It's About Learning

New Council to Develop Standards, Best Practices for Online Learning – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

When I first read this article my first reaction was to post a comment suggesting that there are many well established standards of quality for online education. So when I scrolled through all the comments it was clear that almost everyone who commented had the same idea. Except for the sarcasm the first commentator Steve Foerster really captures the essence of what I was planning to say:

You’d think that online education were some new thing no one had ever heard of before. Why this and not one of the existing organizations focused in this area? I wonder sometimes whether anyone out there is better at reinventing the wheel than higher education administrators. They seem to be masters of leaping to the front of whatever parade they see and shouting “Follow me!”

I also have to agree with DrDave8563 who stated:

…Except instead of leaping to the front of this parade, they are leaping somewhere into the middle of the last third of the parade shouting “Follow me!” This parade has been going on since the Bulletin Board days – it’s hardly something new. There is a great deal of history and data about online education that already exists in both for-profit and not-for-profit realms.

There are many educators like myself who have been teaching online since the early 90’s and we have all seen a healthy complement of standards developed from organization like the Sloan Consortium, Quality Matters or any one of the many Universities who have been involved in online learning since its inception. So when I read the following statement by Hunter R. Rawlings III, the president of the Association of American Universities I have to sadly admit just how out of touch some of our academic leaders can be:

I think too many people are trying to deliver final judgment on the quality of online education, on the value of online education. It is just much too early in my mind to give any kind of final judgment. Let’s give this some time, and some real scrutiny.

We know what constitutes effective learning and exceptional learning designs. The technology plays a secondary role to effective learning design and whether the courses happens fully online, in a blended format or fully face2face we KNOW what good constitutes good education. I have always been hesitant to pile on and take shots at academic administrators because I have spent time in senior leadership so I understand the challenges. However, I have to admit that this is one time when a group of administrators are publicly demonstrating just how out of touch they are with the reality of the learning environment and the research. As one of my peers was so apt to point out with their comment this is an example of the

“blind leading the sighted”

On a positive note, I expect this group of academic heavy hitters to leverage their positions and influence and produce a report that will satisfy the online learner critics.