DISTANCE LEARNING: EVALUATE ACCREDITATION TO ONLINE SCHOOLS

PROTECT YOURSELF How do you know if you are getting what you pay for?

WHO BESTOWS ACCREDITATION TO ONLINE SCHOOLS? A regionally accredited college will generally fully accept all your credit in transfer by other regionally accredited colleges. Credits and degrees earned at non-regionally accredited universities are not commonly accepted in transfer by regionally accredited institutions.

"Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006" The Complete report is the fourth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and the Sloan Consortium. The , based on responses from over 2,200 colleges and universities, addresses these questions:
-- Has the growth of online enrollments begun to plateau?
-- Who is learning online?
-- What types of institutions have online offerings?
-- Have perceptions of quality changed for online offerings?
-- What are the barriers to widespread adoption of online education?

An Analysis of WebCT, BSCW, and BlackBoard by Paul Pavlik
Collaboration, Sharing and Society /Teaching, Learning and Technical Considerations

• Distance Learning Just as good?
  Find out if Distance Learning is just as good as the conventional way
• 24 Measures of Quality in Internet-Based Distance Learning
• Evaluating Online Courses
• Problems with Distance Learning and the Research
• Economics of Education Review
• Higher Education Policy
• Review of Higher Education
• Society for College and University Planning

Horizon Report
is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative that "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education."
Some key trends that the report calls attention to include

• Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate,and communicate.
• Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
• Students' views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.

Bad Distance Learning School
Warnings - Experiences

" Online Education's Drawbacks Include Misunderstood E-Mail Messages, Panelists Say "
by Jeffrey R. Young, How the Internet is affecting interaction between faculty and students, see THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, June 11, 2002