UNISA lets DETC lapse

Sorry, but you haven't answered a very simple contradiction. Let me put it differently: what makes you think YOU understand this, but officials at several universities THAT HAVE GONE THROUGH DETC ACCREDITATION do not? Other than your opinion, of course.

 

Three anonymous posters, vs. several well-established universities who have gone through the DETC accreditation process. Hmmm, which to believe? I just can't figure it out!

 

DETC outside

Unless a prostective student is from the USA, DETC is useless. It was only added to the Unisa brand to attract American students because DETC and Regional accreditation (etc) is American and holds no meaning outside the USA.

Unisa is accreditded as per the Commonwealth (http://www.acu.ac.uk/) manner and therefore, for students familiar with it, who live in or are connected to the Commonwealth, there is no need to have DETC or any other American accreditation. The same applies for the Agence universitaire de la francophonie (http://www.auf.org/) for French language universities around the globe. Most of the world relies on a simpler and more understandable method of accreditation.

 

This from UNISA:

http://www.unisa.ac.za/contents/news/docs/unisa%20link.pdf

UNISA was DETC accredited in 2002. The accreditation was for 5 years.

This also from UNISA:

http://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=7

Boldface emphasis mine

It sure seems to me UNISA knew exactly what DETC accreditation was\is from the beginning.

My guess is that the merger proved to have too many hurdles for UNISA to maintain DETC at this point in time.

Just my humble little opinion based on the above citations.

 

Keep in mind that words like "prestigious" are rarely mistaken for meaningful, even by those using it. It is market speak of the nth degree.

UNISA knows what DETC accreditation is and how/why it is different from RA and made a market driven decision. Market decisions are always fluid and subject to change for many reasons.

But you can't take as valid and reliable anything anyone says about something in which they have a strong vested interest. If UNISA chooses to spend money and time to align with ABCD accreditation, it then will become the subject of the development of new market speak.

This says little about DETC and its charter.

 

Hi, Michael. I was wondering (and kind of hoping) that was the reason.

I think that the biggest obstacle that Australian distance learning faces in the US isn't a perception that it isn't accredited. It's that Americans are largely unaware that it exists in the first place. If Australian DL is serious about entering the US market, it probably needs to market itself like it does in places like Singapore.

That's a good point. American employers still aren't entirely familiar with distance learning and certainly not with the fine points of other countries higher education systems. So being able to say 'it's accredited' is probably a plus in that context. The American employee can just check a box as opposed to educating a skeptical employer about foreign accreditation-equivalence.

 

The fact that some Australian and UNISA have decided to go for DETC accreditation does not add credibility to it. They thought that it would give them more business but if UNISA is not bothering with it, it doesn't say much about DETC.

3 anonymous posters only open the door to the possibility that it might actually have harmed prospect business for UNISA. I'm not saying that this is a fact but something that have turned off more than one student when deciding for schools.

 

Actually, UNISA gave a lift to DETC's brand in North America, not the other way around... and it's just plain weird though that they didn't continue it for their North American students.

My concern about DETC is that it needs to grow its image and staff to match its most obvious destiny, which I believe Rich Douglas prognosticated: the premier DL accreditor.

Dave

 

That makes sense to me. I believe the merger had something to do with it. A quick google of UNISA DETC found a number of positive sounding webpages related to UNISA being DETC accredited.

Anyway, hope you have a great trip!

 

Being unaccredited is better than being DETC accredited? If somebody objects that these foreign schools aren't unaccredited, that they have their own local eqivalent of accreditation, then how does adding DETC accreditation change that?

There are situations here in the US that demand RA (or perhaps specialized accreditations). Typically, schools like Monash are accepted as RA equivalent with no worries. I can't imagine that Monash's DETC accreditation will reduce its degrees' acceptablity around here.

Where DETC might help is in an employee tuition-reimbursement situation. I'm sure that many companies' policies don't even consider DL. They just assume that employees will be taking night classes or something, and require that those programs be 'accredited' (often with no further qualifier). So what happens when an employee located in San Jose wants to attend a university located in Melbourne? The company never even envisioned that possibility when it wrote its tuition reimbursement policy. So the employee can either try to deliver a learned discourse on Australian higher education to some HR person, or just check the 'accredited' box.

 

Very true. In the mid-1990's, I tried to get our HR group to reimburse a student for Open University in UK and it would have required an EVP's approval. Any accredited school in North America with a program to help the employee prepare for advancement would have passed the test though.

Dave

 

The latest DETC publication from the Accrediting Commission notes the University of New England (Australia) resigned their accreditation as of February.

Yes, that's right. It didn't expire, the university actually resigned it. Interesting isn't it?

 

Interesting, but again, you need to provide to the skeptics a research report with interviews, surveys, statistics or a PhD dissertation in order to support the idea the DETC is useless for them.

 

Not so much of an issue for an undergraduate student but it can be an issue for a graduate student. Let's say that you are in Canada and you have a doctorate from UNISA and you put that in your resume for an adjunct position or even a full time position, the person in charge of verifying your credentials does a google search on UNISA and writes in a report for a hiring committe that UNISA is DETC accredited. You have to understand that the average person have never heard of UNISA and the only information available to make a decision might be the DETC accreditation only because timing issues, if this is the case, the person screening the candidates might feel that DETC is not good enough for the school and oversees the fact that UNISA is South African chartered only because DETC was the very first thing it appeared in google. I know this sounds silly, but why would you want to get a degree associated with an accrediting agency that might hinder you for a faculty position? I know this logic might be used by only few students but the idea that the accreditation is not adding value and on top taking students away makes no sense for UNISA. (disclaimer: this is only an opinion and no research studies have been conducted to back up this as a scientific fact)

 

I think that what would matter more to the hiring committee or the average person is whether UNISA is a legitimate and reputable institution in its country rather than whether it's accreditted by DETC...

 

No, it isn't "opinion." You're basing your scenario on an unproven assumption, that someone, somehwhere would look negatively on a UNISA degree because they found out UNISA is also accredited by the DETC.

This thread has some very arcane theoreticals. Snide remarks about "research studies" and "scientific" fact don't excuse you from unsubstantiated and sloppy thinking.

 

Isn't that presupposing that the people doing the evaluating will be incompetent? I realize that academics are incompetents by their very nature, but I give them a little more credit than that. (Grudgingly.)

It seems to me that your evaluators will either know that the University of South Africa is a South African university with its own South African status, or else they won't. If they do know, then adding DETC won't change things. If they don't know, then deleting DETC won't change things.

There may be a handful of cases where (1.) the evaluator has never heard of UNISA and is clueless about its South African status, (2.) the evaluator never thinks to investigate any further upon learning about DETC, and (3.) despite not having a clue about how foreign universities work, still being so familiar with and prejudiced against DETC as to reject the application on that basis alone. That's possible I guess, but I don't really think that it happens very often.

I've never taught a college class and don't anticipate ever doing so. I definitely can't speak about adjunct hiring in fields like business. Perhaps it is just a matter of checking a doctorate box on an application and some perfunctory Google searches.

But in the academic hiring that I've observed, hiring committees knew the reputations of the departments where candidates did their doctoral work. If they wanted a geophysics professor with a strength in seismology or something, they would know whether the school where a candidate graduated has any discernable profile in seismology, tectonics or whatever. They would know the professors that the candidate worked with and probably have a file of recommendations and publications and stuff. They weren't clueless at all and they did their work with considerable care. I just can't imagine DETC impacting that process very much, one way or the other.

 

Waiting to express an opinion until it is well-informed is rarely a bad thing.