There are three separate numerical indicator rankings for online bachelor's degree programs: a faculty credentials and training ranking, a student engagement and assessment ranking, and a student services and technology ranking. To make U.S. News's honor roll of top online bachelor's degree programs, a school needed to place in the top third of ranked schools (rounded) in all three of these modules.
[See all methodologies for U.S. News's rankings of top online education programs.]
Data collection commenced on July 14, 2011, using a password-protected online system. Drawing from its Best Colleges universe of regionally accredited bachelor's granting institutions, U.S.News & World Report E-mailed surveys to the 1,765 regionally accredited institutions it determined had offered bachelor's degree programs in 2010.
Respondents were asked at the beginning whether their institutions offered bachelor's degree programs with course content at least 80 percent accessible to students online. (This threshold is in keeping with The Sloan Consortium's industry standard definition of what constitutes an online course.) Those programs selecting "yes" were then requested to report in-depth statistical information that U.S. News used to compute the rankings and build profile pages in its searchable directory of online bachelor's degree programs.
U.S. News made repeated attempts to get institutions to participate in data collection and then requested that respondents verify their data. By the survey's closing date (Oct. 28, 2011), 969 institutions (55 percent) responded to the survey. Among those 969 respondents, 194 reported offering online bachelor's degree programs while the rest said they did not.
Ten institutions that reported offering programs said that 2011-2012 was their first year offering online bachelor's degree level education courses; therefore, U.S. News did not include these new programs in any of the online bachelor's degree rankings because of their inabilities to supply a full academic year's worth of data. Their information is included in the online directory of searchable program profiles.
The survey instructed online bachelor's degree program respondents to report information across all online bachelor's degree-granting programs. As a result, questions asking for descriptive statistics on students and faculty—such as enrollment or numbers of course offerings—requested aggregations of data across all of a school's online bachelor's degree programs.
By contrast, questions not asking for profile data—such as tuition or career center offerings—could not be aggregated, and schools were asked to report what was most "typical" given the breadth of their programs. Some data provided by schools with multiple online bachelor's degree programs are consequently representative of the typical program at the school rather than being fully applicable to each distinct one.
For all student and faculty data, the survey asked schools to incorporate in their calculations to the best of their abilities only students and faculty who were engaged in online accessible courses applicable toward online accessible bachelor's degrees. In cases when schools offered both fully integrated online and face-to-face bachelor's degree programs in which no distinctions among online students/faculty and face-to-face students/faculty were made by the schools, respondents were encouraged to provide data on online students/faculty based on informed estimates. Most important was that the standards used for reporting online students and faculty in these blended programs were consistent.
Once the survey deadline passed, U.S. News analyzed the quantity and quality of data collected to determine which questions could be used for rankings. Some questions garnered response rates too low to be used. Other questions received data that appeared unreliable for various reasons. Therefore, rather than producing an overall ranking based on incomplete and sometimes inconsistently reported information, U.S. News decided this year to instead produce three distinct rankings comprised only from select questions that significant numbers of schools answered.
Corrected on 1/10/12: An earlier version of this article did not correctly define an online bachelor’s degree indicator relating to faculty experience. In addition, 10 institutions reported that 2011-2012 was their first year offering online bachelor's degree level education courses, which was not previously stated.
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