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JK: I don’t if it has something to do with the change in administrations.
WM: Well, the woman who was assistant secretary for postsecondary education during the Bush administration, Sally Stroup, used to be a lobbyist for the Apollo Group.
JK: There was a big wave of scandals in the late 1980s and early 1990s that prompted Congress to pass some tough consumer regulations and they had a big impact, default rates came way down. I think those regulations were effective for a while. As we entered the 2000s and there was new growth in that field, I think due to the growth in online education, there may have been more abuses in the for-profit industry.
WM: Some people talk about online education as if it’s going to bring access to everyone. But there’s also a concern about real quality. Talk to me about online education and higher education.
JK: Good online education can be very good. The Department did an analysis on the best work that has been done studying online education a year ago and that study concluded that the best online education is competitive with traditional classroom instruction. It found that the most effective form is a hybrid, where you’re combining online with in-class elements. In a great majority of online education, it’s like anything - there are some high quality examples, but in other cases it’s a little harder to tell. One very exciting online application is the cognitive tutor, where online programs can customize the instruction to an individual student and make it interactive to test if a student is mastering a concept or go back and teach it a second way. There really is a great deal of potential here if it is done well.
WM: Is there any specific initiative with regard to online education?
JK: We have proposed what is called an online skills laboratory that would develop high quality course materials to help people see what is possible. That material would be open-source so people can take it, share it and build on the material.
WM: What is the role of the Department of Education in ensuring that online education is high quality? It’s so cheap and easy for anyone to do it, how can the department make it effective?
JK: Post-secondary institutions are overseen by “the triad”: the first two are accreditation, state oversight. The third component is that at the Department of Education we try to look at financial soundness of an institution, default rates, gainful employment, etc. But we don’t go into an individual institution and attempt to assess its quality.
WM: A common DC move is to rotate between think tanks, government, and journalism. Can you explain to me how you approach the different nature between one job and another? The difference between the conversation we’re having here and your role at the Center for American Progress where you were writing articles.
JK: I think the jobs are not dissimilar. Both jobs are filled with smart, well-meaning people that I was fortunate to work with. You spend a lot of time thinking about policy problems, trying to analyze possible solutions. In that case, I spent more time writing papers; in this case I spend more time sitting in meetings. But they are pretty similar. Similar groups of people and similar roles. [Image courtesy the U.S. Department of Education]
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Bronx on February 08, 2011 9:21 PM:
FEAR THE KVAAL!!!