College Guide
Blog
It still seems, fundamentally, like a rather promising model. Colleges deliver many concepts to their students using books students read and lectures students attend. StraighterLine offers books and lectures to students online, allowing them to learn on their own. Colleges evaluate and approve the colleges the company offers. Many real colleges, schools like Assumption College, Fort Hayes State University, and the University of Akron, accept courses taken though the company, allowing students to learn academic concepts cheaply and at their own convenience with the backing of (reasonably) respectable schools
Unbundling higher education is a good thing. There’s no reason that learning biochemistry or comparative literature has to have anything at all to do with sororities, basketball, or ownership of a valuable art collection or library.
The trouble is that, at least at this point, it looks like that evaluation and approval part of this new model has broken down.
StraighterLine functions because its courses are accepted by certain real schools. These real schools, in fact, hold a lot of power over what kind of courses the company delivers. If colleges don’t accept the courses, StraighterLine has no incentive to offer them.
StraighterLine exists as a reflection of the demands of students and traditional institutions. The company can improve but it makes no sense for the company to do so on its own. The company only makes money as long as someone values the course delivery.
Not to excuse the company for several rather crucial problems, but frankly, why aren’t the schools that partner with StraighterLine asking more of the company?
Maybe they’re not expecting much for $99 a month, but they shouldn’t be accepting the credits then.
Facebook
Twitter
Burck Smith on December 21, 2010 3:31 PM:
Given the extensive treatment of the article, I think it would be appropriate to duplicate StraighterLine's response to the initial IHE article here...
While we thank IHE for the attention, it is unusual and unprecedented for Inside Higher Ed to dedicate a 3 part article to the review of a single course from a single course provider by a single student under a tabloid-esque banner. To provide a comparable headline, the article could just as easily be titled “Colleges Wildly Overcharge Students and Taxpayers for Online Courses." Similarly, the article casts StraighterLine as a curricular experiment, when it’s really a pricing innovation. There are a variety of issues that should be raised as well.
First, like any good college or professor, we are constantly updating and improving our courses. Prior to the writer enrolling, this course was reviewed and recommended by the ACE Credit service and given a positive review by the DETC, a DoE recognized national acccreditor. Since the writer’s enrollment in April, we have incorporated a variety of recommendations including shortening the time given on exams, including weighted and cumulative exams, and adding an additional layer of identity verification. Further, several weeks ago we announced that, in the coming year, we will give students the option for full exam proctoring and the ability to select moderated cohort based courses in addition to self-paced courses. Lastly, we periodically review the courses to make content updates or even wholesale changes. Given that this course was reviewed and recommended 13 months ago (not the 5 years as implied in the article), we haven’t had a chance to do that with macroeconomics. The writer has provided a very public snapshot of a course that was deemed sufficient by all the course review bodies available to us at the time of enrollment. This course, like all of our courses, are continuously improving.
Second, now that Inside Higher Ed is acting like the Consumer Reports of online courses, I presume that we will see several thousand more 3-part stories on all of the other colleges offering distance education courses? If that reporting burden is too much, perhaps they should just link to Rate-My-Professor and publish the student reviews found there? It is interesting that the writer neither included comments from other students nor actually compared her experience in a comparable online course. Like colleges, we conduct post-course student evaluation and over 90% of our students would recommend the course to a friend. If colleges actually used student comments to make credit decisions on their courses, there would be few colleges awarding credit. StraighterLine has been through every 3rd party course review available to us. The course taken by the writer has been reviewed and fully recommended for college credit by the ACE Credit service, a service to whose recommendations more than 1000 colleges profess to adhere. This course was reviewed by DETC. This course was reviewed by the College Board’s AP service. Our partner colleges, who award transfer credit for our courses, have been given complete access to the courses. What is the appropriate way to evaluate courses – a single student’s perspective or course-level reviews conducted independently by dozens of professors, dozens of accredited schools and several higher ed associations?
Unfortunately, the standard used by most colleges for the award of transfer credit, the presence or lack of regional accreditation, is not only insufficient to determine course quality but is also unavailable to us. Despite the fact that credit (and courses) are the unit of academic currency in an age when students can take courses from anyone at anytime, individual courses cannot be accredited, only degree granting programs. This means that colleges can offer, and accept for transfer credit, taxpayer-subsidized courses of wildly varying and indeterminate quality under the umbrella