Service learning may be one of the more effective ways of engaging students in the learning process, particularly for the current generation of Millennials. It is worth the effort to add a real-world learning experience to a course, and this extends to online courses, where the challenges are even more complex than in a face-to-face course.

The course
Pratt has taught an online course, “Classroom Applications of Educational Technology,” for several years. This course teaches student teachers how to apply technology in their future classrooms, and Pratt saw the value of adding a service learning component. So, he found a local school that had just received new technologies; the teachers at this school were not receiving sufficient professional development training to adequately use these technologies.

Students in Pratt’s class consulted with the client teachers to learn about the technologies available to them, then did independent research on how each individual teacher could better use the resources at his or her disposal. Pratt’s students met one time face-to-face with their client teacher to present their findings, leaving the client teacher with a USB drive containing resources they could use in the classroom. Students discussed their experiences via online Blackboard discussion and completed a reflection paper as part of their grade; the client teachers also provided feedback on the presentation and value of the consultation.

Through adding this service learning component to his course, Pratt was able to learn the following lessons:

1. Pick a goal, and integrate it into the course
“The key is to meet the needs of the student in the course [as well as] the community organization,” Pratt says. “Pick a goal in your course that could be better met with an organization in your community.” In this case, he found a way to encourage his students to research uses of technology in the K-6 classroom while serving teachers who were already there.

“The next big part is to integrate it as a part of the class and not just an add-on,” he says. This may mean that the introduction of a service learning project will displace other projects. Faculty, Pratt says, need to “appreciate how much time it will take the students” to complete the service learning project and plan accordingly.

Faculty must also appreciate the value of students learning from professionals other than themselves. “It is hard for faculty to give up control, but it’s worth it,” he says. “Trust other people to help your students learn.”

2. Pursue funding
Pratt points out that pursuing funding for a service learning project is not always necessary to achieve the course goals. “You really don’t need any money, but it is nice,” he says. The organization typically is “paid” for its participation in free labor, and the students are typically “paid” in course credit, so no money needs to change hands.

However, Pratt was able to secure a university-provided grant in the amount of $1,000 for his project, and an outside organization called Indiana Campus Compact awarded him $3,000. This money allowed students to provide a USB drive to their client teachers as well as a book they selected, and it allows Pratt to present his findings at conferences.

3. Know when to keep and when to surrender control
One of the challenging aspects of a service learning project for many faculty is giving up some control. This is particularly necessary in a distance learning version of a service learning project, because the professor will need to rely on others to help the project move forward.

“You do have to have a point person at the site, especially for distance learning,” Pratt comments. Since there is no assurance that students will be working at a stipulated time or be coming from the same place, a point person at the client site can help troubleshoot issues. This need can be indicated in the contract between the university and the client organization.

This worked well for Pratt, whose course is offered through a regional campus; although it is online, most students come from a relatively small area, so he could choose a single client organization. The distance nature of the course does mean that Pratt has less control over student interaction with the client school. “With an online course, I can’t really tell students to be a certain place at a certain time, so I had them do a certain amount of research online and then [hold] one meeting,” he explains.

He adds that, had he allowed students to find their own client site, he likely would have asked the students to submit a few possible options for his selection and approval. Keeping control over the array of client sites is important.

4. Have back-up plans
“You have to have a back-up plan for student issues or site issues,” says Pratt. For example, have plans in place for what will happen if a student shows up in unacceptable dress, or in the case of inclement weather. Knowing how to handle these circumstances will make addressing them easier.

Additionally, Pratt recommends having back-up assignments ready for students who cannot attend a site meeting. Although he only required one on-site meeting and gave the students a month to arrange meetings, he did not feel he could require students to attend the meeting if they had work issues or the like. These conflicts are perhaps more likely to come up in the distance education environment, so it helps to have assignments ready the students can complete if they cannot go onsite.

Pratt also recommends faculty give students the opportunity to plan. After the first term he integrated service learning into his course, Pratt found some students were unhappy about the service learning requirement. “Some were upset they didn’t get notified up front,” he says. He recommends faculty make this information available at registration.

Pratt suggests that faculty teaching a relatively new course not try to integrate service learning into it; rather, he believes this is “for someone who has taught a course for several years and is ready to take it to the next level.” Even for experienced faculty, service learning will require skills that the faculty members have not necessarily developed. “It is OK if you’re not good at all things; it can still have a huge benefit for the students,” he says. However, he is sold on the value of service learning. “A more engaging, interactive, real-world approach is more messy but more emotionally [fulfilling]. If any experience can be done in a real-world environment, do it,” he urges.

