e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: distance education

  • UCF and Temple IPEDS corrections lead to new Top 20 in online enrollment

    In response to the new distance education (roughly equivalent to online education) data released by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), I have written a series of posts showing different ways to view the data. In short, the data allows much greater insight into degree-granting online higher education in the US than we previously had. WCET also has a series of posts worth exploring.

    One post in particular listed the top 20 institutions in terms of how many students take at least one online course, broken down by sector. The list for public 4-year showed the following (undergrad + grad, # students taking at least one online course in Fall 2012): (more…)

  • Proposed State Authorization: Dramatic increase in federal control of distance ed

    The Department of Education (DOE) released their proposed State Authorization regulations this week as part of the negotiated rulemaking process that seeks to replace previous rules struck down by courts in 2011. While the new process is more transparent than before (which was the basis of the court rulings), the proposed rulings would represent a dramatic increase in federal control of distance education and compliance burden for institutions. Greg Ferenbach from Cooley LLP noted these changes in a listserv discussion at WCET [used by permission from author, emphasis added]:

    What I don’t think many folks appreciate … is this proposal would be a huge change from the way things work today. From a quick read, it appears as though the proposal would require all states to authorize distance ed (with no exemptions for accreditation, etc.). Basically, this would be a mandate to either obtain specific state approval or participate in reciprocity as a condition for continuing to offer distance education with federal aid.

    Note that this is quite different from the last rule, which only mandated that you need to meet state requirements, if any, and thus it appears to impose a huge new burden on states and institutions. Think at least double.

    (more…)

  • WCET Post on Distance Education Misconceptions

    It is gratifying to see WCET pick up the mantle with their analysis of distance learning based on the new IPEDS data. They have several posts up already, and today’s post is quite good and important. If only more people jumping into the fray on higher education history and reform would start with a grounding in facts, the public debate and resulting recommendations would be much more useful.

    It is surprising how many times people conflate distance (or online) education with for-profit institutions. Often these are people who should know better, whether in Congress, the press, research universities, or other higher education pundits. Certainly, the for-profits have had a huge impact on the distance education world, but maintaining unfounded perceptions does not inform policy or practice. Some examples: (more…)

  • Online Education in US Public 2-year Institutions, focus on Michigan

    Last week I shared data tables for online education at US public 4-year institutions, with additional data for Florida. Now that I’m getting the process reasonably efficient for analyzing this data, there is some room for requests (hmm, slippery slope here).

    https://twitter.com/econproph/status/432308481786253313

    Since Jim teaches in Michigan, let’s review the 2-year data with additional data on his state.

    (more…)

  • Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education

    At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.

    Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”

    “Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

    His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.

    “The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

    I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.

    https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064

    (more…)

  • Response from Babson Survey author on differences with IPEDS

    I have written a series of posts on the new IPEDS data, including two that showed how this data seems to be quite different from the pervasive Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) data (formerly known as the Sloan Survey). In particular, there were two findings, one on the number of students taking online courses:

    And no, there aren’t 7.1 million [from Babson] US higher ed students taking at least one online course. There are closer to 5.5 million [from IPEDS] as of Fall 2012.

    and one on the number of institutions offering online education:

    The big difference that should be obvious is that the Babson data shows less than half the number of institutions with no online offerings than the IPEDS data – 15% compared to 31%.

    Who has an online offering?

    I have been in contact with Jeff Seaman, one of the two authors of the BSRG reports, to get his analysis on the differences, including sharing my spreadsheets used for analysis of the two data sets. Jeff has graciously reviewed the data and provided the following analysis of why BSRG data is so different from IPEDS data.

    (more…)

  • Twice as many institutions as previously reported have no online courses

    Recently I pointed out that the widely-quoted Babson survey on online learning estimates 7.1 million US higher ed students taking at least one online course while the new IPEDS data indicates the number as 5.5 million. After looking deeper at the data, it appears that the difference in institutions (whether or not an institution offers any online courses) is even greater than the difference in students. This institutional profile is important, as the Babson report (p. 13) noted that institutions offering no online courses had very different answers than others, a theme that ran through much of the report: [emphasis added]

    The results for 2013 represent a marked change from the pattern of responses observed in previous years. In the past, all institutions have consistently shown a similar pattern of change over time. Different groups of institutions typically reported the same direction of change – if one group noted an improvement on a particular index, all other groups would show a similar degree of improvement. The overall level of agreement with a particular statement might vary among different groups, but the pattern of change over time would be similar. This is not the case for 2013.

    As noted above, there was a year-to-year change in the overall pattern of opinions on the strategic importance of online education, and on the relative learning outcomes of online instruction, as compared to face-to-face instruction. In both cases, the historic pattern of continued improvement took a step back for 2013, and all of the changes are accounted for in a single group of institutions: those that do not have any online offerings.

    Institutions with no online offerings represent a small minority of higher education – how are they different?

    Let’s look at the IPEDS data on institutions versus the Babson data, first by institutional control. I took the data on page 32 of the Babson report and recreated the graph, then I ran the same analysis using IPEDS data. (NOTE: these interactive charts do not come through on RSS feeds, so you probably will have to click through to post to see.) (more…)