Late last week I described the new plan from the US Department of Education (ED) and their Office of Educational Technology (OET) to “call for better methods for evaluating educational apps”. Essentially the ED is seeking proposals for new ed tech evaluation methods so that they can share the results with schools – helping them […]
DOE
US Department of Education: Almost a good idea on ed tech evaluation
Richard Culatta from the US Department of Education (DOE, ED, never sure of proper acronym) wrote a Medium post today describing a new ED initiative to evaluate ed tech app effectiveness. As increasingly more apps and digital tools for education become available, families and teachers are rightly asking how they can know if an app actually […]
About the Diverging Textbook Prices and Student Expenditures
This is part 3 in this series. Part 1 described the most reliable data on A) how much US college textbook prices are rising and B) how much students actually pay for textbooks, showing that the College Board data is not reliable for either measure. Part 2 provided additional detail on the data source (College […]
Postscript on Student Textbook Expenditures: More details on data sources
There has been a fair amount of discussion around my post two days ago about what US postsecondary students actually pay for textbooks. The shortest answer is that US college students spend an average of $600 per year on textbooks despite rising retail prices. I would not use College Board as a source on this […]
DOE Doubles Down on State Authorization: 25x increase in regulatory language
Now that the Kabuki Theatre of the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking process has finished its penultimate act, can we all act surprised that the likely result includes the proposed State Authorization regulations growing by a factor of 25 with no comments allowed by one of the groups most affected? The gist of State Authorization is […]
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 […]
Postscript on accreditation transparency: Basic financials of two accrediting commissions
Last week I wrote a post on two significant accrediting actions related to City College of San Francisco and Tiffin University. If there really is a shift in the DOE’s views on accreditation or in the accrediting commissions’ interpretation of standards, then that could have fairly profound cascade effects on competency-based learning programs, private online […]