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Welcome and Introduction
Remarks by Marshall Smith
Remarks by The Honorable Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Panel on GEARUP
Panel on LAAP and Distance Learning
Luncheon
Panel on Title II Teacher Quality
Wrap Up Session
M. McLaughlin: Hello. Welcome back to the second session at this Brookings meeting. I am Maureen McLaughlin, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Education for Policy, Planning and Innovation in Post-Secondary Education. I am delighted to have the opportunity to be here at the conference today overall and to have the opportunity to chair this wonderful panel on distance learning.
With respect to the overall objectives of the Brookings' conference, I want to say that it's wonderful to have a conference where people are coming together to talk about implementation of new initiatives.
Over the past few years, I've worked on a number of pieces of legislation, starting with the sort of idea generation through working with Congress to have the piece of legislation enacted. And then also, I've had the opportunity and privilege to work on some of the implementation issues. And I really do see, having gone through that entire process, that while a good, solid, well-written piece of legislation is essential, it is not the answer that you will have a perfect program or have exactly the intended results that you wanted. The implementation, how you design your regulation, what processes you involve in terms of designing specifics, the application packages, the review processes: all of these, what you might call nitty-gritty details of how you get a program up and running really have major impacts on the final effect of the legislation.
We also heard some this morning about partnerships with a variety of players, including foundations, that are another way that you help to influence the effectiveness and the breadth of the effectiveness of programs. So I really am delighted to have the opportunity to be here today on a program that brings together design of new programs and implementation. But, let me move on to distance learning, which is the topic of this session and sort of change gears, because the focus of this session on distance learning is quite different than the session that you just heard on gear up and early intervention programs.
What I'd like to do is very briefly talk about what we were trying to achieve when we designed the administration proposals on distance learning, and then turn it over to my colleagues to talk, both more specifically about the programs and implementation, and what they're doing out in the field.
For us in the Department of Education, distance learning is really a means to an end. What we are concerned about is access to higher education, broadening opportunities for people throughout the country to have additional opportunities to get the kind of post-secondary education that they want and need for their particular objectives, and that distance learning is a way to expand those opportunities to people who might not have had the opportunities, or opportunities of a different kind that are not limited by place or time.
And so really distance learning, which has lots of very intricate details and technical issues, is for us a means to an end, a means to provide additional access to Americans for post-secondary education opportunities and lifelong learning.
When the administration put together their proposal on distance learning, we had really that objective in mind, which was to expand opportunities for distance learning and expand access. And we had two pieces in our proposal that were complementary, but different pieces of the distance learning direction. The first was to look at the rules and regulations for student aid eligibility and to put distance learners on a more equal footing with traditional learners in terms of their eligibility for student aid to help pay for their educations. And the second was the learning anytime, anywhere partnership program.
What I'm going to do is talk very quickly about the distance learning and then turn it over to Brian Lekander, who is running the LAAP Program to talk about LAAP.
When we put together our proposal on the student aid rules and regulations, the rules and regulations for student aid delivery were designed with a traditional model in mind, and not only were they designed with a traditional model in mind, they had many safeguards and constraints to prevent abuse that many felt might occur if you didn't have a very well laid out and fairly rigid model.
And what we wanted to do was to be more flexible on those rules and regulations to allow distance learners to be able to have more access to student aid and therefore more access to education, but to do it in a careful and considerate way that ensured accountability for students, for institutions, and for taxpayers.
So we suggested some fairly broad changes in certain rules. For instance, there was a rule that if you had more than 50 percent of your students or your courses in distance then you were ineligible for student aid. We suggested relaxing that rule and relaxing it for degree granting institutions, which we hoped was a careful way to provide more eligibility for distance learning, but to do it in a careful and cautious way starting at degree granting institutions and see how it moved.
Many, however, were still concerned that even what we thought was some careful ways of dealing with accountability issues, some were still concerned that there was too much potential for abuse. And the compromise in this area was to have a distance education demonstration program. So what we have is a program where 15 institutions for the first two years, or a consortia of institutions, will be granted waivers for certain rules and regulations to be able to try out more eligibility for student in distance learning, and for us to be able to evaluate what happens and what the effects are before we move ahead in a larger way.
