In Online Partnerships, Legal Compliance Is Key

By Joseph G. Casion and Joshua E. Gewolb. More and more colleges are expanding into online education, through traditional courses and MOOCs, or massive open online courses. Developing courses is expensive and requires a lot of technical expertise, so many colleges are forming partnerships with for-profit online vendors to help them. Those partnerships provide an extraordinary opportunity for colleges­—but they also present new legal risks. In the past several years, the for-profit-education sector has been the subject of a number of lawsuits, in which the government has extracted large settlements. Colleges need to be aware of their own risks and to create agreements that protect against liability when entering into partnerships with online-education providers. Read more...