Author: Lindsey Downs

Potato/Potahto, Microcredential/Micro-credential…Finding and Providing Clarity in Defining Microcredentials

By Lindsey Downs

June 30, 2022

What is a microcredential? A certificate? Bootcamp? If you are confused, you are not alone. Currently, there are no industry-wide standard definitions for microcredentials. There are several national initiatives coalescing around developing standard terms to provide cohesion and clarity. While this is incredibly promising and exciting, your organization may need taxonomies prior to national standards being adopted. Digital Promise defines a microcredential as “A competency or skills-based recognition that allows a learner to demonstrate mastery and learning in a particular area (Digital Promise).”

Establishing a common understanding of terms across your organization is critical to any microcredential initiative. To help you navigate this murky sea, we compiled several recommended resources (see box 1) and called on several experts within the WCET community to share their advice.

Recommended Resources for Definitions and Key Terms:
1EdTech
AACRAO
Credential As You Go
EdDesign Lab
UNESCO Towards a Common Definition of Micro-credentials

But first, read the previous blog in WCET’s microcredential series, Considering Your “Why”- How Developing a Microcredential Strategy Will Help Your Students (and Your University) Thrive. The blog concludes where this one begins, “At the root of your why should be definitions and metrics that are authentic to the overall strategy and mission of your institution.”

Q&A With Experts

Please note, some responses have been edited for space and clarity.

Q: Who was involved in this initiative for your institution? Were there others that should have been involved earlier?

Anissa Vega, Kennesaw State University:

Several interested units were invited by the Provost to join a task force charged with designing a cohesive and inclusive institutional microcredential initiative.

The unit representatives came from many different areas:

professional education,
digital learning,
registration,
career services,
curriculum,
strategic communications,
information technology services,
student affairs.

We should have engaged our student affairs group earlier to learn about how they were documenting student engagement on campus; however, once we did loop them in, they helped refine the institutional plan and have embraced the initiative.

Michelle Alvarez, Southern New Hampshire University:

We took a unique approach to launching microcredentials.

First, we identified key roles that were needed and pulled together a team from across the university. SNHU reassigned these employees to a full-time job on the newly formed Digital Credentials Lab (DCL) team. This team was responsible for learning about microcredentials through market research, feasibility studies, and pilots to develop requirements for a minimum viable product.

The group collaborated with others across the university for a year and a half to lay the foundation for offering microcredentials at SNHU.

Erica Vonk, Northwestern College:

When the Center for Innovation & Leadership at Northwestern College began in the Fall of 2020, microcredentials were not one of the top five programs under consideration; however, within a few months external organizations provided strong feedback requesting training and development needs.

So, the journey was motivated by external organizations. From there, the Director of the Center for Innovation & Leadership, the VPAA, and the office of Graduate School & Adult Learning came together to conduct deeper research.

Looking back, we should have provided an opportunity for our undergraduate and graduate students to be involved earlier.

Q: How did your microcredential journey start?

Kennesaw: To start our journey, members of the microcredentials task force read available literature in the field and reviewed microcredential initiatives at other institutions. We then consulted with our campus regional accreditation liaison. The early research helped us understand the larger context, lessons learned from other institutions, and the boundaries of our innovation efforts. Then we set out to design our taxonomy of microcredentials, which took several drafts as we tested it classifying many possible scenarios. The taxonomy helped us define activities or products that would qualify as a microcredential. As the taxonomy solidified, we gathered our work in the KSU Microcredential Guidebook. After many iterations, this guidebook now serves as a central point of communication about the initiative.

Northwestern College: We began with some modeling learned from other higher education examples and an agreement with Credly for the hosting and delivery of our digital badges. We also made an agreement with Franklin Covey learning content, a regional training and consulting company, and a few other conference events. These provided a foundation of valuable credentials that we marketed through a new website. Marketing then included internal face-to-face meetings with every department, and we marketed externally through radio, social media, and local newspapers.

Q: Where did you go to look for terms and definitions about microcredentials?

SNHU: One of the first tasks of the DCL team at SNHU was to create a shared taxonomy around microcredentials. Note how microcredentials is spelled. We had to start at the basic level of how we will spell the word. The team looked internally and externally for definitions that made sense for the context of SNHU. Our definitions came from our Learning Science team and our accreditation team, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, Lumina Foundation, CAEL, ACE, SUNY, Colorado Community College System, National Association of Workforce Development, UPCEA, 1EdTech, WCET, Alamo Community College, and NCES.

The SNHU DCL team used the following definition of microcredentials. “Microcredentials are units of learning, short of a degree, that attest to learners’ knowledge, skills, and abilities” (SNHU, DCL, 2019).

Kennesaw: The Report of The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Working Group on The Present and Future of Alternative Digital Credentials (2019) was especially helpful and much of our language started from their document.

However, we adjusted some terms because our campus community expressed terminology preferences. For example, initially the initiative was called Alternative Digital Credentials, but the campus was more familiar with the term micro-credential. To help with ease of communication and community adoption of the initiative, we decided to adjust our initiative name to be KSU Micro-credentials. From the beginning, we remained flexible and listened to campus stakeholders when they repeatedly needed clarification or expressed preferences in terminology.

Q: How do you define the differences between certificates, microcredentials, bootcamps, badges, etc.?

Kennesaw:

Microcredentials are digital records of a learner’s successful practice of or mastery of professional skills and competencies that are not reflected on an academic transcript.
Both badges and digital certificates appear in our taxonomy; however, digital certificates represent a collection of skills or competencies, while a badge represents one skill or competency. In our taxonomy, badges can stack into a certificate, but a certificate does not currently stack into any higher credential at this time.
Badges serve as digital documentation of the practice of or mastery of a skill or competency that has professional or career value.
Digital Certificates represent that an earner is qualified and capable of employing a collection of competencies or industry standards in professional environments.
We do not define bootcamps but consider them as one pathway option in which an earner may learn, practice, and demonstrate professional skills or competencies.

Northwestern College: We do not currently offer certificates or bootcamps, instead we focus on microcredentials with a digital badge to showcase learning. Microcredentials are defined as a mini-qualification or training that occurs over a shortened time frame that a specific focus on demonstrating proficiency in a skill, knowledge, capability, or experience.

We categorize each microcredential using NACE competency categories of Career & Self-Development, Communication, Critical Thinking, Equity & Inclusion, Leadership, Professionalism, Teamwork, Technology, and Other. A digital badge is a visual representation of the learning accomplished in a microcredential. The digital badge can be shared on social media, displayed on resumes, and added to Credly’s digital badge wallet. Users find the digital badge valuable in marketing themselves to stand out in hiring and promotion processes. Organization’s human resource departments love the ability to digitally track employee’s learning.

Q: Why is there so much confusion about what a microcredential is?

SNHU: Microcredentials is such a broad term that it can be confusing to learners and employers. It is both credit-bearing and non-credit. It is a stand-alone experience or a course-based experience. There is no standard time to complete. Because it can take so many shapes and sizes, and there is no consistency across providers.

SNHU:

1 – Governance and guiding policies are essential to the success of microcredentials.

“Institutions will need to efficiently create overarching strategies for the governance and guiding policies around micro-credentials and badging that allow for both disruptive innovation and centralized oversight. Clarity in an institution of how and where microcredentials, and likewise digital badges, fall inside or outside the curriculum is important. This clarity will help ensure that neither become commonplace nor lose their perceived value for accomplishments” (Alvarez, et al, 2022, p. 38).

2 – We owe learners and employers’ transparency regarding microcredential value.

“Learners who earned a single credit for a learning experience did not value it unless it was matched with an option to earn two more credits, so that it could align to a 3-credit course. The average undergraduate student at SNHU transfers in 30 credits, limiting room for elective credits in their degree program. Assessing a micro learning experience as an elective credit is not useful to a typical learner at SNHU…” (Alvarez, et al, 2022, p. 38).

Kennesaw: Microcredential champions should look for existing campus areas with substantial momentum and borrow that for the new initiative. For example, our faculty are especially active in curriculum innovation and improvement. Where fitting, we mimicked our curriculum design and review processes, employed some of the software tools used by the system, and established a similar level of campus representative review. Faculty and community members can apply their knowledge and experience with the institutional curriculum process to conceptualize how the new microcredential initiative works.

Northwestern College: Know your capabilities. This has taken more time and financial resources than initially estimated. Make sure you have campus “by-in” from departments such as Graduate & Adult Learning, Marketing & Communication, and your IT/Website team. They will be great supporters. You need a support person with great organizational skills for details with website, Credly, and training providers. Overall, be careful with your “yes, start small, and make sure you do not outgrow your capabilities.

Focus On the End Goal – Serving Students

The semantics of microcredentials can be overwhelming, but do not let that derail your institution’s strategy. At the heart of any microcredential initiative is the goal of serving students, the language used must be student friendly. Focusing on this end goal, utilizing existing definitions such as those referenced in this blog, and collaborating across the institution from the start will help ensure a strong framework.

We would like to thank the following people who generously helped with this blog:

Michelle Alvarez, Assistant Vice President of Product and Program Councils, Southern New Hampshire University
Anissa Lokey-Vega, Assistant Vice President for Curriculum and Academic Innovation, Kennesaw State University
Erica Vonk, Erica Vonk, Director of Center for Innovation & Leadership, Instructor of Business & Economics, Northwestern College
Holly Zanville, Research Professor and Co-Director of Program on Skills, Credentials and Workforce Policy in the Institute of Public Policy, George Washington University

Recommended Resources:

Credentials, Managing Digital Learning, Student Success

Practice

A Higher Education Overview of Cybersecurity as it is Relevant to You: Introduction

By Lindsey Downs

June 28, 2022

Recently, a friend texted me to complain about the cybersecurity training she had to do for work, and then asked, jokingly, how I can bear to follow and study the subject matter. I completely understand her complaint.

