A variety of pressures push institutions toward pursuing distance education initiatives. Unfortunately, these initiatives often fail to learn from the experiences of other colleges and universities. Given the amount of time and resources increasingly dedicated to distance education, higher education must do a better job in avoiding the well known pitfalls of early adopters. In today’s post, I want to share some lessons learned for institutions from the research on distance education.
Develop a Strategic Plan
Research shows that the structure and planning of distance education efforts need to be more carefully considered as distance education programs rarely begin with a formal strategic plan. Strategic plans defining and operationalizing goals as well as the articulation of growth, development, financing, and maintenance of programs all need to be carefully decided. In order to assess and refine programs, the dedication and allocation of resources needs to be mapped even as goals are more clearly articulated.
Illustrating this point, in a study of six distance education operations, Compora (2003) found that few institutions conduct a needs assessment to determine program requirements and how well distance education will meet these needs. In fact, many distance education units operate without a defined mission statement. The research is unclear whether this is a symptom of the ever-evolving world of distance education technologies or whether it is the source of the problem. However, the lack of a complete picture can lead to problems. For example, institutions may see burgeoning enrollment in distance education and assume they are meeting a new need and providing greater access to a new population of students. In reality they may merely be enrolling students who have already enrolled and would continue to enroll even if distance education courses were not offered. Defining the mission of distance education and how success will be tracked is vital for all programs. Institutions also need to clearly track the enrollment trends of students to ensure they understand the nature of their students and how best to serve them to ensure success.
Employ and Appropriate Staff
In addition to articulating plans and goals, institutions need to ensure programs have well-trained staff dedicated to service and maintenance of the distance education effort. Williams (2003) identifies thirteen distinct roles in a distance education program including such diverse areas as administrative manager, instructional designer, graphic designer, and librarian. Although the roles may be encapsulated in a single employee, a successful program will sufficiently staff and support each area. As the old human resources adage goes: you are only as good as the people you hire.
Consider Costs, and Expect the Unexpected
While planning and management issues require focused attention for success, the importance of having an overall plan for how the costs of distance education are handled and offset can not be overstated. The costs of distance education include those that the institution and the student must cover (Annetta, 2004). There are a number of factors that affect the cost of distance education to institutions, including the number of students, frequency that materials must be updated, technology, extent that costs are passed to students, and organization structure (Rumble, 2003, p. 114–115). As part of a fallacious effort to control escalating expenses, ‘‘administrators are putting all of their eggs into the distance education basket’’ as part of a fallacious effort to control escalating expenses (Annetta, 2004, p. 1). Research shows that although distance education’s cost per student is lower than traditional avenues of education, the high attrition of these programs increases the institution’s cost per graduate (Rumble, 1997).
One difficulty with costs in business as well as distance education is that how one examines costs will, ‘‘depend on the kind of decisions to be made and what your position is in the decision-making chain’’ (Bates, 2000, p. 151). When dealing with the difficult issue of costs in distance education, one must identify all costs, underlying assumptions, and the reasons for making those assumptions. Each institution places different demands upon its distance education program which in turn influences the cost structure. Administrators should understand the costs and assumptions realistically examining the success and failures of each program independently. The literature as it currently stands does not provide administrators with sufficient empirical benchmarks to effectively evaluate or compare one distance education program to another. Thus, given the highly individualized nature of the goals and finances these programs, institutions should evaluate how well distance education is meeting their own mission and needs.
An examination of e-learning’s rise and fall helps to demonstrate the problems of distance education. E-learning promised a revolution in pedagogy, a boom in distance education with the ability to provide any time and any place instruction, and the market would provide the necessary funding (Zemsky and Massy, 2004). Institutions spent millions of dollars to start massive e-learning initiatives. They did this before conducting a thorough analysis of the market and demand for e-learning. As a result, colleges and universities ‘‘misunderstood the kind of educational experiences that learners wanted and overestimated their eagerness to achieve those ends electronically’’ (Zemsky and Massy, 2004, p. 59).
This post is an excerpt from New verse or the same old chorus? Looking holistically at distance education research
