Accrediting for Educational Effectiveness in Distance Learning Degree Programs
by Dr. John Baker, Jr. (LSU) and Dr. George R. Lucas (USNA) for the American Academy for Liberal Education

[Adapted for presentation at the 16th Annual Distance Learning and Teaching Conference, August 4, 2000 - Madison, Wisconsin]

Accreditation, particularly at the regional level, has thus far labored (through existing consortium arrangements) to establish suitable criteria for institutional best practices and resources that would offer public assurance of the institutional viability, legitimacy, and fiscal probity of distance learning programs. Although these issues are important, the major focus of public concern with distance learning is less on these institutional resource questions than on the academic quality and educational effectiveness of such programs as compared to their conventional counterparts. This is especially true in core liberal arts education: accreditation of new and existing programs thus far has not been designed to address these program-related questions in any detail. In particular, while there is substantial evidence that technical and professional subjects can be addressed adequately in an asynchronous, distance format, scholars, government officials, and the general public have expressed doubt that these claims of equivalence will automatically or unproblematically carry over to those liberal arts and general education courses routinely required for any accredited undergraduate degree program. Such courses are thought to depend more upon direct, personal interaction among teachers and students in the development of intellectual capacities and core competencies than upon a simple mastery of course content.

Distance learning employing the latest available technology has been a factor in higher education since the mail-distributed correspondence course of the early 19th century. In the 1870s, the University of London inaugurated the first university-level program in general (liberal) education via telegraph and diplomatic pouch for career civil servants throughout the British Empire. The program aspired to offer a broad, classical "Oxbridge" style education via readings, correspondence, and examination to a geographically and ethnically diverse population whose liberal education was deemed vital to the maintenance of the rule of law and an orderly civil society. By some assessment measures, this initial experiment in asynchronous, distance liberal education was a success: at the behest of his father (an Indian merchant with an official civil service post), Mohandas K. Gandhi completed the civil service and pre-law distance-learning courses of study with sufficient distinction to permit his travel to London in order to enroll in the University's law school in 1888.

What has changed in the interim is not the basic concept or mission of broad public access to liberal education but the tremendous increase in access and vastly enhanced interactivity that contemporary technologies afford. As CEO Earl Stafford of UNITECH (an information technology and distance learning company) writes, where it once "took weeks for students to get access to valuable feedback from instructors in distant places, enhanced technology now delivers affordable, interactive educational opportunities instantaneously, on demand, to a variety of underserved populations."

The challenge for contemporary distance learning programs and institutions that aspire to offer something in addition to technical or vocational certification is to provide a credible, online undergraduate degree experience, complete with the core of general (liberal) education requirements that define the broadly educated, intellectually proficient undergraduate (regardless of the choice of major). By convention, however, authentic liberal education demands of students -- in addition to the mere assimilation of information -- both critical thinking and the reflective habits of mind usually thought to develop gradually, through peer discussion, personal faculty mentorship, and by wrestling with difficult texts and profound ideas within the context of a living, "real time" community of inquiry. Presumably, this community cannot be easily simulated in e-mail exchanges, chat rooms, by viewing videotaped lectures, reading lecture notes posted to the Internet, or through other interactive technologies.

But it is by no means clear that this convention or received opinion tells the entire story. As Dr. Peter Ewell has observed, the one thing we do know, through both extensive research and practitioner wisdom, is that what works well for one learner does not necessarily work as well for another. Thus, proponents of the individual and societal value of liberal education ought to ask: what might work best to provide access to such education for individuals who simply do not have the resources or the freedom to schedule the fixed "seat time" that the conventional perspective on liberal education seems to require, e.g., working parents, single parents, the disabled, and those with unusually demanding or unpredictable work schedules? Significantly, the higher education record is replete with examples of students who actually gain more of the vital knowledge, intellectual and moral competencies, and lifelong learning habits that comprise a liberal education when it is made available to them in an alternative "virtual" format.

