faculty focus special report distance learning administration and policy

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A MAGNA PUBLICATION

Distance LearningAdministration and Policy:Strategies for Achieving

Excellence

2 Distance Learning Administration and Policy: Strategies for Achieving Excellence • www.FacultyFocus.com

Distance Learning Administration and Policy:Strategies for Achieving Excellence

When building an online program, there are certain big questions that need to be answered.Among them are: What kind of program you want it to be – high tech or low tech? Professorintensive or adjunct driven? Blended learning or fully online? What kind of technology will beused to deliver course content? What about opportunities for collaboration?

Indeed, even though distance learning is no longer in its infancy, and there are a whole disci-pline-full of best practices learned by those who blazed the trail before you, it’s easy to getoverwhelmed by the questions and the possibilities of what you want your program to looklike today and five years from now.

We created this special report to suggest some responses to the big questions about distanceeducation: About pedagogy, technology, philosophy and administration of distance learningprograms. In this report, you will find concise, informative articles on distance education ad-ministration and policy that have appeared in Distance Education Report. Titles include:

• Seeing Where the Distance Education Opportunities Lie• Dumb is Smart: Learning from Our Worst Practices• Building a Distance Education Program: Key Questions to Answer• Eight Steps to On-Campus/Online Parity• Creating a Business Continuity Plan for Your Distance Education Program• Integrating Distance Education Programs into the Institution• Solving the Problems of Faculty Ownership with Online Courses

The mass of program and policy issues confronting distance education administrators growsevery day. We hope this special report will help you conceptualize, manage and grow thedistance education program at your school.

Christopher HillEditor

Distance Education Report

3Distance Learning Administration and Policy: Strategies for Achieving Excellence • www.FacultyFocus.com

Table of Contents

The Concentric Support Model: How Administrators Can Plan and Support EffectiveDistance Learning Programs ......................................................................................................................................4

Mentoring: The Administrator’s Responsibility and Reward ........................................................................................6

Dumb is Smart: Learning from Our Worst Practices ....................................................................................................8

Building a Distance Education Program: Key Questions to Answer..............................................................................9

Seeing Where the Distance Education Opportunities Lie ............................................................................................11

Do Administrative Practices Determine Enrollment Success? ....................................................................................13

Eight Steps to On-Campus/Online Parity ..................................................................................................................14

Creating a Business Continuity Plan for Your Distance Education Program................................................................16

Integrating Distance Education Programs into the Institution....................................................................................20

The Distance Learning Tipping Point: The Moment that Transforms an Institution....................................................22

Solving the Problems of Faculty Ownership with Online Courses ............................................................................23


What is necessary to supporta quality distance educationprogram? Many institutions

initiate a program without having aclear, systematic idea of what isinvolved. Dr. Elizabeth Osika,Instructional Technologist in theOffice of Distance Learning at ChicagoState University, has done a compre-hensive review of the literature anddeveloped a clear, easy-to-understandmodel of the layers of supportnecessary to undergird the central in-teraction between teacher andstudent. She has laid it out in apattern of concentric circles ofsupport, radiating outwards from theteacher/student interaction all theway to the support of the community

beyond the institution, making clearhow each layer serves its necessary

function in support of the criticalcenter. It is a tool institutions can usein the planning and evaluation oftheir distance learning programs.

Born of experience, researchOsika’s plan developed out of her

work at Purdue University-Calumetwhere she was brought in 1998 with amandate to develop a distancelearning program. “Over the years itbecame obvious that there werecertain key elements you needed to besuccessful,” she says. “So I said let’sdo some research and see from theadministrative side of the housewhat’s necessary to really support aquality distance learning program.”“Basically it was a real thorough

lit[erature] review,” Osika says. “Ireally condensed all that down, andsince I’m a visual person I put it intoa way that you can think about itvisually.” The concentric supportmodel, she explains, is like a rockthrown in a pond, with ripplesexpanding out from it. At the center,the core, is the faculty member andthe student — that is what the entiresystem is there to support andnurture. The system must providewhat the teacher and student need tobe successful. Within that inner circle,the model describes the behaviors andthe attitudes that faculty need to have,the equipment they need to have

access to, the training and supportthey need. On the student’s side,technical skills and access to technol-ogy are specified.The center — the faculty member

and the student coming together inthe classroom — is surrounded in thefirst circle by course content. “Onceyou get beyond that one-on-onecontact at the center, with the facultymember and the student, now youneed to start engaging those studentswith each other and the content andwith the class as a whole,” saysOsika. The course content specified inthe second circle enables interactionbetween the students with applica-tions such as discussion boards.Learning objects are found in thisring, encouraging active leaner en-gagement. On this second circle Osikaalso places ADA compliance — it is atthis point that the university needs tobegin thinking about how to makethings universally accessible.The second circle out, after the ped-

agogical core and the course content,is the course management system.“You don’t have to have Blackboard,you don’t have to have WebCT, youdon’t have to have a commercialcourse management system,” saysOsika. But there does have to be aconsistent system through whichcourses are provided. “You can’t haveevery faculty members designing theirown web pages and expect to be suc-cessful,” Osika says. “Student needcontinuity between courses and theyneed to know what to expect.”After the CMS circle the model

moves outward to the third circle ortechnical issues, what the whole insti-tution needs to do to support theonline enterprise. Osika cites her ownexperience: “Back in 98 when westarted at Purdue- Calumet It was like,‘Oh, sure you want to do an onlinecourse, go ahead and do it’ Then allof a sudden we’ve got 150, 200 online

The Concentric Support Model:How Administrators Can Planand Support Effective DistanceLearning Programs

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 5�

CommunityProgram

Technology

Course Mgmt SystemContent

Faculty

Student

The Five Concentric Circles thatSupport Distance Learning

5

classes, our bandwidth is being taxedand our servers are being pushed.”What Osika’s model says is that theuniversity needs to make sure thatthey understand the technical re-quirements, the “nuts and bolts, bitsand bytes.” And along with thehardware and software comes thehuman side of technical support —when the server goes down, or whenan instructor needs help with one ofa dozen things, there has to besomeone there to give that help.

The fourth circle: InstructionaldesignThe fourth circle — one of the most

important according to Osika —contains “programmatic” issues. Shebreaks this circle down into fourcomponents.The first is instructional support.

“Teaching online is very differentfrom teaching in a classroom. Youcan’t wrap your standard lectures andPowerPoint’s, throw ‘em online andsay you have a course. The wholepedagogy’s a little different.” This isthe circle for instructional designersthat faculty can look to for counselabout how they are supposed teachonline — what is online educationsupposed to look like, and how is itassessed?The second aspect of the program-

matic circle is student support, theplace for 24-hour help desks. “Thisgoes beyond standard help desk as-sistance like ‘Here’s your e-mailpassword,’” Osika says. If studentsrun into a server issue late at night,and can’t submit a homework assign-ment, who do they call? Osika pointsout that help desk people today musthave some knowledge and under-standing about what online classesare, and what students are trying todo within those classes. This aspectof the “program” circle includesonline advising, distance learning ori-

entation, and access to the library.The third aspect of these program-

matic issues is policies and proce-dures. Does the institution have aclear copyright and intellectualproperty policy? Do they havesomewhere faculty members can goto find out if their proposed use ofcertain materials will be legal?A final, critical aspect in this circle

is what teaching online means forpromotion and tenure. Osika

maintains that if a university reallywants to see their online programsgrow and develop they need to factoronline instruction into theirpromotion and tenure evaluationprocess.On the fifth circle are “executive

issues.” Is there a clear commitmentfrom the leadership at the universitythat online learning is important? Isthere a common vision across the in-stitution? “The academic side mightbe all behind it but then you get tothe student support side and theydon’t want to let student pay onlineor register online or do the thingsthat are necessary for a student to besuccessful,” Osika says. One thingOsika emphasizes in this circle is thatdistance education should be incor-

porated into the university’s strategicplan. This means (ideally) that theuniversity, in making its decisions,will take into account the effect ofthose decisions on the distanceeducation program.The last ripple around the pond

contains what Osika calls“community issues” – functionsperformed by entities outside the uni-versity. Accreditation agencies figurein here — can you get your programaccredited? So does the market. Canyou get graduates into jobs? “I thinkthat industry was a little bit cautiousabout distance education degrees,although I think they’re opening uptheir arms to it a little more,” Osikasays. Finally there’s the generalpublic. “You know, if you don’t havean online degree program, are theygoing to be happy about it or not? It’ssomething that the university has toconsider in the big picture.”

The advantage of a visualmodelOsika thinks that the biggest

advantage in her model is that ad-ministration hasn’t generally lookedat support in such a systematic way.“Everybody agrees that the reasonuniversities are here is so thatstudents are successful in theirclasses,” Osika says. “And once youget them to agree that that center’simportant, which is usually veryeasy, then it’s easy to use this tobuild and say, ‘OK, if we want toestablish the core then we have tohave these other areas also.’” �

Distance Learning Administration and Policy: Strategies for Achieving Excellence • www.FacultyFocus.com

FROM PAGE 4

“Teaching online is very

different from teaching in a

classroom. You can’t wrap

your standard lectures and

PowerPoint’s, throw ‘em online

and say you have a course.

The whole pedagogy’s a little

different.”

6

As a distance education admin-istrator, one of your mostimportant responsibilities is to

mentor the promising folks on yourstaff. This is important not just forsuccession planning—a topic on itsown—but also to make sure that theprofession itself continues to moveforward with the right kind ofleaders. Chances are that if you are ina high-level administrative position inhigher education, you have the right(and still relatively rare) combinationof skills, attitudes, and values to be agood distance education leader; theseneed to be passed on to others.Having a formal, or even an informal,mentoring relationship can ensurethat this happens. And it can be goodfor you, too—as many have learned,there is much to be gained by giving.The prospect of being a mentor will

not necessarily be a comfortable ideafor all administrators. Some adminis-trators don’t even conduct perform-ance reviews yet, finding it toodifficult to confront the behavioraland related issues that often arise.Among other things, giving honestfeedback to someone can be very un-comfortable. To be a good mentor,you do need to be willing to, at leastoccasionally, have difficult conversa-tions—but always in the bestinterests of your mentee (a word weprefer to “protégé”). You also need toknow how to offer criticism in a con-structive and helpful way. Theseskills, which are necessary to learn ifyou don’t already have them, will

prove beneficial in any number ofways, but they will be especiallyhelpful to you as someone’s mentor.

