Camille Harris performs choreographed dance moves with a fan at a soul line dancing social event in Washington, D.C. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Camille Harris performs choreographed dance moves with a fan at a soul line dancing social event in Washington, D.C.

We all know we should be exercising, but wanting to is a different story. But what if your exercise regimen was the highlight of your week, a chance not just to get active but to see all of your friends?

Enter soul line dancing.

Soul line dancing like country line dancing is really just choreographed dance moves that you do in a group, without a partner. The Electric Slide is a classic example. The "soul" part comes from the music used like R&B, hip-hop, soul and contemporary hits.

Daryl Watson (right), a pastor at a Baptist church, says dancing keeps him in shape and helps him unwind. The Line Dance Addicts refer to him as "the Reverend"; his other nickname is "Smooth Operator." Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Daryl Watson (right), a pastor at a Baptist church, says dancing keeps him in shape and helps him unwind. The Line Dance Addicts refer to him as "the Reverend"; his other nickname is "Smooth Operator."

It's become popular as a form of group exercise, especially among African Americans, in communities across the country. People take line dance classes at local churches, gyms and community recreation and senior centers. They adopt team names like the Sassy Steppers or the Rockettes. People come for the fitness, but they stay for the friends and the broader health benefits that come with having a supportive community.

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"It's a sneaky way to get exercise in," says Washington, D.C., resident and soul dancing devotee Andrea Powell. "You're exercising but you're not labeling it as exercise, because you're just having so much fun."

"I love the people, I love the exercise, it's good for your brain," she says.

Powell has been dancing for about four and a half years with the Line Dance Addicts, a line dance class at the Turkey Thicket Recreation Center in D.C.'s Brookland neighborhood. Her fellow Addicts dancer, Daryl Watson, is a pastor at a local Baptist church. Everyone calls him "the Reverend." He says dancing helps him unwind after long days spent ministering to the faithful.

"Saving souls is good, but I also got to save mine, and part of saving my soul is to be human," Watson says. Dancing "keeps me human, keeps me healthy, in shape and fit."

Paula Allen, "Queen Poobah," operates the music for the dance night. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Paula Allen, "Queen Poobah," operates the music for the dance night.

Watson, Powell and other regulars attend classes at Turkey Thicket taught by instructor Paula Allen. She patiently explains the steps to a new dance until everyone present has the moves down. There's a lot of fancy-looking foot work involved stepping forward, backward and to the side, with some sliding and turning but it's not cardio intensive. Less heart-racing beats of a Zumba class, more playful moves akin to the Macarena or the Cha-Cha Slide.

Paula Allen teaches soul line dancing classes twice a week at the Turkey Thicket Recreation Center in D.C.'s Brookland neighborhood. Olivia Falcigno/NPR hide caption

Paula Allen teaches soul line dancing classes twice a week at the Turkey Thicket Recreation Center in D.C.'s Brookland neighborhood.

But can something this fun really count as exercise? Absolutely, says Terri Lipman, a professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. "Yes, it's dance. Yes, it's fun, but it is efficient in improving cardiovascular health and providing activity," she says.

Since 2012, Lipman has been running and collecting data on a community soul line dancing program called Dance for Health. Based in West Philadelphia, a community with high poverty rates and many children at risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, the program was designed to get kids and adults in the community more physically active. Her research shows that line dancing gets heart rates pumping enough to count as moderate exercise.

"I go to the gym and no one really looks very happy in the gym," Lipman says. But at the Dance for Health line dancing classes, "everyone is smiling. There is such enjoyment that is part of music and part of rhythm, and is almost innate in humans." Another bonus: Unlike running on a treadmill, line dancing is an inherently social activity and research suggests that making exercise both fun and social are keys to creating a habit that sticks.

At a Friday night line dancing social event held at Turkey Thicket, dancers showed off their choreographed moves set to hip-hop and R&B music. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

At a Friday night line dancing social event held at Turkey Thicket, dancers showed off their choreographed moves set to hip-hop and R&B music.

Although many of the line dances are not cardio intensive, they rely on fancy footwork and moves that count as moderate exercise. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Although many of the line dances are not cardio intensive, they rely on fancy footwork and moves that count as moderate exercise.

Lipman notes that dance in general has also been shown to help with depression and improve mobility and memory. The memory benefits, particularly in older adults, come from the fact that dance requires us to remember patterns, "so it's also muscle memory in addition to cognitive memory," she explains.

When it comes specifically to soul line dancing, Lipman's research suggests another major benefit: the social support gained from being part of a community of dancers. When Dance for Health participants were asked what brought them back to class every week, "what they told us was that it was the social support and the relationship-building that was part of this program," Lipman says. "That was something that we had seen was important, but we didn't realize it was key to what the community felt was important."

The Addicts take to the basketball court to perform during the social. '"The appeal is togetherness," Allen says. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

The Addicts take to the basketball court to perform during the social. '"The appeal is togetherness," Allen says.

That sense of community was certainly evident among the line dancers I met through Paula Allen's dance class in D.C. Some of the Addicts even travel together to line dance gatherings around the country. Allen and the team also host events for dance teams from around the D.C. region.

One of the Addicts, Marcia Lee, started coming in 2014. At the time, she says, she was out of work and "going through some things in my life." Allen and her dance mates, she says, are "straight family. They just take you in, love you from the very beginning."

Allen says many of her students have been with her since she first started teaching the class six years ago. "The appeal is togetherness," she says.

Deedee Washington, who has been an Addict for four years, brings her toddler an honorary Addict with her to class. As for her fellow dancers, Washington says: "They're my line dance family."

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For Exercise That Moves Bodies And Hearts, Try Soul LIne Dancing : Shots - Health News - NPR

Ever skipped a run one day only to find that short-term break stretch into weeks without a workout? Or maybe youve been sidelined with an injury and are wondering how that hiatus will take a toll on your overall fitness.

Its no surprise that an exercise break could mess with your fitness, but did you ever wonder how muchand how long it takes to happen? Research conducted at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. sought to answer that question.

In the preliminary study, which was presented at this years Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain, 28 individuals who typically walked over 10,000 steps per day reduced their steps by around 10,000 stepsmeaning, becoming almost completely sedentaryand swapped walks or other forms of exercise for an additional 103 minutes of sedentary time per day.

After 14 days, the researchers analyzed the participants overall fitness levels, which they measured through a combination of VO2 peak (how efficiently oxygen is used during peak exercise effort) and cardiovascular function by blood vessel health. They discovered that their cardiovascular function decreased by nearly 2 percent and VO2 peak decreased by 4 percent, leading to an overall fitness levels drop of as much as 4 percent.

