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June 03, 2009, 12:25 PM ET
Online Educators Won't Have to Spy on Students Under New Federal Rules
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, leaving distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. They feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.
But, as The Chronicle reports on its Web site today, proposed federal regulations 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 that ended last month.
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 believed they were being held to a higher standard than their peers at bricks-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 [act] was requiring for distance-education programs,” said Mr. Lokken, chair of the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges.
Do you think secure log-ins and passwords are enough to verify a student’s identity?—Marc Parry
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