Collaboration strategies for institutions and higher education systems
- Clear guidance on existing and pending laws and regulations.
- Impact and risk assessment on proposed actions.
- Independent opinions on how to proceed.
Federal and State Policy Services
Interpret existing laws and regulations
Analysis of federal and state digital learning laws, regulations, and official guidance to determine their impact on your faculty, students, and business models.
Analyze proposed laws and regulations
Analysis of proposed legislation, regulations out for comment, and actions proposed by accrediting agencies or the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement to determine the possible impacts and risks to your faculty, students, and business models.
Conduct a modality analysis
Faculty, instructional designers, and students are often unaware that laws change once digital learning (whether online or in-person) is introduced into a course. The analysis reviews how well you are addressing the differences in laws, such as: assessment, accessibility, extra fees, and intellectual property.
The Process
Collaborative
Student Focused
In-Depth
Experienced
Russ Poulin brings exceptional insight and precision to federal policy analysis in higher education, consistently translating complex regulatory issues into clear, actionable guidance. His active role in negotiated rulemaking sessions on a variety of topics, reflects both his deep expertise and his ability to collaborate effectively with diverse stakeholders. Coupled with his high level of engagement across the higher education community, Russ is widely respected as a thoughtful leader and trusted voice in the field.
–Leah Matthews
Executive Director
Distance Education Accrediting Commission
Institution and System Services
Review existing institutional policies, web pages, or communications
External review is often useful. Policies might meet their target goals in a more effective way. Web pages sometimes fall short in communicating to their audience, contain a confusing logic flow, or use wording that is at odds with policy.
Create policies to inform students on course modalities
Students sometimes learn about requirements for technologies, in-person meetings, or synchronous sessions when they get the syllabus, which is too late for them. An analysis of a subset of your courses can highlight good practices, the depth of this problem, and recommend strategies to best serve students.
Analyze digital learning student fees
Fees charged to students often are based upon historic patterns of what is charged to fully online vs. fully in-person students. Given the shift of courses and students to mixed modalities, the fee structures likely need to be refreshed.
Conduct impartial reviews
Serve as grant reviewer
Assessing the worthiness of grant proposals often benefits from the point-of-view of someone without a history with the applicants or a stake in the outcome.
Provide independent opinions or arbitration
Due to time to research or differences in opinions, next steps on proposed internal actions are sometimes stalled. An external analysis can provide unbiased input.