Whats more, their metabolic health took a dip, too: Their total body fat increased by 0.5 percent, waist circumference by one-third of an inch, and liver fat by 2 percent. They also became more insulin resistant, a condition where your body does not respond as readily to insulin as it should, causing excess blood sugar to build up in your bloodstream and raising your risk of type 2 diabetes.

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These negative health effects are likely a product of muscle underuse: When you stop exercising, your muscles contract less frequently, and you reduce the activation of an enzyme called AMPK, which aids blood sugar absorption for fuel, Kelly Bowden Davies, Ph.D., professor of Sport and Exercise Science at Newcastle University, U.K told Runners World.

The lack of shear stress, or the heavier force of blood flow on vessel walls during exercise, may contribute to poorer blood vessel health. Thats because the more you exerciseand get your blood pumpingthe healthier your heart and arteries will likely be.

But that doesnt mean you should panic if you let a few weeks of training slip away from you. The researchers also studied how long it takes to get this fitness back, and those results were a little more encouraging.

After the participants resumed exercise, the researchers again tested their fitness levels 14 days laterthe same amount of time that they restedand found that they had returned to their baseline.

The best way to offset these health consequences is to be sure to engage in habitual physical activity, according to the study. So even if you cant do your regular workout, simply getting a small boost of exercise during the day, such as getting out for a walk at lunch, can help.

But even if you are sidelined with an injury for a couple weeksor circumstances temporarily take you away from your workout routineyour fitness levels should bounce back quickly when you resume.

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Heres How Much Just 14 Days of Inactivity Can Cut Your Fitness Level - runnersworld.com

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle talk about mental health, they aren't just opening up about their own experiences they're on a mission to dispel the stigma surrounding mental illness. The new parents are currently on their royal tour of Southern Africa, and on Tuesday, they stopped by Monwabisi Beach in Cape Town to talk about emotional and mental health with the organization Waves For Change. Harry and Meghan are often talking about the importance of these fluid conversations, and this time, they spoke about it on a global level.

"You see that no matter where you are in the world, if you're a small community or a township if you're in a big city it's that everyone is dealing with a different version of the same thing," Meghan said, according to People. "Globally, I think there's a bit of a consciousness crisis, and so the fact we're able to be here together to see on the ground so much good work that's being done, just because people are willing to talk to each other about it and someone's willing to listen is huge . . . [It] doesn't matter where you are, we're all sort of trying to power through and find some optimism."

As for Prince Harry, he wants the world to do a better job at distinguishing between mental health and mental illness. "I think most of the stigma is around mental illness [and] we need to separate the two . . . mental health, which is every single one of us, and mental illness, which could be every single one of us," the Duke of Sussex said. "I think they need to be separated; the mental health element touches on so much of what we're exposed to, these experiences that these kids and every single one of us have been through."

He added, "Everyone has experienced trauma or likely to experience trauma at some point during their lives. We need to try, not [to] eradicate it, but to learn from previous generations so there's not a perpetual cycle."

Waves For Change is a non-profit organization focused on surf therapy and mentorship to deal with emotional and psychological stress in some of the most at-risk areas across South Africa. Prince Harry and Meghan joined them on the beach for a group bonding exercise and the candid conversation about mental health. Find out more about the royal tour across Southern Africa here.

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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Talk About Mental Health and "Finding Optimism" - POPSUGAR

Stepping up the pace of your walk or run a couple of times a week is one way to add intensity to your workout schedule.Peter McCabe / MONTREAL GAZETTE

Twenty years ago health advocates decided the only way to get more people exercising was to get rid of its no pain, no gain reputation. So instead of promoting the benefit of working up a good sweat, they started selling the value of light- and medium-intensity exercise. Suddenly activities like gardening and housework were part of the exercise mix.

Nowadays, tough workouts are back in style. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is all the rage, with its pitch geared to the masses who claim that lack of time is the reason they dont exercise. Headlines boasting that health and fitness benefits can be gained in as little as five minutes of exercise a day are everywhere.

But, if improved health and better odds of living longer are your primary goals, theres no need to adopt a no pain, no gain attitude. The current recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week is more than enough to fulfill your goal. But can health and mortality risk be further improved if exercisers add more sweat-inducing workouts into their weekly routine?

Health experts already make accommodation for those who prefer to work out with more intensity, recommending just 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, which suggests that there is a baseline level of energy expenditure needed to produce improved health outcomes. What we dont know is whether swapping out some of those 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise for workouts of a higher intensity will result in even more reductions in mortality and a greater boost in overall health.

Using data from large British studies that spanned 1994 to 2011, a team of Australian researchers reviewed the exercise habits (frequency, duration, intensity and type of exercise) of 64,913 respondents, 44 per cent of them men and 56 per cent women. Their goal was to find out whether those who reported bouts of vigorous activity (intense enough to get people out of breath and make them sweat) realized greater health benefits than those whose physical activity was limited to moderate-intensive exercise (that which produced a slight increase in heart rate).

Turns out that working up a sweat is worth the extra effort.

We found a 15-per-cent risk reduction (in all-cause mortality) in participants who achieved the recommended 150 minutes of MVPA (moderate-vigorous physical activity) and reported 30 per cent or more of vigorous activity, reported the researchers.

If the idea of a vigorous workout makes you nervous, theres nothing in this study that suggests you need to take your workout into the zone where discomfort meets pain. Instead, try pushing yourself until it takes effort to sustain the intensity. Thats a vigorous workout. And you dont need to spend your whole workout in that zone. Start with one-minute bouts of extra effort and then take it down a notch or two to a more comfortable pace. The trick is to slowly work up to the point where you feel capable of sustaining a workout that pushes your physical limits.

But dont just do it for the boost in health and longevity. There are more rewards to finding that extra gear than just upping the odds of living longer. Confidence grows as you successfully challenge yourself. And once you become more confident in your ability to test your physical limits, youll feel more comfortable trying new workouts, experimenting with different intensities and setting new goals. Not to mention the fact that those short, but intense, workouts that are all the rage, are now firmly within your grasp.

The other interesting finding in the Australian study is that the people most likely to log higher intensity workouts tended to be younger males, which is disappointing as there should be no gender or age limit to vigorous workouts. Stepping up the pace of your walk or run, adding speedy intervals to your bike workout, hopping on the rowing machine at the gym for a quick 2,000 metre workout a couple of times a week are all simple ways to add intensity to your workout schedule.

Remember, you dont need to huff and puff your way through every workout, or for a whole workout. The goal is to boost intensity so that it compiles at least 30 per cent of your weekly exercise volume.

For me that means one shorter, faster run and one HIIT class a week, both of which take me well out of my comfort zone. And while I admit that both workouts arent always met with enthusiasm, they never fail to provide a measure of post-workout satisfaction that is unmatched by my other workouts.

