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

I hope your summers have been both productive and quiet—mine certainly was, thanks to the Department of Education holding off on some of the regulation writing. I spent some time working on articulation agreements, getting a new location in DC approved by the higher education authorization group in the District, and starting to look into 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 leadership changes. There were some behind-the-scenes political issues between the Board and Lori Williams—mostly around the Board wanting NC-SARA to take a low-profile approach, while Lori pushed for the organization to grow into a stronger resource for students, institutions, states, and accreditors, with a greater focus on quality assurance. Until an interim president is named, Marianne Boeke is serving as the Acting President. We'll see what happens next, but in the meantime, there is a new edition of the SARA Policy Manual (22.1) with updates to sections 8.2 and 8.3 regarding changes to the SARA Policy Modification Process. I'm looking forward to participating in this new/updated process. 

At the SARA conference in July, NC-SARA unveiled their new learning tool, the SARA Learning Station. It currently contains only two courses, but it's a great start in building an educational resource for us and our colleagues. I highly recommend signing up and exploring it. If you have someone new in your office who will be working on state authorization issues (or even a new boss), have them take one or both courses to get a good foundational understanding of the work we do. 

WCET-SAN has also seen some personnel changes but continues to work on and expand its Resource Tables. Specifically, for professional licensure programs, WCET-SAN has added information to the following tables:

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

It also sounds like they will soon provide more information on authorization and professional licensure requirements in other countries, particularly our northern and southern neighbors. 

WCET-SAN is hosting a Virtual Advanced Topics Workshop on September 7-9, 2022, which will focus on succession planning and what I call State Authorization 2.0. In other words, once you’ve mastered the basics, how do you maintain compliance while continuing to grow in your role? It should be an interesting one! Fair warning: I developed the breakout session for the last day, and it's a doozy. 

WCET is also holding its Annual Conference from October 19-21 in downtown Denver. It’s a great opportunity for those of us involved in distance or online education and ed tech to come together. WCET-SAN offers a free workshop the day before (October 18), solely focused on state authorization, which I highly recommend attending. We don’t get many opportunities for professional development specifically aimed at state authorization, and it’s a great way to meet others from colleges and universities across the country who do this work. 

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-credentials, alternative credentials, MOOCs, and the like. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Have a great rest of the week, my friends!