Reprinted from Hill, C. (2010). The 4 Keys to Successful Service Learning in Online Courses. Distance Education Report, 14 (24), 4, 8.

Q: Are simulations, games and virtual worlds more useful in training, or for education?

Aldrich: Sims, games, and virtual worlds are useful for any organization that wants to develop competence and conviction in students. One of the earliest examples is a flight simulator, which not only taught basic actions to pilots such as flaps and radio control, but also how to avoid situations where the intuitive answer, such as pulling up hard on the stick when the airplane was in a dive, was the absolute wrong option. And they had to teach the newbie pilots in a way that would stick in the most stressful situation imaginable. This is what it means to teach for conviction, rather than just compliance.

So they’re good at teaching how to do certain actions. But the much greater opportunity is learning how to have control in non-intuitive, complex situations such as project management, leadership, stewardship, long term planning, relationship management, and many others.

Q: What part of pedagogical practice lends itself the most effectively to games, sims and virtual worlds?

Aldrich: Sims require an entirely new pedagogical framework. Many of us have grown up with pedagogies aimed at helping students learn “how to know,” including lectures and papers. But we are increasingly going to use sims to develop in students the ability to learn “how to do.” We are going to have to build up in students abilities that will eventually have to be improvised in a variety of new situations. This means borrowing techniques from sports, from the military, and even from computer games to carefully build up competencies, both intrinsic and extrinsic.

This pedagogy is “practice-intensive” and requires careful level design. Likewise, we are seeing situations where students can learn something without ever being explicitly taught.

Q: In what type of academic scenario are games, sims and virtual world most frequently found today, i.e., community college, public universities, small private schools, corporate campuses?

Aldrich: There are individual professors who are championing them everywhere. But the organizations that are committed to them broadly tend to be universities that have been accredited within the last fifteen years. They do not have the legacy of books and lectures, and they are starting from scratch rethinking content, and they look to sims as a critical part of transferable learning. Distance universities have found that sims replace and improve upon the interactions in face to face institutions.

Q: Is there a danger that some educators will adopt games, sims and virtual worlds simply because they’re popular with young people?

Aldrich: Popularity is fickle and a fast moving target. It is also reasonable to assume that popularity with kids means some degree of counter-culture, which by definition class content cannot be.

Likewise, fun is not a sufficient end goal for any sim. Fun is just too subjective. Having said that, during the roll-out of a new environment, there is a use for “play.” For example, if I were bringing students into a virtual world, after they got comfortable with the three skills of manipulate, navigate, and communicate, I would set up some light games with few rules and maybe some opportunities for competition and self expression. This “fun” is a critical stage, but it has to be followed by rigorous challenges.

Bruce N. Chaloux, Ph.D., past president of the Sloan Consortium and a highly-respected authority in adult degree completion, discussed some of the unique needs of adult learners with Distance Education Report. What follows is an excerpt of that interview.

What are some important ways that these learners differ from traditional undergraduate students?

Chaloux: Adult learners vary significantly from traditional undergraduate students in several ways. Beyond the obvious age differential (traditional students typically ranging in age from 18-22 while adult learners span a much wider range from 25-60, or more), I would note four major differences for those adults who are the current focus–those returning to college when an earlier attempt was disrupted. Returning adults typically:

• take fewer hours, three or maybe six (at most) per term as they seek to balance work, family and other obligations;
• are more serious and dedicated to completing their educational objective;
• bring experiences to the classroom that most faculty find both enhances the learning experience for all students; and
• do not need or utilize most traditional services institutions provide to students (but still need other kinds of support services to be successful).

What are some of the most important forms of support we can offer these learners?

Chaloux: How and when the services are provided for adults is often critical. With many adults returning to the classroom after years away, some bring the need to “polish” off some academic “rust.” They may need assistance in writing, math and in developing strong study skills. While many institutions provide these kinds of services, most are provided for traditional students during “regular” 8-5 hours in on-campus settings. Returning adults can’t access these services at those times when they are miles away from the campus and need the services delivered evenings, weekends and even online. Many institutions have found that moving these services online not only benefits the adult learner but also the traditional learner who would like the same freedom of access. This would include advising, as well as a variety of administrative services such as paying a bill, purchasing books or completing a drop and add transaction.