So go ahead a push yourself a little, and not just for the promised boost in health benefits, but also for the boost in satisfaction that goes along with it.

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Fitness: Sweat more, live longer, enjoy the bragging rights - Montreal Gazette

PRESS NOTICE Thursday, 26thSeptember 2019

Family-friendly health, wellbeing and fitness festival to kick off in the RDS this Saturday, will feature speakers includingAlison Canavan,Holly White, spiritual guide to the starsShaman Durek, husband and wife teamGrainne ParkerandDominic Munnelly,and many more across the two days with a jam-packed schedule covering four stages.

Highlights from the schedule include:

Read Also: Blueprint for healthier Ireland launched by the Medtronic Foundation and The Community Foundation for Ireland.

As well as talks, classes and demos, therell be healthy food for all the family to enjoy, and over 150 exhibitors will also be present in the RDS, showcasing the latest products and innovations from the natural health and wellness sector. Tickets are available on the doorfrom 10 and kids under 12 go free!

Further info on the line-up and scheduling is available on http://www.vitalityexpo.ie.

Co-Founder, Managing Director and Multimedia Designer at InTallaght.

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Family-friendly health, wellbeing and fitness festival to kick off in the RDS this Saturday - InTallaght

Every time superhero trainer and Don Saladino and Men's Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. hit the gym together, you can expect great things to happen. The pair's previous medicine ball toss workout is perfect for honing your balance, core strength, and coordination, and they also teamed up for an arm muscle blaster.

Most recently, Saladino and Samuel showed off a useful series that'll take your gym warmup to the next level. These rack carry crossovers are a way to "move laterally while creating tension," as Saladino explained on his Instagram page, while you work everything from your core to your shoulders.

Since Samuel is our fitness director, we got the 411 on intricacies of the exercise. Here's how you can incorporate this move into your own warmup.

BUY IT HERE

Want more workouts from Saladino? Check out his muscle-building Men's Health Superhero Shred program. He shares the exercises and training principles he's used to help some of the biggest names in Hollywood build up their superhero bodies.

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This Kettlebell Warmup Is Trickier Than it Looks - menshealth.com

Boosters of online higher education have long held out the lofty promise that it would bring down the spiraling cost of college while also widening its reach.

But a little-known industry of for-profit middlemen, which is skimming off as much as 80% of the proceeds and has U.S. revenues of $1 billion annually, may be thwarting the innovative potential of online education.

Known as online program managers, these companies have been hired largely to connect universities with customers who want graduate degrees. Such students are seen as a source of much-needed revenue at a time when drops in state funding and declining undergraduate enrollment have squeezed higher education budgets.

Hiring these online program managers is quicker and easier for public and private nonprofit universities than building and marketing their own online graduate education programs. But in exchange, the institutions are giving up what is often a large share of the money the programs bring in.

Experts say this is likely keeping prices for students higher than they would be if the universities didnt have to pay such a large share of revenue.

The profit incentive is just something that needs to be monitored in these kinds of arrangements, said Stephanie Hall, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive New York City think tank. It warrants scrutiny figuring out who is setting the price, who is taking what percentage of that money and doing what with it in return.

While attention is often paid to for-profit universities and colleges whose students sometimes end up with worthless degrees or no degrees at all, this other kind of profit-driven business has more quietly inserted itself into higher education.

The OPM industry started in earnest about 15 years ago, as more public and nonprofit colleges were looking to ramp up their online programming, and educational technology companies saw a business opportunity in helping them.

In the years since, the industry has expanded and evolved, but the arrangements between colleges and OPMs in their most traditional form still widely in use today look something like this: OPMs market the programs, recruit students, counsel them through the admissions process, enroll them, provide the software and tech support needed for the programs to function and even help instructors design online-friendly courses.

Though the faculty teach the courses and the universities control admission standards and confer the graduates degrees, much of the work of building and managing the courses is done by the companies.

And theyre paid handsomely. Online program managers take anywhere between 30% and 80% of the revenue the online degree programs bring into the schools, according to an analysis by Eduventures Research, a division of ACT/NRCCUA. At programs run by 2U TWOU, -2.40% , an industry leader, the average tuition is between $70,000 and $75,000, according to company data from June 2018. Historically, OPMs have also locked universities into contracts that can hover around 10 years.

Even though the companies are often taking the bulk of the tuition revenue the degree programs pull in, the firms still arent profitable in many cases. Thats because as the companies add more programs, they need to shell out large sums to ramp them up, said Brett Knoblauch, an equity research analyst at Berenberg Capital Markets, who follows companies like 2U. It takes a few years for the programs to turn profitable, he said.

The challenges of this rapid expansion strategy were laid bare this summer, when Chip Paucek, chief executive officer of 2U, told investors on a call that the company would slow down its rate of launches after 2019 to support our path to profitability.

The July call also offered a sign that colleges may be pushing back on sharing so much revenue. 2U has historically given colleges only the opportunity to partner through a traditional revenue share, in which it offers its full suite of services in exchange for a cut of the tuition. But Paucek told investors on the call it will soon give at least one school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the opportunity to use a fee-for-service model for some programs.

Nick Hammerschlag, president of Entangled Group, an education consulting and investment firm, suspects that shift may be a recognition on the companys part that asking universities and colleges to give up a large share of the programs revenue may make it harder for 2U to hold on to its partners once they reach the end of their agreements.

Companies that offer revenue share arrangements make significant investments in the programs they help to launch up front, Hammerschlag said, but they also get an extraordinary deal on the back end. I think people realized that ultimately they didnt need to give up as much opportunity.

For many reasons, graduate programs make up a particularly attractive market both for these companies and for universities looking to shore up their bottom lines, said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at the think tank New America.

One is that theres no limit to how much the federal government will lend to graduate students to pay for school they can borrow up to the entire cost of a program. In addition, graduate students needs are smaller, and likely cheaper to address than those of undergraduates who need more intensive advising and other services, he said.

They just want an education and credential that will help their career, said Carey, who has written critically about the relationship between colleges and OPMs. Its a simpler, more profitable market that also has an unlimited source of debt financing courtesy of the federal government.

Theres no definitive data on how colleges relationships with these companies affect the cost of the programs which include MBAs, masters in public health, masters in social work and more to students. But basic math suggests that having to hand over so much of the tuition to someone else may make it challenging for colleges to provide the programs to students as cheaply as possible.

And though the colleges are still technically responsible for setting the prices of the programs, a recently published review of some of these contracts by Hall and her colleagues at The Century Foundation found that, in at least some cases, the OPMs do play a role.

