow students (and teachers) time off, but spread it out throughout the year so the impact of time away from school is reduced.

3. Longer school years have an even more profound impact on poor, urban settings.

   While all students stand to benefit from more time spent in school, studies are showing that students from poor, urban neighborhoods see the biggest gains from longer schools years. There are a variety of reasons for this, and some aren’t directly related to learning itself. In fact, one of the primary reasons for the benefit is that more time spent in school reduces time spent on the streets and unsupervised, where many disadvantaged children often get in trouble. Also, students from wealthier areas often see less of a gain from longer school years because they are more likely than their poorer counterparts to engage in educational activities while away from school, like visiting museums, going to the library, or even taking lessons.

4. Longer school days and years offer advantages for working parents.

   When schools get out around 3 p.m. and have numerous months off during the year, most working parents have to find someone to care for their children. This can mean extra costs and a lot of stress for working moms and dads, and that’s part of the reason why many are big fans of extended time spent in school. With a growing number of families headed by a single parent or by two working parents and childcare costs that can go into the thousands each month, it isn’t hard to see why less free time for kids would be supported by a lot of parents.

5. Studies have shown that longer school years can help.

   Studies on longer school years and extended days have produced mixed results. Some have found no connection between more school hours and better performance, while others have come to quite the opposite conclusion. While it’s unlikely that these previous studies will ever be entirely reconciled, a review of dozens of studies conducted over the past decade or more has shown that, in general, the longer students spend in school, the better off they are. While it may not be the ideal for every student, in some communities extending the school year could help students boost test scores, improve grades, and even reduce dropout rates.

6. The reasons behind the creation of summer vacation don’t really apply to modern life.

   Back in the day, many Americans worked on farms and the nation as a whole was far more rural. Families needed children at home during the summer to help work in the fields, but this isn’t really the norm for most families anymore. That’s one of the reasons many people are calling for a school year that more accurately reflects the needs of modern kids and their families, spreading out break times or allowing students fewer days off throughout the year.

7. Students often simply don’t have time to learn everything they need in a school year.

   Trying to meet state standards, help individual students, and make it though a whole textbook in a year is a pretty impossible task for most teachers working in the U.S. There simply isn’t enough time during the school year to get to each lesson they need to cover, and some report barely being able to make it through half of a standard textbook on math and science. Part of the problem is having to review material after long breaks like those in the summer but many feel they simply need more school days in order to be able to touch on material that students in other nations are learning. As a result, U.S. students often lag behind their foreign counterparts, with huge gaps in math and science achievement scores for some grade levels.

8. Some states are showing big gains with more school hours.

   Looking for a successful example of where changing up the school year has really worked? Take a look at results from a wide range of Massachusetts schools that participated in a program that extended their school days. Many of the schools reported big gains in test scores and student achievement, though the results weren’t consistent across the board. Administrators believe that this is because a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, even when it comes to extending school hours, and that each school needs to determine the best model for its students and local community to see the best results.

9. Year-round school can also impact students’ overall health and well-being.

   The benefits of year-round schooling aren’t just found in higher GPAs and test scores. Other, less obvious effects of students spending more time in school can be found as well, especially in children who get their meals from school. Summer breaks and afternoons at home unsupervised often lead to students consuming greater amounts of junk food, rather than the healthier (or at least more balanced) meals provided by school cafeterias. In schools where students are still required to participate in gym, required exercise may also have a big impact on the health and well-being of students.

10. Quantity isn’t always a cure if quality is an issue.

    All the extra time in the world won’t help students if they’re not learning what they need to learn in schools, through good teachers and strong curricula. While many districts have been focusing on lengthening the school year or extending days, studies have shown that the quality of education students receive is a pivotal factor in determining whether those extra hours will actually make a difference. It’s important to remember that a longer school year, while possibly an effective way of helping students learn, is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to reforming education in the U.S.

I was delightfully surprised to discover that my expectations were way off base. Due to federal student confidentiality rules, I was unable to see student names or samples of student work, but I had access to the course shell, including the syllabus, the different course assignments, and readings assigned to students. I discovered a well-structured course that required significant amounts of sophisticated student work, and demanded much more faculty involvement with students and their work than most of my colleagues spend in their face-to-face courses. Students enrolled in the course had several mandatory assignments every week, the instructor was required to maintain an online presence 6 out of 7 days a week, and the grading rubric was applied to every assignment and, indeed, nearly every online comment a student makes. I came away from my session examining the course with the impression that anyone who takes the course seriously and completes all the required work would have a pretty solid command of the course material.

Why Did EDMC Colleges Develop Bad Reputations?

While the examination of one course can hardly be considered a thorough investigation of the quality of online college programs, in this one instance it seems that academic quality may not really be the reason why so many online colleges got such controversial reputations in 2010 and 2011. Instead, the poor public image that many online colleges have may have been partly caused by inappropriate management. For a time, corporate financial needs seemed to be placed above the needs of students. Instead of letting experienced educators do their jobs the right way, ensuring that a college course really met the standards of college-level work, the corporations privileged admissions and retention numbers to such an extent that the result was often poor quality courses. EDMC’s decision to turn this around and to produce high-quality coursework and reform its business practices is a good thing for online education, and a great benefit to online students.

How is EDMC Improving Its Services?

That’s why EDMC has been in the news quite a bit lately: The company is taking the bull by the horns and making sweeping changes to its business practices, in the hopes that the quality of the academic programs it offers to its over 150,000 students at different colleges across the country, which include The Art Institutes, Argosy University, and Brown Mackie College in addition to South University. Yesterday, for example, EDMC announced that it has cut 400 jobs in its online division, primarily in admissions. This is 2 percent of its workforce, and the cuts are due to internal examinations following a drop in enrollments amidst last year’s allegations of fraud and the institution of new federal regulations that require tougher admissions standards and more stringent adherence to federal laws regarding financial aid. The fact that most of these jobs are in admissions and other administrative positions, and not the teaching staff, means that the emphasis at EDMC may be shifting from admissions-driven profit to quality-driven profit.

What all this looks like is that EDMC is taking very seriously the damage that fraud allegations and lawsuits have done to the reputations of the colleges they run, and the declining admissions resulting from that damage. This move that can only mean good things for students. For example, the federal government has argued that EDMC “defrauded the government by illegally paying recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled.” Lay-offs in the admissions sector can indicate that EDMC is getting rid of the bad apples and restructuring its admissions practices, which will give students more confidence that their admission was carefully considered and given more personalized attention, instead of a result of a mandatory quota-scramble in which they were simply viewed as another warm body bringing in funds. Such practices placed the institutions federal financial aid at risk, and reform of these practices makes students more confident in the security of their financial aid.

Unfortunately, not all of EDMC’s practices are faultless at this point. For example, EDMC did not fulfill its legal obligation to file a formal notice of layoffs as required by the government. But that is not relevant to the academic offering and, hopefully, as EDMC continues its internal review such errors in business practice will be winnowed out. Ultimately, though EDMC and other online colleges have defended themselves against all of the charges of the past two years, what will really rehabilitate their reputations is the quality of the academic programs they offer. Based on what I saw in South University’s online Anatomy and Physiology course, EDMC is off to a good start on this.