I know what seat time is. How will we determine "screen time"?

I really liked to focus in this week's reading on faculty development and review of your course by a colleague or fellow professor. I think that approach offers the best way forward with assuring quality. I was recently reminded that the whole premise of site visits by outfits like HLC are predicated on collegial review. Your colleagues know what is happening in your discipline and at your school. It should be your colleagues that assess your product. I am concerned with some of the talk about how we may implement quality assurance in my state. Our State Regents have strict guidelines about seat time for face-2-face courses. There is some rumbling that they would like to see an equivalent "screen time" or "time-on-task" metric for all online courses. Apart from how likely inaccurate such a measure would be based on reading speed and Internet connectivity, the measure strays very far away from the authentic assessment or competency based measures that are increasingly seen as the best measures of learning. Time spent looking at a computer screen is probably just about one of the worst measures that we could use for online learning. Additionally, when one advances that "screen time" metric to examine blended learning, I am certain that such a metric would likely defeat the whole reason for the Blended Learning in the first place. The Regents will put some minimum hourly requirement on it, and students will have to come for more hours than they would have if left to the best judgment of their professor. I understand the need to balance quality assurance, but Policy Makers and Administrators need to disabuse themselves of this "screen time" notion. Otherwise, the instructor is no longer free to generate the "blend" for themselves, and instead will be relying on bureaucratically constructed metrics that were envisioned by someone who never taught a blended learning course.