Her review found a wide swath of approaches to price setting and revealed that its been common for OPMs to insist that a school price its program no higher than on-campus offerings, while also requiring that the price be market-competitive.

In addition, Hall and her team found that in the case of one OPM-university partnership to build a coding bootcamp, the contract explicitly provided the OPM with veto power over the programs price. In another contract between an OPM and a school offering a masters in social work, reviewed by Hall and her colleagues, theres a provision specifying that the company might recommend a revised tuition fee based on market research.

You have a third party that needs to make a profit off this, said Brendan Cantwell, an associate professor of educational administration at Michigan State University. Just the cost associated with the revenue share and for the university to make some revenue to cover its costs its probably at a high or a higher price.

Whether working with an OPM will drive up the price of a degree program for students is one of the many factors universities consider when assessing whether to enter into an agreement with one of these companies, said Deborah Seymour, owner and principal at Higher Education Innovation Consulting, LLC.

No institution that brings in an OPM is naive enough to think that some of the cost of using an outside vendor wont have an impact on the cost to students, she said.

2Us July call with investors signaled that the company may have some influence over the price of its programs though the tuition decision ultimately rests with the university offering the program, Jemila Campbell, a 2U spokeswoman, noted in an email. The company reset its growth expectations for the third time in several months in part because of pressure from increased competition, as more colleges launch online programs in some cases, at a cheaper price point than those 2U offers.

Weve got some really good plans in tow to attack one of the things that we think is an important component, which is tuition cost, Paucek told investors, saying he would reveal the plans at the companys investor day in November.

The company also announced a partnership in August with the University of London and the London School of Economics and Political Science to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in data science and business analytics for $25,000. Thats substantially less than overseas undergraduates pay to attend the London School of Economics in person.

Institutions that work with OPMs and try to keep their programs affordable could actually lose out on students, according to Dennis Gephardt, an analyst in Moodys public finance group, which covers nonprofit higher education institutions. Thats because an OPM that works with one university may also partner with others offering the same program, but at a higher price. That means the company may be incentivized to push the programs offered by the school from which theyll get more money.

Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University who directed a project that involved secret shopping for online degree programs offered through OPMs, said that in that secret shopping, a request for information from one program was answered with information for another program instead.

Because they have multiple clients, theyre looking to try to put as many virtual bodies in the classroom as they can, Kinser said of OPMs. From their business model perspective it might not matter what programs those bodies go into, because it all goes to the bottom line.

Kinsers example is just one of many ways the companies incentives arent totally aligned with those of the colleges. That can be a big problem for schools, which are turning to graduate degrees as a way to bring in revenue amid declining undergraduate enrollment.

Gephardt, of Moodys, said hes skeptical that online graduate degree programs offered through an OPM could provide a net revenue salvation that would compensate for other deep revenue challenges.

As Seymour noted: For every dollar that flows to the OPM, thats a dollar less in revenue that can be spent on other aspects that the institution may need. Over time, is the investment in the work that the OPM is doing and the revenue that online programs will bring in worth the offset?

Howard Lurie, principal analyst at Eduventures Research, puts it more bluntly: The companies have done well. The schools? It depends, he said.

The arrangements also threaten more than the bottom line. If a school works with an OPM, it may be under pressure to grow a program very quickly to recoup the revenue its turning over to the company, said Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at Dartmouth College.

In some cases, the companies also require that the programs maintain a certain number of students to keep operating, according to a 2017 review of contracts between OPMs and public universities by The Century Foundation. Growing a degree program as quickly as possible may be in conflict with providing a quality educational opportunity, Kim said.

On a call with investors in May, 2Us Paucek acknowledged the tension between growth and quality. At the time, the company lowered its revenue guidance for the fiscal year in large part because the schools it partners with were becoming more selective, he said.

It has become clear in the rearview mirror that we were prioritizing growth a bit too much based on the feeling on feeling the need to be past expectations, Paucek said on the call.

Amid growing scrutiny of the online program management industry, 2U later announced that, beginning next year, it would disclose more information about its partnerships with universities, including contractual terms relating to academic oversight as well as the nature of its financial relationships.

Providing greater transparency around our partnerships is the right thing to do and will foster a more constructive dialogue about the value of OPMs, Paucek said in a statement.

Other online program managers have been accused of going too far to enroll students. A 2013 whistleblower lawsuit filed by former employees against HotChalk alleged the company violated a federal law against providing performance-based bonuses to college recruiters. In the suit, the employees claimed representatives from the company would push students to sign up for courses by offering free iPads and textbooks. If students didnt meet the colleges admissions requirements, company representatives gave them the chance to explain away any bad grades, the suit alleged.

The company, along with the school it partnered with, Concordia University-Portland, paid $1 million to settle the lawsuit in 2015 and acknowledged no wrongdoing.

At George Mason University, which recently struck a 10-year deal with Wiley & Sons to offer masters programs in business, health systems management and other areas, some faculty have expressed concern that this drive for growth could result in predatory recruiting behavior. GMU is one of a number of schools across the country that have faced challenges from faculty advocacy groups over these partnerships.

A 2017 fact sheet on the GMU-Wiley partnership touted Wileys ability to take advantage of tracking tools and analytics to better reach prospective students. The company also uses a proprietary, consultative approach to recruit students and ensure theyre a right fit for the program, according to the fact sheet.

The company also plays a role by providing extensive market analysis of the tuition students will ultimately be charged for the program though GMU and its trustees maintain final control over the price. The result is that the price for online courses may be higher than the in-state on-campus price, according to the fact sheet.

Theres a place for it and I think it can be of high quality and meaningful to the student, Bethany Letiecq, an associate professor and president of the schools advocacy chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said of online education. But these programs make me very nervous because theyre profit-driven and they seem to be more about the shareholders than the students.

Ashley Frost, who earned a masters in health administration through a George Washington University-2U program, learned of the companys involvement only after she was admitted.

Before I got into the program, I knew nothing about it, she said of 2U. It was my understanding that everything was George Washington University. I didnt understand that it was another program that this was all going through.

Nonetheless, she was satisfied with her experience. I would imagine that it takes a lot of burden off of the school to try to create and manage that, she said of the deals between companies like 2U and colleges.

Thanks in part to the programs technology, Frost said, she felt connected to her fellow students throughout the time she was completing her degree, even though they all lived in different areas of the country. And the program did for Frost exactly what she expected: furnished her with a masters degree that she needed to move up into a new position. But it was costly.

As a member of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, Frost had access to the GI Bill to pay for her courses. She used up that money (about $23,000 per year) and then some, acquiring her masters degree and winding up with about $15,000 in debt.

The school discloses 2Us role in its online degrees to prospective students on its website, said Stacey DiLorenzo, executive dean of external relations for GWs Milken Institute School of Public Health, which runs the MHA program.