Cybersecurity can be extremely interesting, in my opinion, but unfortunately that is never quite conveyed in workplace cybersecurity trainings and resources. I suspect that some of the issues crop up because cybersecurity is a very technical topic that is rarely explained meaningfully in plain speech, meanwhile, much of the cybersecurity information that reaches employees comes from HR trainings (much like the one my friend was doing) which give over simplified direct instructions to employees regarding their expected behaviors to meet insurance requirements. Neither the technical explanation nor the HR explanation succeeds very often in conveying the specifics, complexities, strangeness, or even excitement of cybersecurity.

Although I would hardly consider myself a subject matter expert in cybersecurity (the topic is so massive that it no body is really an expert in the whole thing), I can provide some introduction. Coming from a background in non-technical higher education, the introduction I can provide is relevant to our non-technical higher ed audience.

The ABCs of Cybersecurity

To begin with, let’s talk about language. While “cybersecurity” is a frequently used word that can refer to a wide range of important security topics, this word is often beyond the scope of what higher education institutions need to concentrate on. In higher education, we’re not trying to secure all of cyberspace. Most often, we’re securing data and information. Therefore, language such as “information security” or “privacy and data protection” are more apt descriptions of the same topic.

As “cybersecurity” remains the most frequently used and established word for this subject, WCET still uses this word sometimes but it’s also useful to understand what we really mean.

The CIA Triad

Cybersecurity is summed up by three primary concepts: confidentiality, integrity, and availability (known as the CIA Triad). Each of these concepts is broad, and often overlaps with one or both other concepts, and all cybersecurity threats fall somewhere within the CIA Triad. While each of these topics can be breached by an outside actor with ill intentions, they can also be caused by internal errors and accidents that have no actual perpetrator but are still problematic, regardless of how they occur.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is perhaps the most frequently thought of element of the triad when most people think of cybersecurity. Confidentiality is, as one might have guessed from the word, about keeping data and information confidential. The contents of my bank account are, for example, kept confidential from you. Student academic records may be recorded within a student portal and select people may have limited access to seeing those records when appropriate, but overall, those student academic records are kept confidential from most other people at the institution.

Often when confidentiality is lost it is because someone intentionally breached the protective measures of a website or server such as through phishing or other types of hacking. However, if while getting cash at the ATM I accidentally leave the receipt in the machine when I leave, the next person to walk up might be able to take the receipt and see how much money I have remaining in my account. Without any perpetrator or ill-will, my current bank balance has been displayed to a random stranger and loses some level of confidentiality. Confidentiality is ultimately about only certain people having access to data.

Integrity

The integrity of information refers to the legitimacy and authenticity of information. Data and information that lack integrity are data and information that have been tampered with or recorded incorrectly. If I log on to my Facebook account on a computer in the library and leave before logging off and someone else shares a goofy post as me on my Facebook page, that is a breach of integrity. Other people may see the post on my Facebook page thinking that I posted it, but in fact, it was not me. While this example doesn’t present a very big threat, there are other versions of the same threat that are more concerning: in 2013 for example, a Syrian hacker group hacked into the Twitter account for the Associated Press and posted a fake tweet claiming that there had been explosions at the White House. In the short time that the tweet was believed to be accurate, it was re-tweeted thousands of times and caused a short term drop in the stock market. The accuracy of information is immensely important, especially when it comes to information from trusted sources. Information integrity is also of great importance when it comes to the accuracy of an individual’s information.

Similar to confidentiality issues, issues of integrity can crop up without any perpetrator. If a grade or a research data point is entered into the computer incorrectly, it would reflect inaccurate results. Regardless of the involvement of a perpetrator or not, the incorrect data point can cause confusion to those viewing the data who may recognize that the information seems incorrect, or if nobody is looking very closely, it may not be second guessed at all.

Availability

The last element of the triad is availability, which centers around information or data being available (you probably guessed that from the word!). If WCET stopped paying to have our website hosted on external servers, our website would eventually go down, and would become unavailable to our users. Additionally, if a hacking group flooded the servers of a university website with fake traffic in what is known as a denial-of-service attack, the website at hand could become temporarily unavailable as well. There are, of course, actions that universities can take to prevent such events, but it is a real risk, especially for smaller institutions with fewer technological resources.

Insecurities Within the Triad

You can easily begin to see how these topics could overlap. If I write down my banking password on a piece of paper that I keep in my wallet and my wallet gets stolen, then someone might be able to log into my account (breach of confidentiality) and then make a bank deposit from my account to theirs (breach of availability). Similarly, I could fall for a phishing attempt on my work computer, which could give administrative access to the WCET website to a hacker (breach of confidentiality), and the hacker could make significant alterations to the contents of the WCET website that mislead users about who we are (breach of integrity).

Higher Education is an Easy Target

As you can see, cybersecurity plays an important role in our own personal lives as well as in the whole of the higher education industry today. While it is true that any business regardless of industry can be vulnerable to cyberattacks, causing each of them to need to put time and money into securing themselves from outside threats, higher education does experience several unique vulnerabilities.

The Attack Surface

One central way that institutions of higher education can be extra vulnerable to attack is that they are “open” by design. A private company might have many internal management systems that can only be accessed on site or when connected through a VPN. Access is limited to certain users, which minimizes some potential points of entry and points of attack. Even without limited access, a regular workplace that doesn’t have many security procedures in place will only give logins (for email clients, for company software, for websites, etc.) to employees. However, a higher education institution functions differently by design. Certain systems such as learning management systems and student portals must be available to all students, in addition to many faculty and staff. Faculty and staff meanwhile have administrator logins to some of these accounts as well. Everyone connected to an institution likely has access to institutional email. Each department might have their own login to the institution’s website so that each department has real-time control over their content and doesn’t need to go through a centralized web department. The list goes on. There are a lot of platforms in use and a lot of people who have access to them. Each unique account will likely have its own unique login credentials, which can be more or less secure based on how they are set up. All of these logins and all of these people with varying degrees of access to institutional software and systems creates a very large attack surface.

Data at Risk

There are several more security vulnerabilities in higher education that make institutions especially at risk. For example, institutions have a lot of data, which is vulnerable to being viewed (confidentiality), changed (integrity), or deleted (availability). Such data includes:

Personally identifiable information for all students, faculty, and staff.
Student records from the past and present.
Student financial records.
Employment records, including financial employment information.
Research data from past and current research projects at the institution.
Health data that has either been provided by students or collected at the institution itself when there are on-campus health services.

The list goes on. With all this data at risk, plus all these attack vectors into institutional systems, it is no surprise that higher education institutions are such a frequent target of cyberattacks and with such dire consequences.

Securing Higher Education

It is often said that all employees, not just the IT department, must play a role in security. To better understand how to do this, all employees need better information on what role they play in security. Although security policies will be different from one institution to the next, I hope to continue to provide a few more posts about information security, which explains this topic in an approachable way that is meaningful to the higher education industry.

Cybersecurity, Managing Digital Learning

Policy

What’s Happened to Those Federal Regs on Professional Licensure and Reciprocity?

By Lindsey Downs

June 24, 2022

Publication of the Department of Education’s proposed professional licensure and reciprocity rules will be delayed until 2023.

In March we alerted you to two proposed changes to U.S. Department of Education regulations from its Negotiated Rulemaking process earlier this year. These proposals would have a great impact on the digital / distance learning world, if implemented. The proposed changes were:

Professional Licensure – Currently, institutions are required to notify students if its program meets, does not meet, or the institution has not determined that it meets the educational requirements for the state in which the student is located. The proposed rule would require the program to “ensure” that the program meets the state educational requirements, if any. To “ensure” that the program meets the requirements would protect students but is a standard that is difficult to achieve for some states and programs.
State Authorization Reciprocity – Institutions could still use a reciprocity agreement to obtain institutional approval to serve students in a participating state. However, the institution would be eligible to disburse Federal (Title IV) financial aid to students in a state only if that reciprocity agreement complies “with all State consumer protection laws, including both generally applicable State laws and those specific to educational institutions…”
This adds the requirement for institutions to meet laws specific to educational institutions, which will increase student protections is some states. On the other hand, it could negate reciprocity and will likely increase the work and costs for institutions to serve students in many states.

The Breaking News

Unlike cable news networks “breaking news,” this is actually big news that we learned on Wednesday of this week. The above rules were part of proposed updates to the “Certification Procedures.” These are rules contained in the Program Participation Agreement that institutions must sign to be eligible to disburse federal financial aid.

On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget website posted updates on the status of the proposed regulations.

On the bottom line you can see that the NPRM (Notice for Proposed Rulemaking, where the Department seeks public comment) is scheduled for April of 2023.

In her post last week, Cheryl Dowd said that there were so many rules in the queue that is was hard to imagine they would get to all of them this year. She was prescient.

What this means is that they will not release the proposed rules for public comment until next Spring. If they publish the final rule by November 1, 2023, the regulations will go into effect on July 1, 2024.

We will continue to follow these rules and update you.

What Have We Been Doing About Professional Licensure?

Lots.

We have been working on the behalf of WCET and State Authorization Network members …often behind the scenes.

Rulemaking

During the negotiated rulemaking sessions, we were working with two of the negotiators representing consumer protection groups. We sought to create a compromise that would work for all. Cheryl Dowd (Senior Director, State Authorization Network and WCET Policy Innovations) and I advocated for the following principles in this compromise:

If the profession in a state has clear laws or regulations regarding the educational requirements for entering the profession, the institution must meet those expectations.
The determination of whether the laws or regulations for a profession are met is made at the time of “initial enrollment” of the student.
An institution should not be held to meet the requirements where it is unable to do so. There are some states without rules or without the staff to make a determination for an institution. An institution should not be held to rules that are not there or to which the state will not engage in discussion about whether the institution is in compliance.
Students should be allowed to opt into a program. Given today’s mobile society or populations located on state borders, there are many reasons why a student may wish to enroll in a program that is unable to “ensure” that it meet the educational requirements where the student is currently located.

