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U.S. News Participates in Webcast on Online Education Program Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 28, 2011 Comment (1)U.S. News participated in a webcast called "Ranking online education programs: A Conversation with U.S. News" on July 26. It was sponsored by WCET, a membership organization that works with colleges, universities, and others to—among other things—accelerate and adopt the use of technology for teaching and learning. Many of the nation's largest online learning programs had representatives who attended the online event, which featured a short U.S. News-led presentation about the 2011 online education rankings, followed by a WCET-moderated question and answer session. Audience members submitted questions via Blackboard Collaborate.
Here's a copy of the PowerPoint presentation that my colleague Eric Brooks and I delivered on U.S. News's upcoming online education project.
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U.S. News Starts Collecting Data on Online Bachelor's Degree Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook July 21, 2011 Comment (9)U.S.News & World Report recently started its first-ever effort to collect detailed data from all online bachelor's degree-level education programs in the United States. We sent surveys to around 1,800 colleges and universities that are regionally accredited by one of the six regional accrediting agencies in the United States for bachelor's level education. The school profile data, such as the technology used in online education, will be based on the current state of each school's online bachelor's degree program. In conjunction, we will give all regionally accredited colleges in the country a chance to say if they will have an online bachelor's degree program during the upcoming 2011-12 academic year. This process will enable us to achieve one of our main goals of the online data collection: to create the first-ever comprehensive list of all colleges currently offering online bachelor's degree programs.
In order to qualify as an online bachelor's degree program, the degree program has to offer at least 80 percent of its program course content online. U.S. News has adopted the industry standard definition (detailed on page 4 of this report) from The Sloan Consortium of what it means to qualify as having an online degree program. This does mean that some online programs on our upcoming bachelor's degree online directory, search engine, and rankings will have limited amounts of on-campus or other types of face-to-face requirements. (In other words, all the programs will not be delivered 100 percent online.)
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Keeping an Eye on the Upcoming ABA Law School Survey
Tweet Share on Facebook July 7, 2011 Comment (3)As we reported in last month's post, U.S. News May Change Its Law School Ranking Methodology, an American Bar Association (ABA) committee approved new standards to be used by law schools to report post-J.D. employment and job placement data. We will know exactly how these new standards will be implemented officially when the ABA posts the instructions for its 2011 ABA Questionnaire, the annual accreditation survey that each law school is required to fill out, within in the next few weeks.