DiLorenzo added that the Milken Institute maintains complete control over curriculum, admissions standards and tuition decisions, in addition to other aspects of the program.

Tuition for the online program and the campus-based program is the same and so is the quality, she said in an emailed statement.

Proponents of these partnerships argue that the companies motivations track with the students and schools best interests. If students and universities arent satisfied, the degree programs wont continue to operate, the business will stop growing and the company will ultimately make less money, Paucek said in a May interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The notion inherently that my tax status means that I cant be mission-aligned with the university? Its just wrong, he said.

And indeed, colleges can reap benefits by working with these companies. Building an online degree program from scratch requires infrastructure and marketing expertise that universities often lack. For example, 2U is the third-largest advertiser on LinkedIn, Paucek said in the interview a capacity thats hard for any single school to match.

More broadly, universities on their own often just dont have the resources and know-how to launch and make these programs profitable on their own, said Knoblauch of Berenberg Capital Markets. As of June 2018, universities that partner with 2U earned about $6 million to $7 million on average per year from those programs, according to the company.

Higher education is abysmal as a business, said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, which tracks online education.

In some cases, college leaders are under pressure from boards of trustees or other stakeholders to meet certain revenue goals so quickly that they dont have much choice but to bring in an OPM because they just dont have the time to develop the capacity internally, said Seymour of Higher Education Innovation Consulting.

In addition, the companies offer a smooth technological experience that, some faculty say, makes it possible for them to put more emphasis on meaningful interactions with their students. Pam Baker, the division director of special education and disability research at GMU, is one of those faculty members. (GMU connected Baker with MarketWatch in response to an inquiry about its partnership with Wiley.)

Baker began exploring a partnership with Wiley in 2016 to take some of the courses her division already had online to the next level, she said. It offers an autism spectrum disorders graduate certificate, a graduate certificate in applied behavioral analysis and a masters of special education through the Wiley partnership.

The 24/7 tech support provided by the company as well as the structure of the courses, which require faculty to essentially preload much of their content before the course begins, are among the ways Baker said working with Wiley has helped to smooth out the technology experience for students.

If I were to show you the pre-Wiley version of the course that I teach and show you the Wiley version of the course that I teach same course objectives, same syllabus the Wiley version is an upscale version, Baker said. It is more engaging, it is more consistent. Thats important, she added, because in my book if you cant make the technology invisible for the student, then they cant concentrate.

Baker said she doesnt believe those benefits have come at the expense of students needs. Though Wiley helps with recruiting, the department maintains control over admissions standards, and Baker said she hasnt felt any pressure to let more students in.

Were not going to compromise quality for anything, she said. Were very committed to that.

Nonetheless, some colleges are reconsidering whether it makes more sense to build that infrastructure in-house. Increasingly, public universities, which are facing state funding challenges, are becoming more hesitant to work with outside corporate partners and share valuable revenue, according to an Eduventures Research report.

Southern Methodist University, a private institution that works with 2U and other companies to offer online masters degree programs, is switching to an online degree operation thats run fully in-house.

Officials have been happy with 2Us work, said Larenda Mielke, associate provost for SMU Global and Online, but realize there are benefits to having the school offer the programs itself without having to rely on an outside partner.

For one thing, having that intellectual property within the university means that if a contract with an OPM ends, the program can continue to move forward. Its sort of like renting a house versus buying a house, Mielke said. And, of course, the school will also be able to keep all the revenue.

But for the program to be successful, SMU in many ways needs to mirror the approach of the for-profit OPM industry.

Mielkes team has explored search engine optimization and geotargeting to get the schools message to the prospective students most likely to respond to it those living in Texas and other areas with large populations of SMU alumni, such as Southern California. And to figure out which programs to offer, the university is starting with the needs of the market instead of simply its own capabilities, Mielke said. In addition, shes focused on metrics like internal rate of return and product mix.

I think about it in the same way as if Im running a business, honestly, she said.

Shares of 2U have been down 62% this year to date, compared to a 16% increase for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.30% and a 19% gain for the S&P 500 Index SPX, -0.24%

This story about online higher education was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechingers higher education newsletter.

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Online courses could help make college affordable, but this $1 billion industry is standing in the way - MarketWatch

In 2018, the high-school graduation rate in Newburgh, New York, climbed to 78 percent, up from 66 percent just five years earlier. It was happy news for the tough-minded city about an hours drive north of Manhattan, known more in recent decades for its high rates of violent crime than the stately homes that line its parks and thoroughfares. About two thirds of the school districts 12,000 students are from low-income families, and nearly one in six are English language learners. Connecting more students to diplomas and productive postsecondary work or study was a critical goal for the district and the city as a whole.

Central to this success was Newburghs use of online credit-recovery classes.

For decades, high-school students who failed a required class were presented with two unappealing options: either repeat the course next year or during summer school. But in recent years, online credit recovery has emerged as a third way. Students who fail a course can enroll in a computer-based version of the class without waiting, quickly progress through required material, earn the missing credits, and, in some cases, improve their grade-point average. When implemented well, online credit-recovery classes can be a lifeline to struggling students, providing personalized learning experiences and a path to graduation. But these classes also may be vulnerable to abusenot only by students keen to post a positive outcome, but also by schools and districts eager to raise high-school graduation rates.

That was apparently the case in Newburgh, where an investigation by the local district attorneys office uncovered myriad abuses by educators that artificially inflated student performance, including changing grades, giving students unlimited opportunities to take identical tests and quizzes, and awarding credits to students who did not actually attend class. In response, the district has stopped offering online credit-recovery classes and launched its own investigation into the practice.

However, we understand instructional technology is not going anywhere, Superintendent Roberto Padilla recently said during a local school-board meeting. We need to give students opportunities, not take them away, but we need to partner with organizations that meet our needs. Well be looking for programs that provide tighter structures.

What actually happens during online credit-recovery courses? A look at recent headlines reveals reasons for concern. The flexibility of online credit-recovery programs can help educators meet students diverse needs, but it may also hamper efforts to ensure that coursework is rigorous. That may undermine students longer-term success.

An enticing solution

Between 2011 and 2017, the U.S. graduation rate rose to an all-time high of 85 percent from 79 percent. During that same period, average math and reading test scores on college-entrance exams and the National Assessment of Educational Progress remained flat. If more U.S. students are graduating but these same students on average are not showing increased academic achievement, something else must explain the phenomenon. Either the bar to graduate high school has been lowered, or schools are providing more supports in order to help more students meet the standard. How does the rapid rise of online credit-recovery programs fit into the picture?