Engaging Professional Licensure Associations, State Licensing Agencies, and Professional Accrediting Agencies

a nurse holding a tablet — *Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels*

Cheryl Dowd, has contacted many associations of state licensing agencies for different professions. She has also talked to individuals at some specific state agencies. Many of them were unaware of the proposed rules or the possible impact that it could have on their agencies.

Cheryl’s persistence helped several organizations within a health profession to coordinate with each other. Eventually, they gained a meeting with Education Department leadership.

Engaging Other Organizations

Several of the higher education presidential and leadership organizations are assembling a series of recommendations to the Department regarding the proposed rules. We contributed extensively to the wording in that letter regarding the anticipated professional licensure language.

Cheryl just returned from a meeting of the Council of State Governments and the National Council of State Legislators regarding licensure compacts that provide portability of a license to other compact member states for individuals who already possess a license from a state agency. She continually raised the issue about the need for increased communication between state licensing boards and postsecondary institutions to address portability of the education at the pre-licensure stage. We are already strategizing next steps about who else needs to be engaged.

We have presented on these issues several times, including at NASASPS – the state regulator organization. We also have talked to several other organizations. Next week, Kathryn Kerensky, Director Digital Learning Policy & Compliance and Cheryl are presenting at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) and then we are presenting at the Online Teaching Conference for the California Community Colleges and we will certainly raise this issue.

If you are getting the idea that Cheryl has been a bulldog on this issue, you are reading that correctly.

What Have We Been Doing About Reciprocity?

NC-SARA and the four regional higher education compacts (MHEC, NEBHE, SREB, & WICHE) have led the charge on this issue. Especially for WICHE and the compacts, we have provided input and advice.

Rulemaking

During the negotiated rulemaking sessions, we provided background information and suggestions to several of the institutional negotiators. None of them had any background on this issue.

Engaging Other Organizations

We were asked to contribute to the higher education presidential and leadership organizations’ recommendations to the Department. Again, we provided extensive suggested language for that letter regarding the anticipated reciprocity language.

We have presented on these issues several times and have talked to several organizations.

Our Take on Reciprocity

Our take has been that the proposed regulation would improve consumer protection in a few states, but will make SARA a less valuable option for several states and institutions. If states drop out, consumer protection could actually lessen. We are also sure that underfunded and low-in-personnel state agencies will be ill-prepared to handle the resulting onslaught of requests from hundreds (thousands?) of institutions.

We also wonder how the Department might enforce this rule if it were to go into effect. Let’s say that a reciprocity agreement does not comply. Will they deny aid to the students from institutions in the 40+ states participating in the agreement? We are unclear how this rule could be enforced. Due to the limitations on what the Department can regulate, it is focused on institutions but the intent seems to actually be to regulate states.

NC-SARA will soon update its policy process. And they need improved policies. Our recommendation is for the Department to work with states, the compacts, and NC-SARA to improve consumer protections through reciprocity. By doing that, protections will reach nearly every corner of the country. And that’s a better option than improving protections in just a few states.

The Department now has ample time to work with states on both these issues.

And we’re happy to help.

Our Message to Members

We’re doing lots of work behind the scenes. It’s not flashy. It’s not in the press.

We’re working to improve consumer protections for students.

And we’re working for you…our members.

Negotiated Rulemaking, Professional Licensure, Reciprocity, Regulation, SAN, State Authorization, U.S. Department of Education

Policy

Juneteenth: Freedom and Educational Equity

By Lindsey Downs

June 21, 2022

WCET + Every Learner Everywhere Celebrate Juneteenth

Juneteenth, or “Freedom Day” is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth not only celebrates the freedom of African Americans from slavery, but it also is a time when our achievements are noted, and continuous self-development is encouraged. WCET and Every Learner Everywhere sought to make a Juneteenth commemorative post showcasing the strength in the American spirit to recognize wrong and set about making it right.

Juneteenth offers an opportunity to talk about this complex history and here we share reflections from WCET Executive Leadership and Every Learner Equity Advisory Board and Staff on our ideas of freedom and educational equity and how freedom has shaped our educational experiences.

To me, educational equity means creating learning environments that enable all learners to achieve their fullest potential. In order to experience true liberation, we will need to dismantle systemic racism and classism, decenter whiteness in teaching and learning, and remove structural barriers in our educational policies and practices.

Working towards equity in Higher Ed is personal for me because my hope is that we will ultimately create a more equitable and fair learning experience for the future generation of students which includes my own children.

Jessica Rowland Williams, Ph.D., Director, Every Learner Everywhere

As a first-generation college student, woman of color, and daughter of an immigrant, I lead California Competes: Higher Education for a Strong Economy with the perspective that higher education can be a vehicle to prosperity for individuals and the communities they serve. Dismantling systems that do not serve today’s students equitably is our professional (and my personal) mission. My parents did not have the opportunity to go to college. They ended up in California after leaving challenging circumstances and had to carve their own pathways to success around the systematic barriers that kept them out. For me and my brother though, my parents emphasized that college was key, and it was instilled in me that higher education opens doors, creating the freedom of choices to turn one’s dreams and aspirations into reality. They were right. The benefits of higher education have profoundly impacted my life, and I want all Californians to have this opportunity—this freedom of choice on what trajectory to take—to reach their full potential, regardless of backgrounds and circumstances. The ultimate goal for us at California Competes is one where every individual can access higher education to bolster both personal and community development, engagement, and success.

Su Jin Jez, Ph.D., Executive Director, California Competes + Every Learner Equity Advisory Board Member

When thinking about freedom and educational equity, I go to this quote from former US Secretary of Education and current managing partner at Emerson Collective Arne Duncan: “By becoming a champion country, we are answering a global call to action to focus the world’s attention on the cause of education and equal opportunity for all. A good education is one of the most powerful ways for nations to reduce poverty, become competitive and grow the economic pie for all. It’s better for individuals, for the country, and for the world when countries invest in education.” By promoting educational equity, we are positively impacting every aspect of society.

Jenni Atwood, Grants Manager, Every Learner Everywhere

As a native South Texan, I learned that Juneteenth or “Freedom Day” is a part of the state’s history. Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with the news that the Civil War was over and slavery in the United States was abolished. In 1979, the Texas Legislature passed a bill to mark Juneteenth as a state holiday. Forty-two years later, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act that establishes June 19 as a national holiday that commemorates the end of slavery and honors the culture and achievements of African Americans.

Educational equity, to me, is the foundational practices, policies, and procedures of academic fairness and inclusion. Every child/student deserves access to the necessary tools and resources that will provide an opportunity to be successful in their educational journey, K-12 and post-secondary. Yet, here we are in 2022, still met with challenges every day across the digital landscape of America.

As an administrative leader at an institution of higher education that primarily serves a Hispanic student population, my role is to provide educational technology services and resources to all students regardless of race, color, or economic class. My educational experiences differed from my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, but we lived through the challenges and persevered. Every generation experiences educational equity, and our role is to pay it forward as leaders to make a difference for every child/student.

Rolando R. Garza, Ed.D., Director of the Center for Academic Technology, Texas A&M University-Kingsville + Every Learner Everywhere Equity Advisory Board Member

Observing Juneteenth reminds me to celebrate how far Black Americans have come since the 1860’s, but also to reflect on the work that still needs to be done. I believe that education – specifically public education – is essential for the advancement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and freedom. Furthermore, I believe that online public education helps to expand access to educational opportunity, especially for students who can’t afford to pause family, home and work responsibilities for a traditional four-year, on-campus experience.

For me, Juneteenth inspires empathy for underserved student populations, and reminds me that the onus is on institutions of higher education to better serve underserved student groups and to narrow the equity gap in higher ed. I am proud to devote my career to improving educational access and am grateful for how Juneteenth challenges me.

Shannon Riggs, Executive Director, Academic Programs & Learning Innovation, Oregon State University + WCET Steering Committee Chair, WCET Executive Council

On June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two and a half months after the end of the Civil War, Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order Number Three in Galveston, Texas announcing the end of slavery and proclaiming, “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” This proclamation, though, was not enough to end discrimination and inequality. In fact, racial discrimination became the law of the land when in 1896 the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that separate but equal facilities, including schools, were legal. This doctrine of separate but equal wasn’t struck down until almost sixty years later in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet, even then, educational discrimination remained and continues in 2022.

What does Juneteenth mean to me? For me, Juneteenth represents a powerful promise that has gone unfulfilled. Even the landmark Brown v. Board of Education has not been enough to ensure equitable education for all learners. Juneteenth teaches us that proclaiming something is not enough; we must actively work to make the promises of Juneteenth and Brown v. Board of Education a reality. Educational inequity isn’t a thing of the past; it persists. But it doesn’t have to. We have the ability to call out educational inequity when we see it and work to eradicate it. We can create an educational system where all learners have access to the resources they need to be successful. We can fulfill Juneteenth’s promise.

Van Davis, Ph.D., Service Design and Strategy Officer, Every Learner Everywhere + Chief Strategy Officer, WCET

On Juneteenth, the truth about the end of slavery in the United States was finally proclaimed in Galveston, Texas. As Van outlines above, that did not immediately end inequality. But the truth was out there and they acted on that truth.
Distance and digital learning in higher education has evolved over the years to allow students to overcome the barriers of geographic and temporal separation. A truth that emerged in stark relief during the pandemic was that the digital divide barrier was much wider than we ever imagined. In particular, Black, Indigenous, LatinX, and poverty-affected students often found themselves on the outside looking in.
We, in the digital learning field, have been at the forefront of knocking down barriers for years. The new truth is out there about the digital divide. It is time for us to keep acting on that truth.

Russ Poulin, Executive Director, WCET & Vice President for Technology-Enhanced Education, WICHE

Juneteenth is more than an observance of freedom. It’s also a time to share the experiences of those who fought to seek true freedom for future generations. The celebration of Juneteenth acknowledges hard history while also empowering students to be advocates for change. Together we’ll continue to celebrate the freedom of African Americans, honor our achievements, and catalyze change in dismantling systemic racism and removing structural barriers to educational equity for every learner, everywhere.

