Research Now Part of Distance Education Administrator’s Job Description

December 8, 2008

By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning Administration, Online Education

More and more, distance education leaders are expected to be scholars as well as administrators, and to contribute to the academic research in distance education.

“One of the questions we get asked quite frequently is what scholarship are you contributing to the field. [Academics] are very used to the tenure and promotion process that emphasizes scholarly productivity and that’s spilling over into our area as distance education is mainstreamed,” says Scott Howell, director of evening classes at Brigham Young University. “The need for involvement in academic research by distance education administrators today, as contrasted to even five years ago, has seen a dramatic increase.”

Research in Distance Education
As distance education continues to become a fact of institutional life, provosts, academic vice presidents, and board members are asking questions of distance educators that can only be answered with in-depth academic-style research and analysis. “I’ve never been asked more difficult questions and expected to reply with more scholarly answers than I have in the last few years,” Howell says. “There seems to be a greater interest in what we are doing by our academic colleagues and they are asking some difficult questions. I’ve been in this business almost 20 years now and haven’t seen the likes of it.”

Of the last 30 articles Howell has written, almost all have been in response to an academic question. How do you integrate institutional objectives into distance learning? How does the school make sure you’re not compromising the integrity of the institution by teaching students at a distance? How do you align your learning objectives with your assessments? How do you scale a distance education program to handle the influx of online learners? All these are questions that distance education administrators are being asked, and they’re expected to answer in the language of scholarship.

Now more than ever, the academic community sees distance education as a place for real-world or applied research, with real data. Howell says even though he is a fulltime administrator, he has written into his job description an expectation that he will research and disseminate his findings.

Academic departments now send graduate students over to the distance learning programs because — “we’ve got real data, they’ve got theoretical constructs, and we are both interested in seeing what we can do together,” says Howell. BYU’s distance education program has been involved with more doctoral dissertations in the last three years than they have in the previous 20.

Editor’s Note: In Wednesday’s Faculty Focus we’ll outline eight resources for conducting research in distance education.

Adapted from Nine Tips for Doing Scholarly Work as a Distance Ed Administrator, Christopher Hill, Distance Education Report, April 15, 2007.