The concept of credit recovery is not new: high-school students have long had the opportunity to retake a failed course. But in length and format, those makeup classes werent dramatically different from the initial course. That has changed in the past decade, as online programs taught with varying levels of adult supervision have proliferated and, in many cases, replaced the traditional model of credit recovery.

That change is largely attributable to the confluence of two forces, said John Watson, the founder of Evergreen Education Group, an education research and consulting company focused on digital learning. First, federal legislation starting with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 set clear incentives for high schools to boost graduation rates, because they faced punishing consequences if their rates were too low. In allowing struggling students to quickly make up courses, online credit recovery emerged as one enticing tool to keep more students on the path to graduation. Current law under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 established some flexibility on that measure but also requires intervention at schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. The pressure to improve graduation rates seems unlikely to lessen anytime soon.

Second, through programs like the ConnectED initiative, federal agencies and private companies made a multibillion-dollar investment to improve broadband access and technology in schools and libraries nationwide. A vast and lucrative education-technology market emerged, offering digital products and programs that promised to provide students with more personalized instruction. At the same time, educators were exploring new types of lessons that did the same, trading top-down, lockstep curricula for more flexible models that could meet the changing needs of individual students from day to day.

Online credit-recovery programs have ridden the crest of all these trends, combining personalized learning and digital tools in response to a nationwide call to increase high-school graduation rates. Today, some 89 percent of high schools nationwide offer at least one credit-recovery course, and as many as 15 percent of all students take such a class, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey of school leaders in the 201415 school year.Such coursework is more prevalent at schools serving larger numbers of low-income students than those in wealthier communities (see Figure 1). The formats of those courses differ: 71 percent of schools offer courses online, 46 percent support blended courses that combine direct instruction with online work, and 42 percent provide traditional in-person classroom instruction.

The horse is out of the barn

Despite the widespread use of credit-recovery programs, remarkably little is known about how schools adopt and implement them and whether students are actually benefiting from their use. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Educations Institute of Education Sciences conducted a research review but was unable to draw any research-based conclusions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of credit recovery programs. In the 2019 Building a Grad Nation report, researchers from Civic and the Johns Hopkins School of Education wrote that given the lack of comprehensive knowledge on the rigor of the most widely adopted credit recovery programs, it is difficult to understand the true impact of these courses.

Among researchers greatest concerns is that online credit-recovery courses lack rigor and are easy for students or educators to exploit. We dont know a lot about the rigor and what we do know seems to indicate that the rigor isnt all that stringent, said Matthew Atwell, a researcher at Civic who coauthored the report.

In a recent study, researchers Carolyn J. Heinrich and Jennifer Darling-Aduana examined online courses in the Milwaukee Public Schools. They found that by the 201617 school year, 40 percent of graduating seniors had completed at least one online course, the majority of which were taken for the purpose of credit recovery. The study found positive effects for online students on the number of credits earned and whether they graduated high school and enrolled in college. However, in a related study, they found mostly negative associations between online course taking and students math and reading test scores. The results suggest that on average, online course-taking is not . . . reflecting real learning, and some students may even be set back in their learning, the authors wrote.

Through classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, the study uncovered several potential explanations for the uneven learning gains, such as disengaged students using Google to copy and paste answers to assignments and limited interaction between students and teachers. If the students were already struggling in a traditional classroom, most likely theyre going to need more help, not less, Heinrich said in an interview.

A 2016 study by the American Institutes for Research compared student performance in online and in-person credit-recovery classes for Algebra I among a group of 1,200 high-school freshmen in Chicago. Two thirds of online students passed the class, compared to three quarters of in-person students. Online students also were more likely to describe the course as difficult and scored lower on an end-of-course test than students assigned to a traditional face-to-face classroom. However, their longer-term outcomes were similar: they earned comparable grades in subsequent math classes, and about 47 percent of students from each group earned their diplomas on time.

For most kids that fail courses, who are probably at risk in a number of different ways . . . an online course, in the absence of really phenomenal technological advances, is probably not enough to help them regain content that they havent gotten, Jessica Heppen, the studys lead author, said in an interview. So I do have a lot of concerns about the widespread use of online courses for credit recovery with so many unanswered questions.

Still, Heppen acknowledged that online credit recovery, now used in most high schools, is unlikely to go away soon. I always say, the horse is out of the barn. This is happening anyway and so I dont think theres a way to kind of pull back on it, but I do think it makes sense to exercise some caution and to think about individual kids and their needs.

Edgenuitys website touts a graduation rate that nearly quadrupled at Dearborn Magnet High School but fails to mention that the school graduates fewer than 10 students a year.

A booming market

Most online credit-recovery courses are developed, maintained, and sold to districts by private for-profit companies. Two of the largest vendors are Apex Learning, which is used in nearly 2,000 school districts, and Edgenuity, in 8 of the nations 10 largest districts. Districts typically pay about $250 for each student who accesses the online courses, though costs vary significantly among vendors based on the size of the district.

The process by which districts vet potential providers of online courses varies. In some cases, districts form committees to review the online courses. In other instances, the process is much less formal. For example, Houston Independent School District had several students from across the district try out different courses across different platforms, said Maria Bonilla, the districts virtual-instruction program manager. The students selected Apex as the one they preferred over the other ones.

Other districts essentially take a trial-and-error approach, contracting with a company until concerns about rigor, quality, or cost prompt them to go shopping for a new provider. In Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby County Schools has gone through three or four vendors since 2008, according to Vinson Thompson, the director of online learning.

Such informality extends to the regulatory level as well: on the whole, state leaders have set few standards for online credit-recovery companies to meet. An analysis last year from the Education Commission of the States found that relatively few states have adopted state-level credit-recovery policies, including definitions of and mechanisms for regulating credit recovery. And a Slate investigation in 2017 found that while many state education departments have started to review online education providers, few bar districts from using companies that dont meet their standards.

With minimal state guidelines and a limited research base, many districts choosing among online course providers are left to rely on the information provided by the companies themselves. That can be a problem for districts that dont know what to look for, said Christine Voelker, the K12 program director for Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization that reviews online courses.

There are providers who have marketing teams and theyre good at what they do, she said. They might have flashy content, and things that will wow you and things that are very much eye candy. If youre not knowledgeable about what you are looking for, youre going to fall into that trap of saying, this is a really cool-looking course, but it might not be hitting those learning objectives that you want your students to hit.

Indeed, reviewing some of the vendors marketing materials reveals claims that, at best, lack context, and at worst, appear designed to mislead. One promotional video on Edgenuitys website touts a graduation rate that nearly quadrupled at Dearborn Magnet High School in Michigan in the four years that its courses were implemented. Not mentioned is the fact that Dearborn Magnet is a small alternative school that graduates fewer than 10 students each year. Or that the graduation rate has since swung wildly up and down even as the school continues to use Edgenuity.

