Home News The Next Stage for NC-SARA – Inside Higher Ed

The Next Stage for NC-SARA – Inside Higher Ed

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A national group dedicated to coordinating state approval of online programs selects a new leader and plans to focus more on program quality.

Six years after the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity emerged to attack a knotty problem — making it feasible and affordable for colleges to offer online programs in states other than the one in which they are physically located — that “easy work” is done, Paul Lingenfelter, the group’s board chair, said with a hint of irony in an interview last week.

The work certainly hasn’t been easy: many states are very protective of their standards for judging the quality of educational providers within their borders, and getting 49 of the 50 states (California remains the lone outlier) to sign on has been a heavy lift. But it may have been easier (or at least more straightforward), Lingenfelter said, than what the organization wants to do next: “to see if we can now begin to work with institutions and accreditors to improve the quality of distance education.”

Now that won’t be easy work, given how hard it is to define educational quality of any kind. But if NC-SARA, as the council is called, can coalesce the state regulators and the colleges and universities they authorize around a definition of quality online education in the same way it got them over the last six years to agree on a common definition of minimum quality, anything is possible.

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