Thank you to those featured in this post for sharing your reflections on this day.

To learn more about Juneteenth, we recommend visiting the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture’s Juneteenth webpage for more information and resources.

— WCET and ELE Staff

Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, Online Learning, Student Success

Practice

Equity is Quality in Education

By Lindsey Downs

June 17, 2022

Next week we observe Juneteenth – a day to commemorate the announcement in Texas that slaves had been granted freedom during the Civil War, a day to reflect on the true meaning of “freedom” and cultural tradition. Inspired by this, today our Steering Committee DEI Working Group presents the first of a new blog series considering the importance of equity within higher education quality assurance. Thank you for the committee for your work and thank you to Chantae Recasner from WGU for writing today’s post.

Enjoy the read,
Lindsey Downs

“…American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. …Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.”
–Toni Morrison, 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“Failing to ensure equity is a limitation in quality…”

This year the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Working Group of the WCET Steering Committee decided to bridge conversations between DEI and quality. It’s an inevitable partnering as accounting for equity is an essential feature of quality assurance.

To put it plainly, failing to ensure equity is a limitation in quality. Nonetheless, any conversation about equity that centers on quality must address problematic parallels between advancing equity and diminishing quality.

The Historical Context of this Opening Post

We open this series as we commemorate Juneteenth, a historic benchmark in Black Americans’ journey to freedom in the United States. The timing of this is impeccable in my eyes since I read Juneteenth as a historic cautionary tale that affords a few lessons:

It reminds me of the risks of making decisions fora population and not with a population.
It exemplifies the potential failures of “improvement” efforts rooted in politicized paternalism.
It is a testament to the irony of recognition without accountability (while Juneteenth is rooted in Texas history, some Texas legislators are working incessantly to bar any race-based historical teachings. Thus, we can celebrate but we cannot teach about it).

That Black Texans received notification of their freedom some 18 months after it was declared was a foretelling of ongoing challenges with access that would befall an entire race of people throughout this country. It also is a stark reminder that, for Black Americans, freedom is more than a political ideology. It is a physical state, one in which the Black body emerges as a contested site (Hassard & Holliday, 2001). This celebration of Black Americans’ journey to freedom is thus representative and, perhaps, even a situating of Blackness as synecdoche—alluding to Morrison’s Africanistic other as representative of all that is nonwhite.

Importance of Historical Context in DEI Efforts

The socio-historical context provided by Juneteenth commemoration underpins the complexity of growing institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Since the murder of George Floyd, a surge of efforts to center DEI work in higher education has occurred, but the jury is still out on whether these efforts are more “additive than transformative” (Mcinnis, 2020), especially when efforts are led by disempowered personnel in underfunded offices. Greene and Paul’s (2021) report on DEI Bloat in the Academy argues:

“…large DEI bureaucracies appear to make little positive contribution to campus climate. Rather than being an effective tool for welcoming students from different backgrounds, DEI personnel may be better understood as a signal of adherence to ideological, political, and activist goals.

In addition, high DEI staffing levels suggest that these programs, like many other administrative initiatives at universities, are bloated relative to academic pursuits. It is fair to wonder whether reducing administrative bloat and reducing costs would do more to promote college access and inclusion than the best efforts of any diversity officer.” (p. 14)

While the authors clearly state they are not advocating elimination of DEI efforts, they remain concerned that “colleges’ vast DEI bureaucracy has little relationship to students’ satisfaction with their college or their personal experiences with diversity.” Vast in this context is evidenced by, for example, the 163 identified DEI personnel at University of Michigan out of its total 31, 283 faculty and staff. We might disagree about the definition of vast (among other points), but what I hear from these authors is a concern about a quality return on investment for DEI staffing and initiatives. What I hear is a questioning of the relationship between equity and quality that legitimizes the need for more discussions, like this one, that link equity inextricably to quality.

Considering Quality in Online Learning Today

Quality in online learning and in education generally is variously defined and is associated with:

course/program level rigor,
institution/program accreditation and compliance,
standards for course design, and/or.
student satisfaction.

While this post is not attempting to provide a single definition of quality, it is an effort to conceptualize the term as one seeped in power rhetoric. Associating quality with rigor or academic excellence, for instance, is not an exercise in political neutrality as the formation of the academy was not a politically neutral endeavor. In fact, paramount to discourse on democratizing education to enable opportunities for all students is a critical examination of historical limitations to access and the hegemonic formation and use of race as justification for those limitations. In other words, “beliefs about intelligence and belonging, and, in some fields, the prevailing intellectual paradigms” (Posselt, 2018) are tethered to inequitable constructs about race.

Thus, as Jessica Rowland Williams of Every Learner Everywhere reminds us, we must deeply consider:

“Who decides how quality is defined?”
Jessica Rowland Williams

Damon Williams (2013) reminds us that since much of educational culture continues to “reflect the values, identity, and mores of dominant culture,” we must be wary of deficit model thinking which often pushes social and cultural assimilation as fundamental to students’ capacity for success in higher education. Moreover, as McKenzie and Phillips (2016) assert, teachers continually fall into the “equity traps” of deficit thinking, racial erasure, and deep belief in meritocracy. These traps are otherwise noted by Olsson (1997) as “detours” in advancing anti-racism. Deficit ideology persists despite the insights of many scholars—including Gorksi (2019), Bensimon and Malcom (2012), Harper (2010), and Kendi (2019). They acknowledge the systemic nature of racism and oppression in education and thus challenge us to frame our equity intentions as directed improvement of policies and practices and not as improvements of people and cultures—especially the people and cultures most adversely impacted by inequities.

Challenges to Equity Limit Quality

So why is it important that we explore equity and quality simultaneously in online learning? Well, the detours along equity journeys are not called out by brightly colored signs contrasting with the subtle everydayness of engineered travel routes. Instead, they manifest suddenly sometimes and microaggressively at other times. They manifest as criticisms of fiscal investment in efforts that yield little to no overall quantitative improvement; concerns about accommodating excuse making for students, which cripples their professional development; or concerns about dumbing down curriculum so that all students can succeed.

On staffing fronts, they manifest as concerns about hiring unqualified workers to meet a diversity goal. On the surface, these concerns appear quite reasonable. If rephrased, one hears the following questions: Are we proper stewards of institutional funds? Are we adequately preparing our students for today’s workforce? Are we honoring the core tenets and the fidelity of our disciplines in curriculum? Are we securing the best talent for the job? But, these questions, when used to stall or otherwise challenge equity efforts, are drenched in allegiance to ideological hegemony and racism.

Equity research across sectors reveals thematic associations of equity with concepts like “trap”, “challenge,” “difficult,” or (as noted above) “bloat.” These terms imply at least anxiety and at most recalcitrance about a move toward equity, and whether epistemological or methodological, challenges to equity limit quality assurance.

Suggested Touchstones in Our On-going “Equity is Quality” Discussion

As this conversant space is intended to be both enlightening and provocative, I offer the following touchstones as we move forward in our explorations of equity and quality.

Equity IS quality. It bears repeating. We should be ever mindful that growing equity does not decrease rigor or shortcut quality. In fact, the conceptual symbiosis suggests one cannot exist without the other: equity cannot exist without quality and quality cannot exist without equity. Where questions about quality emerge at the thought of advancing equity, we must confront the potential implicit bias informing the question and/or reconstruct conceptual understandings of equity.
WHO defines quality? – might be the most important question of all. Who defines quality? Who determines what is needed? Who is impacted by change? Whose voice is heard? In the upcoming posts, we will hear discussions of equity and quality that engage faculty perspective as well as student perspectives. While we often concede the equity imperatives in higher education are about ensuring opportunities and outcomes for students, institutional change efforts—particularly for equity—are not always communicated clearly or in a way that gives agency to faculty. As reported by AAC&U and Hanover Research, “..when it comes to equity goals, there is a gulf in certainty between faculty, deans, and directors, on the one hand, and senior administrators, on the other, with faculty most likely to report being unsure of whether their institution has set such goals.”
Equity is the work of EVERYONE. Recognizing the shared responsibility ensures quality experiences and outcomes for all members of a college/university community. Shorter-Gooden (2013) asserts inclusion work must engage institutional commitment, access and success, infused programs, and an affirming climate. This cross-sector of impact cannot be achieved by facilitated efforts of only those employees with a DEI-identified title.

Digital Learning, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, Student Success, WCET

Policy

Digital Learning: A Mystery about Pending Federal Rules

By Lindsey Downs

June 14, 2022

It has been an action-packed year thus far on the Federal regulatory front. In January, we shared a preview of the “coming attractions” and encouraged you to grab some popcorn and watch along with us. And, while we’re only through the first half of the year, our popcorn has been refilled multiple times!

small boxes of popcorn — *Image by Devon Breen from Pixabay*

And you may want to grab some more. Like the middle of a good mystery film, we now know the players, but we are left with many questions. What regulations will come out this year? What exactly will they require? What is the impact on my students and my institution? Stay tuned to find out…

Today, we would like to share with you the current status of the 2021-2022 Federal rulemaking committees and the timeline required to develop effective regulations. Additionally, we’ll share our teaser trailer for some other issues to watch for which we believe there will be either guidance or additional rulemaking.

Although this is a spoiler alert, please consider two takeaways from this post:

First, the U. S. Department of Education is juggling many matters including 19 issues from the two recent rulemaking committees, addressing the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on OPMs, contemplating accessibility regulations, as well as Title IX, loan forgiveness, and more!
Second, the path from proposed language to final regulation has many time-consuming steps and must follow a strict calendar process making the ability to move all rulemaking issues to final regulations by November 1, 2022, a very difficult task.

The plot thickens and along with the release of summer blockbuster movies, the Federal regulatory action will continue, and we will keep the popcorn ready!

Negotiated Rulemaking for Higher Education 2021-2022

The Department is undertaking a Herculean task if they intend to move 19 issues from negotiated rulemaking through the many arduous steps to prepare and release the issues as final regulations to meet the November 1, 2022, deadline!