What are some of the most effective media for reaching these learners?

Chaloux: Beyond structuring programs and services designed to meet the needs of returning adults, the single biggest challenge for institutions is how to reach these prospective students. We don’t have the luxury of direct and continual access we have through our high schools and community colleges for traditional-aged students. So many institutions continue to experiment with the most effective approaches to reaching adults. Not too surprisingly, the Internet has become the most popular, and one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach adults. Television has been effective, radio less so, and newspaper advertising has generally not been effective–as fewer individuals read traditional print forms (as online readership of newspapers continues to grow). Employers can be a critical component, including using internal websites (intranet), email campaigns and electronic newsletters.

For more information on this topic, check out the seminar Dr. Chaloux presented on “Effective Strategies for the Adult Degree Completion Market.” Learn More »

Ensuring quality in online programs more important now than ever. What are the factors that make it so crucial?

Schilke: Quality in online programs has become much more important over the past few years. Questions about their instructional value have been raised based on the publicity around a number of recent cheating scandals related to online courses. The federal government has implemented stricter guidelines in the most recent Higher Education Opportunity Act legislation to ensure student identity in online classes. There is also pressure on the regional accrediting bodies to look more closely at online programs during accreditation and reaccreditation visits.

These cases of lax academic integrity compounded by the rapid growth in online programs have put online learning in the spotlight. When done properly, online programs are not easier or less costly than face-to-face programs, they are just different. Online programs have unique challenges that impact their overall quality and the reputation of the institutions.

Do we need to enlist the active backing of top institutional administration to energize the development of our quality process?

Schilke: All quality programs have a better chance of success if top leadership is supportive and involved. There are parts of quality programs that can run at the department or division level, but to really experience success, top leadership must actively support it.

The eQuality program looks at quality from different perspectives. One unique perspective is the idea of quality administration. This looks at the administration’s policies, decisions, and actions, ensuring the institution does not build barriers to student, staff, or instructor success in the online classroom. eQuality also looks at existing policies in an effort to change those that impede student, staff, and instructor success. Without top leadership support, this will be extremely difficult.

We’d like to get a quality program in place as quickly as possible. What are some ways we can speed up the development process for our model?

Schilke: Start by looking at successful institutions and review the literature on best practices, then look closely at what your accrediting agency requires. Once you know what is expected, begin to develop your program centered on quality. Ensure you have plans for quality courses, quality instruction, quality support, and quality administration. However, keep your stakeholders involved in the process from the beginning and keep them involved.

Simply implementing programs, policies, and procedures from other institutions is not enough, though. Every institution is unique. Modify these to meet your institution’s requirements, make them yours. The eQuality model forms a foundation of quality that helps you build your program to match your unique characteristics.

How does faculty development fit into the quality program? Have you developed standards or guidelines for that?

Schilke: The most successful quality programs ensure they provide their stakeholders with the right tools to succeed. In online learning this means to give your faculty, staff, and students the technology, knowledge, and skills to do their respective jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible. This includes a proactive and living faculty development program. The faculty needs to know and experience what a satisfactory and exemplary course looks and feels like. They need to know how to improve their instruction to get the most out of their students.

We use and recommend a multifaceted approach to faculty development. We have our institutional-wide training courses and program in Blackboard, online teaching skills, media development, and an online instructor certificate program. These provide the foundation for teaching online. We use webinars to actively engage our instructors when we make major changes, like our recent Blackboard update. We also publish audio and enhanced podcasts on a wide range of topics to help instructors polish their techniques and understand administrative requirements.

For more on this topic, check out the seminar Schilke presented titled Ensuring Online Program Quality with the eQuality Model.

1. Teaching and Learning

• State objectives, expectations, and policies
• Establish communication rules and group decision-making norms
• Give prompt, effective feedback

“I believe that you absolutely have to have an understanding of the pedagogy in order to be successful. If you try to map over what worked for you in the classroom and you don’t make the accommodations – not that that was a bad thing, but if you don’t make the accommodations and understand the dynamics of how it is now going to occur in the online classroom – you’re going to struggle and I think your students are going to struggle. So I think that is really a critical dimension of being able to understand, and conceptualize, and manage that teaching and learning sphere. It’s very, very important.”

