Susan Dynarski

[Commentary] Online courses have the potential to improve instruction at every level of education. Adaptive online courses can allow students to learn at their own pace, with material adjusting to fit the needs of both advanced and remedial learners. Online courses can also open up more curricular offerings in schools that lack specialists, such as those in rural areas. Online courses are particularly attractive to school and district leaders looking for ways to trim costs.

To get aid for college from federal or state governments, as well as from colleges, students and their parents must fill out the Fafsa (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid). The notoriously complicated form, which is longer than the typical 1040 tax form, collects detailed information from students and families about income, expenses and taxes.

On March 3, families logging onto the website for federal aid found that a key component of the online application had stopped functioning. The component, known as the Data Retrieval Tool, automatically fills in a Fafsa application with information from an applicant’s tax return, via a data connection with the Internal Revenue Service. Without the tool, applicants have to transcribe tax information from their old returns or order tax transcripts from the IRS (which can take several weeks). Six days later, the Department of Education and the I.R.S. jointly released a statement saying that the IRS had “decided to temporarily suspend the Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) as a precautionary step following concerns that information from the tool could potentially be misused by identity thieves.” The agencies declined to elaborate, and it was unclear whether a breach had occurred or had only been feared.