What mentoring isYou might think of yourself as a

friendly person, supportive of yourstaff, and just generally agreeable inmost situations. That’s good—but notenough for a real mentoring relation-ship. To be a true mentor, you needto provide your mentee with overalldirection, specific guidance inspecific situations, and an empatheticlanding place when she or he fails.You also need to be a bridge to other

high-level leaders at the institution aswell as interesting career opportuni-ties.Mentoring is the passing on of not

only skills—the person to bementored probably has a lot oftechnical skills already anyway—butalso attitudes and values. It is aboutcommunicating what it takes to be asuccessful leader in this field, andthen supporting and enabling thegradual development of those charac-teristics in another person. It is abouthelping someone who already showsaptitude and capability to developjudgment and balance.

Whom to mentorThe natural place to look for a

mentee is among your staff. There isgenerally a lot of raw material to befound there—folks with great tech-nology smarts and experience butwho may need a more effectivepeople-handling approach, orsomeone who is a good manager oftechnical staff but who hasn’t hadenough experience yet with other in-stitutional leaders to have developeda sense of how to work with themwell and how to nurture those veryimportant relationships. Or therecould be a staff member who is veryeager and enthusiastic and does agenerally great job but who doesn’tyet communicate well with others inwriting.You need to look for three things

before you select a mentee (or agreeto be a mentor to someone who hasasked you): promise, potential, andpermission. Promise shows itself ingeneral ways. A person who haspromise will shine brightly even inroutine situations in a noticeableway. He or she will come to yourattention as much by demeanor as bywords and actions; a mentee will besomeone you feel drawn to admireand respect. Potential is more specific


Mentoring: The Administrator’sResponsibility and Reward

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 7�

You might think of yourself as

a friendly person, supportive of

your staff, and just generally

agreeable in most situations.

That’s good—but not enough

for a real mentoring

relationship. To be a true

mentor, you need to provide

your mentee with overall

direction, specific guidance in

specific situations, and an

empathetic landing place when

she or he fails.

7

than promise. It is all about thefuture and the leader that the personis eventually capable of becoming.Clues as to a person’s potential willbe seen in the handling of difficultsituations. Not that the person willdo it all perfectly, of course (thenwhy have a mentor?), but he or shewill behave in such a way so that youcan see the spark of a successfulfuture. Permission, of course, is theperson’s willingness—better yet, hisor her eagerness—to be mentored.Since this is a special kind of rela-

tionship, the chemistry and trustbetween you and your mentee willalso be a factor. That’s important inmost boss–subordinate relationships,but much more so between mentorand mentee.

How to mentorIf you have been fortunate enough

to have had a mentor yourself atsome time in your career, you willhave a wealth of good experience todraw upon. Applying this experienceas a mentee can help you be a moreempathetic and skilled mentor. If therelationship is new to you, you maywant to look to similar roles for inspi-ration: teacher, advisor, counselor—not identical roles, to be sure, butgood enough to offer a lot of usefulclues.To begin with, it will be useful to

identify the qualities that have madeyou a success. Without beingarrogant or self-serving, you shoulddo an honest appraisal of what it isprecisely that has helped you attainyour current position and what it isthat contributes to your ongoing ef-fectiveness. These are the characteris-tics you will want to nurture in yourmentee. You may also spot in anothersome of your own weaknesses, andsometimes, if done in the right way,dealing with these can be just asuseful as nurturing strengths. It’s not

that you will want to harp on yourmentee’s weaknesses; you certainlywant to capitalize on his or herstrengths, but addressing both sideswith your mentee can lead to a betteroutcome.You should talk it all out at the

beginning so that you and yourmentee have a common set of expec-tations. You don’t necessarily need tohave a formal plan, with specifictimelines and objectives (althoughit’s OK if you do), but you do need tohave a clear understanding of whatyou’re doing and why. You also bothneed to know when you’re done!You do need to be careful—the re-

lationship can become smothering(too parental, too hovering) or, evenworse, can cross an often invisibleline into harassment (you need to beespecially careful about a malementor–female mentee relationship).You need to be aware at all times ofthe inherent imbalance of power inthe relationship and handle this verygently and carefully. Throughout itall, you must be both professionaland as objective as possible. Andstanding back and letting yourmentee do something dumb once in awhile can be a good thing too, aslong as it turns out to be a learningexperience.Of course, it can be a challenge to

be both a boss and a mentor to thesame person. As a boss, you willneed occasionally to order anddictate; sometimes you will need towithhold important information ormake very difficult decisions in orderto serve the overall best interests ofthe organization. You almost alwaysneed to be taking the long-range viewof situations rather than respondingto short-term issues. This all may, attimes, come into conflict withmentoring, when you may want, forexample, to share information with amentee in a way that’s different fromsharing with a subordinate. You willalso need to be cautious that the staff

in general does not see you asplaying favorites. There are no hard-and-fast rules here; you will need tofind the right balance in eachsituation, but knowing that thisconflict can arise may arm you betterto deal with it.Above all, it is important for a

mentor to be humble—rememberthat you can make dumb mistakesand exhibit bad judgment sometimestoo. Although the wonderful qualityof wisdom is what most people thinkof when they think of mentoring, noone is wise all the time. So don’t letbeing a role model and guide go toyour head.

The rewardsMentoring isn’t all one-way; for all

that you give in the mentoring rela-tionship, you will get much in return.The best teachers are the ones wholearn from their students; it’s thesame with mentoring.In addition to the wonderful rela-

tionship that mentoring can be foryou, you are also likely to develop abetter staff overall. You will improveyour own interpersonal skills (andwho couldn’t use that?), you willbecome a better leader, and best ofall, you will have the satisfaction ofknowing that you have made a reallyimportant contribution to the profes-sion. To watch a mentee eventuallytake his or her place as leader can beincredibly gratifying. �


FROM PAGE 6


Myk Garn, Senior Advisor forAcademic Affairs for theKentucky Council on

Postsecondary Education, says theidea came to him a couple of yearsago at a distance education confer-ence. He recalls being impressed bythe best practices being recom-mended by the presenters, by howsmoothly and efficiently all theirprojects seemed to have gone. It ledhim to wonder if he were the onlyone that ever had everything gowrong with an initiative, ever hadtrouble seeing the solutions to aproblem, ever had to stumblethrough a project all the way to theconclusion. That’s when it hit him.These impressive presentationsweren’t telling the whole story. Theyhad deleted the mistakes—the all-important mistakes that made thefinal success of their projectspossible.“I realized that people are going

back through and rearranging thingsand making it all make sense in theend. My epiphany,” says Garn, “wasthat yeah I learn a lot from the thingsthat go right, but I learn more whenthings go wrong. And I said youknow, I should be doing a presenta-tion on what went wrong, what weremy worst practices. What are theworst things I do and what did I learnfrom them. And I thought, well, theremay be other people out there whofeel the same way.”Garn talked over his insight with

an associate, Ed Klonoski, ExecutiveDirector of the Connecticut DistanceLearning Consortium. Klonoski says,“What resonated with me is that Iactually think that mistakes are a wayto learn things. With entrepreneurialor new kinds of activities, the enemyis perfection. We need to be comfort-able with mistakes and we reallyneed to be good at fixing them.That’s what you do with an entrepre-neurial organization.”

Admitting to your mistakesThe two colleagues decided it

would make a worthwhile presenta-tion. They would ask people for theirdumbest mistakes. The confessionalnature of the session suggested a 12-Step program to them, and so theystructured their presentation as aversion of the 12-Step process. Theycalled it “the 12 Steps from Dumb toSmart.”Garn describes a session: “People

would stand up and say, ‘Hello, myname is — whatever their name was— and I did something dumb.’ What Ithink is interesting is when thisstarts, everybody comes in there andthey want to contribute. They’ve gota dumb thing they want to bring up.”Klonoski says, “What was interest-

ing at the session was that oncepeople realized it was OK to go aheadand ‘fess up,’ we got some pretty in-teresting stories where people talkedabout some significant misjudgmentsand mistakes and, more interestingly,

what they learned from those mis-judgments and mistakes.”“They’ve been listening to all these

other presentations that are so neatlywrapped up and it makes the peoplelook so great and smart,” Garn says.Garn and Klonoski’s process, on theother hand, allows people to dosomething different. ”It lets youwrestle with where you are in aprocess that doesn’t have that clearnice end in sight, and isn’t allwrapped up.”A few hands go up when Garn and

Klonoski ask for dumb mistakes, andthen more, until “people just can’tget it in fast enough,” as Garn says.“People get stimulated by the otherperson’s error,” Klonoski says. Oneby one, people stand up and admitthey’ve made a dumb mistake.Description and discussion of themistake ensues. The respondent isthen required to say what theylearned from their mistake. ThenKlonoski types in a brief capsule de-scription of the mistake on the PowerPoint and a description of the lessonlearned from the mistake. Klonoskiand Garn try to go from the specificsof the mistake to a generic descrip-tion of the lesson learned.“We take notes so that there will be

something up there as people telltheir stories. It’s nice to give people asense that you’re saying back to themwhat they’ve said to you and wewant to validate the sharing that wasgoing on in the room.” Klonoski andGarn go first in the process to getthings rolling and “to put our pain onthe line,” as Garn says.

