I have often wondered why provosts and other senior administrators don’t complain more about assessment. Some of them have to be clever enough to know that their institutions are wasting time and resources just to satisfy accreditors. That they don’t is at least partly attributable to the need to show that their institutions are fully committed to a culture of assessment, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Assessment has another use. It lets you claim that low quality online programs are comparable in quality to your face to face programs.
So it’s interesting to see that California has begun to try to reign in the Online Program Managers (OPM) that have driven much of the growth in online programs. The IHE had an article about it yesterday and Bob Shireman is front and center in the process of bringing the OPMs to heel.
“I think we have a problem,” said Shireman of colleges working with OPMs. “I think traditional institutions have been too quick to hand over the keys … They’re doing this on extraneous programs that they don’t really care about so that they can make money for the rest of the university, and that’s a good cause. But they’re contracting with for-profit entities that have an incentive to be quite aggressive in their recruiting and are capable of charging a lot of money just because there’s federal aid there.”
Aside from worries about predatory recruitment practices, Carey is concerned that some OPMs are taking too much academic control, which would violate federal rules. “If you look at some early OPM contracts, they talk very explicitly about the curriculum. When you look at later contracts, that language is removed because they know they’re crossing a line they’re not supposed to cross — I certainly have questions about that.”
Read the whole thing.
An earlier post on the OPM menace.