In the past year, the U.S. Department of Education under the Biden Administration has held two separate negotiated rulemaking committees.

The first in Fall 2021, was the Affordability and Student Loan Committee, focused on Borrower issues and Prison Education Programs.

The second, held in in Winter 2022, was the Institutional and Programmatic Eligibility Committee. Our previous posts have primarily focused on specific issues within the Winter 2022 rulemaking, which you can review: negotiated rulemaking surprises-February 2022, proposed changes to reciprocity and professional licensure-March 2022, and additional issues-March 2022.

If you would like a recap of the full picture of the Federal rulemaking process, go to the “Quick Recap” section at the bottom of this post. Please remember, the Department has many proposed rules in the hopper and a very strict and short timeline on which to act for the rules to become effective next year. If you decide to go to the Quick Recap, come back here. Otherwise, forge ahead.

Affordability and Student Loan Committee

In brief, this committee concluded in December 2021 having addressed approximately 12 issues, depending on how you count the various aspects of Borrower Defense. This committee reached consensus on four issues, which means that the Department is obligated to forward that language (listed below) as agreed upon by the Committee:

Institutional and Programmatic Eligibility Committee

Beginning in January, the Department began its second rulemaking committee covering seven issues. Most published reviews of this rulemaking focused on Gainful Employment and the 90/10 Rule, although there were five other very nuanced issues that were also addressed. This committee concluded in March 2022, reaching consensus on only two of the seven issues:

Ability to Benefit – Clarification of how a student who does not receive a high school diploma, or its equivalent can gain eligibility for Title IV Federal student aid.
90/10 Rule – Federal regulations to implement Section 2013 of the American Rescue Plan Act to require that at least 10% of a proprietary institution’s revenue be derived from sources other than Federal educational assistance funds.

The Department is left to write five of the seven issues from this rulemaking, including two that we followed closely: Change of Ownership and Certification Procedures. We will be providing a more detailed look at these issues next week and share some of the work we have been doing behind the scenes to help support understanding of the nuances of the issues.

Issues to watch:

Change of Ownership:
- Revisions to the 34 CFR 600.2 definitions of Distance Education and Nonprofit Institution. The impact of these changes is unclear.
Certification Procedures:
- Section 26: The Department to designate maximum hours for which a student is eligible for Title IV Federal financial aid for gainful employment programs that lead to a license or certification in a state.
- Section 32: Professional Licensure: Institutions “ensure” that the curriculum satisfies the state educational prerequisites to obtain a license where the student is located at time of enrollment in order for the program to be eligible for Title IV Federal financial aid.
- Section 32: Reciprocity: Institutions must comply with all state consumer protection laws both generally applicable and those specific to educational institutions. Looking for clarity regarding the Department’s view of the parameters of a State authorization reciprocity agreement.

What is next with rulemaking?

It is important for those watching the Federal rulemaking process unfold to remember that the review by the OMB is a critical and time-consuming part of the rulemaking process.

The next step is the Department’s submission of packages of rules to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for economic review. That time-consuming step has begun. There is consensus language for some of the issues submitted to OMB that is linked above.

However, for issues that did not reach consensus, we are awaiting the Department’s version that was written by the Department after the negotiated rulemaking meetings concluded.

On April 22, 2022, the first package of issues was received by OMB which includes the following issues from the Fall 2021 rulemaking: Borrower Release, Public Loan Service Forgiveness, Interest Capitalization, Total and Permanent Disability, False certification, and Closed School Discharge. As of this writing, this package of issues remains under review with the OMB.
On June 8, 2022, the second package of issues was received by OMB including two issues from the Fall 2021 rulemaking: Improving Income-Driven Repayment and consensus issue, and consensus issue, Pell Grants for Incarcerated Individuals and two issues from the Winter 2022 rulemaking: Clarifying Rules on Changes in Ownership and consensus issue, 90/10 Rule.

Most issues from the Fall 2021 rulemaking have now been moved forward for OMB review. We believe that the release of the consensus issue, Ability to Benefit, from the Winter 2022 rulemaking will be submitted this summer. However, we are not clear about next steps for the remaining issues from the Winter 2022 rulemaking that did not reach consensus: Administrative Capability, Gainful Employment, Financial Responsibility, and the issue we are watching closely, Certification Procedures. You can follow submissions on the OMB website by visiting List of Regulatory Actions Currently Under Review, hovering over the “ED” column on the “Regulatory Actions Currently Under Review by Agency,” and clicking to show the actions currently under review.

What Will Be Included This Year is Unclear

Trusted experts have shared the following possible pathways for the remaining Winter 2022 issues:

The Education Department has many proposals in the hopper. Due to capacity issues in the Department and OMB, it is unclear which additional issues will be released this year for implementation in July 2023 and which will have to wait.

The Department will prioritize some issues to move forward for this year to be released as final regulations by November 1, 2022, and may hold off on releasing some issues until later in 2023; or
The Department will pursue release of multiple packages including all issues in some sort of “NPRMpalooza,” attempting to seek a final regulation release for all issues by November 1, 2022.
- Pursuing release of all regulations as final by November 1, 2022, causes the effective date of the regulations to be July 1, 2023.
- Release of regulations as final after November 1, 2022, to be effective July 1, 2024, raises the concern that the regulations could be reversed by Congress utilizing the Congressional Review Act (CRA) if there is a change in administration.

Additional Issues to Watch

Online Program Managers (OPMs)

The Department expressed its agreement, appreciation, and a future response to findings of the May 5, 2022, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report addressing oversight of arrangements between colleges and OPMs. The report, Education Needs to Strengthen Its Approach to Monitoring Colleges’ Arrangements with Online Program Managers ultimately concluded that colleges and auditors lacked clear instructions from the Department to ensure that arrangements between colleges and OPMs were not violating the Higher Education Act (HEA) ban on incentive compensation. The GAO made recommendations to strengthen oversight of these arrangements.

An institution may use OPMs to help with the management of the institution’s online programs. These OPMs are third party contractors for which the institution contracts to receive certain services. These services can include student recruiting, program marketing, marketing analytics, course development, faculty and student support, and more. Institution’s use OPMs for degree programs and for short programs such as bootcamps.

OPMs often contract to receive a share of the tuition revenue as payment for their services or are paid on a fee-for-service basis. However, the HEA prohibits institutions from providing incentive payments. The Department issued guidance in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter in 2011 that clarified its view that institutions may provide payment to third parties for student recruiting based upon a sharing of the tuition revenue IF the payment is for bundled services for which recruiting is included and if there are other safeguards preventing abusive recruiting practices.

Because the GAO concluded that the Department had not provided clear instructions to monitor these arrangements, the following recommendations were made:

The Department to provide additional instructions for auditors in the Compliance Supplement to identify and assess possible incentive compensation ban violations. The additional instructions should provide the auditors with direction to ask institutions specifically about OPMs and assist auditors to address compensation information for the OPM staff who provide recruiting services.
The Department to provide institutions with more instructions about how they will provide the information about OPM arrangements during compliance audits and program reviews. These additional instructions should direct the institution to identify OPM contracts that include recruiting and provide the auditors with copies of the contracts that inform how the OPM staff is to be compensated.

The Department responded with their agreement to these recommendations and their intention to propose revisions to the Compliance Supplement to strengthen the oversight of the ban on incentive compensation. It is likely that we will see additional instructions and guidance for institutions that will support the Department’s enforcement of the ban. The extent to which the Department addresses revision or withdrawal of the 2011 guidance providing for an exception for “bundled service” remains to be seen. Stay tuned on this issue!

Intent to Amend Regulations Implementing Section 504 Disability Civil Rights Law

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced its intention to propose regulation amendments to the Department’s regulations at 34 C.F.R. pt. 104, implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This announcement includes a call for public written comments addressing how to improve the current regulations. Comments must be submitted by June 30, 2022 and sent to Section504@ed.gov.

The purpose of the development of amendments is to strengthen and protect the rights of students with disabilities. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in public and private programs and activities that receive federal financial aid. This includes schools and postsecondary institutions. The regulations to implement Section 504 were originally implemented in 1977, forty-five years ago. The Department notes that the Department’s 504 regulations have largely been unaltered despite many other changes in the world. Therefore, there is an important need for updates to the regulations. The Department’s OCR looks forward to listening and soliciting public input including from people with disabilities to make improvements to the disability rights regulations.

Looking ahead

Although the Department is clearly hard at work, the timing and specifics of their plans are not completely clear, at this moment. However, we do believe that steps will be taken through the summer that will direct our communications with our readers. The State Authorization Network (SAN) created the U.S. Department of Education Rulemaking 2021-2022 Information Here! webpage that will continue to be updated with new information as it becomes available.

When proposed regulations are released, we hope you will consider participating in the rulemaking process by submitting a public comment. We will provide analysis of the proposed language and share key points for you to consider. The Department will appreciate public comments in support of regulations as well as comments that share the stories of concern for the impact on students. We look forward to sharing more with you soon!

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Quick Recap of the Negotiated Rulemaking Process Steps

It helps to understand the specific steps that must be accomplished and the strict timeline that must be followed to march the volumes of proposed language forward toward becoming Federal regulations. You can find details about the Department’s negotiated rulemaking documents and recordings of the meetings on the U.S. Department of Education website.

A master calendar guides the steps to reach the effective date for regulations tied to Title IV Federal Financial Aid. Generally speaking, the following steps are taken:

Announcement of intent to initiate rulemaking.
Announcement of the issues to be addressed along with request for nominations for the rulemaking committee, which should include:
- Key stakeholders affected by the designated issues.
- Subject matter experts regarding the designated issues.
The committee meets, typically, for a full week each month over three months. The meetings are streamed, for the public to view.
During the final day (or so) of week three, the committee votes on the proposed language.
Consensus is the goal for the voting, which means 100% agreement on the language.
If consensus is met, the language can move forward as proposed regulations subject to public comment.
If there is no consensus, the Department may write the regulations and release proposed regulations subject to public comment.
The Department must analyze the public comments.
Final regulations released by November 1, 2022, will become effective July 1, 2023 (for the financial aid year).
Final regulations released after November 1 will not be effective until the July 1, 2024.

