Colleges Resist Feds’ Attendance-Taking Proposal for Online Courses

The U.S. Department of Education appears to have focused some of their regulatory initiatives earlier in 2024 on online education. A draft rule regulating the sector was the subject of negotiated rulemaking hearings during the first quarter of 2024, and the Department published a proposed rule based on those hearings on July 23.

One of these proposals would require all online courses to take attendance every day. But a student’s simply logging in to a learning management system will not be sufficient. ED instead wants documented evidence at least every 14 days of “substantive” academic engagement.

The agency provided examples of such engagement, such as completed assignments, participation in discussion forums or courseware, interactions with a teaching assistant, professor, or classmates, or completed assessments like quizzes and tests. However, the Department has not yet specified the standards or mechanisms it wants colleges to apply that would align with the policy.

Now, why would ED want colleges to verify daily attendance? Ostensibly the agency doesn’t want an institution collecting Title IV financial aid money for many months after a student had dropped out of an online course. The proposed rule says that the Education Department doesn’t want colleges failing to report an accurate “last date of attendance,” or “using the date that allows the institution to keep the most money.”

Does the Department believe that the potential amounts of financial aid funds the agency would recoup justify the costs and time required for institutions to keep accurate attendance records daily? That answer remains unclear. ED acknowledges that attendance would significantly increase colleges’ financial burden, but several observers believe the agency’s estimate seems low.

Based on the average salary of college administrators earning roughly $50 per hour, the proposal calculates that the financial burden would annually cost about $7.55 million for 1,866 colleges to capture attendance information for their records daily. The 1,866 figure accounts for 50 percent of the 3,732 U.S. colleges that offer at least one distance education course. ED believes that about half of the colleges already have systems in use that take attendance and that it would require the other half of the colleges about 10 minutes a day to record attendance as well.

David Baime, the senior vice president for governmental relations at AACC—the American Association of Community Colleges—told Inside Higher Ed that the Department of Education “wildly underestimated” the time and costs required for accurate daily attendance taking. “Despite what the department has said, it can ultimately be quite complicated and difficult and furthermore costly for institutions to provide documentation that the department appears to be requiring as a result of the attendance requirement for online courses,” he said.

So Baime said he contacted the Department of Education. He asked for data that shows how widespread a potential issue involving the lack of taking attendance in online courses could be.

Baime reported that the Department didn’t reply.

The first sign that university administrators across the nation were dissatisfied with the attendance proposal came on June 4. That’s when a group of higher education organizations joined with Baime’s association—AACC—in sending a letter criticizing the proposal to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Those organizations included the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, the online and professional education association UPCEA, the higher education consulting firm Quality Matters, and WCET.

The letter warns the Secretary that if the attendance proposal moves forward, marginalized students could be affected the most by increased costs and program cutbacks. The language also warns Cardona that increased compliance costs will drain resources that could be used for student services or educational innovation. “This could discourage institutions from serving students or increasing the price paid by students,” the document says.

Two paragraphs of the letter complain about the issue that Baime raised in terms of the Department’s inability to provide statistics or financial data as evidence of institutional noncompliance. “For the organizations that developed this letter, non-compliance on ‘last date of attendance’ has not been a commonly reported problem,” the letter says.

Aside from institutions that already take attendance or those that are fully online, all others reported a series of problems with the proposal. They cited a variety of new tasks that colleges would need to perform to satisfy the proposed regulation, including the following:

• Capturing every instance of academic engagement in the learning management system or other software.
• Creating new connections between financial aid systems and the LMS.
• Addressing this requirement across multiple learning management systems in use at large universities.
• Formulating and communicating policies and procedures on how to implement this requirement.
• Developing and conducting faculty and staff training programs on how to implement the requirement.

“In brief, this ‘simplification’ is much more work to obtain the same piece of evidence for ‘last date of attendance’ as is currently done,” says the letter. “Every instance of academic engagement would need to be archived for every student rather than just finding the test, paper, or discussion post for those few students who withdraw without notice.”