The meaning of mistakesKlonoski believes that the success

of their sessions has implications forhigher education. According to him,higher education today is riskaversive. “If we don’t find the folkswho are willing to take risks and help

Dumb is Smart: Learning fromOur Worst Practices

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 9�

9Distance Learning Administration and Policy: Strategies for Achieving Excellence • www.FacultyFocus.com

When building, or running, anonline program, there arecertain big questions that

need to be answered. Chief amongthem is what kind of program youwant it to be. High tech or low tech?Professor intensive or adjunct-driven?What media will deliver the teaching?Will the students ever meet with theirinstructor, or each other?Richard Magjuka is Chair of the

Kelley Direct Online MBA Program atIndiana University. Indiana’s KelleySchool of Business, now in its 86thyear, is rated among America’s top 20business schools. When Kelley decidedto offer an online MBA program,called Kelley Direct, Magjuka had toanswer those questions, and continuesto ask some of them. For administra-tors who are contemplating an onlineprogram, he says, it’s vital to know thedesign and administrative issues you’ll

be confronted with.Distance Education Report spoke

with Magjuka in 2006 about how tobring those issues and decisions intofocus.

DER:What are the design issues thatneed to be addressed in an onlineprogram?Magjuka: In terms of pedagogy the

single most important issue is what isgoing to be the center point or overallphilosophy of your program. I’m notsaying that it’s going to be aneither/or trade but for some programsfaculty interaction is the center pointof pedagogy. And then for others it’sreally the technology.

DER: Can you expand on that?Magjuka: There seem to be two

general strategies in terms ofpedagogy. And one is, is it technology-

based or is it faculty involvement-based? You can have a comparativelylow-tech program that is high infaculty interaction. If you have moreof a technological model you might ormight not decided to go the route offull-time faculty. Most programsdecide not to.I think that’s a really important dif-

ference — it’s part philosophy, partbusiness model. I think it winds upcreating very significant differences inhow a program is designed anddelivered.

DER: Can you give me some practicalexamples?Magjuka: In Kelley Direct, every

single course has faculty assigned to itas part of their normal teaching load.We don’t have a strategy where you

them understand the learning thatarises from errors in judgment,” hesays, “we can’t help higher ed much;and I think those of us who seelearning as kind of a disruptive inno-vation have a responsibility to teachhigher ed how to change.”Klonoski says there’s a “metacogni-

tive” element to their session — thatis, it gets people to think about howthey think. “People don’t reflect onwhat they’re doing and why they’redoing it,” he says. “They may accumu-late best practices but they don’talways accumulate wisdom. All Mykand I are trying to say is its ok to think

hard about your screw-ups and in factthat’s probably where the mostlearning is occurring. For those of usin distance learning right now I wouldprobably say that’s exactly where thelearning is.”Klonoski goes on: “Distance learning

is going through changes that aremore rapid and more significant thanour big brothers in traditional highered. We’re building from small to large,we’re going through a rapid productimprovement process, we’re growingour product out to new marketplaces.To do all that you’ve got to be realcomfortable with trial and error

learning.”Garn says that the critical element in

this process isn’t so much the particu-lar anecdotes as it is giving theattendees permission to tell theirstories -- to confess that they learnedsomething because they made amistake or a misjudgment. “What wasunique about this,” Garn says, “wasthat people began to feel empoweredto tell stories about their ownmistakes.”“I think,” Garn reflects, “we hit a

nerve someplace.” �

Building a Distance Education Program:Key Questions to Answer

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 10�


have a single faculty and their effortsare leveraged where its like a masterteacher with a lot of facilitators,instead it is one faculty to one sectionof students — 30 to 40 students —and the faculty is responsible for deliv-ering within that course the amount oflearning that he is comfortable with togive our school’s imprint and saythat’s three credits of graduateeducation.

DER: How did you decide on a partic-ular mode for Kelley Direct?Magjuka: So much of how a

program evolves is based in the partic-ular circumstances in which it wascreated. And in my case, in KelleyDirect, we’re a business school; thefaculty are heavily involved inteaching case [studies] so it’s not asurprise. What we have really empha-sized is how to teach business cases inan online environment. So that’s a bigdifference. Some of our best classesare remarkably text-based. The reasonfor that is because just like in a class,where people learn most is in the giveand take with the instructor.On the other hand, it’s very

common in engineering distance ed tohave a model where a videotape ismade of an in-class lecture, and thenthe videotape is quickly sent out to thestudents as a DVD, and then themethod is watching the interactioncaptured on film.That’s fine but that is a very big dif-

ference in how we teach.

DER:What implications does thathave for program administrators?Magjuka: What flows from that is

how you have to think about the ad-ministrative support for your instruc-tion, depending on what theunderlying philosophy is and wherethe bulk of your teaching effort willbe. If it’s taping in-class instruction,quickly editing it and sending it out,

well not surprisingly I can guaranteeyou they have a larger multimediagroup than I do. We have one and halfpeople total broadly construed as mul-timedia but we have a number ofpeople involved in online coursedesign with our faculty. It’s a differ-ence that sort of radiates in lots ofother places.

DER: Are there other relateddecisions?Magjuka: In terms of administrative

issues, I think one that is very muchrelated to this teaching issue iswhether or not you’re going to haveopportunities for synchronous learningexperiences. Are you going to decideto allow, as an example, students tohave a blended option? It’s tied veryclosely with your philosophy. I don’tthink you’d find too often that a placethat is sending out CD’s is really tryingto create a broad set of curricularoptions that say you can attend a classor participate online or view it as a CDdepending on where you are that day.The University of Warwick [U.K.] is

an example. They are really pushingadministratively for a model ofblended learning which says that atany point in time you can participatein the same class period on this topicin marketing in several differentvenues, depending on your availabilityand where you are geographically.I think that this is an administrative

issue and a pedagogical issue and Ithink it’s an underlying philosophicalissue. Is your program going to bepushing toward the establishment ofsome sort of standardized deliveryacross distribution channels, whichwould allow for this notion of ablended program, or are you reallygoing to be exclusively distance?I think programs really differ in the

extent to which they have a mobile setof floating residential experiences ordo they have multiple locations thatthey could run this from.

In the purely distance model, espe-cially if its going the high tech route, itis way more likely that you can runthat without a very large contributionfrom tenure track faculty. So to methat’s more of a leverage strategy. Howto get more teaching out of yourfaculty.Blending is more of a strategy about

the next level of evolution in howwe’re going to teach in this world.Which, by the way, might mean thatyou have more faculty involved as yougrow, rather than just getting moresubsidiary outcomes from what youare currently doing. So its sort of likean attitude, it’s sort of like a philoso-phy, it’s also a business model. Abusiness model for the blended says,“Five years from now, this is howwe’ll be teaching.” The leverage modelis like saying, “Look we only have xamount of time and resources. This isa very efficient way of leveraging whatwe already do.”The lower tech model uses the web,

but first and foremost is interactionbetween student and faculty member.Power Point, Podcast, video streamsare all secondary. The bulk of the in-struction is carried by the interactionbetween faculty and student. Whereasthe high tech model truly relies onputting a much greater percentage ofthe learning on the screen.

DER:What other questions do ad-ministrators need to answer?Magjuka: If I were starting a

program now I’d really be asking thequestion of whether or not it’snecessary to make a significant invest-ment in developing my own supportcapabilities. The old “make-or-buy”question.If I were asked to go to a university

and create an MBA program launch,one possibility is that you could reallydo it with a minimal amount of

PAGE 11�

FROM PAGE 9

11

The decision to launch a newonline program is a dauntingone. But it can be made easier

by asking the right questions andgetting the necessary answers. GloriaPickar, Ed.D., president of CompassKnowledge Group, has helpednumerous institutions consider thepro’s and con’s of creating a newprogram. Compass Knowledge Grouppartners with non-profit institutionsto determine if the market and the in-stitution are both ready for the suc-cessful launch of a new program.Distance Education Report spoke

with her about the basics that an in-stitution should know as it goes intothe decision-making process. Makesure audience and institution areready, she says. Start by consideringthe three major areas to look at whencontemplating a new program: mar-ketplace, curriculum and instruction,

and infrastructure.

MarketplaceThe evaluation of your audience is

by far the most important step in theassessment process. You should beginby developing an audience profile.This includes the size of yourprospective audience; how it is likelyto grow or not grow in the nearfuture; and what is their medianincome.One of Pickar’s key concepts is

what she calls the input and outputoccupations. By this she means theprofession and job level at whichyour prospective students will enterthe program (input); and the profes-sional and job level for which theprogram will prepare them (output).For instance, the input occupationsmay be in police or corrections at theentry level. The output may still be

police or corrections generally, butspecifically probation or parole workat the management level.Another example: If you are consid-

ering offering a bachelor’s degree inclinical lab work compare the inputposition — lab assistant, for instance— and what salary that positionpays, with the potential outputposition — for instance a medicaltechnician — and the salary that yourprospective student can anticipate.The differential between input and

output will begin to show theviability of your proposed program.While you are considering the inputand output, also consider whether ornot the industry growth rate is higherthan the national average.Next, look at what Pickar calls

demand drivers. What will drive

overhead. Just purchase [the infra-structure] through some kind oflicensing agreement — the LMSsupport, the orientation materials, thecall center support, the faculty devel-opment — you can buy that now.Unlike when I started in 1999, it’s notlike you have to create everything onyour own. That’s a key design issuenow.

DER:What considerations are ad-ministrators likely to overlook?Magjuka: I think in online

education, administrators have under-appreciated the potential impact of the

blended option. If you think about fiveyears from today and think about thetrends in student preferences for theireducation, the question is how muchface-to-face instruction will beexpected. If your answer is, as it is ingraduate professional education, “I'dlove to meet once a month, and let’sget the rest of it done online, if that,”then what is it going to look like fiveyears from now? If that's the case, thelast design issue I would really like toask people to consider today is whatam I designing a program for, what isthe future that I’m envisioning here?Because it’ll take you two years to

get ramped up with your program, andif you say to yourself that five yearsfrom now I see in my market a greatconvergence between programs, be itresidential or weekend or online, thenas a design issue, from an administra-tive point of view, from a strategicpoint of view, you should really juststart thinking with that future in mind,and start designing And, institution-ally, start working on creating the kindof program that you think you’re goingto wind up having five years from nowanyway. �


Seeing Where the Distance EducationOpportunities Lie

By Christopher Hill

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people to your program? What is thecurrent industry demand for the pro-fession and degree you will beoffering? What are the individualdrivers? What will “pull you into thatdegree?” as Pickar says. Some factorsmight be the need for licensure orcertification. Or a big differencebetween input and output salaries.The desire for professional parity maybe a driver, for example there may benew documentation or certificationrequired in a certain field that practi-tioners will need to remain competi-tive.

