A set of educational
organisations and state officials unveiled a proposed compact among
the states with the intention to create a so-called common market for
online education so that students can easily enrol from anywhere they
wish. Besides, the proposal also aims to set certain standardised
consumer protections that would give students the space to approach
their regulators with complaints regarding any issue.
 |
| English: The United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
In the United States,
there are nearly seven million students who are presently accessing
college programmes online. However, the rules and regulations
designed to authorise the universities offering those courses differ
from state to state. Out of them, there are many who date back to the
pre-internet period, that is, the time when a college used to operate
solely in the state where they sustained a physical presence. Well,
this has led to confusions affecting negatively the worldwide
distribution of online courses.
Although most of the
reputed non-profit as well as for-profit online providers have made
lump sum investments to seek approval for letting students enrol in
all the fifty states, some states like Minnesota, Arkansas and
Massachusetts have turned down students. Confusions also popped up on
behalf of the system when they identified issues like what would
happen if students migrate to such a state having unaccredited
institutions.
The proposed compact
moreover will act as a kind of an agreement among the states that
will require legislation in some cases, whereas all the states would
require voluntary buy-in. States imposing stringent requirements
might express reluctance in joining. The organisers however said that
the proposal has given rise to extensive work where all the
constituencies will have to contribute a lot. In fact, it is being
expected that the representatives of 47 states will soon be taking
steps in the form of implementations.
What’s the best and
innovative part of the compact is that the regulators can willingly
address student’s complaints made against institutions based in
California to somewhere else. If somehow they fail to do so, they
might be expelled from the compact. As per Michael Goldstein, an
attorney in Washington, those states imposing stringent requirements
on institutions might need to be a bit flexible since it might give
rise to a new layer of state-level accountability.
Well, the compact
wouldn’t have any negative effect on the international students
pursuing courses from the United States. Even the MOOCs would not be
affected in any way offered by reputed universities through
accredited platforms like Coursera, edX and Udacity.
No comments:
Post a Comment