2. Technology Aptitude

• Know the LMS
• Seek technology assistance
• Be creative and flexible

“If I don’t make you successful with the foundation tools that you’re working with – that is, the learning management system, or if you’re using Web 2.0 technologies, or whatever the environment might be – it might be Illuminate Live or it might be Connect Pro – but if you’re not facile in those technologies, you are going to struggle and your students are going to struggle. So regardless of what tools are selected, I think the second largest category of competencies has to be around the technology.”

3. Classroom Administration/ Management

• Check and manage roster
• Submit grades according to University policy
• Manage drop/adds

“There are some non-negotiables in this teaching and learning process. For the institution, for example, a non-negotiable is the fact that you are able to submit grades on time and that students are able to see their progress as they move through the course, or that you’re able to manage the drop-add process. All of the mechanics, I think, have become so innate in us in the face-to-face environment that when we move to the online environment we sometimes forget that.”

4. Faculty Workload Management

• Define time frames
• Develop schedule and responsibilities
• Communicate expectations

“In listening to faculty, a critical element of their success is how they manage their time. I would argue that I can’t help you manage your time until you’ve had some experience. A little bit like attitude, I can probably give you some suggestions of things. I can suggest to you, for example, that you set defined timeframes during the day when you’re going to be teaching online, and that you try to prevent the course from bleeding into your home life, and your recreation life, and your vacation. I know none of you has ever done this, but sometimes faculty take their computers on family vacations and they’re still teaching their course. And I’m not sure what I would say to that one, except you’ve got to be careful; you have to be able to define those boundaries about when you’re teaching online and when you’re not.”

5. Building Community

• Foster dialog and interaction
• Provide for “space” for instructional & social interactions

“The need for the instructor to be able to craft this learning space where people feel valued and they’re contributing to it. Again, I would agree that that’s really, really important, and it’s certainly a potential outcome of a well-designed learning space. We have these tools, right, that allow us to do this, so why wouldn’t we take advantage of it?”

Excerpted from “Asking the Question: Rate the core competencies for online teaching.” Distance Education Report, 13.22 (2009): 5.

With the advent of e-learning and blended courses, the role of the librarian in education has certainly changed. Today, the library and the librarian can and should be integral parts of a course, with a role in curriculum design. This is the position espoused by Jim Julius, associate director of instructional technology services at San Diego State University. He explains what the library can bring to online learning.

Today, the librarian can be a partner, a collaborator in curriculum design. In addition to roles as curator and mediator, he or she can be embedded into classes, helping faculty and instructional designers construct curriculum and helping provide information literacy and other 21st century skills training.

Collaboration between the library and faculty and instructional designers can strengthen student learning and build effective teaching practices. Collaboration allows the institution to make use of the resources and expertise found in the library for curriculum design and selection of instructional materials. Collaboration allows the institution to move toward common goals for faculty development and student learning, and it helps the institution deal with challenges like shrinking budgets, expanding class sizes, and hybridization of courses. Finally, collaboration is a working example of a desirable approach for faculty to take with their peers and students.

Three levels of collaboration
At San Diego State University, “the librarians have been a big part of our Course Design Institute,” says Julius. The CDI is a fellowship program that helps faculty redesign their courses to include blended and online instruction, and librarians work with faculty to develop partnerships, construct curriculum, embed library services into classes, and provide information literacy training in courses.

Librarians become involved with course development in three different ways, each providing a different level of involvement. At the “most intense” level, Julius says, is the professional learning communities, a version of a faculty learning community that involves subject matter faculty, library faculty, and professional staff that gather to explore course design. Usually, one or two librarians participate in each group, and they are “hearing what faculty are thinking,” says Julius. This enables them to better pursue the goals of integrating library resources and expertise into classes. Julius calls this “the full service version” of library involvement.

At “the other end of the spectrum,” Julius says, is the Center for Teaching and Learning Lunch Series. In this series, librarians and other representatives plan 12 to 15 lunches each semester that fit into six different tracks: Provost’s Lunches on Learning, Learning 2.0, Student Diversity and Success, Architecture of the Curriculum, Learning Stores: Adventures in Course Design, and New Faculty Lunches. These lunches help develop partnerships and provide outreach services, allowing ultimately for greater librarian involvement.

The third, middle route of involvement is the librarian as research and subject guide. Librarians can collaborate to help determine methods for including library resources on Blackboard, including investigating third-party software packages that may come into play. Julius also notes that the librarians can create a subject guide for any course, with an RSS feed pasted into Blackboard delivering the latest information. These activities are part of “helping faculty become more aware of their subject area librarians,” he says.

