Proposed federal changes to distance ed: IHE article

[polly_mer]

https://insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/meanwhile-washington%E2%80%A6

On page 18,647, it delivers one of the weirder passages I've seen in a proposed regulation.

"The Department wishes to call attention to the need to be consistent in the way that institutions and accreditors measure a credit hour, and that it may no longer be justifiable to treat lecture and laboratory classes differently when assigning credit. The new definition of a credit hour demands equitable treatment of student work; therefore, the amount of credit awarded for laboratory classes should be equivalent to that awarded for lecture classes."

The discussion then goes into the problems with changing lab credits while keeping general education requirements the same.

[spork]

I always found it absurd that a lab meeting 2.5-3.0 hours per week was worth only 1 credit.

[mamselle]

Dance classes are the same.

If you take a 1-credit class, you could be in the studio for an hour-and-a-half to two hours, 3 to 5 times a week for ballet or modern, respectively (OSU was a "modern school," with strong complementary ballet for backup; hence the seeming disparity.)

But they're more energy-extensive, so that makes sense to me. Muscles are slower to learn stuff, they require more repetitions and fine-tuned correction to perform a step (or play a series of notes) well.

Any "doing thing" is like that, to my way of seeing it.

Hence the hours of practice....

M.

[sockknitter]

Music classes are similar. Class piano (or whatever course title the institution uses) might meet for three hours per week for one credit hour. Ensembles, such as orchestra or band, typically meet 5-6 hours per week, and are usually only one credit hour.

I don't know how many credit hours are allotted for marching band, but the amount of time that eats up in the fall semester is bonkers.

[Aster]

This is more of an issue of educating people about how credit hours work than anything else. The standard coursework calculation formulas have not changed, it's just that less people seem to be trained on them, and those untrained people are put into leadership positions at U.S. universities and on governing boards. And now we have those same untrained people appointed to the U.S. Department of Education.

It is the common confusion of these terms.

- confusing credit hours with contact hours
- confusing contact hours with coursework hours
- confusing credit hours with coursework hours