The traditional classroom setting often relegates otherwise bright and able students to the role of passive spectators rather than active, engaged learners. Others may be excluded from the conventional classroom setting altogether by circumstances beyond their power to alter. Online versions of the same course, however, dramatically change the terms of participation. Not only does distance learning enable such students to function as the active and engaged learners they desire to be, their course work and their comparative assessment of these alternative educational experiences often reveal that many of these students performed better and learned more in the distance learning setting than in a conventional classroom. There is, thus, ample evidence that we should be prepared to alter our expectations about the circumstantial constraints on liberal learning in light of experience, even as we seek to extend a quality version of liberal education to such non-traditional students.

Asynchronous, distance learning courses may, in some cases, compensate for other, more common impediments to learning. As every professor can attest, many students come to regularly scheduled classes unprepared (and often sleep-deprived). If so, the class session is almost certain to be a waste of time. In an online course, by contrast, a student cannot get by without a sufficient amount of preparation but has the luxury of not having to proceed until fully attentive and prepared. Students who are uncertain as to whether they have adequately prepared for an online course can simply pause the course and review the homework again, thereby getting the maximum benefit from the online class session. For effective online liberal education to occur, it is also necessary to orient faculty, accustomed to lecturing in "real time," to how they might prompt genuine dialogue in an asynchronous environment (which the University of Maryland University College is currently doing) and fully utilize "groupware" to establish small, focused study groups despite the "lag time" and the random login and logoff of learners. Professors can and must give many more writing assignments and be willing to offer more extensive feedback and evaluation of student writing than they are willing or able to administer in a conventional course. As a result, students and professors alike often report more intensive interaction and instructional feedback in the asynchronous, virtual setting than in the traditional classroom one. Finally, the posing of questions that stimulate "problem-based learning" and foster team exploration is extremely well suited to the distance learning environment.

In principle, all students stand to benefit from the wider availability of distance learning programs, and such programs may, in some cases, provide an even more authentic liberal learning experience than conventional, classroom-based courses. The key issue for the providers is to settle upon some broad, common, fair, and uniform standards of quality assurance to be upheld through accreditation.

Distance learning thus promises to transform dramatically the landscape of American higher education. Innovations in technology have helped increase access to undergraduate degree programs, especially for individuals normally unable to participate in these programs due to scheduling, travel, financial, or health restrictions. But distance technology is in its infancy. Although anticipation is high about the potential reach and benefit of undergraduate distance education, there is an undercurrent of concern with the quality that these programs are actually providing and with how course and program quality can best be assessed in this new context. These concerns center on the imbalance between program development and efforts to standardize program quality. Despite over 400 studies purporting to demonstrate the functional equivalent of courses in conventional and asynchronous format, groups such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) continue to deny the reliability of data indicating whether distance learning programs provide an effective, high-quality alternative to conventional courses and programs. While in general education vast resources are being committed to the development of educational programs that can take full advantage of this new, but still evolving, technology, relatively little effort is being spent by the accreditation community towards the development of quality assurance procedures for liberal arts and general education programs.

In response to these concerns, regional accreditors have responded promptly to monitoring the institutional infrastructure of distance learning programs. They have begun establishing agreement on best practices pertaining to institutional accreditation in an effort to assure institutional authenticity and integrity, fiscal probity and reliability, and the adequacy of institutional resources for free-standing institutional programs of "cyber universities." Western Governors University (WGU) has just completed a rigorous accreditation review conducted by the Inter-Regional Accreditation Committee (IRAC), an ad hoc consortium of the three regional accreditors within whose regions WGU currently offers associate's degrees and articulation credit. In the spring of 1999, the largest of the regional accreditors, the North Central Association (NCA), made national headlines by accrediting a completely virtual, online university offering business communication and other professional degree programs. NCA's Executive Director, Steve Crow, commented that the accreditation of distance learning programs raises issues that are, in the main, indistinguishable from those customarily encountered in the accreditation of conventional institutions. At a recent meeting of regional and national accrediting agencies convened by the American Academy for Liberal Education, Charles Cook of the New England Association reported that a task force on distance learning within the Council of Regional Accreditors has initiated the process of taking up the common institutional and resource questions that the accreditation of virtual universities poses. While this Council is attempting to confront questions that require immediate attention, its focus is necessarily broad and does not directly address the issues of quality and effectiveness of liberal arts courses and programs that are currently being made available online.

