| Distance Learning Course Time (Also called seat-time) - Jul 13, 2010 |
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As more and more student are attracted to the distance learning courses for prelicense, post license and continuing education requirements, regulators and distance learning providers are constantly trying to find a means to get the student to spend the time necessary to learn the material.
ARELLO, which is the association which approves distance learning formats for various state regulator agencies, has two methods to determine how long a course should take:
1)Have 10 potential students take the course and record how long it took the each student to do the program.
2)Have two professional educators take the course and determine how long it should take.
Most provider take the second choice and hire two professionals to take the course.
Even then there are various course formats that come into play and regulators are constantly trying to find a method to make sure distance learning courses require the same amount of time in a course as the conventional classroom.
Cooke Real Estate School is licensed in a number of states and at the present time New York has been the only state we are in, that requires an online course student to be on the course for the required hours.
We just got notice today that Virginia is now going to require a distance learning student to "actively engaged online in learning the content of Board-approved online courses for at least 50 clock minutes to receive one hour of pre-license, continuing or post license education credit".
In our recent application to ARELLO for the 90 Hour West Virginia Principles Course are going to be requiring course-time.
My feeling is this is going to be a trend in the real estate licensing education industry. A requirment of "course-time" is for the betterment of the student’s education. If the student spends the time in the course, the student is going to spend time reading the material more thoroughly, viewing the video presentations and the other aspects of the course and as a result, have a better end result.
So watch this trend by regulators to be moving in this direction for distance learning courses.
Frank Cooke
President
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