It's the US Department of Education that did this. Trigger warning: A rant follows that will upset some people. The US Department of Education destroyed the i

It's the US Department of Education that did this. Trigger warning: A rant follows that will upset some people. The US Department of Education destroyed the innovators in inexpensive online learning by claiming that an online course you can take online at your own pace is not a distance learning course but is instead a correspondence course. The US Department of Education says the difference is RSI. No, not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but something more painful called "Regular and Substantive Interaction" between the teacher and student, in a way that is scheduled by the teacher. The two biggest advantages of online courses were that you could work on them where you wanted to, and when you wanted to. The US Department of Education killed that. I mean they pulled the baby of online learning baby halfway out of the birth canal, forced a pair of scissors into the back of the squirming newborn's head to make a hole, rammed a curettage and suction device into the agonized baby's skull, and sucked out the baby's brain, murdering the newborn online learning industry before it could draw its first breath. As an instructor who built online courses that were perfect to the point that 80% of my students could finish the course and do better on a departmental final exam than in-class students did, I am horrified. My online classes in Canvas are regularly gutted by school administrators who delete large portions of the courses. They are meticulous in deleting all my backups as well. I am forced to schedule absurd mandatory office hours that are really online pseudo-lectures without decent visual aides where students fight for hours to glean the bits of knowledge that could have fit on a PowerPoint slide or two. The more disfunctional these sessions are, the more pleased the college administrators are. If I dare to use competent visual aides, then students do not sit through the multi-hour torture session and instead screen-capture what they need in a minute or two and leave. Such competence threatens the existence of our college because it means we can not get paid for online education courses if there is not regular and substantive interaction between the teacher and the students in a way that is scheduled by the teacher. My competent online courses cost one college their SACS accreditation. The fact that I respond to all student emails within 12 hours, 24/7/365 is not enough. The fact that I detail grade all assignments with detailed comments on a clear grading rubric within 12 hours of the assignment being submitted is not enough. The fact that I give my personal cell phone number to my students (when ethics rules allow it) is not enough because they do not all call me every week and because I do not schedule that time. If I do not force my students to schedule a time every week to sit down and listen to me, then we lack RSI. The US Department of Education took over $700 million dollars from one college that did a great job innovating online courses. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/17/regular-and-substantive-interaction-online-college https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/17/regular-and-s... I've never taught for that college, but I have seen other colleges completely gutted by the government scum.