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Ed Surge

Mordecai I. Brownlee

March 23, 2023

This semester, the Community College of Aurora rolled out the first microcredentials in its history. These short courses offer students the opportunity to study behavioral health, which aligns with jobs in our region related to human services, sociology, counseling, psychology and social work.

Community colleges, which have historically served as comprehensive institutions offering associate degrees with transfer articulation agreements to four-year colleges, have also served as workforce drivers through their array of educational credit and non-credit courses. However, as industry and technology have evolved rapidly, inadequate higher education funding and rising costs due to inflation have affected higher education’s responsiveness.

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EDSCOOP

Lindsay McKenzie

March 20, 2023

Educause is continuing to press the U.S. Department of Education to revise its oversight of edtech providers.

Educause is continuing to work with its institutional members and other higher education organizations to get the U.S. Department of Education to reconsider its recent guidance on ‘third-party servicers,’ according to an update the higher ed IT organization shared last week.

The department’s guidance, in the form of a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter last month, was intended to expand the department’s oversight of online program management companies by classing them as ‘third-party servicers’ — a category of organizations that are required to report details of their business dealings with colleges and universities.

The department’s definition of ‘third-party servicers’ is now so broad, however, that it could be interpreted to cover any provider offering educational content, services, software or systems to higher education institutions. This could create “unnecessary burdens for higher education institutions and their providers,” Jarret Cummings, Educause’s senior adviser for policy and government relations, wrote last week in Educause Review.

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Inside Higher Ed

Doug Lederman

March 22,2023

The educational services giant, which has been supplanted in the space by 2U, Coursera and others, sells its online services unit to a private equity firm in an unsettled landscape.

Once upon a time, Pearson Education helped Arizona State University become one of the biggest online powers in higher education. It was one of the first, and most significant, arrangements in what would come to be known as the online program management industry.

That contract more than a decade ago made Pearson a major player in the burgeoning industry that has done nothing but expand as more colleges and universities move into online education (despite growing regulatory scrutiny).

But the formal expiration of Pearson’s contract with Arizona State, announced last summer, solidified what had been clear for years, which is that Pearson had been supplanted as a market leader by 2U, Coursera and a slew of other players. A few months later, it announced a “strategic review” of its online services division, which led to speculation that it would sell the unit and, in the eyes of numerous market observers, put Pearson in competitive limbo.

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