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Public colleges and universities, which educate the bulk of all American college students, have been slower than their counterparts in the for-profit sector to embrace the potential of online learning to offer pathways to degrees.

continuum of organizational levels

low end of the spectrum, course availability, pricing, transferability of credit, and other issues are all determined at the institutional level, by colleges, departments, or individual professors, resulting in a patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.

The Department took those suggestions, and will be providing institutions with greater regulatory flexibility to design and test new approaches to student financial aid designed to meet the need of these students through several new experiments that will: Enable students to earn federal student aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class by providing federal aid to students enrolled in self-paced competency-based education programs. Provide flexibility for an institution to provide a mix of direct assessment coursework and credit hour coursework in the same program. Allow the use of federal student aid to pay for prior learning assessments, which can allow students—including returning adults or veterans—to decrease their time to get a degree.

Institutions that apply for and are granted these limited waivers would be able to have more flexibility over a portion of their federal student aid in order to implement experiments suggested by colleges, universities and the higher education community. Applications for the new experiments will be due in late September

Department is also announcing today that it will collaborate with the Department of Labor to develop a $25 million grant competition for an Online Skills Academy to support the development of a platform to enable high-quality, free or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, or other employer-recognized credentials

Many of the 600 or so colleges that are trying to add competency-based degrees are focused on adult, nontraditional students who want a leg up in the job market

in collaboration with specific industry partners, where an employer’s endorsement of the credential can lead to a graduate employee getting a promotion.

ther colleges' forays into competency-based education have been in disciplines with professional licensing and a heavy dose of task-based learning, which seems like an easier fit with academic programs based on mastery rather than time in a classroom.

Office of Digital Education & Innovation, charged with scaling up instructional innovation and experimentation across the institution. In its early days, the office was divided into three labs:    The Learning, Education and Design Lab, focused on doing research and scholarship to understand how instructional technologies and digital media can be used in teaching, learning and collaboration; The Digital Education & Innovation Lab, which was established to help create new digital courses, including MOOCs, and help develop open educational resources; and The Digital Innovation Greenhouse, which emphasized development of software specifically to help students.

First, the courses will be taught entirely online—an option that Southern Methodist has never before offered to undergraduates.

taught by professors at other universities

ourses, offered through the online-education company 2U, will come from a consortium of colleges participating in 2U’s Semester Online program