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More than half of U.S. students took at least one online class in the 2022–23 academic year. The Education Department is proposing a number of changes to gather more data about how students fare in those courses.
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The Education Department wants to collect much more information about distance education courses and the students enrolled in them as part of a broader effort to increase oversight of online programs.
The department’s proposal would require colleges and universities to take attendance in distance education classes, which include those offered online or via correspondence. Institutions also would have to provide more information to the agency about those classes’ enrollment. Additionally, the department proposes to end any asynchronous options for students in online clock-hour programs, which are typically workforce training programs that lead to a certificate.
The proposed changes worry some higher education groups, which say they could hamper innovation, unfairly target online classes and limit access for students who could benefit from the flexibility that online education provides. The department and advocates say the new regulations are needed to ensure oversight of online education—which increased during and following the pandemic—and track the outcomes of students in those programs. In the 2022–23 academic year, about 53 percent of U.S. students enrolled in at least one online course.
Edward Conroy, a senior policy manager at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said the additional data will shed light on whether the programs are effective—and for which students.
“Schools should want this information, because if it’s not proving to be effective, then we need to find ways to improve it,” he said. “I don’t think online education is going away, and so if it’s going to be part of our lives, then we need to make it good.”
The proposals are part of a package of draft regulations that also include provisions to open up a federal college-prep program to undocumented students. The regulations were posted on the Federal Register last week and are open for public comments until Aug. 23. If they are finalized and issued before Nov. 1, they would take effect by July 1 of next year.
With this package and other regulatory changes still in the works, the Biden administration is aiming to better protect students and give them greater control over how their financial aid is used, while increasing oversight regarding colleges. Critics say the changes reflect the Education Department’s growing skepticism of the quality of online education and whether these programs pay off for students.
Jordan DiMaggio, vice president of policy and digital strategy at UPCEA, the online and professional education association, said that the department’s goals are laudable, but this proposal and other actions raise questions about the agency’s motivations.
“There’s questions on whether the department is truly focused on protecting students’ outcomes and taxpayer dollars,” he said. “Or do they kind of reveal an antiquated bias against online education that’s framed by some suspicion and distrust of the field as a whole?”
He added that the department’s rationale for some of the changes seems to be rooted in the assumption that online education is bad—and is drawing from data from the early days of the pandemic, when universities quickly switched to remote instruction.
“It sort of feels like using last month’s weather forecast to plan today’s outfit,” he said. “We’re looking at the worst of the worst in a time when [some] institutions had no idea how to teach online … We’re in a vastly different place.”
What the Department Wants to Change
The department says it’s simply trying to ensure that students are getting what they pay for with distance education programs. The various changes will help the department “better measure and account for student outcomes, improve oversight over distance education and ensure students are receiving effective education,” according to the proposed regulations. One big change: Colleges would be required to create a virtual location to house all their programs that are offered entirely online or through correspondence, which would not have to be approved by accreditors or state officials. (Note: This paragraph originally stated that accreditors and state officials have to approve new virtual locations, and has been corrected to reflect that they do not.)
In 2022–23, a little over 3,700 institutions of higher education offered at least one distance education course. But current federal reporting requirements don’t distinguish between on-campus programs and those offered online or in a hybrid format. The department also can’t tell how much federal financial aid is going specifically to distance education programs. To address that information gap, the department is proposing new reporting requirements related to distance education enrollment along with the virtual location.
The reporting requirements would require colleges to break down whether students enrolled in a distance education course are fully online or hybrid, though the specific details have yet to be determined.
Next, all distance education courses will have to take attendance as part of a proposal to more accurately determine when a student withdraws from a program, except for doctoral dissertation research courses. That withdrawal date is key to calculating how much federal financial aid should be returned to the government by either the institution or the student. The department says the proposal will help students better pay down any balance owed after they withdraw while simplifying the calculation for institutions.
DiMaggio and others said that implementing the attendance requirement will be complicated and likely require more systematic changes to institutions’ learning management systems and other software. The department is underestimating the difficulty institutions will face in complying, they say.
The department expects an institution to spend about 10 hours to initially implement the attendance requirement and then about 10 minutes a day to capture the necessary information for their records. The agency estimates that about half of the institutions offering distance education courses are already taking attendance.
“Institutions can often easily determine when students stop attending because a school’s systems can often identify when students submit assignments or interact with instructors and students during lectures and course discussions,” officials wrote.
DiMaggio said he doesn’t think that’s the case. “And many of our institutions have indicated to us that that’s not the case,” he added.
Another key change in this package rolls back a 2020 rule change that allowed asynchronous learning activities—such as watching a prerecorded video—to count toward the required number of clock hours in a distance education course. Clock-hour programs tend to be shorter term and career focused, requiring hands-on instruction to prepare students for employment in a certain field.
The 2020 change “puts students and taxpayers at risk,” officials wrote in the proposed rule, citing its oversight and compliance activities. Officials added that “asynchronous learning in clock-hour programs has often consisted of playing videos, reading assignments or scrolling through pages,” which results in a “substandard education” for students. Additionally, students have told the agency that a lack of direct engagement with instructors “hampered their ability to obtain the skills necessary to pass certification exams or obtain a job in their field.”
The department believes that “very few institutions” would be affected, though it doesn’t have data about how many programs include asynchronous elements.
Conroy of New America said that the changes to the distance education regulations reflect the “huge shift in how people go through higher education.” That includes more students enrolling in a mix of in-person and online classes.
“If that’s going to be a big part of how higher education is delivered, we need to know what’s happening with it, and we need to be able to provide students who enroll solely online with similar or the same protections if something goes sideways, as we do for students who enroll in person,” he said.
‘Needs to Be a Better Solution’
Critics of the proposal say that the department is making unnecessary and sweeping decisions in response to some bad practices, particularly when it comes to the changes to asynchronous learning activities in clock-hour programs.
“They’re right that there’s some really bad practices out there, but they’ve also said themselves that there are institutions that have spent a lot of money and spent a lot of time and effort in order to make sure that they’re right,” said Russell Poulin, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies, or WCET. “There needs to be a better solution than this one.”
Poulin and others at WCET say the proposed changes will make it more complicated for institutions to offer distance education rather than simplifying processes. For example, complying with the attendance requirement is more complicated than just “counting noses.” For distance education, it’s not just a question of whether a student showed up or logged in but also whether they participated in the class. That would have to be determined by the faculty member reviewing a student’s file, they said, and measures of academic engagement could vary depending on how the class is structured.
“There are loads of little processes that get put into this that’s far from simplification,” Poulin said.
Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education, said that eliminating asynchronous instruction in the clock-hour programs could hinder students considered nontraditional, such as parents.
“Because they can do it at their own pace,” he said. “They’re working two or three jobs. They’re trying to support their families in whatever ways, and they don’t have the luxury to have a carved-out time every week to go sit in the classroom with their peers and learn. What you’re doing is you are limiting the ability of these students to access postsecondary education by using student aid funding, and this could have a huge impact on low-income students.”
Guillory added that the other changes, from the attendance requirement to the virtual location, will likely mean that colleges—some of which are already underresourced—will have to expend more resources and manpower to comply.
“It just adds more stress and burden upon the men and women on our campuses that are really trying to best produce quality academic programming, ensure teaching and learning on campuses, and it’s just more red tape that they have to deal with,” he said.