*Please note that the Department must consider the time required for the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to review the proposed regulations for economic impact before they can be released as proposed regulations subject to public comment AND the OMB must review the final regulations before they can be released to try to meet the November 1, 2022, deadline.

Distance Education, Negotiated Rulemaking, Regulation, SAN, State Authorization, State Authorization Network, U.S. Department of Education

Practice

It’s Not All Bad

By Lindsey Downs

June 9, 2022

WCET Frontiers is happy to again welcome Kara Monroe, President and Founder of Monarch Strategies LLC to continue her article series on leadership in higher education digital learning.

This post, a reflection on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for higher education today, is the fourth in this series. Don’t forget to check out the previous posts: “Shifting from Covid-normal to New Normal,” “The ‘New Normal’ and Reflections on Accessibility,” and “Before and After Moments.“

Enjoy the read,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

In April and May, I had the opportunity to do a type of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis with three different groups of higher education colleagues. These groups represented more than 50 people in jobs ranging from institutional level managers to CEOs of national policy organizations. One of those groups was the WCET Steering Committee.

Each individual SWOT analysis took place with their specific group and the separate groups did not know there were others completing similar exercises. I did these as a part of different client agreements and the exercise just seemed to fit naturally into the flow of what the group wished to accomplish meaning I didn’t have an intention to study this particular topic when I used this exercise the first time.

While the sample size is still somewhat small, the themes that have begun to emerge are clear. In this month’s post, I want to share some of those themes as well as a few of the intricacies of the conversations with you. And, as I want to end the post on a high note, we’ll start first with the threats, then go to the weaknesses, and we’ll end more positively with the opportunities and the strengths.

As we begin, I want to revisit the purpose for this series of articles briefly. COVID was a massive, shared experience and we should – both individually and collectively – learn from our experiences. The purpose of this series is to examine what we’ve learned from COVID – predominantly as higher education institutions. Since we’re likely at the midpoint of the series, today’s post can serve as our reflective midterm exam.

What wasn’t working before COVID that still is not working well today?

To prompt the identification and discussion of threats, I posed this question: “What wasn’t working before COVID that still is not working well today?” These are things that while they may look different now than they did before the pandemic began, they were major obstacles before COVID and still remain major obstacles today.

Institutional Trust In Their Employees

This concept came up in all three groups. When COVID began, organizations had to scramble to provide all of their employees with a safe way to work which generally meant sending them home. In a lot of higher education institutions this even meant packing up the computer on their desk and sending them home with that computer. As one participant said, “They wouldn’t buy me a laptop because they thought it would get destroyed and here I went with my entire PC, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. They had no choice but to trust me.”

IT Tools was not the only place this conversation came up. It also centered itself in the work location, work hours, and work structure. Employees who worked from home for months (or years) are now expected to be in the office daily, even if they are still serving students remotely because it’s how students prefer to be served. Many participants in these conversations felt it ridiculous that remote work arrangements that had been made before COVID, where employees could work from where it made the most sense for them on a specific day, are now being replaced by all or nothing in office arrangements.

Infrastructure For Support

The infrastructure – from IT to Human Services – got a lot of attention during COVID and in some places did improve. However, many faculty who grew infinitely more comfortable using technology during COVID are now returning to classrooms that lack the basic tools to allow them to use that technology effectively.

Furthermore, basic supports like childcare, mental health support, food, and housing received a lot of attention during COVID but in many institutions solutions were short-term at best and did not result in long term changes.

Testing

I was surprised that testing was identified in all three group’s SWOT analysis. Each group came at it from a very different perspective.

From the perspective of the WCET Steering Committee, the concerns with testing were specifically around the multitude of challenges with proctoring. On most college campuses, the volume of proctored testing has far outpaced what campus proctoring centers can handle. While many institutions used HERFF COVID relief dollars to fund digital proctoring solutions which students found convenient and which gave institutions much needed additional capacity, those funds are running low and there is no clear path forward.

Other groups praised the move by many higher educational institutions to go “test optional” for admission and to use other criteria instead. However, as standardized testing has started up in earnest again rather than giving time for this methodology of placement to more fully develop and be iterated on for improvement, some institutions are simply returning to the pre-COVID non-student-centric ways of requiring exams like SAT and ACT.

What started working better in COVID that is now functioning worse than pre-COVID?

To identify weaknesses, I asked groups to think about how COVID has made them stronger and whether a “return to normal” has stagnated or even reversed that progress. As learning organizations, this should be the category that makes us the most upset.

Modality Confusion

I was a little surprised to see this come up in groups outside of the WCET Steering Committee. During COVID we had a load of “new modalities” spring up. While none of them are really new, we tried to place names on major categories of packaging instruction that hadn’t been offered previously – or at least hadn’t been used in large enough volume to categorize before.

These new modalities and changes made in existing modalities now cause confusion for faculty and students alike. And, advisors lack the kinds of tools they need to describe these modalities, along with all of the other pathways and initiatives that they have to describe to students.

Communication Silos

Communication came up in all three groups that completed this activity.

During COVID, communication was far better and without silos. This was true with the two groups focused mostly on intra-organizational communication as well as with the group that focuses largely on inter-organizational communication.

Comments during this discussion included things like “everyone just knew they had to work together” to “we had to talk to each other more because we couldn’t use body language as much” show the breadth and depth of this issue from both individual communications to communication amongst departments, institutions, and organizations.

What started working better in COVID that has now stagnated?

Recognition Mental Health Needs and Stress

It is hugely important to recognize that mental health is a challenge right now and faculty, staff, and students are overwhelmed. There were two comments that came out of the dialog with the WCET Steering Committee that I think need to be quoted directly for the broader community around this topic.

The first is specific to psychological safety in organizations. As COVID hit, one of the first things the team I was leading did was provide a safe and easy way for students to exit a learning experience if it simply was not going to work for them. When our students came back from Spring Break, we turned their world upside down and we recognized that was not going to be for everyone. We made late withdrawal easier. We made pass/fail options easier. We provided tools to help explain where these made sense for a student and where they didn’t.

From an institutional goals perspective this was countercultural to what our long term aims were – we were trying to turn around a culture that had, for many years, told students, “Don’t fail, drop the class.” We had actively tried to change that culture to “Stick with the class and keep learning. We’ve got your back if you have to retake it.” But, in COVID we recognized that might not be the responsible thing for student mental and physical health so we made both paths easier. This quote summed that up beautifully. “During COVID there was a lot of accountability on faculty and institutions for students to feel safe. Now policies have less grace than they did during COVID.”

Broadly speaking, I think the quote below from another member of the Steering Committee summed up many of the challenges that colleagues across all three groups shared in these exercises. How our institutions are not always keeping people – whether that be students, faculty, or staff at the forefront of our decision making as we’ve run quickly to “return to normal.” That person said, “A return to normal is a return to practices that were not learner centric and had less emphasis on learner needs.”

What started working better in COVID that continues to work better today?

It’s also important to note as we begin this category that in every single one of the more “negative” areas above, there are pockets where the challenges are not occurring. For example, one of the comments related to testing that came up as a strength in the WCET Steering Committee is that more and more faculty moved to authentic assessments instead of “bubble-sheet” style tests. While this may not have represented the “norm” across all institutions it means that at least one institution in this sample chose to keep this positive rather than returning to “normal”.

Increased Faculty Awareness and Respect for Teaching Various Modalities

Image: Photo by ANTONI SHKRABA:

When everyone had to begin teaching at a distance everyone had to at least gain a base level of understanding about what it means to teach and learn online. You could no longer rely only on your opinions or preconceptions. You now had real life lived experience.

In a lot of cases this meant the more faculty and staff learned that while there are certainly benefits to teaching and learning at a distance, there are also challenges that you have to learn to overcome.

Many faculty welcomed and actively participated in professional development to learn new technology tools and teaching methods. I have a wonderful faculty colleague who said in the first weeks of COVID she had no desire to sit in the workshop but if she was going to survive the semester she had no choice. She now loves teaching her students with Zoom and can’t believe she waited so long to learn more about how to use this tool in her courses.

While we all still catch ourselves one or more times a day saying, “You’re muted” we also got collectively better at using digital tools simply because we had no choice.

Deeper Consideration of The Importance of Belonging

While this theme came up only in the WCET Steering Committee group, I think it’s a nice place to end this article. During COVID and today, we have no choice but to understand our interdependence a bit better. From the availability of basic goods in stores to the safety of essential workers to a groundswell of support for social and racial justice – we all experienced a collective situation in COVID.

Through our shared COVID experience we all have shared language – and in this case all means people from around the world. Words like lockdown, quarantine, and vaccine have new weight and new meaning in our global vocabulary. Perhaps this global shared experience – and particularly the isolation many of us experienced during times of lockdown and quarantine – contributed to our broader understanding of the importance of belonging.

While the understanding that belonging is necessary is not universal, it is much broader than it was before COVID. We all need to continue to think about the experience of COVID helps us to drive improvement in our lives and the lives of others around us.

So What, Who Cares?

So, what do you do with all of this information? Here are a few practical suggestions.