So we will select 15 institutions or a consortia of institutions, and that processes selecting those institutions is just about done. The department will be announcing the institutions and consortia who will participate in the demonstration program in the next day or two or three. So we're very close but we can't say who they are today.
That was a process of people sending in applications and then having expert peer viewers come in and review the proposals and select a set of institutions and consortia that would allow us to tryout different things and to have a broad representation of types of institutions across the country.
So we will be using that as an opportunity to learn, to do an evaluation which we will then submit to Congress, and we also have the ability to up the number of institutions or consortia in the third year by another 20. And the expectation is that the evaluation will help to look at different issues and set the stage for what kinds of changes we would want to do in student aid eligibility in the future.
These second part of our approach on the distance learning, which was a complementary approach, was the Learning Anytime, Anywhere Partnership Program. This is a competitive grant program that was designed to tryout new partnerships, to leverage federal dollars for change, to experiment and spur innovative uses of technology to provide learning opportunities anytime, anywhere. And in this case, we put forward the proposal and the end proposal that was enacted by Congress was almost verbatim the proposal that we had put forth.
So what I will do it is let to Brian Lekander, who is the person in charge of implementing the LAAP program, talk with you about how we're implementing it, where we are in terms of implementation, and how different decisions on how to carry out the competitions affect the kinds of work that we are doing.
Brian is a member of the FIPSE staff, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, who had worked on many issues related to distance in the past and is now running the LAAP program.
Thank you. Brian.
B. Lekander: Okay. Thanks, Maureen.
Good morning. The Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships, as Maureen suggested, is really interested in funding partnerships among colleges and universities, but also involving the business sector, community agencies, school districts, any player that might have a stake in post-secondary education. And the program is really focus upon a particular subset of distance education that we are calling anytime anywhere learning, meaning we want to make it possible for students to be able to access programs literally anytime and anywhere. We will be relying upon technologies such as the Internet, or the CD-ROM, which can enable students to work at anytime of the day or night. They can work around their other life commitments, if they have children, jobs, whatever.
But, also we want them to be able to have programs that are self-paced, where they can enroll at anytime of the year, make progress based upon their achievements, and have those recognized so that they can finish at any given time, so that they won't, in other words, be bound by the restrictions of the traditional academic calendar.
That, we think, is particularly important for folks such as those who have been displaced from jobs or people in the welfare rolls, for example, people who need quick retraining where they don't necessarily have the luxury of waiting around for the academic calendar to pursue their education.
I just want to say a few things about how we actually made some implementation decisions about the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships. First, we made a conscious decision to model LAAP very much on the FIPSE comprehensive program, which has over a quarter century of track record in fostering innovative educational reform projects. And there are several key elements of the comprehensive program that we wanted to carry over. One is that we wanted to have an open competition that was not prescriptive and that was what we call field responsive. In other words, we wanted to be able to respond to the ideas that arose from the field rather than specifying strict models for which applicants would have to follow.
Secondly, we have adopted a two-stage application and review process. Applicants first submit brief preliminary proposals which are reviewed, and a select number are invited before we actually receive the final proposals. Now the purpose of this is really two-fold, I think. One is to encourage people, through a relatively easy gateway, to get their ideas at place so that we can hear them. We can learn from them, reviewers can see them.
Secondly, when you have the second step, you have the opportunity to provide feedback to those applicants. So they get the benefit of the comments of the reviewers and the proposal can then evolve into a stronger thing than maybe how it started.
Finally, I think one of the key things that FIPSE has always emphasized that we wanted to carry over into LAAP is an emphasis not only on program sustainability and growth, but also on ongoing program evaluation, so that we are mindful of how and whether students are learning and how certain kinds of models on the institutional programmatic level are working as well.