Audience accessibilityThe next part of studying your

prospective market is to gauge theiraccessibility. Can you locate themand get your marketing messagethrough to them? Is the audience ho-mogenous — easy to speak to as onegroup? The more homogenous, theeasier your job will be. Will directmarketing and print media reachthem? Look at the internet for keyword searches that will bring up yourprogram. Are there portals that youcan be linked to?Of course you need to consider

your competition. Typically the majorcompetition will be for-profit schools.Build a “competitive set” of other re-gionally accredited institutions. Lookat the comparisons between theirprograms and yours. Look at thecompetitive advantages of yourprogram.Decide how you’re going to set

tuition. Pickar recommends that yourtuition neither be the highest or thelowest among your competitive set.Decide if you are going to have aresidency requirement.

Curriculum and instructionCurriculum and instruction are the

next major elements to consider asyou make your decision.

Can the curriculum be delivered ina scalable model? Do you need tooffer every course every term? It canbe a real advantage if you don’t haveto have faculty time absorbed byteaching every course every term. Doyou have enough faculty to teach allthe students that you expect? Canyou find enough?

Is the program structured so thatthe students can complete it in a rea-sonable amount of time? If youronline program is targeted towardworking, professional adults, are youradmission requirements flexibleenough to accommodate them?

InfrastructureThe third set of items to be

evaluated has to do with the infra-structure of the program. Will you beable to provide online studentservices? Are you set up to do enroll-ment tracking? Will you be able toprovide tech support for faculty? Canyou run a 24/7 help desk? Who willtrain and support your faculty?How will your bookstore work

online? Are you set up to conduct e-commerce? Will students be able tomake purchases online?As you start your recruitment

efforts, will you be able to respond toan enquiry in 24 hours?Can you create an online orienta-

tion? Will the students know how toparticipate? Do they have all thepieces? Are your students comfort-able with technology? Considerbuilding students into small learningcommunities of 15 to 25.Think about assigning a retention

specialist to support your students.Someone to advocate for thestudents. Someone who, if thetextbooks haven’t arrived by the timethe class starts, or any other snafuoccurs, they can advocate for thestudents and be responsible forresolving the problem.Pickar suggests the assessment

process can be done in four to sixweeks. The next step is to put amarketing plan in place. She recom-mends allowing six months formarketing before you open the e-doors. �


FROM PAGE 11

The evaluation of your

audience is by far the most

important step in the

assessment process. You

should begin by developing an

audience profile. This includes

the size of your prospective

audience; how it is likely to

grow or not grow in the near

future; and what is their

median income.

13

Many of the studies conductedon distance educationprograms, over the years,

have focused on the correlationbetween faculty and/or course qualityand program success. There have beenfew that looked at the relationshipbetween the quality of program ad-ministration and success as measuredin increased enrollment. And what or-ganizational structure best contributesto that success? How does the qualityof administrators’ communicationimpact success, if at all?These are the questions that Zachary

Tippetts, the former webmaster/onlinetraining specialist for the SubstituteTeacher’s Institute at Utah StateUniversity and now a doctoral studentthere, and his colleague ByronBurnham, looked at. The duoconducted a study analyzing thequality of administrative practices,specifically communication quality,and the practices’ contribution toincreased enrollment. They alsocompared organizational structures todetermine if any one was better thananother in facilitating success.

Relating Practices to OutcomesThe Sloan Foundation lists adminis-

trative issues as one of its five pillarsof success. Both fiscal concerns andcommunication fall under this pillar.Administrators who manage costs,increase enrollment and controlexpenses understand how practice andoutcomes are related.Applying research from the business

world that shows relationships

between communication and success,Tippetts and Burnham looked for anycorrelation between good communica-tion practices among administratorsand rising online enrollment numbers.

Surveying key individualsFor the communications practices

portion of the study, the duo selectedinstitutional members of theUniversity Continuing EducationAssociation. They surveyed key indi-viduals in online and continuingeducation at association schools.The two-part survey was sent to two

distinct groups. The first part, a paper-based survey developed specifically forthis study, went to all UCEA institu-tional contacts.Questions concerning growth, orga-

nizational structure, faculty involve-ment and other demographicinformation about the school wereincluded in the instrument.Those individuals were also asked to

participate in the second part of thesurvey, an online version of Down’sand Hazen’s CommunicationSatisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ). Thisquestionnaire, which includes sectionson superior/subordinate relationships,can be used to measure communica-tion quality and has the advantage ofrelating to productivity or success.The campus contacts were then

asked to distribute instructions for thesame online survey to individualsholding one of five specific titles attheir institutions. Those receiving theinstructions included the provost,chief information officer, director of

continuing education, the leadinglibrary personnel responsible foronline learning support and director offaculty training.A dean or department head respon-

sible for administering one part of thedistance education program alsoreceived the instructions. “With theexception of deans and departmentheads, there is typically only one suchposition per institution,” the duonoted. “It was up to the institutions tochoose the representative from amongthe deans and department heads.”The original CSQ focuses on both hi-

erarchical and overall communicationsatisfaction. Questions were addedthat focused on the practice of com-munication between administrativepeers.Despite good intentions, the paper

survey’s response rate didn’t meet theduo’s expectations of 30 percent. Only78 of 375 targeted institutionsresponded for a response rate of 20percent. “Of these, 19 schools (24percent) reported no significant onlineactivity associated with continuingeducation at their institutions,”Tippetts and Burnham noted.Conclusions were drawn from theremaining 15.7 percent.Carnegie I institutions responded in

far greater numbers than representedin the initial population, with 40percent of the continuing educationcontacts completing the surveys.Those with the fewest responses(zero), were baccalaureate/associate’scolleges. Schools with between 10,000and 19,000 students had the greatestnumber of responses at 23.Statistics for enrollment increases

over the past year showed an averagegrowth across institutions of 35percent. But the real surprise camewhen the duo looked at five-yeargrowth. Overall growth across institu-tions came in at a whopping 437percent over five years with the largestgrowth, 879 percent, occurring inschools with 10,000 to 19,000


Do Administrative PracticesDetermine Enrollment Success?

By Mary Lou Santovec

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How can you assure paritybetween a distance programand its face-to-face counterpart?

Is it possible to guarantee identicaloutcomes with two such differentmeans of delivery? In some programs,some educators may settle for a roughequivalence. But what about whenparity of outcomes is absolutelyessential? What about a discipline likepharmacy, where the presence orabsence of certain competencies can belife and death matters? CreightonUniversity offers an online pharmacydegree. The accrediting body, theAmerican Council on Pharmacy

Education, visited Creighton five timeswithin the first two years of the imple-mentation of the program. Each time,they asked, How are you going toestablish parity? The program neededto produce the same set of competen-cies that their traditional program did.Naser Alsharif, associate professor on

the pharmacy faculty at CreightonUniversity, studied the relative parity ofthe online and face-to-face versions ofthe same course—The Chemical Basisof Drug Action—in Creighton’sPharm.D. program. His finding? Parityis possible, but it needs a major institu-tional commitment to ensure the

equality of outcomes that his programdemanded. Here are Creighton’s stepstoward parity.

1. Admissions: Parity begins with theadmissions process. You need to look atadmission criteria—what type ofstudents will do best in an onlineprogram? What requirements do youhave of your online students? Considerbasics like computer proficiency.Consider where they graduated. Havethey taken courses online before, whatis their academic maturity level, Do

students.The response rate for the CSQ was

even lower than for the paper-basedsurvey. Only 112 online questionnaireswere filled out, representing 60 institu-tions. Of those filling out the survey,the director of continuing educationand the director of faculty training hadthe highest response rates.After analyzing the responses,

Tippett and Burnham discovered a sta-tistically significant correlation of .327between communication quality andenrollment growth. “Its effect size wasslightly over 10 percent meaning thatcommunication quality is an areawhere administrators can look for in-dicators of the growth or lack thereoffor their programs,” noted the duo.Interestingly, in the comment

section of the CSQ, more than 40percent of respondents voiced concernabout top-down communication fromtop administrators. Other respondents

requested more and better communi-cation overall from their bosses.Also as part of the same study, the

duo looked at Mintzberg’s organiza-tional structures: simple structure,machine bureaucracy, professional bu-reaucracy, divisionalized form andadhocracy for any correlation betweena particular structure and success.“Among the target institutions there

were no significant benefits derivedfrom one structure over another,” saidTippetts. “However, in the last sixyears, structures have changed at 20percent of the institutions. Consideringhow little change is said to haveoccurred in the last 100 years, thisseems to be an important finding.”They also compared the different

structures with the age of a program.“One relatively newer institution (ithad been in place only 14 years), wasthe only institution using anadhocracy,” said Tippetts.“Adhocracies are contractor-basedprograms. In this case it was likely

that faculty were contracted to teachthe classes, and not full-time faculty.”In terms of separateness or

autonomy of online units, only 14percent of online programs hire theirown faculty and only 16 percentdefine their faculty roles and responsi-bilities. “In other words, for the mostpart, traditional institutions and theirpower structures are in place,” headded.There also doesn’t seem to be a

‘best’ institutional structure. “Thereare only better practices within institu-tions,” said Tippetts. “Among theitems recommended are communica-tion of strategic direction andmore effective managementcommunication.”While the study did not show a

direct cause and effect of better com-munication equals increased enroll-ment, Tippetts’s and Burnham’s workshows that good communication canpositively influence enrollmentgrowth. �


Eight Steps to On-Campus/Online Parity

By Christopher Hill

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FROM PAGE 13

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they possess time management skills?“Certainly we look at the admission

criteria as a guide in terms of whattype of student we enter into our on-campus and our web programs. Butthe criteria are different and the modeof delivery and the learning isdifferent. And the students aredifferent. The average age of thestudents in our web pathway is 33compared to 21 or 22 in our on-campus program.”

