Friday, March 23, 2001

Accrediting Groups Issue Recommendations for Distance-Education Programs By DAN CARNEVALE Representatives of the six U.S. regional accrediting bodies have finalized a set of recommendations for building and evaluating online-education programs. But the recommendations won't become accreditation standards, says Charles M. Cook, the director of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. "We've always considered them testimonials, not a new set of standards," he says. "It's always been the local regions' option of how to adopt them." At the same time, however, distance education is punching through regional boundaries, creating a need for consistency, says David B. Wolf, executive director of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges. He says the recommendations will help the usually autonomous regional accreditation agencies stay within the same framework for their policies. "We can start using a common language," he says. "All the regions want to work off a similar script." Mr. Wolf says formal accrediting standards generally aren't as detailed as this list of recommendations. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education helped the group of representatives, called the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, develop the list. The report on the recommendations, completed last month, describes in detail the steps an institution should take to run an online-education program successfully. The recommendations cover five general categories: institutional context and commitment, curriculum and instruction, faculty support, student support, and evaluation and assessment. The report includes such specific recommendations as having "ongoing technical support, preferably offered during evenings and weekends as well as normal institutional hours." The list went through several drafts. One sentence that was omitted from the final version suggested that institutions develop policies covering faculty issues like workload, compensation, intellectual-property rights, and faculty evaluation. Mr. Wolf says the council chose to delete that provision to avoid the appearance of choosing sides on collective-bargaining issues. Leslie Purdy, president of Coastline Community College in California, says the recommendations will help institutions that want to begin offering distance education. "It serves as a way for them to consider what it takes for them to get into it," she says. Coastline already has a distance-education program, and Ms. Purdy says the recommendations will also help officials there. The suggestions the council put together are broad enough to apply to different kinds of distance-education programs yet still offer practical guidelines for running a program, she says. "Distance education is really a broad umbrella, and these guidelines really reflect that," she says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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