Lyndon Baines Johnson Federal Building / US Department of Education
Updated 9/2/2020: The Department of Education has released final Distance Education and Innovation rules, which offer new flexibilities for colleges and universities that offer certain types of distance education. The rules, which are nearly unchanged from the proposed rules introduced in April 2020, bring closure to a rulemaking process that began in 2018 with ED’s announcement to convene a negotiated rulemaking session.
The Secretary proposes to amend relevant parts of the Higher Education Act of 1965 to hasten adaptation to online learning. Two-hundred forty-eight (248) comments were received. We have picked a few them for easy access here. Note the “sturm and drang” (drama) over the definition of “distance education”.
Posted April 5, 2020
The purpose of these distance education and innovation regulations is to reduce barriers to innovation in the way institutions deliver educational materials and opportunities to students, and assess their knowledge and understanding, while providing reasonable safeguards to limit the risks to students and taxpayers. Institutions of higher education may be dissuaded from innovating because of added regulatory burden and uncertainty about how the Department will apply its regulations to new types of programs and methods of institutional educational delivery.
We reviewed a few of the 248 comments received during our Federal action teleconference, We picked a few representative comments to enlighten understanding:
National Student Legal Defense Network
We are watching for further action. See our CALENDAR for the next Federal action teleconference; open to everyone.