2. Planning: You have to be thinkingabout this from day one—how you’regoing to enhance and optimize parityfor two student cohorts. The academicaffairs office and the office of studentaffairs are critical in organizing thenew program.

3. Training: Online instructors needspecial training to achieve parity withtheir on-campus counterparts.Creighton’s pharmacy program takesadvantage of the school’s office offaculty development and assessment.Training is given to both on-campusand online teachers in pedagogy, tech-nology, the scholarship of teachingand assessment, and how to do allthis online. There are also fellowshipsoffered to the faculty that can lead tocertification as online teachers.Creighton has an office of informa-

tion technology and their role iscritical. They acquire the best technol-ogy that is available, but moreimportant, they train the faculty touse it.Online students must have adequate

training as well. Students in theCreighton distance Pharm.D. programhave an on-campus week of trainingand orientation at the start of theprogram. They are trained on anysoftware that the faculty may utilize,including but not limited to Excel,PowerPoint, FrontPage, discussionfolders, Outlook and iLink.

4. The website: In achieving parity,standardization of the course websiteand how students access coursecontent is particularly important. Arethe course websites standardized in away where students both on campusand online use the same website andget the same information?

5. Ability-based outcomes: TheCreighton Pharm.D program isabilities-based. “We need our studentsto be able to do certain things by thetime they finish each course,” asAlsharif says. The pharmacy facultyagreed that for parity between the twostudent cohorts, course objectives interms of learned abilities had to be thesame—that by the time the studentsfinished the course both cohorts haveto meet the same abilities-basedoutcomes. “So if we say my coursewill promote critical thinking, or mycourse will promote communicationsskills, or my course will teach phar-maceutical decision-making, it has todo that for both cohorts. You cannothave an ability-based outcome for theweb students that’s different from thecampus students.”

6. An activity grid: To comparecampus-based and online programs,the Creighton pharmacy departmentcreated what they call an activity grid.The activity grid lists all the activitiesthat the on-campus students willengage in and asks how they willcreate the equivalent learning oppor-tunity for the web students.For example: In the first year of the

program, on–campus students do acase study and accompanying PowerPoint presentation. There was anempty space on the activity grid for itsonline equivalent. The campus groupprepares for it for about three weeks,presents it for about 20 minutes infront of the class, and then fieldsquestions. For the web equivalent, theonline students also did the casestudy, but they were asked to developdiscussions surrounding that case

including different scenarios. Theyneeded to publish that case online onthe due date and then facilitate discus-sion online.

7. Grade distribution: You will needto look at quizzes and exam averagesand at letter-grade distribution to seeif there are significant differencesbetween the on-campus and onlinecohorts.The Creighton researchers believe

that measured in terms of class per-formance the results are quite close.An average of test and quiz scores inthe spring of 2006 showed class per-formance at 80.3 percent on campusto 82.9 online. Results, by the re-searcher’s standards, that can becalled consistent.Alsharif admits that in terms of the

letter grade distribution, there is a dif-ference between Creighton’s on-campus and online programs. TheCreighton researchers are working onreconciling the differences, factor byfactor.If research does show significant dif-

ferences, you need to go through pieceby piece reviewing components of thecourse—from the delivery method, tohandouts, quizzes, labs, lectures,learning experiences, etc. The coursehas to be analyzed for ways to bringstudents in the underperformingprogram up to the level of the other.Should you do more videos, shouldyou do more tutorials, should you domore capturing of certain content?Can the online students see andvisualize everything that the on-campus students can?

8. Student perceptions: The otherthing that researchers can look at isstudent perception based on courseand instructor evaluations. You caneven, as Creighton did, hold focusgroups with the students. In thiscontext, one thing that is a great helpis having several years of evaluations


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We all saw what HurricaneKatrina did to education inLouisiana. Do you know

what you would do when disasterstrikes you distance educationprogram? Disaster can take manyforms, and an event that can shutyou down doesn’t have to be nearlyas dramatic as a hurricane. A rela-tively minor hardware malfunctioncan put you out of business. And youhave a student body who a just aclick away from going with anotherprovider if you can’t fix the problemfast enough.When Distance Education Report

spoke with John Orlando, instruc-tional resource manager at theNorwich University School ofGraduate Studies, he discussed whyit’s crucial for you to have a businesscontinuity plan for your program.And why putting an effective plan inplace might be a bigger job than youthink.

Distance Education Report: Doesevery distance education programneed a continuity plan, or just those

in high risk areas?John Orlando: I really think they all

need continuity plans because all or-ganizations are in recognized riskgroups. There are risks that affect anyorganization. Granted, the ones thatwe hear about are hurricanes, fire, etcetera. But the major risks are not theflashy things you read about in thenewspaper. The major risks out there,numerically in terms of what bringsdown businesses, are not terrorism orhurricanes. They’re the commoneveryday events.

DER: Such as?ORLANDO: The number one event

that affects business continuity ishardware failure. Number two isweather-related incidents, includingstorms that kill power. Any businesshas to worry about hardware failure.Any business needs to worry aboutfire or losing power.The major events, the ones that are

threats to any organization, arecommon events that really areuniversal. So I would say for thatreason that any distance organization

should have a continuity plan just asany organization should. It’s particu-larly important for distance educationprograms to have a continuity plan inplace, more so than for residentialprograms for a number of reasons.

DER:What are some of thosereasons?ORLANDO: One is, in a residential

program, if the campus shuts downor loses power for a few days, thestudents probably aren’t going to goelsewhere. Our distance students areout there in the world and we haveas many competitors as there areother distance programs. Our com-petitors are only a mouse click away.To go to a competitor, they don’thave to move, they don’t have to gothrough all the effort of relocating.They can just get fed up and say“Forget it, I’m going to the Universityof Phoenix.” Distance students aremuch easier to lose.They’re more demanding of

services, especially adult students.

so that you can observe trends.Looking at course evaluations, see ifany general themes emerge that arecommon to both the online and theon-campus cohorts. This might beseen in different types of studentresponses: They may say that the

courses (in both programs) are well-organized, the notes are well-written,and the courses are highly interactive.If themes like that come up for bothgroups, that is “proof of parity”Alsharif says. “If those themes are thesame from both student cohorts that’sfantastic, that is evidence you’re doinga good job.”

The bottom line is that it’s impossi-ble to guarantee 100 percent perform-ance and learning parity. But you canalways seek to optimize and enhanceit by applying some of these insightsfrom Creighton. �


Creating a Business Continuity Plan for YourDistance Education Program

By Christopher Hill

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FROM PAGE 15

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Adult students very much want valuefor their education. And certainlywe’ve found even when we have rel-atively small connectivity issues, theservers go down for three hours, youhear about it. If it happens a coupleof times, people start saying “I’m nothappy about the reliability here” andthey start to look elsewhere. Evensomething like that, where you thinkwell, that’s a minor inconvenience,for some reason people are botheredby those minor inconveniences.When you discover that the e-mail atwork is down for three hours, youthink you might as well go home. Itbothers our students. It’s much easierfor a distance program to lose itsstudents.Also, I think distance education in

a traditional university setting is notthought of as important as residentialeducation, and for that reason adistance program might be easier tocut. If it does have a problembecause of poor service, they havelow enrollment, they maybe losemoney for one or two years, the uni-versity’s more likely to say, we’regoing to get out of the market, wewere never really confident to beginwith.

DER:What’s the first step?ORLANDO: The business impact

analysis is the initial stage of aplanning process. It’s part of whatprepares the planner to know whatneeds to be done in response tovarious scenarios. The idea is, youtake a look at what could happen toyou and what would be the outcomeof those things happening to you. Sofor instance, if there’s a fire at yourbuilding what would happen? Youthink to yourself, OK a fire, we maybe out of that building for two tothree weeks, what would be theimpact of that. That would be a

major impact — it would be very dis-ruptive. Because of it, having someresponse mechanism or a secondplace that we can go may be thenumber one priority—the first area tobe addressed in the plan, the firstplace to put our resources.Going further down might be

something like what would happen ifwe lost our student records. Thatmight be a little less disruptivebecause student records are neededfor transcript requests which cangenerally be put on hold for a fewweeks. That’s less important than theimpact of fire on a building thatcauses you to lose your building. Thebusiness impact analysis takes a lookat the impact of various events onyour business and ranks them frommost to zero. It guides you in deter-mining where priorities should be inpreparing for different events. Ideallya full-fledged business impactanalysis goes so far as to put amonetary value on each event.A hypothetical case: Amazon.com

does all their selling through theirwebsite. Let’s imagine they had oneserver. And that server could godown. They may decide it’ll take fivedays to replace the server. And itactually does take a while to replacea server, more than people think.They may say, we do five milliondollars worth of business a day; if theserver takes five days to replace, thatevent could cost of $25 milliondollars. And then they ask, howlikely is that event? Let’s imaginethey say there’s about a 20 percentchance of that happening every year.So hypothetically we would expect itto happen about once every fiveyears. With that, they would say,“This is a $25 million event, wewould expect it to happen once everyfive years, so we can expect to lose,on average, $5 million a year fromthis event. Which means that we canjustify, from a business standpoint,

spending up to $5 million a year toprevent it.”That’s in principle how a business

analysis goes; it reduces everything todollars and cents. I personally thinkthat’s hard to do. Some of thenecessary information is simply notout there. People just don’t knowwhat the likelihood is of the air con-ditioner dying in the server room is.Going that far is very hard to do. Sowhat you really have to do is saywhat’s really serious. Losing ourclassroom is really serious. That’show we deliver our education. Losingour classroom for more than one ortwo days is going to make a lot ofpeople go bye-bye — we’re going tolose a lot of students. So it’s reallyimportant to institute a process sothat we won’t lose our classroom.That would be more of a realexample, from a distance educationunit’s standpoint.