With all of these things in mind, we still had some major decisions to make about how actually to define priorities, and for that we very quickly did, using list serves and other rapid means of communication, did a survey of the field and we got well over 100 responses that were all very carefully written from people all over the country, most of whom were from colleges and universities, but a lot of whom were from technology companies or potential employers of higher ed graduates and so on.
And I just want to share with you a couple of these salient pieces of advice that they shared with us, and that we tried to reflect in our priorities. First, they all agree that the time was ripe, the technology has developed sufficiently to really focus on this anytime anywhere paradigm. But, to do this institutions need to be pushed a little bit, because they need to undergo a kind of cultural shift. There's a lot of things, or ways of operating, I guess, everything from a basic 15-week semester to notions that they're serving students in relatively small geographic regions that have shaped the way institutions are structured and the way in which practice as developed. And in some cases, I guess, these could be called structural things or policy things. In some cases, it's just a matter of habit. But, in any case, they're barriers to anytime anywhere education.
So, we want to provide some incentive in the LAAP program for institutions to rethink things a bit, so that they are really constructing programs with an aim to serving student needs, and in particular adult student needs, as opposed to relying strictly on traditional academic practices in taking those things for granted.
Secondly, we were advised that partnerships were a real good thing here because institutions can't do this kind of education alone. The programs are just too expensive and complex to mount, and institutions going it alone are liable to make the mistake that if they build it, students will just naturally come, and that may not work in a world where it more and more competitive in higher education. So we were encouraged to do was only to fund those things which really encourage sharing and use partnerships to implement programs on a large-scale. Partly so that they would be large enough to attain student enrollment that were sufficiently large to recoup development and operating costs, but also so that the programs would have a broad enough reach that it would prevent the need for individual institutions to unnecessarily duplicate what others are doing. We didn't want a situation where a whole lot of nearby providers especially are all doing the same thing and leaving lots of student needs undealt with.
Finally, I'd like to emphasize that we were told that doing this, promoting this kind of partnership arrangement, we would raise a whole series of new problems that institutions would have to deal with. For example, if you are in a joint venture how do you share development costs, and correspondingly how you distribute revenues, who gets what? How might you deal with certain kinds of problems with the student, like in showing credit reciprocity. All of these kinds of things are things that we hope that LAAP projects would deal with, in addition to just developing the curricular programs and degree programs.
But we also thought that the goal should be always to serve students and to make their experience navigating this changing higher ed environment as seamless as possible, so that they wouldn't necessarily see any adverse effects from these changes in institutional policy, they would have the flexibility to draw from different providers, and they would be supported by a full range of student services. So that's what we were generally aiming for when planning the LAAP competition.
Let me just give you a quick update on where we are at. We had a deadline, the preliminary deadline, on April 2nd and we received 653 applications. This was substantially more than we had anticipated. It was a large enough group to include almost 4000 partners. That means any of the partnering organizations, it might be colleges, it might be systems, it might be businesses. Approximately 45 percent of the applications had business and industry partners, and the grants leveraged a cost share of about 150 percent of the actual federal requests.
Of the 653 proposals, we've invited 122 of those to the final round. We just got those in last Friday, and we are just beginning the review process to determine the actual award winners. By the end of July, we hope to make approximately 25 awards averaging about a million dollars per grant. And these grants will be about three to five years in length. Hopefully most of them will be three years.
Within the applicant pool there is a tremendous variety. We've got, in addition to projects that create programs, we've got projects that specifically address support services, that address accreditation of distant education programs, and we've got a tremendous variety of topics that they deal with as well, everything from vocational subjects, like training firefighters and heating and air conditioning maintenance workers onto teacher education, most of the allied health fields, nursing, as well as the sort of traditional liberal arts subjects as well.
M. McLaughlin: Thank you. Brian.
As you can see from what Brian says, the interest in LAAP has really been phenomenal, far more than we had expected, and we've really been quite excited about the quality of the proposals that have come in and are looking forward to the final decisions.
Our next panelist is Mary Beth Susman. And Mary Beth is going to talk about, as she put it, the reality of what goe