e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: online courses

  • Fall 2013 IPEDS Data: Top 30 largest online enrollments per institution

    The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. Last year they released data on distance education (essentially online courses) starting with the Fall 2012 term. Last week they released new data for the Fall 2013 term.

    Let’s look at the top 30 online programs for Fall 2013 (in terms of total number of students taking at least one online course) while showing both 2012 and 2013 data. Some notes on the data source:

    • I have combined the categories ‘students exclusively taking distance education courses’ and ‘students taking some but not all distance education courses’ to obtain the ‘at least one DE’ category;
    • The ‘All Students’ category combines those taking DE course with those taking no DE courses;
    • I have highlighted in red the not-for-profit sectors;
    • IPEDS tracks data based on the accredited body, which can differ for systems – I manually combined most for-profit systems into one institution entity as well as Arizona State University ((ASU splits into various entities although the online programs are coordinated.)); and
    • Please note that along with Russ Poulin from WCET we have identified some significant problems with IPEDS data validity – see this article for more information.

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  • 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…)

  • Lack of online course evaluation leads to accreditation warning

    ACCJC, the accrediting commission behind the City College of San Francisco crisis, issued an warning to Honolulu Community College in February of this year, with a report required by October 15. As described in Hawai’i News Now:

    Honolulu Community College has been placed on warning accreditation status by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, the only of the University of Hawaii’s ten campuses to get such a warning.

    The accrediting panel gave the 4,400-student campus the warning after an evaluation visit to the Kalihi school last fall.

    What is interesting in this action is that one of the primary drivers of the warning was HCC’s lack of evaluation of the effectiveness of their online courses versus the comparable face-to-face courses.

    More than 100 HCC faculty members teach courses online and that’s where the accreditation panel leveled its most serious criticism.

    “The college should compare the instructional quality of face-to-face and distance education courses and develop a strategic plan for distance education,” the accrediting panel wrote.

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