The Washington Post published an article, summarized as follows: “Some online colleges allow students to take unlimited courses on their own time, leading to quick degrees and worries about devaluing credentials.” The piece focused on the phenomenon of degree hacking, in which learners have figured out that certain credentials can be attained through some combination of (1) prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR), (2) competency-based assessment, (3) flat tuition independent of course load, and (4) self-paced online courses. Together, these features allow what critics call degree hacking: the idea that a program’s design can be exploited to earn credentials in a fraction of the expected time.
There is a great deal to unpack here, from questions about what counts as an “appropriate” time to complete a course or degree, to distinctions between forms of online education, to questions about who has access to higher education and who does not. But the issue I wanted to address was our tendency to police this phenomenon rather than approach it with curiosity. So, I wrote the letter below, which the Post published last week. I am posting it here for posterity.
As a professor of education and researcher of online learning, I was disappointed to see speedy graduates framed as a problem to be investigated and policed in the April 20 front-page article “Educators alarmed by students ‘speed running’ online degrees.” Look again at these students. Before one student enrolled, they spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work. Another student finished 16 courses in 22 days while balancing full-time employment and a 6-year-old.
These learners aren’t gaming a loophole. They’re demonstrating self-direction, time management and strategic planning. These are the very skills higher-education leaders and employers claim to want from graduates. Whether a five-week philosophy course teaches as much philosophy as a 15-week one is a fair question. Whether these students are learning is not: They are demonstrating it on the assessments their own institutions designed to measure it. If the yardstick is wrong, that is an institutional problem, not a student one. And yet, as the article itself noted, the institutional response is to police them.
Jason McDonald
Thanks George. I almost completely agree. Particularly that it’s an incredible institutional failing to police students for taking seriously the promise we made them that education can be super flexible.
I think the one issue I see differently than you is that this seems like a both/and situation, not an either/or. Because at the same time the institution failed, it does seem like students are likewise exploiting the programs to get through with as little friction as possible. Again, they’re doing exactly what the institution hyped up to them, but I don’t think that equates, necessarily, to the students showing “self-direction, time management and strategic planning,” as you do. The same examples you highlighted (16 courses in 22 days?) againread very much like we created an online diploma mill and then freaked out when it worked better than expected.
So I propose another story. This isn’t a story of degree hacking or student ingenuity. It’s a story about the chickens coming home to roost in our lowest-common denominator approach to online ed.
George Veletsianos
Jason! Always a pleasure to hear from you. This is the kind of response I was hoping I would provoke, and I appreciate you sharing this! The piece I couldn’t fit in 250 words is exactly the both/and you point to. I do think there are many stories here. An additional one is our tendency (including my own) to universalize about online education when it is many different things to many different people in the same way that in-person education is. For example, I suspect “16 courses in 22 days” represents someone who studied the material over months, then enrolled and sat the (competency-based?) assessments in 22 days, rather than someone absorbing 16 courses’ worth of new content in three weeks from scratch. Hard to tell. But yes, that’s partly a story of rational response to incentives. What I think your framing captures that mine didn’t is that the institution and the students can both be doing exactly what the system rewards, and the system can still be the problem.
Jason McDonald
You’re absolutely right. It includes us researchers, too; online education is many different things to each of us. I don’t think we can underestimate how our own experiences shape how we see, study, and understand the phenomenon we research. My assessment of how the student got through 16 courses so fast is based on my own experience taking correspondence courses as an undergraduate. I wasn’t nearly as speedy as this student, but I compelted Statistics and Accounting in three weeks each. And even that was because there was an enforced three week minimum–without that I would have been done much faster. And I can tell you it wasn’t because I was prepared for the material. They just weren’t very robust courses….