Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, scanning fingerprints and installing cameras in the apartments of online students to ensure that people are who they say they are.
At least not yet.
The recently reauthorized Higher Education Act required accreditors to monitor the steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work. The language in the law had left distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. The distance educators feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.
But proposed federal regulations about implementing the law, worked out this May, would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations.
After an emotional controversy that touched on cheating, privacy, and Congress’s lingering discomfort with distance education, some in the field are welcoming the developments.
Some distance educators felt they were being held to a higher standard than their peers at brick-and-mortar institutions. And some technology vendors exacerbated the anxiety through “purposeful distortion” of the law, said Fred B. Lokken, an associate dean at Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada.
“There were companies who saw a chance here to get their business base by, I think, exaggerating what the HEOA was requiring for distance-education programs,” said Mr. Lokken, chair of the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges.
Still, while colleges may have dodged an immediate bullet, what had been more of a “back burner” issue will now be “front and center,” Mr. Lokken said. In the future, as identity-verification technology evolves, the expectation is that accrediting agencies will require more than simple log-ins and pass codes.
Beyond Log-Ins
At the heart of this debate are a few words in a large bill that Congress reauthorized last year. Congress required colleges to have “processes” establishing that “the student who registers in a distance-education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit,” according to the Instructional Technology Council.
The move fits with earlier government skepticism about distance education. The so-called 50-percent rule, for example, had blocked institutions that provided more than half their courses via distance education, or enrolled more than half their students at a distance, from participating in federal financial-aid programs. Congress revoked that rule in 2006.
Once the new student-identification requirements emerged, technology companies like the Acxiom Corporation and Moodlerooms pointed to the law in announcing a new option for colleges to get tough on cheating: an integration of Acxiom’s identity-verification product into Moodle, the open-source course-management system that Moodlerooms uses.
Acxiom’s FactCheck-X, used in online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed, personal “challenge” questions. Other advanced tools colleges can use include the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Some college officials saw advantages to the new technologies. Others were wary of involving third-party vendors that may not safeguard students’ privacy. And others chafed at the assumption that because the course was online, the person doing the work might really be a student’s mother.
“People were just concerned that our job was going to be moved from teaching to some kind of FBI-like forensics work,” said Jennifer E. Lerner, director of the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College. “People were resentful of that because no one checks a photo ID when someone walks into a classroom. You call their name, they say ‘here,’ and you assume that that’s who the student is.”
The proposed regulatory language, forwarded to The Chronicle by the Instructional Technology Council, says colleges can verify identity with techniques like “a secure log-in and pass code; proctored examinations; and new or other technologies and practices that are effective in verifying student identification.”
Michael J. Offerman, vice chairman of the Capella Education Company, was an industry representative involved in rule-making negotiations. Here’s his bottom line: “For most, if not all of us, that would mean we don’t need to change the way we’re doing verification. But we’ll have to report it now to our accrediting agency.”
An official from the U.S. Education Department confirmed that the proposed regulations do not require colleges to put in place any new student-authentication technology beyond a secure log-in and password at this time.
For her part, Ms. Lerner argued that proctored testing is “essential” for a program’s quality.
“And a lot of institutions are not doing that now,” she said.
