The coronavirus has caused major disruptions in the lives of people around the world in 2020. The academic world is no exception. The spread and severity of the virus has resulted in major academic changes in university class availability and content delivery; the use of technology for administrative, faculty and student meetings; how clubs and…

The COVID-19 school closures offered states and local school districts an opportunity to reimagine education--to tailor it to meet students' needs, support teachers and aid their professional development, keep schools safe, and better support families. Thus far, not a lot of imagination is on display. In particular, schools are not taking…

When schools closed their doors in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a scramble to adjust to remote learning. Over the summer and into the fall, the debate over reopening took center stage, as school leaders struggled to answer how and when it would be safe to return to the classroom. The Center for American Progress (CAP)…

This brief report uses data collected under the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Fall Enrollment survey to highlight distance education data in the state of Utah. The sample for this analysis is comprised of all active, degree-granting…

There are differences in the benefits that are afforded by the two extremes of face-to-face and distance education. University campus courses are based on the assumption that the student community and interaction between learners and an expert teacher in the same physical location is essential to the learning process. In comparison, distance…

The need for institutions of higher education to increase enrollments and provide more access to students, especially in rural areas, makes distance education very important to nearly all institutions of higher education. Yet few studies have been conducted on the leadership characteristics of the directors of distance education programs even…

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the best practice of using "big data" reports to help distance learning administrators better understand their own programs and represent them to stakeholders. The authors examine five reports: (1) the number and percentage of graduates from the main campus who also take classes at the…

This mixed-methods study was designed to measure and elaborate constructs of faculty online readiness from pre-COVID-19 pandemic literature. Bringing together the validation of a scale to measure these constructs and insights from a focus group, findings suggest that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions to student learning from K-12 to universities and continues to manifest negative effects on students. To better understand the challenges our students face and how those obstacles have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic began, we surveyed our undergraduate ecology students who ranked obstacles to learning…

In the United States, educator preparation is regulated at the state level. Accordingly, each state education system, and even individual districts, responded uniquely to the COVID-19 pandemic. Western Governors University (WGU) compiled a list of each state regulators' response to COVID, many of which included relaxation of student teaching…

For Fall 2016, of the 175,509 students enrolled in the Utah System of Higher Education at third week, 69,535 (39.6 %) are participating in some form of technology delivered instruction. Of that total, 54,269 (30.9%) enrolled in at least one online class. Despite availability of online courses and degrees, students prefer using online courses to…

Among the ways in which states attempt to ensure quality in K-12 education is by requiring that most teachers in public schools be licensed via state-level requirements that vary by state. This patchwork of requirements has not been a problem for most teachers over the last century, because so few teachers taught in multiple states concurrently.…

The goal of this study was to examine the professional development experiences of two contrastive participants while they were creating standards-based individualized education plan (IEP) goals using a virtual world called TeacherSim. Two specific focuses of the study were on how special educators engaged with the task of creating standards-based…

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and its 16 members work collaboratively to expand educational access and excellence for all citizens of the West. By promoting innovation, cooperation, resource sharing, and sound public policy among its members and their institutions, WICHE strengthens higher education's contributions…