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give state regulators a new option to either act as accreditors or create their own accreditation systems.

“States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus.”

regional accreditors are doing a fairly good job. They are under enormous pressure to keep “bad actors” at bay while also encouraging experimentation. And he said accreditors usually get it right.

Andrew Kelly, however, likes Lee’s idea. Kelly, who is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform, said it would create a credible alternative to the existing accreditation system, which the bill would leave intact.

eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority

“Accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing and even competency-based tests,”

broad, bipartisan agreement that federal aid policies have not kept pace with new approaches to higher education.

expansion of competency-based education. And he said the federal rules governing financial aid make it hard for colleges to go big with those programs.

accreditors is that they favor the status quo, in part because they are membership organizations of academics that essentially practice self-regulation.

changes to the existing accreditation system that might make it easier for competency-based and other emerging forms of online education to spread.

offering competency-based degrees through a process called direct assessment, which is completely de-coupled from the credit-hour standard.

What spaces can we build online that aren’t quantified, tracked, scored, graded, assessed, and accredited?

What we have is a series of online classes with no real infrastructure to support the work that students do on college campuses outside and between those classes

Up to now, online learning has taken little notice of the web upon which it’s suspended

Today, the road to access doesn’t necessarily detour through the university, and anyone, of just about any age, can travel it.

We’ve created happy little caskets inside which learning fits too neatly and tidily (like forums, learning management systems, and web conferencing platforms). We’ve timed learning down to the second, developed draconian quality assurance measures, built analytics to track every bit of minutiae, and we’ve championed the stalest, most banal forms of interaction — interaction buried beneath rubrics and quantitative assessment — interaction that looks the same every time in every course with every new set of students.