By August 27, hundreds of colleges, professors, administrators, and organizations across America had criticized the Department’s attendance proposal. That’s when Inside Higher Ed ran a front-page story with the sharply-worded headline “Universities Hit Back Against Proposed Online Attendance Policy.”

Officials at large university systems in California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin had all expressed concerns to IHE about the proposed attendance regulation. Dr. Nicholas Jones, the University of Illinois System’s vice president for academic affairs, said that:

We understand and support the department’s interest in taking attendance and withdrawing students in a timely manner to ensure that Title IV funds are not wasted or abused. However, we disagree with the blanket approach that punishes students and legitimate institutions. It would unnecessarily shift resources to address these regulatory demands instead of focusing on what matters: students and their success.

Some suggested that the proposed regulation may indicate bias within the Education Department. UPCEA’s Vice President Jordan DiMaggio told the publication that “there are questions on whether the Department is truly focused on protecting students’ outcomes and taxpayer dollars. Or do they kind of reveal an antiquated bias against online education that’s framed by some suspicion and distrust of the field as a whole?”

A statement from Boise State University also said the regulations “reveal a bias against online education.”

“We recognize that the department’s proposed regulations may be in response to instances where other institutions employed inadequate practices that failed to protect students as consumers,” BSU wrote. “But such failures exist with face-to-face programs—especially with for-profit providers. Why is the department focusing on. . .online programming?”

For insights and analysis, we once again turn to astute Scottsdale, Arizona-based educational technology industry analyst Phil Hill. Hill’s estimates, based on his conversations with administrators at colleges and universities, reveal that taking attendance will require not merely 10 minutes per day, but dozens of hours per day in aggregate per institution. That’s a difference from what the Education Department estimated by about two orders of magnitude.

How could ED have miscalculated so wildly? Hill says the Department doesn’t understand that even with today’s technology, there’s still no interoperability for third-party edtech applications to send activity data to a central learning management system that can record attendance records. Some of these edtech tools might be able to record attendance, but the only way to obtain accurate verification would be to check the academic engagements recorded by every edtech application on which the student has an account—and no LMS can currently accomplish that function.

In short, Hill says that ED is assuming functionality that doesn’t yet exist. Here’s how he explains what happened:

ED assumes that LMSs already have the information needed to take attendance and that schools merely need to create reports to be sent to the registrar or financial aid office. This assumption is wrong—unless an institution uses an LMS and no other EdTech tool (which is extremely rare) or has the clout to force all vendors to share private data (also rare), there is no mechanism today for third-party applications to send daily activity to the LMS in order to create an aggregated attendance report. It cannot be automated as assumed.

The net effect is that the only realistic way for most schools to follow the regulations is for somebody (mostly instructors) to be required to take attendance manually by looking at all tools being used in their course sections. When you add up all of this time for the new burden, that is how you get dozens of hours per day per institution.

In other words, Hill argues that for attendance-taking to function as specified in ED’s proposed regulation, all the interactions from multiple systems must be aggregated for each student in every course section. For example, to see if John, a sophomore, was active (i.e., hadn’t dropped the class) on August 29, some person or process has to check all the edtech tools where John had accounts to see what he did in all these various applications on that particular day.

And there could be a lot of applications to check. Maybe John stayed away from the LMS for five days. But he could have been active in the textbook’s courseware system and taking quizzes there, or watching the Zoom lectures and engaging in chats along with one or more of the videos, or posting comments in conversations with classmates on the professor’s discussion forums. And all those “academic engagements” would need to be recorded and verified.

Hill’s conclusion is that there currently is no way to automate the process of aggregating attendance verifications on learning management systems along with all these edtech applications. One or more university employees would need to perform those functions manually. If those employees, on average, cost $50 per hour, the dozens of hours they’d need to spend each day would make the financial burden estimated by the Department of Education seem minuscule by comparison.