The U.S. Education Department is cracking open the door to federal financial aid for students enrolled in nontraditional education programs — and trying out alternatives to accreditation in the process.
On Wednesday the department will announce a pilot program that will allow federal grants and loans to flow to educational-technology companies that team up with colleges and third-party "quality-assurance entities" to offer coding boot camps, MOOCs, short-term certificates, and other credentials.
The experiment has two chief aims: to make nontraditional programs more accessible to low-income students, and to test new ways of measuring program quality that are based on students’ outcomes.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Boon-to-Boot-Camps-US/233742