Editor’s Note: In the world of online education, school accountability can be tough to find. Without a national data set, or any requirements by the government for schools to report success rates, there is no source for reliable, consistent data on online colleges.
At Get Educated, we’re big fans of the efforts by independent educational groups that offer free, honest evaluations of online universities. CollegeChoicesforAdults.org is a non-profit devoted to helping you learn about learning outcomes in online universities and degree programs.
From the project director, Cali Morrison:
eflon/flickr
Looking for real hard student data from different online colleges? Search no further!
As an adult, the concept of returning to or starting college can be a daunting one.
How do you know what institution to choose? What program of study will help you gain the knowledge and skills to pursue the career path you’re interested in? How can you find the best online university?
In a web full of marketing messages and websites whose only mission is to redirect you to high-paying clients’ schools, how do you find information you can trust?
Visit CollegeChoicesforAdults.org. Our site came out of a collaborative of regionally accredited, adult-serving institutions that wanted to improve access to information on distance learning for adult learners.
Our site provides data, not marketing fluff, for you to evaluate programs and institutions.
We don’t provide rankings – we want to leave the decisions on what elements are most important to you up to you when choosing an online school.
Our site is different because our approach is different: Our member institutions voluntarily provide data on student outcomes; data that is hard to find elsewhere. We supply things like online college graduations rates, and more. Then it is quality-assurance reviewed by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) before being posted to the web.
In addition to program-level learning outcomes, or in plain English – what a program expects its students to learn – we provide a new metric called learner progress. This is comprised of two elements – learner retention and completion.
‘Retention’ looks at a group of students (called a cohort) to see if they are still enrolled, or have completed a degree, one year after joining that cohort (for most, that means one year after enrolling in the institution.) ‘Completion’ looks at how many students completed a degree within 150 and 200 percent of ‘normal time,’ which is defined by National Center for Education Statistics as two years for an associate degree, four years for a bachelors degree, two years for a masters degree, and four years for a doctorate.
Our cohort is especially relevant in that it measures part-time and transfer-in students in addition to first-time full-time students, which are relevant online education statistics, Other retention/graduation statistics available on the web measure only consider first-time, full-time students.
As a result, we provide you with a more broad measure of how adult students, at our member institutions, persist and complete degrees.
Our measure lets you gauge how learners like you – those going to college part-time while balancing the many demands of adult life - perform at our partner institutions.
Written by: Cali Morrison
Can’t wait to read what your next article is going to be about; this one was interesting to those of us
in online learning.
Cali, great post! I am particularly interested in the way that you created a unique statistical analysis of adult students. You segmented the student population to give realistic data for people interested in the ease and effort required to earn a degree is effective with all of the tools available these days.
I truly enjoyed studying on this website , it holds superb content. “Wealth and children are the adornment of life.” by the Koran.
Hi Cali,
I did not know about your site and found out about it by reading this post while searching for affordable online education degrees for grad students at Get Educated. I visited Transparency and found it useful but are you going to add more schools and especially grad education programs? I am finding most schools don’t publish data like you have and it is helpful. I liked knowing more about Capella from your site which is one school that offers quite a bit about education but which I am uncertain about because I know no one who attended this school personally.
Hi Ana,
Thanks for the response! I’m glad you found our site useful. To answer your question regarding adding more schools – we’re trying. As we are a voluntary effort, institutions must make the commitment and provide us with the data to review and publish. We cannot add them without their participation.
Best,
Cali
Hi Chris,
Thanks! Please visit http://www.wcet.wiche.edu/advance/join-transparency-design to learn more about how your institution can get involved.
All the best,
Cali
Hi Cali, this is a great idea. How would a nonprofit, regionally accredited institution offering completely online degrees go about submitting the necessary information to be listed on this website?
Thanks,
Chris