All participants in the dialogue agree that significant issues of educational effectiveness remain unaddressed, and this silence provides fuel for controversy. Shortly after North Central's decision to accredit Jones International University, for example, the accreditation committee chairman of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) denounced NCA's decision, characterizing it as an attempt to "define any kind of institution as a higher-education institution." Months later, the U.S. Department of Education's National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) provoked further controversy by questioning whether a recognized accreditor's experience evaluating conventional academic programs automatically justifies its authority to accredit distance learning programs. Most recently in her newly-released monograph, "Core Academic Values, Quality, and Regional Accreditation: The Challenge of Distance Learning," Judith Eaton, President of CHEA, listed six challenges to six core values of higher education posed by distance learning, among which she cited "general education" as the area posing perhaps the most important but also the most intractable and, thus far, least addressed of the difficulties posed for quality assurance and accreditation.

In his keynote address to the American Academy meeting of accreditors just mentioned, Assistant Secretary of Education Lee Fritschler cited the challenge of "Cyber U." to "Site-Based U." in the delivery of core liberal education courses as the single-most outstanding challenge facing the accreditation community in this decade and urged this new body to add this challenge to its current agenda on the assessment of educational effectiveness within conventional, site-based institutions. According to Fritschler, when asked about course and program quality, institutions offering distance learning programs routinely and confidently assert, "Our accreditor is handling that," implying that quality assurance questions are completely under control. The wider public (including the accreditors themselves) continue to express concern that all is not entirely well, that they do not yet have the conceptual tools in place to address such questions, and even that the proposal to put assessment criteria at the head of the accreditation agenda for distance learning programs might establish an unfair "double standard" (since assessment of educational effectiveness at the conventional, site-based institutions does not always play a determining role in their accreditation).

Approaches to distance learning derived from conventional institutional accreditation seem to beg an important question. While a certain number of new "cyber universities" (e.g., the new Open University operation headquartered in Delaware and Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University) make their appearance each year, the majority of new distance learning programs are not being developed or offered as new, freestanding organizations requiring full institutional review. Rather, the majority of such programs are offered as expanded programs within institutions already fully accredited by their appropriate regional agency. The kinds of questions raised repeatedly by a skeptical professoriate, congressional critics, and others concerned with these new developments in higher education are thus not primarily institutional questions about legitimacy, viability, or institutional resources but focus instead upon the academic quality of the courses and programs offered. Distance learning is often offered as an alternative (and presumably equivalent) path to an institution's already-accredited degree program, thereby escaping independent scrutiny. The University of Maryland's venerable University College states that despite its internal focus on the rigorous learning outcomes assessment of each of its courses and programs, it is presently required only to report inputs (curriculum offerings, course syllabi, and descriptions) to the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC). Neither MHEC nor the Commission of Higher Education of the Middle States Association, the University of Maryland's regional accreditor, at this point requires specific evidence of education effectiveness or learning outcomes assessment of these alternative-format programs (since these are offered within the already-accredited university).

In sum, public quality assurance is less likely to concern questions of institutional integrity or the adequacy of institutional resources than questions about the academic excellence of core undergraduate courses and programs. In April 1999, for example, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) released a detailed report challenging what they characterized as the selective and anecdotal quality of much of the assessment research on distance learning. IHEP charged that the bulk of this research has not been disinterested but has been undertaken to support the unregulated expansion of distance education by suggesting that there is "no significant difference" between courses and degrees delivered in such programs when compared to conventional, institutional-based programs involving scheduled classroom seat time. Since then, the Chronicle of Higher Education and leading national newspapers have featured an unending stream of articles and reports disputing the program quality and educational effectiveness of distance learning courses and programs.

Dr. Peter Ewell, however, argues that the technical shortcomings of current research on the learning effectiveness of distance learning programs in fact apply equally well to "published research about virtually every method of instructional delivery including, quite noticeably, the classroom-based ones we presently use" (Change, May/June 1999, p. 4). The point is not automatically to distrust or denigrate the effectiveness of merely the newest forms of instructional delivery but to acknowledge that we have had a longstanding problem with evaluating and assuring the uniformity and effectiveness (particularly through accreditation) of our existing conventional forms of education. We can logically expect, therefore, to encounter problems and the consequent need to address them whenever new forms of educational delivery arise.