From there, integrating a librarian into courses can take many paths. In classes with a research component, Julius explains that faculty can involve an information literacy librarian to help engage the students. The librarian “becomes a partner or co-teacher,” says Julius.

Excerpted from Are You Maximizing Support From the Library?, Distance Education Report, volume 13, number 15.

Persistence is a key issue for community colleges because they tend to be driven by FTEs. These institutions are typically open admission, and maintaining a certain level of FTE determines the school’s funding for the next year.

To better understand online course persistence, Knipe contacted colleagues at area community colleges. “All [were] seeing about a 70 percent on-time completion rate, down from 80 percent,” he says. However, most research done at that point on online student persistence focused on programs at the baccalaureate level. So, Knipe constructed a “Top Ten” list based on his research that helps community colleges understand when students are most at risk for not completing an online course.

Knipe’s Top Ten Persistence Factors
#10: Learning Style: For a student to be most successful in an online course, he or she must have a learning style that is compatible with the demands of the course. This requires a certain ability to study independently; it also requires a match between the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning qualities of the course and the style of the student. There are several online assessments available which students can use to understand their own learning styles.

#9: Previous Success with College Work: As any academic advisor will attest, there is a degree of uncertainty with a new student (or a student new to the institution). Students who have demonstrated that they can handle college-level work are more likely to be successful studying online.

#8: First Time Distance Learning Student: Likewise, a student who has never studied online has no track record demonstrating their ability to handle these classes. The first time distance learning student is something of an unknown.

#7: Technical Factors: Technical factors can also be risk factors for some students, including those who have substandard skills, those who have problems with access, and those whose hardware and/or software are incompatible with the university.

#6: Gender: Being male can be a risk factor for failure to persist, but only up to a certain age. “Young males don’t do as well; older guys do,” Knipe says. Male grade performance trails that of females up until the age of about 25-30, after which men outperform women.

#5: Developmental Needs: These needs include reading, writing, math, and study skills. In a presentation on the subject, Knipe identified the following data point: “For a 50/50 chance of earning a C or better in any online course, basic academic skills should be at college English level.”

#4: Engagement: “Student engagement correlates highly with on-time completion,” Knipe comments. Lack of engagement can come in several forms, including lack of engagement with the course, instructor, other students, or material; lack of feedback; lack of community; or poor instructional design, to name a few areas of potential pitfall.

#3: Age: Academic performance correlates with age. As mentioned in #6 above, gender is a predictive factor in persistence; likewise, both men’s and women’s mean grades rise as they age, although the men make more dramatic strides while the women remain relatively consistent until the age of 25-30, after which they begin to academically improve as they age.

#2: Poor or Nonexistent Advising: Students who receive no advising or who self-advise are subject to a number of potential risks, such as approaching a class with an unrealistic expectation of the time or workload commitment, an assumption that online learning will be passive, or beginning the class with poor time management skills.

#1: Time of Registration: The most dramatic indicator of risk of non-persistence is time of registration. Those who registered 70 or more days from the beginning of the class posted the highest mean grade average, while those who registered after the class had started were very likely to fail.

Strategies for Addressing Online Persistence
So what does an institution do with this sort of information? Knipe explains that there are three ways to improve persistence: better instructional design, gatekeeping, and systemic improvement.

Better instructional design: By improving instructional design, the institution can impact many of the factors within its own control. The institution can do this by training faculty adequately, insuring that course design includes ample opportunities for interaction and feedback, and that faculty can learn from one another through best practices and mentoring.

Gatekeeping: This is the process of allowing the students best-suited for online study to register for the course, while consulting with those at risk before allowing them to proceed. For example, institutions can suggest or require that students take learning style assessments and technical assessment to insure both they and their technology (computers, internet access) are suited for the demands of the course. Knipe also suggest a block be automatically put on a student registration for an online course if the student exhibits one or multiple risk factors; for example, a student attempting to register for a course after the start date may be asked to see both an advisor and the course instructor for counseling about suitability for the course.

Systemic Improvements: Even the best-designed online courses will be problematic if the student support and business processes do not work to the students’ advantage. Knipe reminds campuses that all business process, including admissions, registration, financial aid, and bookstore, must be virtual and distance-learning-friendly, as should student support services like the library, bookstore, tutoring, and the like.

