Just Curious.... Since there are Catagories of Schools(in the RA World) by respectibility (Tier 1, Tier 2 and so on as per US NEWS COllege Ranklings) I was just wondering if there is such a ranking for DL schools.
Although it probably isn't fair, I'd imagine that the "rankings" probably break down something like this, if they exist at all: 1. Degree-granting "Extension", "Outreach", or "Adult Education" arms of well-known brick and mortar universities. (RA) 2. Lesser known schools that have a brick and mortar campus, but also cater extensively to the Distance Learner. (RA) 3. "Virtual" campuses of large, multi-site "for-profit" schools, such as Capella or Phoenix. (RA) 4. Non-RA schools with a distance learning arm. (DTEC, other "national" accrediting) 5. Legitimate unaccredited institutions that are unaccredited because they are either too new or have some sort of political opposition to accreditation. (Bob Jones, etc.) 6. The rest. Corporate Distance Learning Programs, Hamburger University, etc. 7. Degree Mills, LEGITIMATE UNIVERSITY DEGREES FOR LIFE EXPERIENCE, Kinko's and Mailboxes, Etc. "campuses". The question is where the "big 3" DL schools fit in here - my guess would be somewhere between 2 and 3, but personally, I have a lot of respect for people who have the initiative and drive to design and plan their own educations the way you have to to get a degree from Excelsior, COSC, or TESC.
This may be an accurate ranking in terms of public perceptions. But it's rather sad. Hopefully this will change, and each institution will be known more for its effectiveness than its position in this classification. I already see some of this -- e.g. Capella, Fielding are more highly regarded than Phoenix, AIU, and some traditional B&M schools. I also wonder where foreign ("GAAP") schools would fall? I would guess generally in category 4 of Fortunato's scale.
It is sad, but I don't think it is going to change. With the influx of so many schools with technology changes, I think it will become even more so now than ever.
I think that before we can rank schools, we have to settle on some criteria with which to evaluate them. So I think that it might be useful to look at why people choose the schools they do. What characteristics are we looking for in a school and how do we weight them in our choices? There's already been a thread on that. See (here). But it's more complicated than that, because the word 'best' is ambiguous. There's 'best' in a 'personal-suitability' sense, and 'best' in a normative 'objectively-best' sense. I'm not sure how we determine the latter, even though I think that most of us feel intuitively that some schools are objectively better than others. I guess that part of the difference is that 'best' in the broader sense is defined by a larger set of stakeholders. We are not only considering students' reasons for choosing a school, we are considering what employers want in a graduate, what professional and scholarly organizations respect, what licensing bodies demand and so on. But I still wonder whether we can ever settle on a single set of criteria that work equally well across disciplines and professions. Probably the most general standard is public-perception, I guess. The importance of that shouldn't be underestimated. But I think that public perception is often superficial, to say nothing of circular and self-reinforcing. (Individuals respect what the group respects, but the group is composed of individuals.) I prefer to look at the opinions of smaller, better informed, professional and scholarly groups. You can find some of the nation's best specialist programs at lesser known schools, while the public simply believes that Harvard is best, even in subjects that Harvard doesn't even offer.
I didn't think about foreign schools when I was pounding that post out last night. But I would expect that it depends on the country. Canadian, Australian, South African, and European universities/colleges will probably give people more "warm fuzzies" that schools from less developed areas. So, say that so-called "first world" schools would fall somewhere from 1-4 on the scale in my original post, depending on such factors as name recognition, etc., and "third-world" schools would fall in somewhere at 4 or below. And before people jump on my case - remember, I'm talking perception (since really, isn't that all these school rankings measure?) out in "the real world", and specifically, in the US. People in the DL community may well know that the Kenyan Institute of Technology Training (K.I.T.T.) offers the world's best distance education program in talking-car engineering. But unfortunately, whether it be instituionalized racism or whatever, Americans with degrees from American schools want to hire other Americans with degrees from American schools. They'll make exceptions for some other countries, but not all of them. We probably miss out on people with some great training and skills, but that is the unfortunate reality of the world we live in.
