As I mentioned in the Week 7 entry for my EDTECH537 – Blogging In The Classroom course earlier this morning, today I wanted to post a sample of a guest blog entry.
Jason Siko has held appointments at Madonna University and Grand Valley State University. Prior to entering the academy he was a high school biology and chemistry teacher in the metro Detroit area. Jason’s research is primary focus on K-12 online and blended learning.
There’s an old saying that goes something like this, “There’s no such thing as a bad medical school. If you graduate bad doctors or ones that can’t pass the licensing exams, they’ll shut you down.” The same could likely be said about law schools. The point I’m trying to make is that there are mechanisms in place for the quality control in some areas of education. Heck, the same could be said about restaurants: even with variations in oversight and regulations from health inspectors, Yelp! ratings matter. If people get sick, or see rats coming out of the kitchen, you know that restaurant will not be around much longer.
However, when we look at K-12 online learning, we see a different story. Course pass rates for online courses pale in comparison to their face-to-face counterparts, yet the growth of online learning at the K-12 level continues. States and third-party providers continue to grow their programs and add new courses. How does the process of getting a course approved and keeping it in the catalog work? In this post I’ll provide an overview of how some states handle this process.
Generally speaking, states can require approval at the course level or the provider level, or both. These processes are fairly self-explanatory; at the course level, the course must meet whatever guidelines are dictated by the state before being accessible by students, while at the provider level, it is the provider who must meet requirements before being allowed to provide/administer online courses in the state. In some states (e.g., California), approval of courses is optional. Finally, some states have different approval options based on whether the course is created for use within a district or if students from multiple districts are allowed to enroll.
As you can see, there is little followup based on student performance once the course is “live.” Two states, Washington and Colorado, have made efforts to include elements of continued approval of courses based on performance and student attendance, but they are still in their infancy. What challenges do you see (i.e., political, logistical, economic, etc.) with creating a system of oversight that monitors (with consequences) online course success rates based on student performance?
Note: Some of the information in this article comes from the following source.
Barbour, M. K., Clark, T., Siko, J. P., DeBruler, K., & Bruno, J. (2019). Cases of quality: Case studies of the approval and evaluation of K-12 online and blended providers. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 22(1). Retrieved from https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring221/barbour_clark_siko_debruler_bruno221.html
Jason Siko, Ph.D., is a researcher whose primary focus is K-12 online and blended learning.
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