Hello Hello! Happy Back to School Week(s)!!!

I hope your summers have been both productive and quiet ‐ I know with the Department of Education holding off on some of the regulation writing mine certainly was. I've gotten to spend some time on articulation agreements, getting a new location in DC approved by the higher ed authorization group in the District, and beginning to look in to finding ways to improve Boulder's OOSLP information collection and recording.

NC‐SARA and WCET‐SAN have also had a productive summer! What have they been up to you ask? Well...

As you may have heard, NC‐SARA is undergoing some leadership changes. There were a lot of behind‐the‐scenes political issues between the Board and Lori Williams ‐ mostly stemming from the Board wanting NC‐SARA to lay low and Lori wanting the organization to grow in such a way that they would become a better source of information for students, institutions, and states, as well as assisting accreditors and the states in quality assurance. Until they name an interim president, Marianne Boeke is serving as the Interim's interim (or Acting President as they're calling it). We shall see
what happens next, but in the mean time there is a new edition of the SARA Policy Manual (22.1) with updates to sections 8.2 and 8.3 relating to changes in the SARA Policy Modification Process.

And at the SARA conference that was held in July, the folks at NC‐SARA unveiled their new learning tool, the SARA Learning Station ‐ as of right now it only contains two courses, but it's an excellent start in building an educational resources for us and our colleagues. I highly recommend signing up and poking around in it and if you a have someone new in your office that will be working with you on State Authorization issues (or a new boss even), have them take one or both courses so they get a good foundational understanding of the work you/we do.

WCET‐SAN has also had some personnel changes but have continued to work on and develop their Resource Tables. And specifically pertaining to our work surrounding professional licensure programs, WCET‐SAN continues to add information to the following tables:

• National Associations for State Licensure Research
• Licensed Professions per State

It also sounds like they will be putting out more information soon about authorization and professional licensure requirements in other countries (specifically our northern and southern neighbors).

WCET‐SAN is hosting an Advanced Topics workshop (virtual), September 7‐9, 2022, that will focus on succession planning and what I like to call State Authorization 2.0. That is once you get past the basics, how do you keep up and maintain compliance while continuing to grow and improve in your role? This should be an interesting one, though fair warning ‐ I developed the breakout session for the last day and it's a doozy.

WCET is holding their Annual Conference October 19‐21 in downtown Denver and is a great opportunity for those of us that deal in distance or online education as well as ed tech to get together. WCET‐SAN piggy backs on to this and offers a free workshop the day before (10/18) solely focused on state authorization. I highly recommend attending if you can ‐ we don't get many opportunities for professional development aimed at state authorization, and it's a great opportunity to meet others from all sorts of colleges and universities from all over the country who do this work.

And finally, I had the opportunity to present a pre‐conference session with my friend Ricky LaFosse from the University of Michigan at the BADGE Summit a couple of weeks ago. We spoke about the hidden compliance issues surrounding micro or alternative credentials, MOOCs and the like. I've attached the slides if you’re interested and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Have a great rest of the week my friends!

Erika

Erika G. Swain
Associate Director for State Authorization
Office of Academic Affairs
University of Colorado System
e: swaine@cu.edu
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Assistant Director for Compliance and Authorization
Office of Data Analytics | Office of Institutional Research
University of Colorado Boulder
e: Erika.Swain@colorado.edu
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