Use these four questions in your own work team. If possible, invite a neutral facilitator to conduct the conversation. What do you learn about the current state of your institution from using these four questions and using it to design a future state for your organization or team?
- What wasn’t working before COVID that still is not working well today?
- What started working better in COVID that is now functioning worse than pre-covid?
- What started working better in COVID that has now stagnated?
- What started working better in COVID that continues to work better today?
Is trust a challenge in your organization or team? Stephen Covey’s book The Speed of Trust is a good resource if you’d like to learn more about this important concept in your team. Not ready to dive into the book? Consider asking your team members in their next one on one where they feel the institution demonstrates its trust in them and where they feel the institution demonstrates that it doesn’t trust them.
Communication played such a vital role in COVID. Here are some communication items to consider:
- Have you taken time lately to evaluate your communication pathways?
- Do you need to ask students about the hours of services at your office?
- Should you survey your employees about what tools you are using for communication they find most helpful or what suggestions they have?
Did your institution change its testing practices for admission or placement during COVID? If so, what evaluation are you doing in order to determine the effectiveness of these tools for helping students meet their educational goals?
What are the modalities offered at your institution today? Can you describe them in less than a tweet (i.e. 240 characters?)? If not, what can you do to simplify the explanations? As leaders in educational technology and distance education, what tools have you provided to faculty, advisors, and students so that these various modalities are clear and easy to understand?
What learner centric and people centric changes were made during COVID that you’ve now reversed? Were those decisions to reverse policies and procedures based on data or on preferences of leadership? If so, how will you reevaluate those policies and procedures?
How are you actively fostering belonging in the groups and organizations that you are a part of?

I enjoyed facilitating the SWOT analysis sessions for these groups, and hope you enjoyed reviewing what we learned. While there are improvements that can still be made, and it’s never great to see progress limited, it’s important to take the time to recognize the positives as well. As the title said, it’s not all bad! I hope that you will take some time individually and/or as a part of whatever teams or groups you are in and ask yourself some of these same questions and chart a few actions to keep moving forward.

COVID-19, Distance Education, Leadership

Networks Policy

The State Authorization Network (SAN) – Meeting an Important Need

By Lindsey Downs

April 21, 2022

An urgent need caused the creation of the State Authorization Network (SAN) by our parent organization WCET (the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies).

In October 2010, to the great surprise of many institutions and states, the U.S. Department of Education released the first Federal regulation for state authorization of distance education.

The intended purpose of the regulation was to provide important consumer protections for students participating in interstate distance education. The relatively simple statement in the original language of Federal regulation 34 CFR 600.9(c), that was ultimately vacated by Federal courts, was the catalyst to what we know now is the very complicated and everchanging landscape of out-of-state activity compliance for postsecondary institutions.

A need had presented itself! One may want to consider the words of Sinclair College founder, David A. Sinclair, “Find the need and endeavor to meet it.”

The need for SAN includes an eleven-year history rich in community development to respond to institutional compliance management for the seemingly endless fluctuations in state and federal requirements related to serving students across state lines. SAN empowers members to successfully resolve regulatory challenges to improve student protections in digital learning across state lines. Benefits of SAN membership center on timely updates, analysis, training, and member interactions. Additionally, SAN serves all postsecondary institution sectors and related organizations.

If you are a member of SAN, thank you! We appreciate your collegiality! If you are not yet a SAN member, please review our history, benefits, member endorsements, and also, please consider joining the SAN community!

History

In March 2011, Russ Poulin, who was WCET’s Director, Policy and Analysis at the time, endeavored to meet the need to help institutions provide important consumer protections through compliance with little known state and federal requirements and sought interest in the development of a new service, the State Authorization Network. Originally, the plan was to pull together systems and consortia to collaborate on strategies and to share information about federal and state regulations related to interstate activity compliance. Additionally, members were offered the opportunity to obtain training and access to experts from the newly created SAN along with support from WCET colleagues, Megan Raymond and Marianne Boeke, then from NCHEMS. SAN saw tremendous membership growth with each year of the unsettled state and federal landscape. Due to continual demand and growth, SAN developed into a sizeable organization, initiating the decision to add a full time Director for SAN, Cheryl Dowd, in 2015.

Fast forward ten years from the initial communication to April 2021, when SAN celebrated its 10^th Anniversary, having grown to more than 800 institutions and organizations nationwide. The need for SAN continued though a dramatic decade of Federal court decisions, two negotiated rulemaking committees, two new versions of Federal regulations, and the creation and implementation of reciprocity for state institution approval through the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (SARA). During that decade, in addition to supporting members through the COVID-19 pandemic, SAN began addressing ancillary issues around compliance related to programs leading to a professional license or certification, international compliance, and employment law related state requirements regarding interstate activities.

SAN was surprised to see the state authorization saga continue in 2022 with a new negotiated rulemaking that once again raised the issues related to state authorization of distance education. With the addition of new staff: Rachael Stachowiak, Director, Interstate Policy & Compliance; Kathryn Kerensky, Director, Digital Learning Policy & Compliance; and Leigha Fletcher, Administrative Assistant, SAN is prepared to continue filling the needs of SAN members.

Member Endorsements:

Leeann Fields, Executive Director, Office of Educational Compliance (OEC); under the office of the Vice Provost for Academic Programs. University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)

How many of us working in the area of state authorization describe many of our days as running around like a chicken with our head cut off? Too graphic, yet true? I know many times, I just feel aimless, bouncing from one aspect of this area of compliance to another.

What does SAN do for me? It gives me focus. It gives me clarity and a deeper understanding of the issues. SAN helps me with organization and strategies. Most of all, SAN lets me know that I’m not alone.

Being an N of 1 working on SARA at a University with over 3,000 employees, the isolation can feel very real at times. It’s not like being in a Registrar, Financial Aid, or Admissions office where there are a number of colleagues working and applying regulations, other people you can go to and ask questions. I have an office with NO other people… Ahhhhhh, except I have SAN! Thank you SAN for being there for me! You are truly like another full-time employee (FTE) that I can turn to on a regular basis to ask, share, and yes, even socialize with at times. You understand my issues, my frustrations, and even celebrate the small wins with me, which are starting to happen more and more. You are a safe haven to share, and you help me problem solve. I appreciate the feeling you create, letting me know you are there for me and I’m not alone.

Thank you SAN!

Katie Hoffman, Project Manager, Office of Assessment & Accreditation Support. University of San Francisco – California

SAN has been absolutely essential for me as I learned to navigate the complex world of compliance on the state and federal levels. In addition to its robust web resources for state authorization and related issues, (I frequent the section on professional licensure), SAN helps keep me in the loop on changes to federal regulations that affect my institution. Through SAN’s lively community discussion platform, WCET MIX, I am in-tune with issues common to other IHEs, and I feel welcome to ask questions of the members. Overall, SAN prepares its member institutions to be well-informed on matters of compliance when seeking to offer distance education across state borders, and most importantly, it prepares them to offer education that is centered on the students’ interest.

Benefits of SAN

SAN is the leader for guidance and support for navigating state and federal regulatory compliance for out-of-state activities of postsecondary institutions. Memberships to SAN are held by individual institutions/organizations, small partnerships, and large groups/systems/consortia.

Regardless of the type of membership, all staff at the member institutions or organizations are eligible to access the benefits of SAN. SAN provides expert analysis, resources and training on foundational and emerging issues, collaboration on compliance strategies, development of solutions, and evaluation of their efficacy. SAN accomplishes these benefits in the following ways:

Resources, Research, and Support:

Password-protected website — library of resources including SAN created research and external resources.
Members-Only digital community provides timely updates on emerging issues and member discussions.
SAN Monthly eNewsletter.
Direct access to SAN staff members to answer your compliance and membership questions.

Events & Training:

SAN Newcomers Experience – professionals who join SAN can complete the guided tour through the SAN website, answer challenge questions, and earn a badge.
Open Forum – Monthly Themed virtual Q & A sessions with experts.
Workshops – training at highly discounted rate for SAN members (Basics & Advanced Topics).
NASASPS (state regulator) Conference with SAN Institutions each spring – member fee and SAN only sessions.

Member Interaction:

SAN Advisory Group – member representatives to advise on the issues and interests of the SAN members.
Special Interest Teams (SIT) — Small member led workgroups created to discuss and research identified topics to prepare deliverables on the topic to the network. Current SIT topics include: Institutional Engagement and Professional Licensure Research & Disclosures.
SANsational Annual Awards for member development of high-quality compliance solutions.
Professional Development – member presentations on webcasts, monthly calls, and face to face meetings.
A network of peers from across the country, working on the same issues.

Member Endorsements:

— Terrence Scarborough, Director of SARA North Carolina.
North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority – North Carolina

SAN has proven to be an enormous benefit in administering state authorization in my state.

The collaborative culture is inspiring. Members are always willing to share their knowledge and the best practices they employ within their respective organizations.

I am truly grateful that SAN is the ‘one-stop shop’ for higher education regulatory compliance.

— Susan Darlington, Associate Dean, Bucks Online. Bucks County Community College – Pennsylvania

Navigating regulatory compliance in distance education is a daunting task. As the SAN Coordinator for the community colleges of Pennsylvania, I depend heavily on my affiliation and membership with SAN. I find the monthly SAN Coordinator meetings to be engaging, beneficial, and allow the coordinators to feel comfortable asking specific questions. The SAN team is able to clarify the complex distance education rules so that I can feel confident in my work toward ensuring institutional compliance. During this time of great stress and upheaval in higher education, relying on the support and guidance of SAN has been priceless!

— Deb Maeder, Director of Digital Education and Instructional Design. Bryan College of Health Sciences – Nebraska

Our organization has been involved in SAN since 2016. When thinking back about all that I’ve learned and the benefit provided to our organization, it doesn’t seem possible that it’s only been six years since we joined. SAN has been instrumental in helping our small institution (700 FTE) to be on the forefront of all things distance education and educational regulatory compliance. Without the guidance and communication from SAN, we would not have been prepared for Professional Licensure & Certifications requirements, Digital Tax laws, Data Privacy laws both domestic and international, Secretary of State regulations and how to find them, or Regular & Substantive Interaction regulations. I could go on and on. In each of these examples, SAN support has helped our institution to be in front of the proverbial curve to ensure we were in compliance on day one of each new regulation.

SAN also provides our organization, and myself as an individual, with a collaborative community to use as subject matter experts, sounding boards, and general support in the work we do. There is no possible way an organization of any size can be an expert in all that SAN supports, but through the network of State Authorization professionals, someone is always willing to step up and help identify a direction forward. This group of professionals is able to protect proprietary knowledge, yet be supportive and open with anyone who presents a question.