Ultimately, many of the findings of Knipe’s research are somewhat intuitive, while others may raise an eyebrow or two. However, understanding the factors that may put a student at risk for failure to persist in an online class can lead to better advising, better course design, better systems, and a better institution.

Reprinted from How Ten Critical Factors Determine Persistence in Community College Online Programs, November 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.

Northern Michigan University is a private university serving about 9,000 students located in the center of Michigan’s upper peninsula near Lake Superior. Located in one of the snowiest areas of the U.S., NMU is quite rural and is always seeking ways to make education more accessible for its students, many of whom work and have family obligations, and all of whom are dealing with the winter travel conditions that can make getting to school difficult.

Judith Puncochar, associate professor in the school of education at Northern Michigan University, explains the process by which the university found new opportunities for online education by looking at their existing offerings.

Driven by goals
In 2007, the university set two goals that affected this process: first, to find an additional 1,000 students who would enroll in online classes over the next three to five years, and second, to document the current state of online teaching and learning at the university.

This fit well with the goals set by AQIP, the Academic Quality Improvement Program for accreditation sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission. AQIP set four goals for the university:

• to improve the quality and consistency of the online learning experience for students and faculty
• to identify stakeholders in need of support and/or training, which may be inhibiting them from participating
• to document the current state of online learning at NMU and create a baseline to measure growth
• to identify new opportunities and increase the number of online offerings.

Finding the baseline“The first step was to create a baseline document from which to measure growth,” says Puncochar. This process turned out to be quite labor-intensive, requiring the help of some of Puncochar’s student research assistants.

In short, the baseline document creation process required a manual tally of information gleaned from program web pages, online course offerings, websites, and graduate and undergraduate bulletins. The researchers tallied the number of credits and the number of required courses within each program for each major, minor, associate’s degree, certificate, bachelor’s degree, and master’s degree. The research also looked at course type such as traditional, online, and hybrids.

Identifying new opportunities
Once this raw data had been gathered, Puncochar and her colleagues could begin to find opportunities for expansion of online programs. They did this by analyzing the programs that had courses online and identifying those that were close to having an online certificate or degree available.

For example, the bachelor’s degree in sociology of liberal arts required 124 total credit hours with eight required courses, seven of which were currently offered online. Likewise, the bachelor’s degree in criminal justice also required 124 credit hours but had 11 required courses, nine of which were online. Each of these programs was offering more than 80 percent of its required courses online, meaning that it could likely easily become a program available online with the addition of one or two courses.

Puncochar then began working the phones, asking these departments what it would take to put those last couple of courses online and what barriers the departments were encountering. With some departments, these conversations brought expressions of resistance, as the chairs and faculty members reminded Puncochar that they have academic freedom and can teach the courses they like in the methods they see as most effective.

This is true, Puncochar allows. “Faculty don’t have to teach online,” she says. “How do you sell this?” Sometimes, the conversation addressed the kind of experience a faculty member could expect; for example, Puncochar finds that her online students are more engaged than her traditional classroom sections, where students can sometimes hide in the crowd.

Overall, some programs were easier to complete than others. At the baseline measurement, the percent of required courses offered online ranged from nearly 50 percent for master’s degree required courses to nearly 15 percent for bachelor’s degree courses to a low of about 7.5 percent for certificate program requirements. Just one year later, these numbers had jumped to nearly 78 percent for master’s degree programs, 18 percent for bachelor’s degree programs, and 22 percent for certificate programs.

Additionally, there are some programs that will likely never be offered entirely online. For example, Puncochar says the university has a goal of having programs in all six liberal studies divisions available online, since the school is a liberal arts school. However, some science departments, notably chemistry, are uncertain about having lab courses offered online, since this implies that students would be conducting potentially-dangerous experiments in their kitchens. However, geology and astronomy were both able to find lab course options that were safe to deliver online, so students can indeed fulfill their lab science requirement online.

Excerpted from Building New Programs with Existing Courses, April 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.

For most institutions, change is inevitable. “External forces are putting on more pressure to change than internal pressures to stay the same,” says Kelly Edmonds, doctoral candidate in higher education research at the University of Calgary. She has identified a “second order change” beginning in higher education that will likely force a number of paradigm shifts in response to three main types of forces affecting the university. This second order change, while a painful process that brings about dramatic shifts in the way an organization operates, may herald the next generation of higher education practice as the academy shifts to serve a new kind of student, a new kind of economy, and new demands on those who have dedicated their lives to education.

