Attendance is correlated with student success. This leads to mandates to increase attendance. Then the perverse incentives kick in. Teachers refuse to post good materials online so more students have to attend.
The idiots in the US Department of Education decided that correspondence courses were not worth as much as distance learning courses. They decided the difference between correspondence courses and distance learning courses was that in distance learning courses the instructor initiated (real-time) regular and substantive interaction with the students. This means that if your students can take the class entirely online and never have questions because of the excellent materials, then your school gets penalized by getting almost no money for online courses. If you sabotage your online materials so badly that students have to sit through painful, multi-hour video chats with annoying instructors, then your school get the big bucks.
The US Department of Education has destroyed online education through gross incompetence and blind rule following.
The idiots in the US Department of Education decided that correspondence courses were not worth as much as distance learning courses. They decided the difference between correspondence courses and distance learning courses was that in distance learning courses the instructor initiated (real-time) regular and substantive interaction with the students. This means that if your students can take the class entirely online and never have questions because of the excellent materials, then your school gets penalized by getting almost no money for online courses. If you sabotage your online materials so badly that students have to sit through painful, multi-hour video chats with annoying instructors, then your school get the big bucks.
The US Department of Education has destroyed online education through gross incompetence and blind rule following.