Much to everyone’s surprise, the Department of Education finally released the last set of regulations from last year’s negotiated rulemaking for public comment on April 1st (and it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke—we checked).
This post will examine the proposed changes to the distance education and credit hour definitions. We’ll have another post early next week that will dig deeper into the proposed changes related to direct assessment and competency-based education as well as a few other select issues such as proposed changes to the credit hour definition, calculating financial aid eligibility for correspondence education, and defining an instructional week for asynchronous delivery.
For a more comprehensive review of how we got here, you can check out all of our blog posts on the 2019 negotiated rulemaking process here, but here’s the TL;DR version.
In 2018 the Department of Education solicited public comments on the scope of a negotiated rulemaking process that might address distance education regulations, including state authorization and regular and substantive interaction.
As a result of the comments it received, the Department announced it would engage in an unprecedentedly large negotiated rulemaking process in early 2019 that would include a wide variety of regulations including accreditation, distance education, state authorization, religious institutions, licensure notifications, and several other areas.