DER:What’s the biggest difficulty ininstituting a continuity plan?ORLANDO: The biggest issue is

one that private organizations runinto as well. The biggest issue isreally getting buy-in from the organi-zation itself. On a couple of differentlevels. One on the individual level —it’s hard to get people to see the im-portance of doing things like doingdata backup on their computer,reading the business continuity plan,doing fire drill practices, doing allthose preparation things you need todo when in fact, from their position,,you’re preparing them for an eventthat may never happen. And theythink of it as a nuisance, somethingthat takes away from their productiv-ity. So getting buy-in from the peoplewithin the distance education unity isone.And then especially, you need buy-

in from the other units around it. A


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distance education business continu-ity plan will require the cooperationof the other units in the university.First and foremost would be the ITunit. Because that’s probably theweakest link, the spot where it’sgoing to break — as I’ve said,hardware failure is the number oneissue. Distance education unitsdeliver their education through IT soIT is the most important area. Soyou’re going to need to work with ITto find out what are our backupsystems if the servers go down? Howwill we notify students when theservers go down? So getting coopera-tion from IT is important.

DER:What if your entire facility isunusable?ORLANDO: As far as physical

threats like fire, et cetera, you need towork out collaborations or prioragreements with your facilitiespeople. For instance, at NorwichUniversity, if there’s a fire or anythingthat would cause us to have toevacuate the building that ourdistance education unit is in, we havea prior agreement that we will moveto a computer lab in the library, andwe will start working from there.We’ve gone through and tested thecomputers and we know that theyhave to be reconfigured in a certainway to fit our needs. And essentiallywe can kick the students off them.But we needed that agreement aheadof time. We can’t wait until the eventhappens to go over to the library andsay, “We’re here!” So you need prioragreements from other units aroundthe distance education unit toprovide the support services. Thatcan be a little problematic becauseyou’re preparing for an event thatmay never happen. Units may simplynot want to extend themselves forother units. There’s kind of a siloeffect in education. If I’m a library

and I feel my responsibility is toserve the students, I may be reluctantto say I’m willing to kick all thestudents out. Getting those agree-ments from the other divisions is alsoa big issue.A lot of it is simply the planning

part — it’s really not about buyingstuff. There are certain things youhave to spend money on in order tophysically protect yourself. You mayhave to put in security measures inthe building to prevent theft,obviously fire suppression. But mostof a business continuity plan doesn’tinvolve spending money. It involvesspending time — to get agreements,to get people to understand what todo in certain situations. I don’t thinkwe’ve spent more than a couple ofhundred dollars on our plan. I thinkwe had to fix a few broken locks. It’sbasically getting the collaborationand cooperation of others and con-vincing them that it’s important.

DER: Does being part of a bigger in-stitution like a university give youany continuity advantages?ORLANDO: One benefit that a

distance education unit has over aprivate company is that it can drawoff the wider institution’s resources.In the example I just gave, ifsomething happened to our unitdowntown, we would move to thelibrary. If it’s a long-term disruptionand we have to be out of our buildingfor weeks or months, we have anagreement with facilities that thereare two specific classrooms that theywill essentially convert to offices forus. They’re already wired for Internetconnectivity, they’re wired fortelephone connectivity, they knowwhere the office equipment wouldbe, and we have a list of the officeequipment that would get moved in.For a private company, when itdevelops a business continuity plan,let’s imagine it has 100 employees inone building, they have to worry

about where they would go if thebuilding burnt down or becameunusable. They usually have to spendmore money. They have to get anagreement with another industry, ifthey have space available that theymay have to rent on an ongoingbasis. They have what are called ‘hotsites’ for IT equipment which aresites where you literally have serversand computers waiting for you. Theycan just flick the switch. And all thatcosts a lot of money. So the goodthing about a distance education unitis that it can use the university’swider resources. And because of thatyou do not need to spend muchmoney on it

DER:Where do you find out how toimplement a plan?ORLANDO: The first step would be

just to get education on what isneeded. There are a few websiteswhere you can get information onplanning. What a business continuityplan looks like, examples of plans,things like that. The first thing youhave to do is assign somebody the re-sponsibility of pushing this through.That person has to know about conti-nuity planning if they’re not already acontinuity consultant. Most universi-ties don’t have these people just lyingaround. Somebody’s going to have toget educated on this. So you’reprobably going to have to assignsomebody the responsibility ofpushing it forward, then allow themthe time to get the information andthe education they need. Then theadministrator has to make it knownto whoever the plan effects that he orshe is behind the plan and thatthere’s an expectation that they’llcooperate. So if the administrator’sthe dean of a distance education unit,the administrator has to stand behindthe planning process to his or herown people. Call a meeting and say,


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“This is what we’re going to do.”And at the same time that adminis-trator is going to have to at least helpto make the connections with theother units around the university.The vice president of operationswho’s probably in charge of facilities;the IT unit; security. Help build thoseconnections at a high enough levelthat the individual who’s actuallycharged with writing that plan canget the cooperation he or she needs.And then basically it’s letting themloose and allowing them to go upthrough the planning process andstanding behind things like this andthe exercises that also need to bedone as part of the planning.

DER: Can you outsource the creationof a plan? Are there consultantswho will do it for you?ORLANDO: There are a variety of

private organizations that do continu-ity planning. There are companiesthat do this consulting work and theyusually divide their services up in acouple of different ways. One serviceis that they can come in and do acomplete plan for you. And thesecond service is that they can docertain parts of the plan. And someof these companies can actuallyprovide the support for IT backupthemselves. An example is SunGard— they will not only help youdevelop a continuity plan, but youcan sign a contract with them andthey will have their own servers tocreate a hot site for you. Now that’sgoing to cost money, and the consult-ants are quite expensive.

DER: How can you plan for all thedifferent circumstances that mayaffect your operation?ORLANDO: If you try to look at

everything that may happen to you,there’s so many of them that you’llprobably have a hard time getting a

handle on each of them. There couldbe a fire at your office. There couldbe a malicious attack at your office.There could be water damage. Therecould be a lightning strike. If you gothrough all the possibilities, you canjust keep rolling, until you realize,we’re not even going to think of allthe possibilities. In fact, the thingsthat often shut people down are thethings you never would haveimagined. So what you do is you getaway from thinking of the causes thatcould shut us down, and rather thinkterms of outcomes. So a fire or alightning strike or a loss of power atour offices would all have the sameeffect, they would all shut down ouroffices, and cause us to have to gosomewhere else.So in the planning process, you

don’t delineate events by saying whatdo we do if there’s a fire or alightning strike or a malicious attack.What you do say is, ‘what do we doif the office is a loss?’ for whateverreason. And once you start thinkingin those terms, it radically limits thenumber of possible scenarios youhave to cover.So in our own business continuity

plan, I think we have about 10scenarios. And that’s far less than thehundred that you could think of. It’slike, what happens if our office islost? What happens if our email islost? What happens if the IT systemis lost? What happens if our office islost and whatever happens to makeour office lost also makes the campuslost, like in New Orleans withKatrina?

DER: Once you have your plan, howdo you implement it?ORLANDO: Implementation

involves a couple things. It goes backto this issue of buy-in. It’s helpful toinvolve more people in the planningprocess because then you get naturalbuy-in. If people were actually part ofthe process of creating the plan,

they’re more likely to stand behind it.They’re more likely to do the proce-dures. So my advice is that eachbusiness area — admissions,marketing, et cetera — have a repre-sentative that’s assigned to sit on thecommittee that develops the plan.The benefit it has is that once thisplan is created those people can helpgo out to their own division and helpdiscuss the need for the policy andprocedures. And watch to make surethey’re doing it.Business continuity plans can very

easily become shelfware. You create aplan, you send it to everybody, theyshelve it and then forget about it. Youreally need to test the processes,actually go through a sample firedrill, or a drill for other events thatcould happen, Go through theprocess of testing. We took five or sixpeople and we called IT and saidwe’re going to see what happens ifwe go and use the library computers.So we went down there, started themup and started testing which of thefunctions we could get into. IT saidwe’ll make a script of how to get intothe various sites you have to get into.A lot of times you develop a plan andyou don’t do the testing. After pre-senting the policies and proceduresyou really have to test them. Andthen you have to go back to it once ayear to see what’s changed—espe-cially distance education units, theychange quickly, new technologycomes along. So the plan has to berevised probably on a yearly basis. �


FROM PAGE 18

20

Do you ever feel that yourdistance education programsits at the margins of your in-

stitution? Feel like a bit of an after-thought? Well, you’re not alone, saysMaggie Murdock, Associate VicePresident and Dean of the OutreachSchool at the University of Wyoming.The folks who run distance educationprograms often feel that they’re anadd-on to their institutions, not quitepart of the central mission of theschool.“I can think of times in my experi-

ence, in my university when we wereseen as necessary but as a nuisance,”Murdock says. Distance educatorshave a different kind of student, whois sometimes not easily absorbed intothe institution’s system of registrationand record-keeping. When an institu-tion starts to get into distanceeducation, it finds new and strangedemands made regarding things likeregistration and financial aid.“I think if I were to look at it propor-

tionately, more [outreach units] doconsider themselves at the fringe. Justlistening to people talk, they often talkin terms of us and them,” Murdocksays. “Sometimes we joke that weused to be a hobby. But now, andpeople in other distance educationprograms would tell you the same, thisis where growth in the university is.So when you’ve got the headcount,and you’re bringing in money, youbecome much more to the university.”Any way it’s approached, the rela-

tionship between an outreach unit and

the central institution is going to becomplicated, in terms of financing,technology sharing, student servicesand so on. But there are ways aroundthat, Murdock says.

