The U.S. Department of Education released the findings of a meta-analysis conducted by its Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development on Friday that confirm what online educators have known for years: “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” 

Online education has gained tremendous momentum in the last several years.  A November 2008 report titled, “Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008” published by the Sloan Consortium notes that during the fall 2007 semester, some 3.9 million students were taking at least one course online, representing a twelve percent increase over the previous year.  During the same semester, twenty percent of all college students were taking at least one course online.  An Eduventures report from November 2006 predicted this growth; that report found that half of the 2,000 potential students surveyed indicated that they would be interested in completing a degree online.

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American Public University System has focused on assessment and learning outcomes since 2004. Dr. Jennifer Stephens, our Dean of Assessment, publishes our learning outcomes on the web at http://www.apus.edu/learning-outcomes-assessment. We are committed to continuous improvement and making sure that we are providing online programs that match our students’ needs. I asked Dr. Stephens to provide me with a guest blog article summarizing the trends in accountability and our participation in the Transparency by Design initiative.

As Congress and the U.S. Education Department are placing increasing public pressure on higher education institutions to publish significantly more information about their performance, accountability initiatives are on the rise. The need for greater accountability in higher education was formally recognized in September 2006, when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued the recommendations of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Included in this report is language on the requirement of higher education institutions to use standardized assessments of student learning. Met by much criticism and derided as a “one size fits all” approach by many college leaders, higher education organizations and institutions have responded by forming voluntary accountability systems. Recognizing the importance of informing students and the public about the educational value offered by their institutions, colleges and universities have committed to releasing data about student learning outcomes and other data that have not been previously published. At the annual meeting of the Higher Learning Commission in Chicago this past April, commission representatives described three major accountability initiatives:

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