Last month I asked our readers to contemplate whether or not we’re “on a road to nowhere” as we prepare for the fall and beyond. Today, I want to take a look at where we are on that road and consider what this journey may look like for the next several months.
In 1985 The Talking Heads released “Road to Nowhere.” That song, and that metaphor, have been on my mind a lot lately as I think about where higher education is going in the fall and beyond.
I suspect many of us feel a bit like Phil Connors right now—every day seems like the last as we go through a seemingly endless series of Zoom meetings, emails, and revisiting many of the same issues over and over as circumstances require us to reevaluate and revise former decisions. High on that list of issues is likely questions about federal regulations and regulatory relief in this time or remote education.
Even before the COVID-19 global pandemic, higher education was struggling to make sense of what David La Piana and Melissa Mendes call a VUCA world in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World. Originally coined by the US military to describe a post-Cold War world, VUCA stands for:
· Volatile– The world is rapidly changing and is no longer static.
· Uncertain– The world is unpredictable.
· Complex– The world is interwoven and interconnected.
· Ambiguous– We no longer understand what the change levers are or even the extent to which everything is interconnected.
This post will examine the proposed changes to the distance education and credit hour definitions. We’ll have another post early next week that will dig deeper into the proposed changes related to direct assessment and competency-based education as well as a few other select issues such as proposed changes to the credit hour definition, calculating financial aid eligibility for correspondence education, and defining an instructional week for asynchronous delivery.
On November 8, 1965, surrounded by faculty, lawmakers, and former teachers on the gymnasium floor at his alma mater, Southwest Texas State University, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Higher Education Act of 1965. At the time Johnson claimed that the bill would “swing open a new door for the young people of America… [T]his means the path of knowledge is open to all that have the determination to walk it.”