For that particular school, that was something to celebrate, said Deborah Rayow, a vice president of Edgenuity, when asked about Dearborn Magnet. While the companys website does feature independent research studies of some of its other digital products, those focused on its credit-recovery programs were conducted internally and often provide little explanation of methodology.

A grand-jury investigation focused on the Newburgh Free Academy found systemic failure, including grade changing and manipulation of attendance records.

Implementation matters

The vendor chosen by school districts is just one of several factors that affect students experiences in online credit-recovery courses. How teachers interact with and support online credit-recovery courses has major effects on student success, as do district and state policies that dictate the grading and oversight of such classes.

Indeed, the resources that schools put in place to support online learning may have a much greater impact on students success than the particular vendor a school chooses. For starters, teachers need technical training on how to use the online platform. They need to have strategies to keep kids engaged and ensure students are actually doing the work instead of using an Internet search engine to look up and copy the answers. And schools need to keep class sizes manageable so that teachers can provide individualized feedback and support. In the Milwaukee study, for example, researchers observed teachers struggling to manage large groups of students, saw scant substantive interaction between teachers and students, and noted that students were frequently distracted by their cell phones or other websites.

John Watson of the Evergreen Education Group said in most cases, the biggest determining factor is the quality of the student-teacher relationship.

There is also tremendous variation in what district and state credit-recovery policies, standards, and regulations look likeif they exist at all. That makes it nearly impossible to know just what instruction looks like in practice from high school to high school. Some programs are condensed face-to-face classes, others are completely online, and still others are blended, in which students work in a computer lab with support from a certified teacher. In some districts, courses are graded on a pass/fail basis, while in others students can earn scores up to 100 percent. Some districts cap the number of credit-recovery courses a student can time at one time, while others dont. Some districts require students take paper-and-pencil assessments proctored by a teacher, while others allow testing to be completed at home on a computer.Some online classes are used to make up parts of a course, while others are designed as a wholesale replacement.

This variation is by design. One of the main appeals of credit-recovery programs is their flexibility and adaptability. Particularly when using online platforms, students can move through the course at their own pace and can skip large sections if they do well enough on a pre-assessment. Teachers and administrators are typically given wide latitude in deciding, for example, how many attempts students are given to pass a quiz and what score is needed to pass.

But this key strength can present a vulnerability. Credit recovery, including online programs, has been at the center of several scandals in recent years.

In Newburgh, a former teacher and coach lodged complaints with the local district attorneys office and state education department in 2017, alleging massive problems with chronic absenteeism and manipulation of student-athlete records at the districts high school, the Newburgh Free Academy. A resultant investigation culminated in a damning 89-page report by a grand jury that a local judge released to the public in April 2019, detailing major misuse by district staff of two software programs: Apex, the online credit-recovery course software, and Infinite Campus, which was used to track attendance.

In precise detail, the report documented the ways teachers and administrators at district high schools misused the Apex credit-recovery software to boost graduation rates artificially. The grand jury found that between 2016 and 2018, dozens of teachers overseeing the program made a total of more than 1,000 grade overrides to scored assessments. One teacher had altered students grades 325 times and some grades had been changed nearly five months after a test was taken. Students were allowed an unlimited number of opportunities to retake tests and quizzes. In a large number of cases, students had completed the online courses in an unusually short amount of time: one student completed the course in 18 minutes. And dozens of students earned course credit despite not meeting attendance requirements.

By design, Apex can be customized by educators, just as they customize traditional classroom instruction to fit student needs, according to Apex Learnings chief executive officer, Cheryl Vedoe. She said that almost every feature of an online program can be turned on or off by the course administrator.

When theyre teaching the traditional material, teachers every day make those judgment calls, when theyre grading student work and theyre giving students the opportunity to make things up, she said. You know, teachers as professionals do that every day with a more traditional curriculum.

The Newburgh report, however, stated that testimony from teachers revealed blind administration of a program of learning that ultimately served as a disservice to the students most in need of it . . . but which nonetheless serve the Newburgh Free Academys interests in increased graduation rates. The motivation to continue to operate the program in such a way is therefore clear.

A spokesperson for the Newburgh school district declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing investigation by the New York State Education Department. But the district has shared details of its response through public meetings, including a detailed presentation in April that notes it suspended its use of Apex and is designing a second chance evening school for students who need credit-recovery options.

So much we dont know

Its important not to conflate the abuse of credit recovery that occurred in Newburgh with well-intentioned efforts that may or may not actually help students. But the Newburgh example demonstrates the many ways online credit-recovery programs may function without academic integrity and ultimately undermine, rather than support, learning.

In recent years, dispatches from North Carolina, Florida, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.to name a fewhave described programs operated with little oversight and few safeguards to ensure students are being properly graded and awarded credit. Some states are starting to take action: the North Carolina State Board of Education, for example, is requiring all districts to develop clear policies for credit recovery.

Tougher still is the question of academic quality. The proliferation of online credit recovery is a logical development given the incentives that are baked in to current education policies. The era of accountability that No Child Left Behind ushered inand that the Every Student Succeeds Act has continued to a lesser extentplaced tremendous pressure on districts to raise graduation rates, or face consequences. At the same time, states have mostly failed to put in place the kind of oversight and regulations that would ensure rigor and quality are not sacrificed in the pursuit of higher graduation rates. The result is that states are incentivizing districts to boost graduation rates while placing a great deal of trust in districts and private vendors to preserve rigor and quality in the process.

There are potential tools to ensure rigor that states and districts could explore. Three states, for example, require students to pass an objective, external exam to recover credit for a course: Georgia, Louisiana, and New York. But most leave it to districts to set policies around vetting, adopting, and implementing credit-recovery courses.

States also could expand their use of end-of-course exams, which require students to show they have mastered certain knowledge and skills in required subjects. While far from universal, such exams have been used in 32 states and the District of Columbia since they first appeared in the 1990s, and are intended to serve as an external yardstick for specific coursework, helping to set and uphold academic standards.

An August 2019 study by Adam Tyner and Matthew Larsen found end-of-course exams generally positively correlated with high-school graduation rates. The exams can be deployed without stakes but with their results publicly reported so as to tamp down on grade inflation or abuse of credit-recovery programs, the authors wrote.

Its likely that many school districts are using credit recovery thoughtfully, with the necessary supports and resources in place to maximize student success and hold students accountable for their learning. But without additional information about how these programs are being adopted and implemented, theres just so much we dont know, Atwell, the Civic researcher, said.

As for the software companies, they say theres only so much they can do. Edgenuity and other vendors cant dictate the use of their materials any more than a publisher of a textbook could, said Rayow.

