Here is a great paper relating to many of the issues we discuss in this forum pertaining to DL, accreditation and financial aid... Maintaining the Delicate Balance: Distance Learning, Higher Education Accreditation, and the Politics of Self-Regulation is the second paper on distance learning education commissioned by the American Council on Education (ACE) and EDUCAUSE. It describes the impact of distance learning on the balance among accreditation (to assure quality in higher education), institutional self-regulation, and the availability of federal money to colleges and universities. The paper confronts the challenges of protecting students and the public from poor-quality higher education, and attending to quality in an increasingly internationalized higher education marketplace. The paper hits many of the points we discuss everyday and is light reading (39 pages). http://www.acenet.edu/bookstore/pdf/distributed-learning/distributed-learning-02.pdf (Requires Adobe - .PDF format)