Regulations Overview

Accessibility

One of the major concerns affecting providing an equal opportunity education to all students falls under the area of accessibility.  A major hurdle DECs face is getting faculty to understand that if the use of online materials is required of students, then all students must have the ability to use those materials. Laws requiring that course materials be accessible have been established at both the state and federal level. Accessibility is also required in Title 5 regulations. Despite all this, many colleges struggle with finding ways to ensure that materials are accessible and there may be a local debate about who should ultimately be ensuring that materials are accessible.

Distance Education in General

The Higher Education Act of 1965 Links to an external site. (HEA) provided, among other things, "financial assistance for students".  HEA was reauthorized by the The Higher Education Opportunity Act (Public Law 110-315) (HEOA) Links to an external site. that was enacted on August 14, 2008. HEOA contains language defining what distance education is, differentiating distance education from correspondence education, and requires student authentication.

Copyright

An area of the law that concerns all faculty is copyright.  Traditional face-to-face educators have the Fair Use Act to fall back upon when using copyrighted materials.  Many online instructors do not realize that the Fair Use Act does not apply to online courses.  The Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2001 Links to an external site. is the remedy to this, but it has more limitations to the use of copyrighted materials in an online environment than the Fair Use Act.  These regulations are covered under the section on Copyright.

Accreditation

Finally, an area that concerns all campuses and distance education specifically is accreditation. Fortunately there is much duplication of expectations between the various regulations and accreditation requirements. Unique to accreditation is the substantive change process and the requirement that distance education students receive all the same services as campus-based students. This latter requirement can be useful to the DEC who is advocating for taking measures to ensure such services are readily available.