Tension #1: Economic Forces
Everyone who works in higher education is aware that the academy is not insulated from economic pressures. Governmental support for higher education is dwindling, with the situation more dramatic in the U.S. than Canada, says Edmonds. This loss of traditional sources of income means that universities are exploring different models of balancing the budget. One potential response is a move to the “business model,” an idea that is gaining traction among an academic population that a few years ago would have recoiled at the idea that the provision of education has any similarities with the marketing of other goods and services. “The term [business model] is actually being used at the University of Calgary,” says Edmonds.

In addition, no discussion of economic forces would be complete without mentioning competition, and higher education is certainly seeing its share. Privately-owned, for-profit institutions have become very successful bringing traditional business practices, like an emphasis on customer service, to the table. Traditional universities are feeling the pressure to compete with these for-profits or lose a certain segment of their potential student population.

As a result, Edmond notes, universities are being asked to adapt to an entrepreneurial culture with a focus on market share, branding, and consumerism of students. “Universities are moving to commodify education; education is being sold as a product,” she says. While this may be a reasonable response to these pressures, some members of the university, particularly the faculty, are “feeling a loss,” Edmonds says. This sense of loss leads to another set of pressures that she characterizes as philosophical resistance.

Tension #2: Philosophical Resistance
Many of the objections that faculty might have to the growth of online learning are well known. Edmonds identifies several factors in play, such as questions of quality arising from the commodification of education and poor application of technology. Concerns about quality can also stem from a sense of loss of connection to students and the changes to the traditional role of faculty member as expert and lecturer, a model that nearly all of the current generations of faculty members would have experienced in their own career as students.

Many faculty prefer to use conventional pedagogical methods in their classroom. They have a vested interest in these methods, Edmonds finds, and there is a strong Western tradition of the transmission of knowledge from the experts to the learners that is altered in the more egalitarian online environment.

Finally, faculty may have concerns about job security. Many of the current generations of faculty may feel they are giving up some control of the curriculum to instructional designers, especially if these faculty members do not possess the skills to design an online course themselves. Along with this insecurity come concerns about the erosion of academic freedom, as the development of a course comes to require more of a team approach and less of the time-honored tradition of a professor alone in his or her office, consulting reference materials and creating a new course independently.

Tension #3: Political Challenges for Leaders
Edmonds likens changing a university to turning around a ship – a slow process that requires much careful maneuvering. Each of the tensions mentioned above can cause a political challenge for higher education leadership: global competition, competition from for-profits, competing budgets, academic structure and governance, lack of e-learning policies, academic freedom, and resistance by the faculty.

To address all of these concerns, universities will have to embrace this “second order change” that Edmonds identifies. This is a period of change during which the status quo is destabilized, beliefs are questioned, and the next move is unknown until the institution passes through the change and can “refreeze” in a new form.

Navigating this change is critical for higher education as a whole to move from incorporating online learning solely as a one-off program and into using its delivery and pedagogical methods across the academy. The institutions who can embrace the challenges of change may be pleased at the new paradigms open to them in the future.

Excerpted from Are You Giving Up Control of the Ship? Three Pressures You May Not be able to Resist, Distance Education Report, July 1, 2008.

Lee Freeman, who administers the online MBA program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, decided it was time to answer those questions and maybe challenge a few misapprehensions about time in online teaching. He surveyed instructors in all different schools and colleges of his institution. He came up with some useful facts and busted some myths.

The big findings
What Freeman calls his “big finding” is that, relative to face-to-face development, online course development really isn’t as terribly time-consuming as people say. The extra time spent developing an online course as opposed to a face-to-face course is proportionately similar to the extra time spent teaching the online course compared to classroom teaching.

And guess what? “Teaching [online courses] isn’t all that bad either,” as Freeman says. “Basically,” Freeman says, “after the second or third time the instructors are comfortable with it and that learning curve has been reached.”

This curve is reached relatively soon for online pedagogy and even faster for the technology itself. “After the first or second time people were comfortable with the technology and beyond that they figured out how to teach it,” Freeman says. In Freeman’s research, it appears that it takes an instructor a little longer to figure out what they want to do with the course pedagogically than to become comfortable with the technology.

