Each physical location or street address and program (both certificate and degree) must be listed with the U.S. Department of Education before any student enrolled in it is eligible for any Federal Financial Aid. The time required to get U.S. Dept of Education approval for the proposed site and program should be taken into account when setting the program start date. The process for gaining U.S. DoEd approval requires a great deal of time as a copy of the letter from SACS / COC approving or acknowledging the site and program must accompany the request; SACS / COC is often very slow in getting the approval letter back to the campus. Requests to the U.S. DoEd for site and program additions cannot overlap, and this lengthens even further the time required to gain approval (functionally, any number of new sites or programs can be requested on a single application but no additional application can be submitted until the "current" request process has been completed). The Director of Extension and Distance Education works with the Office of Financial Aid to submit the request for additions to the approved site and program list.

Violations (the awarding of Federal Financial Aid to a student at an unapproved site or program) can endanger the University's entire Federal Financial Aid Program, and thus any program requiring U.S. DoEd approval must take into account the additional time required to gain the site or program approval.

Deans, department chairs, and academic program coordinators should be aware that sites must be discontinued when no programs are offered there for a semester, and "delisted" sites must go through the U.S. DoEd approval process again should programming be set at them in the future. The same is true for programs.

Colleges and departments are asked to confer with the Director of Distance Education before selecting and publicizing any new location as some sites are preferable to others and some sites may lead to objections from other institutions or agencies. The director can provide guidance on why a site might or might not be a good idea and can seek pre-approval from institutions or agencies that may have a stake in the placement of programming in a particular location. The physical location, street address is the "site." Changes to the street address must go through the SACS Substantive Change Procedure I (6 months prior approval).

For a list of programs and sites authorized by the General Administration you may review the General Administration Distance Education Inventory. The sites on the list are approved for the specific programs listed at that site. If a program is not listed on the inventory at a desired site, General Administration authorization is required at a minimum, and in some cases, the placement of programming may constitute a SACS Substantive Change Procedure I (6 months prior approval).

Please contact either the Distance Education Program Manager assigned to the program or the Director of Distance Education, Mary Englebert at englebertmf@appstate.edu for information on specific U.S. Department of Education program and site approvals.