The Research On Accreditation System Of Online Higher Education In The United States

With the rapid development of science, technology and the popularization of Internet, online education has gradually become the trend of globalization of education. Online higher education, as a new force in higher education system, is increasingly revealing its unique advantages. It has received widespread concern and attention of governments, colleges and universities all around the world. This form of online learning will not be limited by time and space. It can not only reduce the cost of learning, but also can promote the realization of lifelong education and learning society. Online higher education has been at the forefront of the world in the United States. it has formed a complete quality accreditation system after years of development. This paper focuses on describing and analyzing the online higher education accreditation organization system, accreditation standards and procedures in the United States. Focusing on online higher education institutions and courses accreditation standards and procedures that carried out by regional accreditation agency, the Distance Education and Training Council, Quality Matters and Online Learning Consortium. And then analyzing the characteristics of these accreditation standards and procedures. The results found that, these institutions are different in the design of the framework of accreditation standard content and the specific details of the plan, but they also have a lot in common. Each agency has their own emphasis on standard. Whether the regional accreditation agency or national accreditation agency, accreditation standards on online higher education institutions emphasize the integrated strength of institution, institution mission, learning support services, academic integrity, interactive online learning. As for online higher education courses accreditation standards, Quality Matters emphasizes interactive online learning, learning support service, online courses environment. For on online higher education institutions accreditation procedure, Distance Education and Training Council combines institution self assessment with peer review, written assessment with onsite visitation. For online higher education course procedure, Quality Matters is mainly by way of peer review. According to the research results, learning from the successful experience of America we can come to the conclusions that we should establish a online higher education accreditation system, establish a third party for accreditation online higher education, develop scientific online higher education quality accreditation standards, found personal training mechanism for online higher education quality evaluation.