I think anyone who has been in school has been in classes where textbooks were used for good and where textbooks were used for not so good, she said. The same is true for digital education.

David Loewenberg is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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A Digital Path to a Diploma: Online credit-recovery classes are a lifelineand ripe for abuse - Education Next - EducationNext

GLOBAL

With the advent of the internet, the prospect of offering interactive educational online experiences started to be explored and, by the 1980s, the earliest virtual learning environments started to emerge. Moving forward to now, enrolments in online courses continue to grow by around 35% per annum as more and more higher education institutions deliver online degrees.

Industry and business also see the value in using online learning for training purposes and the online corporate market is experiencing healthy growth, which is expected to continue to grow by about 15% per year. Constant re-training and upskilling is essential in todays competitive marketplace.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges associated with online education is assuring parents, employers and students that the quality of what learners receive is just as good as that delivered in face-to-face mode. That challenge of course, is often compounded by the quality of what is actually offered and the ad hoc nature in which online education companies have sprung up.

What some of them are producing is very questionable and this affects more broadly how online learning is perceived.

While the stigma that was attached to online education in some countries and by some employers has almost disappeared and it is now largely accepted as being as credible as traditional face-to-face delivered degrees, there are still pockets of scepticism about the use of technologies in learning and the absence of a campus experience.

Earlier adopters such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom generally tend to view online degrees as being as good as those delivered face-to-face and thousands of students in those countries study online from undergraduate up to doctoral level. The trend universities in those locations are seeing is that more and more students are taking at least one course via online mode.

Todays reality is that students have to work to support themselves through university and the flexibility and convenience online offers is a huge bonus.

Education for all

Online learning options have made education more accessible and have gone some way to helping achieve the goal of education for all. Students can study from (almost) anywhere, at times that suit them and at their own pace. It also provides an amazing, sometimes overlooked opportunity of connecting students from different countries and cultures.

Still, it is important to acknowledge that learning via online delivery is not necessarily for everyone some students are better suited to face-to-face. Online demands, inter alia, student autonomy, self-direction and good time management.

Some students need the social, physical interaction with other students and with instructors. In the online learning environment, the teacher and learner are separated and how this is treated drives the success or failure of online learning.

There are many stakeholders in the online learning environment. These include the institutions that offer online education, the staff who teach the courses, the students enrolled in online study, the parents paying their childs fees, the prospective employers of graduates from online courses, the ministry or government and the broader society.

First and foremost, all these stakeholders want the online courses to meet certain standards, be quality assured and accredited and so be recognised nationally and internationally. It means having in place a supportive governmental policy environment.

Institutions that deliver online should have clearly spelt out quality assurance mechanisms in place for staff and students and make sure these are implemented. Staff who develop and deliver online must be appropriately qualified and supported professionally. Adequate resourcing and investment in technology that works must be available.

Lastly and just as importantly, there must be a guarantee that learners have access to support right through their learning journey, from admission up to graduation. The key is to develop ways for online students to feel as if they belong, they are connected, they can develop relationships even if they are virtual.

To support this, instructors need to proactively engage with students, get to know them and maintain contact throughout their study, as well as incorporate methods to motivate and encourage them and foster student to student contact also. Unresponsive instructors are a significant factor in students not continuing with their online studies.

An interconnected support scheme

The whole process can be summed up as an interconnected support scheme where the students do the learning, the instructor provides the learning materials and supports the students learning process, the higher education institution makes available the infrastructure and systems for the instructors delivering the courses to the students and the ministry authority or government that oversees the accreditation of academic programmes provides an appropriate policy environment for all stakeholders engaged in online education.

Technology has brought great advantages to the online teaching-learning environment. It has changed how we do teaching and learning and opened up the world of learning and opportunity to those who would not have had such opportunity without it.

However, for online education to be successful there has to be commitment and support by governments, institutions, academics and learners. An absolute necessity is providing quality education. That means well-resourced institutions, well-qualified and motivated staff, good and continuous quality assurance mechanisms and supportive leadership.

Nita Temmerman (PhD) is a former university pro vice-chancellor (academic) and executive dean of the faculty of education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is currently visiting professor to Ho Chi Minh City Open University and Papua New Guinea University of Technology, academic reviewer at the University of Queensland, Australia, as well as invited specialist with the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications, invited external reviewer with Oman Academic Accreditation Authority, and a published author.

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The quality of online higher education must be assured - University World News

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, U.S. The Grain Elevator and Processing Society (GEAPS) and Kansas State University (KSU) are offering online courses focusing on inspections, quality management systems, maintenance, safety and flour milling. The five courses will run from Oct. 29 through Dec. 3, and registration closes Oct. 23.

The GEAPS 522: FGIS Grain Inspection Orientation was developed by the U.S. Department of Agricultures Federal Grain Inspection Service in conjunction with GEAPS and KSU. It introduces the basics of grain inspections, provides a history of inspection and an overview of general techniques.

In the GEAPS 530: Quality Management Systems for Bulk Materials Handling Operations participants learn about quality management systems and how to use them in agricultural storage environments. This course provides strategies for integrating systems into normal business activities and teaches how to create food safety plans and develop quality management systems. After completing the course, participants should be able to do a basic quality analysis of facility operations and identify points where physical quality or economics are impacted.

The GEAPS 540: Entry Level Safety lectures identify the main risks of working in the industry, discuss precautions and emphasize the need to learn and follow company and facility safety and health policies. This course is a great resource for new grain industry workers, and serves a refresher for more experienced employees.

The GEAPS 554: Equipment Maintenance I course teaches safe function, monitoring, adjustments, maintenance and repair of equipment used in grain facility operations. Lectures cover the parts, components and troubleshooting of common elevator equipment. They also address maintenance methodology, dust suppression and collection, power drive transmissions, screw conveyors and bin sweeps.

The GEAPS: 630 Quality Control, Quality Assurance Practices in Flour Milling course focuses on the quality control and quality assurance principles of milling, including milling process quality, flour analysis, sampling and additives. Participants will learn methods to quantitatively analyze both flour quality and mill performance. The tools and techniques introduced in this course will enable better and more efficient communication between the milling operative and the quality control/quality assurance department.

GEAPS 530, 540 and 630 are all required for base credentials from GEAPS and KSU. Learn more about the credential program on the GEAPS website.

Courses cost $700 for GEAPS members and $965 for non-members. Courses can be completed any time over the five-week schedule, and each offering should take approximately 10 hours to complete. Companies can save up to 20% on blocks of registrations with the volume discount program. For more information about the courses or the GEAPS/KSU Distance Education Program, visit the GEAPS website.

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GEAPS, KSU to host online grain education sessions - World Grain