The three main characteristics distinguishing online from traditional institutions outlined by Perley and Tanguay hold true in the main for me. However, I feel we've missed an important point, there is a back door into accreditation for online degree programs--and that is the traditional university or college. Because these schemes promise to be big money makers, many traditional institutions are willing to bet their "brand name" on the economies of scale and dive into the online degree granting business. As such, many of the online programs, courses, degrees and certificates housed in traditional universities are no more quality controlled than those at exclusively online institutions.

It certainly may be effectively argued that virtual institutions are more likely to be blindly profit motivated, however, in a recent study which my husband and I presented at a conference at the University of Cincinnati last month, we found no difference between traditional and virtual institutions in terms of their advertising. As suggested by Perley and Tanguay, these ads appeal to the basest market forces. In fact, wholly 87% of online degree program ads we examined had at least one appeal to ease, convenience, non-interference with current family or work obligations, legitimacy, or symbols appealing to the traditional higher education experience such as class rings, pictures of graduates, crests, and Latin mottoes. We found that these ads mislead the reader by offering no connection between what is being advertised and the reality of the online learning experience. We suggested that perhaps a warning label should be added to these advertisements (as we do for cigarettes or Gingko Biloba), something like, "This degree program has not been shown to provide a liberal education and no promises of higher salaries, career advancement or personal satisfaction are implied or guaranteed."

Education is a labor intensive process. In order to create good quality learning environments and stimulate higher thinking processes, good writing, and strong communication skills, people need to work with students. Higher education is increasingly business-oriented and labor is expensive. We make too many decisions based on the false god of efficiency. The huge lecture hall is one example, and perhaps those shouldn't be accredited any more than huge virtual lecture halls. These systems perpetuate the worst we have to offer in education, direct information dispensation. Advocates claim there is no other future for higher education; we must find ways to generate more revenues and online education is one way to do that. Another way, much less technologically seductive, is to bring the relevance of higher education research and teaching to public attention, to garner further public support for public institutions of higher learning.

In the end, if you really want to know the best criteria for evaluating a virtual university for quality, check their financial records. If they're making money hand over fist, the chances are excellent that they've taken the labor out of a very labor intensive process and focused more on advertising and marketing than on effective learning.

-- Ali Carr-Chellman, Assistant Professor of Education, Penn State University (posted 10/28, 11:05 a.m., E.D.T.)

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