In today's accountability atmosphere, the ability to provide evidence of "good teaching" in the online classroom is a prominent endeavor in distance education. In 2009, the US Department of Education published a meta-analysis reviewing 10 years of empirical data research in the online classroom. The overall finding was that generalized "best practices" by online instructors can only take you so far toward quality online education. Implementation of the generalized improvements in an already functional online learning environment rarely produced significant improvement in student success. The report indicated the statistically significant improvements resulted from leveraging the power of technology for individualizing instruction to suit the individual student and circumstances. Most educators did not find these results to be too surprising.

Aditionally, current research is finding that individual student behavior in the learning environment has a significant and direct impact on student success – hooray for research. Several facets of student behavior (e.g. total time, frequency of occurrence, average duration of each occurrence, sequencing in relation to other behaviors, etc.) may differ greatly from class to class. Measuring those different facets of individualized student behavior in relation to students' success is a major focus for current research. Many of these endeavors are going by names such as Predictive Analysis, Learning Analytics, Academic Metrics, and the like. In conjunction, teacher behaviors that result in the most productive student behaviors (again, individualized for the student and/or specific class) are also being studied. The analyses of the results of these behavioral activities are being formulated to provide predictive measures for student and instructor behaviors within the online environment. Be on the lookout, over the next few years, for the focus on generalized "best practices" to wane in favor of much more precise and individualized metrics for improving online student performance. It appears these new metrics (specific student and teacher behaviors) may become significant components in the accountability trend that is likely to continue in the foreseeable future.