Online Education: An Overlooked Lever of Education Policy – The Chronicle of Higher Education
I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
For states, online education is the overlooked lever of education policy.
Sometimes all it takes is one interesting image to drive home a point. Last week, at the Eduventures Summit in Boston, one slide in a presentation by Richard Garrett did it for me. It was a color-coded state map of “Winners and Losers” in online education.
The map, along with Garrett’s commentary, highlighted for me some overlooked opportunities. Many states are not taking concerted steps to use online education to promote the kinds of priorities that state leaders have historically championed, such as affordability, access, or meeting the needs of local employers.
Garrett, the chief research officer at Eduventures, an advisory and research organization, had been talking about trends in distance education, including the dominant role now being played by institutions like Southern New Hampshire University (which I wrote about last year) and other online mega-universities. Then he showed that slide on how states stack up in their population of online students. It compared the number of residents enrolled in online programs at out-of-state institutions to the number enrolled online in-state.