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It’s that odd time of year when the holidays feel so close you can almost touch them, yet time seems to play tricks on you—moving both unbearably slowly (is it really still ten days until Christmas?) and impossibly fast (how am I going to get everything done?). Personally, I spent most of the week still recovering from the Brandenburg Blight I picked up on my way home from OEB. But what did I read this week?
Pulling rank
This week, Times Higher Education released their Online Learning Ranking 2024. This first edition of the rankings brings to mind the comment I used to see on my grade school report cards: must do better! We wrote about the rankings when they were first announced, and the final product confirms that some of our skepticism was well-founded.
One of the biggest issues at the time was the decision to exclude schools of business while including institutions with programs that are only partially online. In this week’s announcement, THE doubles down on this approach, making the questionable claim that it is impossible to define exactly what online learning is.
There is also no global agreement on the definition of online learning. This pilot ranking measures only the parts of universities that deliver online learning, which means the courses are advertised as “online” and at least 40 per cent of the content is delivered online.
It’s unclear whether the institutions listed truly offer fully online programs or some form of blended learning. The rankings include 120 institutions, with 56 receiving a ranking and the rest simply labeled as “reporting” due to incomplete data. This raises an important question: if the data was incomplete, why publish the names of these institutions at all? Listing them without rankings creates the misleading impression that they somehow fall below bronze status.
Institutions were not ranked in numerical order but instead awarded gold, silver, or bronze status. The U.S. had three institutions ranked (all gold), the UK two (both gold), Australia two (one gold and one bronze), and Canada none. India had the largest representation, with seven institutions ranked: two gold, one silver, and four bronze.
