Vet School Just Got Official Rules for Online Learning. Here's What That Actually Means.

If you went to vet school during COVID, you know the drill. One day you were in the anatomy lab, the next you were watching a recorded lecture in your apartment at 11pm wondering if this counted as education. It did — technically. But nobody had a rulebook for it.

That's changing.

In January 2025, the AVMA Council on Education (COE) — the accrediting body for veterinary programs in the U.S. and Canada, received federal approval to formally include distance education within its scope of recognition. That meant building the policies, the standards, and the approval process from scratch. And doing it in twelve months.

By the end of 2025, every U.S. and Canadian veterinary program that requested approval had received it. That's not a small thing.

So what actually changed?

Before this, distance education in veterinary schools existed in a gray zone. Programs were using it — some extensively, some barely but there was no standardized framework for what qualified, what was required, or how quality would be assessed.

The COE spent the past year defining all of it. They engaged with accreditors, DE experts, veterinary deans, and nearly 1,400 stakeholders through a public comment period. The message from the field was consistent on one point: keep clinical training in person.

"There was a strong feeling in surveys that the clinical year should be in person and hard to put online," said Dr. Jesse Hostetter, COE chair and professor at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine. "Things like anatomy lab are hard to have online. They need to be there to do that."

The final standards reflect that. Veterinary schools cannot deliver clinical rotations, laboratory courses, or more than 15% of the total preclinical curriculum through distance education. Everything else — with the right infrastructure, faculty training, and student outcomes data in place can qualify.

What counts as distance education?

This was one of the trickier questions to nail down, and the COE was specific about it. Distance education is defined as instruction where the content expert is not physically present with students — even if a facilitator is in the room. A professor teaching live via Zoom to a classroom with a proctor present? That's DE. A flipped classroom where students watch videos at home before showing up to an in-person session with their instructor? That's not DE. A temporary accommodation during a natural disaster? Also not DE.

The distinction matters because it determines what gets regulated, reported, and reviewed during accreditation.

How did schools respond?

Veterinary colleges were asked to submit detailed documentation outlining which courses had DE components, how much of the curriculum was delivered remotely, what faculty training existed, and how student outcomes were being assessed. The timeline — a few months to compile years' worth of curriculum information — was tight.

At The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, the team completed their submission in roughly three months. Course chairs reviewed individual courses, an external team cross-checked the data, and the submission was in.

"Technology, in this case, is a gift," said Dr. Alison Gardner, interim associate dean of education and student success at Ohio State. "We don't just have experts in Columbus delivering content. We felt justified in using distance education to intentionally connect leaders across the nation with our students."

That's one of the real arguments for thoughtful DE —- access. Not every veterinary school can bring in a nationally recognized specialist for every topic. But they can beam one in.

The honest tension

Not everyone in the profession is neutral on this. The push to standardize DE came partly because programs were already using it extensively — and there was no quality control mechanism in place. Standardization is a good thing. But the pressure to move fast also meant schools with strong existing infrastructure had an easier path than those starting from scratch.

Dr. Hostetter acknowledged it directly: "Some schools were doing already a great job with it and had great support and infrastructure. Some were doing little, if any DE."

What this process did was force every program to look at what they were actually doing, document it, and bring it in line with federal standards. For some schools that was a light lift. For others, it required real investment in technology, faculty development, and curriculum review.

What it means going forward

The COE will now collect DE information through site visits and annual reports — meaning this isn't a one-time checkbox. It's an ongoing part of accreditation.

For students currently in vet school or just starting, this matters. It means the online components of your education have been reviewed against quality standards — not just tolerated by necessity. For educators, it means DE has a legitimate, defined place in the curriculum rather than existing in a workaround.

Veterinary education is still fundamentally a hands-on profession. Nobody is putting a palpation lab on Zoom. But the lecture, the case study, the specialist guest, the foundational science — those have always been about getting the information in front of the student. If the standards are right and the execution is intentional, the platform matters less than the outcome.