The three stages of integrationMurdock believes there are three

basic kinds of relationship between adistance education unit and the insti-tution to which it belongs. One isisolation. Though the main institutionmay not make it explicit, the distanceed unit is essentially seen as aseparate entity, added on to theschool’s main mission of educatingstudents on campus.Another possibility is integration —

where the distance program is consid-ered as an equal and legitimatepartner to the other departments inthe institution, and central to the uni-versity’s mission.In between those two is the least

satisfactory condition, one thatMurdock calls hybridization — wherethe distance education unit is onlypartly integrated into the institution,where responsibilities are fuzzily de-lineated and initiatives are duplicatedbetween the distance unit and the uni-versity. In her words, “Duplication isproduced by an unorganized combina-tion of the efforts of individualoutreach players and the emergence ofan institutional outreach system.”Murdock thinks of her three options

not as separate, distinct conditions butas points on a continuum.

The benefits of being isolatedShe points out that isolation can

have its compensations. “Even thoughI don’t believe isolation is a good placeto be, it can be pretty fun. Becausesmall groups are really very creative,and the exposure to the institution isreally pretty minimal.” She uses herown outreach unit as an example:“Twenty-five years ago, nobody gaveus any money. We had to be cleverand we also had to be quite collegial.So even though I wouldn’t say thosewere the good old days, there was adifferent kind of feeling we had whenI was in the outreach center whichwas about 150 miles away from themain campus. They let people go offon their own and be creative.”The hybrid stage is where you

encounter the dangers of redundancy.“The most costly and the least funpart of the continuum is the hybridstage,” Murdock warns. “Becauseyou’ve got lots of people runningaround doing the same thing and sortof falling over one another and they’respending the university’s resources inkind of a redundant way. Many peopleare buying equipment or duplicateequipment. Registrations aren’t cen-tralized. So for me that’s the leastdesirable place to be. It’s costly andit’s really less fun because you don’tknow who is doing what.”In the hybrid stage institutions may

give an implicit OK to departments tostart up outreach projects on theirown, not coordinated with theoutreach unit, creating competingoutreach efforts in the same institu-tion. “The university will say, ‘Yeah,why don’t you go out on your own?’and sometimes people will say we’regoing to do this outreach stuff becausewe see this as a way to make money.”One of the particular areas of

redundancy is in the purchase oftechnology.


Integrating Distance EducationPrograms into the Institution

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 21�

21

“Everybody’s going out and buying[equipment] and they’re spending alot of resources — ‘Hey this videoconference stuff is pretty cool, whydon’t we get our own?’ Everyonethen goes out on their own and buysa different system, and none of theequipment talks to one another, soinstead of having one big system youhave a bunch of little systems.”

Financial integration: Pros andconsOne of the critical questions about

integration is whether or not to haveyour finances integrated with the uni-versity’s. Murdock’s position seemsparadoxical at first — she believesoverall integration is better served byhaving your financing remainseparate from the institution. “In myown view, it’s really helpful togenerate your own funds. Because ifyou’re just getting regular fundinglike any other part of the universitythen you have X amount of dollarsand that’s all you have. It takes awaythat entrepreneurial spirit which Ithink makes these kinds of units verysuccessful.”Integrating revenue streams also

takes away a “big carrot” or bargain-ing chip in one’s dealing with otheruniversity departments. “We can sayto the departments we can transfersome money over to you. We used tosay we’ll give you X amount ofmoney and you’ll give us X amountof classes. What we’d like to get to isto be able to say, ‘Well, we’re gener-ating some money, here’s a chunk ofmoney, use it to support outreach.’ Ithink it really does help you to haveflexible funding— we see it as investment capital

and it sure gets people interested.”When integrated, outreach units

can serve as the technical experts ofthe university. On the other hand,

when they’re not integrated technicalredundancies and foul–ups can occur.“When you get those ‘experts’saying, ‘Oh we could do this, it’spretty easy,’ you can have problems,”Murdock says. An example she givesis when a college went out andbought a lot of audio equipment thatwas the exciting technology at thetime. “But they bought it all fromRadio Shack,” she says. “In some ofthe outreach areas they were sayingwe can’t hear anything,” Murdockrecalls. “So we were secretly loaning[the other department] the use of ourequipment.”The engineers and technicians in

Murdock’s outreach unit do a lot ofresearch and they know what to buythat will work. “That investment inresearch and technology is one of thebest investments we make,” Murdockstates. “When money comes along, agrant or something, we know exactlywhat we want to buy and exactlywhere we’re going to put it. Thatdoesn’t happen when your mainfocus is academic. You don’t get theknowledge of the technicians whenyou’re an academic college.”

Moving toward integrationSo how do you move from

isolation, or hybridization, to integra-tion? One way is to “pretend” youbelong, as Murdock puts it. “Some ofthat has to do with how the upperparts of the university, the adminis-tration, will characterize the unit.Your own attitude can affect that. Soif in fact the director of the unit isincluded in decision-making groupslike the dean’s council, that will bequite helpful,” she says. Another wayis to keep making compacts and part-nerships within the institution,generally making yourself indispensa-ble. If your equipment always works,if people know they can count on youfor technical assistance, you willgradually become more a part the

inner circles of planning.As changes come to the institution,

opportunities can arise. “Forexample,” Murdock says, “we’vegone through a change from onestudent information system to a newone. The old one had the outreach in-stitution as a tack-on. When weplanned this new student system,everything in outreach was inte-grated. We’re not totally integratedyet, we still do a few things differ-ently, but saying, “Yeah, why don’tyou get us in on the ground floorinstead of tacking us on later?’ reallyhelps. Being in command of datahelps, too, being able to say, this ishow many students are beingbrought into the university throughyour programs. I think it’s very goodto become a data driven unit in theearly stages.Murdock ends on a note of caution:

“I can tell you that unless the univer-sity’s administration believes in this,it’s pretty tough. I’d say almost im-possible.”How do you know, then, if you’ve

been successful in integrating yourprogram into the institution? “It canbe pretty hard to measure,” Murdockadmits. “But when I sit in a dean’smeeting or I sit in an executivecouncil meeting with the vicepresident, and I’m not the onebringing up outreach, that it’s thedean of a college or another vicepresident, saying, ‘Oh we need to bedoing this,’ then you know you’vebeen successful. Because you aren’tcarrying all the water, you’ve gotsome other people to carry the waterfor you. If you can get partners whobelieve in you, then you can putpressure on an administration whomay not be as interested as you are.”�


FROM PAGE 20

22

The “tipping point” is the pointwhere individual occurrences“spread by small changes that

reproduce themselves and expand ingeometric progression, grow biggeruntil they reach a critical mass.” Youcan see the tipping point effect atwork in a wide variety of settings,from large demographic changes tokids buying iPods. What does thishave to do with distance education?The idea of the tipping point applies tothe long-term acceptance of distanceeducation within an institution,making it a permanent or evendominant part of the institution.If you want your school to be identi-

fied with distance education there’s alot to be learned by studying the ideaof a tipping point. And there’s somethings to be learned even if you don’t.In either case, your path up to thetipping point should be a consciousone, says Claudine SchWeber, Chair ofthe Doctor of Management Program atthe University of Maryland UniversityCollege (UMUC), or you may findyourself with more distance educationthan you can handle.SchWeber has been making a

science out of predicting the momentthat an institution has tipped intobeing a primarily online institution.This is what she’s come up with:Small changes replicate>Critical

Mass(CrM) rM+1=alteration of equi-librium >tips the system --38-40% x(online enrollments) tips the system

into an epidemic (overwhelming forcefor change).

Tipping too fastIn other words, individual instances

of the phenomenon i.e., studentsenrolling in online courses, grows untila critical mass is reached, at whichpoint you only need the smallest addi-tional weight–symbolized here by thenumber one—to tip the system. Thiswill happen when about 38 to 40percent of the enrollees are online.“I’m not a statistician,” SchWeber

says, “but people ask me ‘how do youknow when you’ve gotten to it?’ I wastrying to figure out if you could dothat.”There are risks in the tipping

process—you have to watch how youbuild to your critical mass. SchWebersuggests you watch three indicators atyour institution–-enrollments, facultyinvolvement and infrastructure. If thetipping point is your goal, you need tohave all three moving upwardstogether at something like the samerate, supporting each other.“Student enrollment in online

classes are the easiest data to trackand to quantify,” SchWeber says.“When that hits 38-40 percent, I’marguing that that institution hastipped. And that means the other twoparts have to be in sync.” For instance,if your enrollments are booming butyou don’t have enough faculty, or youdon’t have very good technical

support, (your system’s alwayscrashing, people can’t get the onlinelibrary resources, etc.) you’re going tohave a serious problem. Similarly, ifyou have an infrastructure that’s veryelaborate, but you haven’t trained thefaculty or the faculty are not inter-ested, or you don’t have very manyenrollments, you have a veryexpensive problem.“What you don’t want,” SchWeber

says, “is for it to tip over.”The point, SchWeber says, is that if

you want to bring your institutionfully online, and do it successfully,you should pay attention to the threeindicators. “This should not be about‘Lets get on the latest craze and see ifwe can bring in some money.’ There’scommitment, there’s a reward astructure for faculty who want toengage in this, there’s money for thetechnical support, for training, forlibraries. It’s conscious.”To successfully transform an institu-

tion requires the highest levels of theadministration to be on board. Thepresident and the provost have towant to move the project forward. AndSchWeber suggests that those adminis-trators may have to announce thatthere are consequences if faculty don’tparticipate. But, she says, it’s not somuch about individual leadership.“It’s not just having the right person ina leadership position,” she says. “It’sabout making a conscious commit-ment and reward structure andsupport network to do this.”

