Thursday, August 13, 2015

Does Online Ed Lack 'Integrity'? - Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

A line about the integrity of online learning in Hillary Clinton’s higher education plan has experts on online education questioning the candidate’s grasp of the market. In a version of the plan distributed to the media this past weekend, the campaign said, “We must restore integrity to online learning and will not tolerate programs that fall short,” as though online education has recently lost its way. The campaign reworded the sentence before Monday’s announcement, however. The published version reads, “We must bring integrity to online learning” -- as though it never had any in the first place. A spokesperson for the campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Online learning experts criticized the plan for what they described as a “narrow” view of how education is delivered -- a view they said implies that the online education market is dominated by for-profit diploma mills looking to take advantage of unwitting students. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/13/clinton-higher-education-plan-questions-integrity-online-learning