As the single State Authorization professional in my organization, there is no possible way I could do my job as effectively as I do without the support of SAN staff and the SAN community.

Looking Ahead

SAN will continue to address the needs of our members and serve them with high quality services and opportunities to participate in the SAN community. SAN will remain a strong support for those new to the issues of interstate compliance by providing training, an abundance of topical resources, and access to community. Additionally, members can continue to count on SAN to keep them up-to-date on regulatory and policy changes for interstate compliance, analysis to understand the impact on institutions, and for the development of strategies to manage compliance.

For those unfamiliar with SAN, we hope that you have learned more about SAN and will consider membership. If you are interested in membership, please review the Membership webpage on the SAN website. Please connect with the SAN staff for more information!

State Authorization, State Authorization Network

Practice

Realizing Students’ Dreams of Success: Harnessing Course Sharing through Grant Funding

By Lindsey Downs

April 19, 2022

Recently, the organization that I lead, the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex), was honored to receive a grant from Greater Texas Foundation to support a two-year project, Harnessing Course Sharing to Support Texas Pathways at Scale. The funding, in the amount of $645,405, will support a collaboration between us and the company Acadeum to assist colleges across Texas in solving the problems of persistence, on-time completion, and access to courses to assist in fulfilling guided pathways, through inter-institutional course sharing.

Greater Texas Foundation supports initiatives that increase rates of postsecondary enrollment and completion for all Texas students, with a particular focus on students who may encounter barriers to postsecondary success. For example, on-time credential completion rates continue to be a significant problem for community colleges. In fact, data from the National Center for Education Statistics in 2020 show that only 13 percent of community college students graduate in two years. In Texas, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported in 2020 that the average time to complete an associate degree was 3.9 years. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, and we offer one solution–course sharing.

One Solution

Guided pathways have proven to be one effective solution to this problem and research shows that the practices used in guided pathways programs can lead to better outcomes for students. However, many colleges, particularly small and/or rural institutions, lack access to courses needed to create and consistently fulfill in-demand pathways and support on-time completion.

This project aims to address this challenge through two primary strategies:

increase the number of high-quality, online STEM, and in-demand shorter-term courses that are a part of the existing course sharing initiative; and,
assist participating colleges in implementing course sharing strategies to ensure learners can access and complete guided pathways.

In the initial press release on the grant, Dr. Richard Rhodes, Chancellor of Austin Community College District, a project participant and DIgiTex’s home base, described the benefits of course sharing: “Community colleges hold an enormous amount of potential to be economic growth engines within their communities. We are proud to deploy course sharing to ensure that in-demand certificate and degree completion pathways can reach students in every geographic region to deliver on that growth opportunity promise.”

Course sharing can benefit any institution and student, and deserves the utmost attention.

"life is sharing" written on a wall — *“Life is Sharing” by cogdogblog is marked with CC BY 2.0.*

Three colleges have joined the project as Teaching Institutions (TIs) offering courses: Austin Community College District, Houston Community College System, and Western Texas College. Another nine institutions so far will be serving as Home Institutions (HIs), and their students will benefit from courses at the TIs: Angelina College, Cisco College, Frank Phillips College, Howard College, Paris Junior College, Ranger College, South Plains College, Vernon College, and Weatherford College. Through a series of meetings with these project participants as well as data from a survey on high-need, in-demand courses, we’ve determined the initial offerings for the Summer and Fall terms. They will include courses in Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Spanish.

Project Logistics

Additionally, we proposed the following success metrics for the project:

at least thirty unique courses in STEM and other in-demand disciplines will be offered through course sharing;
at least 3,600 unique students will gain access to courses needed to progress toward (and/or complete) credentials through guided pathways (we also will be tracking various student demographic metrics); and,
the average percentage of earned credits (typically 30) in one year for students at participating Home Institutions will increase three percent from the period two years prior, compared to a historical average of one percent over two years.

We also plan to share stories of the impact of course sharing on individual students’ ability to progress to credential and/or on time completion. We anticipate stories similar to a hypothetical scenario that I submitted with our proposal to highlight the potential impact of course sharing on student success.

A Student Named Jorge

Take, for example, a hypothetical first-generation student, Jorge Rivera, attending Frank Phillips College in the small town of Borger in the Panhandle of Texas. Jorge aspires to obtain an Associate’s of Science Degree and transfer to West Texas A&M University (WTAMU) to pursue a Bachelor of Science Degree with the dream of one day going to medical school and becoming a doctor, and returning to Borger to serve his community. He and his family have saved two years of expenses needed beyond the Pell grants for which he is eligible, making completion of the credential in that time period crucial to his success. The guided pathway he is on has kept him right on track.

silhouette of graduating students — *“The Graduates” by Game of EPL5 & LUMIX G20/F1.7 is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0.*

However, the semester before his final spring term, Jorge discovers that the physics course he needs will not be offered that term. He can’t wait until the course is offered again in the fall due to lack of funds. Jorge would have to drop out to work full time until he can save additional money for college, risking becoming discouraged and/or having life events intervene and potentially never returning. Thanks to course sharing, though, Jorge and his advisor discover that a participating Teaching Institutions offers the physics course just when he needs it. Jorge quickly enrolls in the course, completes it, and earns his associate degree (the first in his family to do so) on time, transfers to WTAMU to pursue a baccalaureate degree on a full scholarship, and continues his journey to becoming a doctor!

I will follow up here in two years with a report on the impact of the project. Hopefully, through the project, we will have realized the dreams of students like “Jorge.” As we progress with the project, we are hopeful to provide more positive stories of student success.

Now your turn. Have you (or your institution) endeavored on a large-scape course sharing initiative? If so, what have you learned or what advice would you give?

DigiTex has a long history of facilitating inter-institutional course sharing, founded in 1998 as the Virtual College of Texas for just that purpose and serving all fifty Texas public community college districts and over 50,000 students. Although we have expanded our initiatives to include leading the Texas Quality Matters Consortium; supporting Open Education policy, practice, and advocacy; and other activities, facilitating course sharing – now with our partner Acadeum – continues to be a mandate. Grant funding like this from Greater Texas Foundation – our first grant in our 24-year history! – will aid us in strategic expansion of course sharing to support student success.

Collaboration/Community, Completion, Student Success

Practice

Welcome to the new WCET Frontiers

By Lindsey Downs

April 14, 2022

Last fall, WCET relaunched the WCET website. And, to be honest, Frontiers got a little jealous.

So, what else could we do except give Frontiers an update as well?

As you can see, we’ve made several design and feature changes to the Frontiers blog. Here is a quick tour of our updates! The first official blog post in the new format will be published later this week.

The blog is now housed within the WCET website, which means easier access to the posts, site content (check out our practice and policy pages!), and links to our member- only resources.

All new design elements that match with the WCET website and use our new, pretty web colors (we’re biased, we know).

The main website search filtering options will show results from
- the blog,
- the website,
- from the wcetMIX community discussion posts, and,
- other results from wcetMIX (such as our member resources).

Easier to find features of the blog such as post tags and archives.

Visually review and filter posts by blog tags.

And finally, we made sure the publication date is definitely included at the top of the post by the title.

As many of you, I’m sure, are aware, changes and updates don’t always go quite as planned.

We are going through all of our posts to verify accessibility and formatting of the content and design. We have identified some issues that occurred with the transfer, such as not transferring over alternative text with all images.

Please feel free to reach out to us at wcetinfo@wiche.edu if you have any questions about our content as we are completing the update process.

We all hope you enjoy the new design and features of the blog! From all of us here at WCET Frontiers, enjoy the read!

WCET

Q&A With Experts

Q: Who was involved in this initiative for your institution? Were there others that should have been involved earlier?

Q: How did your microcredential journey start?

Q: Where did you go to look for terms and definitions about microcredentials?

Q: How do you define the differences between certificates, microcredentials, bootcamps, badges, etc.?

Q: Why is there so much confusion about what a microcredential is?

Q: What lessons would you share with someone starting a microcredential journey at their institution?

Focus On the End Goal – Serving Students

The ABCs of Cybersecurity

The CIA Triad

Confidentiality

Integrity

Availability

Insecurities Within the Triad

Higher Education is an Easy Target

The Attack Surface

Data at Risk

Securing Higher Education

The Breaking News

What Have We Been Doing About Professional Licensure?

Rulemaking

Engaging Professional Licensure Associations, State Licensing Agencies, and Professional Accrediting Agencies

Engaging Other Organizations

What Have We Been Doing About Reciprocity?

Rulemaking

Engaging Other Organizations

Our Take on Reciprocity

WCET + Every Learner Everywhere Celebrate Juneteenth

The Historical Context of this Opening Post

Importance of Historical Context in DEI Efforts

Considering Quality in Online Learning Today

Challenges to Equity Limit Quality

Suggested Touchstones in Our On-going “Equity is Quality” Discussion

Negotiated Rulemaking for Higher Education 2021-2022

Affordability and Student Loan Committee

Institutional and Programmatic Eligibility Committee

Issues to watch:

What is next with rulemaking?

What Will Be Included This Year is Unclear

Additional Issues to Watch

Online Program Managers (OPMs)

Intent to Amend Regulations Implementing Section 504 Disability Civil Rights Law

Looking ahead

Quick Recap of the Negotiated Rulemaking Process Steps

What wasn’t working before COVID that still is not working well today?

Institutional Trust In Their Employees

Infrastructure For Support

Testing

What started working better in COVID that is now functioning worse than pre-COVID?

Modality Confusion

Communication Silos

What started working better in COVID that has now stagnated?

Recognition Mental Health Needs and Stress

What started working better in COVID that continues to work better today?

Increased Faculty Awareness and Respect for Teaching Various Modalities

Deeper Consideration of The Importance of Belonging

So What, Who Cares?

History

Member Endorsements:

Benefits of SAN

Resources, Research, and Support:

Events & Training:

Member Interaction:

Member Endorsements:

Looking Ahead

One Solution

Project Logistics

A Student Named Jorge