Deciding what you wantOf course, your institution might

want to do something short of tipping.A healthy 26 percent online may beexactly what your long term strategycalls for. “Institutions that are gettinginto online learning need to payattention to the paths that they’re on,”SchWeber says. No matter what pathyou’re on, even if limited online


The Distance Learning TippingPoint: The Moment thatTransforms an Institution

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 23�

23

growth is all you’re looking for,SchWeber’s same three factors—en-rollments, faculty and infrastructure—still apply. “What if you have 25 or 30percent online enrollments and let’ssay 30 percent of the faculty. Andyou’re not able to get on to the libraryexcept from nine to five. That’s notgoing to work. The three balls have tobe in the air together.”

Faculty resistanceOf the three key elements that have

to be in place for transformation,faculty is by far the most problematic.SchWeber notes several ways to dealwith faculty resistance. Your first moveshould be to recruit the early adopters,younger faculty used to using technol-ogy, who want to try online teaching.They become your supporters andchampions. Then you pick carefully

which programs you want to moveonline—you don’t do all at once. Youalso want to reward and recognizepeople for working online. SchWebercites Georgetown University for facultysupport. Georgetown funds facultyresearch in online learning, theyrecognize online teaching as part ofthe tenure process, and they have anannual ceremony, attended by thepresident, to honor the best courses orresearch. “If you do that you’ll get thepeople who are inclined but scaredbecause of the consequences fortenure,” SchWeber says. Anotherfaculty-related issue is unionization.Faculty unions have various kinds ofarrangements with their institutions—some of which have to do with intel-lectual property, others with workloadand quality issues.Sometimes external factors can

affect when and how a school reachesthe tipping point. Hurricane Katrina

brought a number of schools in NewOrleans online, and pushed some allthe way over the tipping point.“Sometimes there’s an incident, andthe institution realizes, “Oh my God, ifwe had this we could keep going.Online learning makes an institutionmore resilient,” SchWeber says. Infact, for SchWeber, the notion of re-silience has a lot to do with thedecision to transform an institution.The resilience of online learning givesan institution the flexibility to followwhere their enrollments are going.“Figure out who you want in yourstudent population, where they’recoming from, whether some of thiswould serve them. And be carefulabout it. Don’t do it to be doing thelatest thing, but think about it--whatdoes it cost, what do we want to do,what stages will we go through, howdo we support faculty and students?Think it through.” �

In the distance education world,the battle lines between facultyand administration have become

complex and fraught. Once tradi-tional understandings regarding intel-lectual production and property havebeen eroded by digital technology.Everyone is trying to make their ownway and find their own solutions tothe problems posed by puttingcourses online. In this scenario,however, there are options for happysolutions. Distance Education Reportdecided to talk to an authority to geta sense of the possible choices in this

world of new rules. Our authority isDr. Kim Kelley, Associate Provost andExecutive Director of the Center forIntellectual Property at the Universityof Maryland University College.

DER:What are the basic issues inthe struggle for control over onlinecourses?Kelley: The issues for the institu-

tion and the faculty member aresimilar but slightly different. And thatis, as you go online it becomessomething more than faculty notesthat are being used to teach. Further,

what’s becoming much more of thenorm is the concept of a group of in-dividuals, not just a faculty member,putting the course together—a personwith programming skills, somebodywho can do simulations and games,an instructional designer for convert-ing the content into a deliverymechanism that is appealing anddurable in an online environment.The faculty member isn’t the onlyplace where there’s developmenttaking place. So when you get into


Solving the Problems of Faculty Ownership withOnline Courses

By Christopher Hill

PAGE 24�

FROM PAGE 22

24

these situations from an institutionaladministrator’s standpoint thequestion becomes at what point doesthe institution have a vested interestin the material? And then the secondquestion is at what point would theinstitution want to have ownership ofthat content?And from the faculty perspective,

it’s always been the case that thefaculty owned their course materials.This is just an extension in theirminds of the current delivery thatthey do in the classroom. Anddepending on how independent thefaculty member is at developing, heor she may think that this intellectualcontent is theirs.

DER:What are some approaches toresolving these claims?Kelley: What institutions do varies

widely. So a lot of the big institu-tions—MIT, Cornell—have said to thefaculty, you know what, you canhave your content. And if we want touse the content, we’ll either license itfrom them or we’ll get their permis-sion. Or in the case of MIT theyfreely made it available. So there’s noexchange, monetarily.There are other models. What they

initially did in some cases was theyhad the faculty member say that hisor her work was a work for hire.Which would automatically, oncethey signed the agreement, give theinstitution ownership. And then thefaculty member would be paid a sumabove their current salary in order tomake it an equitable outcome forboth parties.In many cases the administration

was interested in trying to encourageinnovation, to get faculty involved increating materials for online delivery.So if you want to encourage innova-tion, you sweeten the opportunity.And you give faculty some ownershipof the work. The problem for the

faculty member is that theydeveloped the content and thecontent is constantly changing. Buthe or she may not get back to it againbecause it’s not primarily what thatperson is delivering. That content

may get out of date and it needs to berevised. So who does that? Theperson who originally developed it?Who they gave ownership to? Or theinstitution? And at the point that theinstitution goes to revise it, whoowns it at that point? The originalfaculty member or the person whocomes next, who does the revision?

DER: How do you deal with thosequestions?Kelley: One thing that the institu-

tion does is that they buy the course.And then the course belongs to theinstitution, so who revises it is theirdecision. Another way they handle it

is they work in groups and they havea faculty member work on thecontent. They can either use thesame faculty member to revise acourse, or they can hire anotherperson.The other model is if the faculty

member actually has ownership, notonly does the faculty memberdevelop the course but the facultymember becomes responsible for de-livering the course. Just like theywould with a face-to-face course. Andthen they’re responsible for the con-tinuing development and delivery ofthe course.

DER: That sounds reasonable. Arethere problems with that?Kelley: The problem is when your

policy says it belongs to the facultymember. That’s all well and good,but if it came down to a situationwhere there was a dispute legally,there are some equally goodarguments that the faculty memberwas working in the capacity of workmade for hire. And if that’s the casethe content would legitimately go tothe institution. So that’s wherethere’s a lot of problems. The facultysays that if I develop a course, I haveownership of that course. Then Ihave a greater incentive to create thecourse, deliver the course, plus it’s apart of my teaching portfolio. That’show I demonstrate my ability to begood at this so that institution Ywants to hire me.

DER: Is there a point where the twosets of interests can compromise?Kelley: From the institution’s

standpoint, they can license some ofthe rights. So, for example, when Iwas involved in revising the policyfor the University System ofMaryland, the faculty member is thecopyright holder. But the institution


PAGE 25�

The problem is when your

policy says it belongs to the

faculty member. That’s all well

and good, but if it came down

to a situation where there was

a dispute legally, there are

some equally good arguments

that the faculty member was

working in the capacity of

work made for hire. And if

that’s the case the content

would legitimately go to the

institution.

FROM PAGE 23

25

has certain rights to use that contentin perpetuity. For example, they havethe right to deliver that course as itwas developed, for as long as theywant to. And in some cases, if thefaculty member leaves the institution,he or she may not use that content attheir new institution for a period ofsay two years.The other way you can do it is to

make an arrangement with thefaculty member like a CreativeCommons situation, where you havecertain rights. The institution has theright to use the content, has a right torevise the content. And some of thoserights are in perpetuity. In anotherinstance, I know of arrangementswhere it’s only for three years andthen the content reverts to the facultymember.The implication there is, most

content is out of date relativelyquickly, and so we only wantownership for a period of time so weshare those rights. You can eitherhave the conversation again, or wecan do another course, or we can dosomething else. I have done that,where I had faculty develop a course,and we had an agreement where Ihad ownership of the content forthree years. And then at the end ofthat three-year period it reverted tothe faculty member. And again, atthat time, I would go to the facultymember and say do you want to bethe person responsible for revisingthe content, do you want to permit usto continue to use the content? Andhe or she would say yes or no andthen we would do a contract forrevision and delivery for anotherthree years.

DER: So it depends on what modelyou’re using to approach this.Kelley: Yes. There are two ways

you can basically think of this. Onewould be like a patent. In the case of

a patent we have always believed andit’s always been a policy at most in-stitutions that faculty members donot own their patents. Instead there’sa royalty. Faculty members let the in-stitution pay all the money it takes toget a patent; the institution has avested interest in the outcome. If the

faculty gets any moneys for his de-partment for any value that comesfrom the patent and the institutionowns the patent, that’s a goodmutual arrangement.An alternative has been for

example, the textbook. Think ofcourse design and development like atextbook. If the faculty memberdevelops a textbook, the facultymember gets a relationship with apublisher and then the publisher paysroyalties—this is a model that institu-tions don’t want to replicate withtheir online courses. They don’t wantto buy it back, the way they getsqueezed in purchasing librarymaterials or journals. What theywant is for the content to be ownedmutually between the institution and

the faculty member, so if there werecommercial exploitation there couldbe some arrangement made so the in-stitution doesn’t find itself purchasingits own materials.

DER:What if the university has acommitment to the open contentidea?Kelley: If faculty own the courses

and are resistant to putting it outthere in the open content domain,but the institutions feels it is part oftheir mission to educate and tofurther scholarly endeavor, institu-tions may have an issue with theirfaculty. In a situation like that the in-stitution has to come to an agreementwith the faculty in terms of how canthey participate? And preferably, itwould be ideal in my view if theycould use a Creative Commonslicense model, come to an arrange-ment in terms of how content isshared, and then have those rightsworked out in a standard way acrossthe board. So that we could have anunderstanding which is similar topatents. But we don’t have that levelof comfort with courseware.

DER: Is there one important guidingprinciple in all this?Kelley: I think it’s just important

that whatever model is selected it hasto have the agreement of everyoneinvolved. So it’s more about how youcome to a decision than what thefinal outcome is. And that institutionssometimes make the mistake of notdealing with this in policy. �


What they want is for the

content to be owned mutually

between the institution and the

faculty member, so if there

were commercial exploitation

there could be some

arrangement made so the

institution doesn’t find itself

purchasing its own materials.

FROM PAGE 24

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