Jose Ferreira writes here about accreditation issues and their effect on education revolution. As we have discussed for a number of years now, that’s where the present gates or bottlenecks are for change. We’ve talked about two sorts of accreditation, one upon exit from DLE, or one upon entry into workforce position. Jose was in DC talking with big wigs like Arne Duncan on this:
Last week, I was fortunate enough to sit down with a small working group of education entrepreneurs and policy makers in DC to discuss ways to promote positive change. It was organized by AOL Co-Founder and Revolution CEO Steve Case.
In addition to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Under Secretary Martha Kanter, and Asst. Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton, the group included 2U’s Jeremy Johnson, StraighterLine’s Burck Smith, Chegg’s Ann Dwane, Echo360’s Fred Singer, Blackboard founder Michael Chasen, Knewton COO David Liu, Ujjwal Gupta from BenchPrep, and Donna Harris from Startup America.
During the conversation, I advocated strongly for the government to play a prominent role in encouraging institutions at all levels to expand their credit acceptance policies to accept — without friction — online courses from any other legitimate school. I am convinced that no other one policy would do more to accelerate education innovation.