“That’s one of the biggest things, that the technological learning curve is shorter than the pedagogical learning curve,” Freeman says. “The technology’s not the problem. It’s not what’s making people take longer when they teach.”

Second (and third) time’s the charm
Freeman was able to demonstrate that, once past the first online course, there is a significant reduction of instructor time. This leads him to believe that much of the complaint of excessive time consumption probably comes from the first-time experience. One implication of this is that, if instructors can be conscientiously coached through their first online experience, they are likely to find things much better on successive tries.

Freeman’s data doesn’t challenge the assumption that it takes longer to develop an online course than a face-to-face course. What he has established is that the teaching, as well as the development, become less time consuming, and that that change can come as early as the second or third time out.

Four lessons for distance ed administrators:
What are the lessons for distance education administrators in Freeman’s investigation? The research suggests four ideas:

1. Make sure faculty understand that they’re starting something new. You have to make sure faculty understand that, while they may be teaching the same content, there is going to be a bump that they have to climb over. It’s going to take some time and some effort but it will get better.
2. Teach your faculty to think about their course in a different way, to be ready to do things differently. Let them know that teaching online gives them an opportunity that they may overlook in the classroom because they are habituated to the way they have always done things. In teaching online, the nature of the technology allows and sometimes requires teachers to change things. Whatever kind of change that may be, the directors and instructional designers, while not pushing any particular technique, should always be showing what’s available and reinforcing new ways of doing things.
3. Use your instructional designers. As the faculty member is developing the course with the instructional designer, the designer should be on the lookout for time consuming approaches. If they see that the teacher setting up a time consuming situation for themselves, the instructional designer should alert them and where possible suggest ways to get the same results by doing things differently.
4. The more an administrator knows about the process of course development, the better he/she can manage. Program managers and administrators should be sure that they understand what online instruction takes and that they communicate it well. If they do, they will face fewer instructors coming back saying they’re never going to teach online again. As Freeman says, “Let them know that what happened the first time is not going to be the constant truth of what’s going to happen every time.”

Excerpted from Time Requirements for Teaching Online: Beyond the Myths, Feb. 1, 2008, Distance Education Report.

Q: Was the online AS in veterinary technology an online program from the beginning, or did it develop out of a face-to-face program?

Flora: The online program grew out of the face-to-face program. The distance program was accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 1995, but the conversion process started in 1991. We were kind of online pioneers. Our online program was the first online vet tech program fully accredited by the AVMA.

Q: Was it hard to enlist the participation and support of faculty?

Flora: At first there was a little bit of uncertainty. It wasn’t really “I’m not going to do this,” but they were just wondering how it was going to work. But the faculty here really has and does embrace the online environment. The same faculty that teaches on campus teaches online; the courses are exactly the same, just delivered differently. And so the faculty has really embraced this and really has developed it to the point where it is now.

Q: Were there struggles getting the program accepted by the market?

Flora: Back then online instruction was just something that wasn’t being done. So the reputation of an online college wasn’t that great. People looked at it pretty skeptically. When the accreditation process went through at the AVMA they really took a pretty hard look at it, and that helped the acceptance.

I think the biggest milestone in acceptance was the performance of the online students on the national licensing test. The online students consistently score a good standard deviation above the on-campus students. The first students would have taken the test in ’94/’95. That’s when you could start comparing performance on a standardized test. We’ve used the fact that our online students perform so well to market the course to prospective students. We still make sure students are aware of that right from the start.

Q: Do you regularly revise the curriculum?

Flora: Yes, we’re continually looking at the curriculum because veterinary medicine is changing so rapidly. Part of what we have to do is make sure we maintain the requirements to be accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association. They put out the things that an accredited program has to cover. Our faculty’s really good about staying current, altering courses every semester for the new information that’s out there. It changes from semester to semester; nothing’s static at all.

Q: What were some of the aspects of the program cited by Sloan-C in presenting the award?

Flora: Student performance was a big one. And then they went in to look at the courses and look at the technology that was being used. That was the other big thing that they liked about it. We do a lot of audio chats instead of texting. And with reusable learning objects, our instructors have gone in and created video presentations especially for the lab classes. They might be talking about analyzing blood samples where they can narrate over slides of what they’re instructing about, and they are able to highlight different areas of the slides.

Or they can do video over their PowerPoint so that as they instruct on an abnormality in one of the white blood cell lines, the students can come into the class, open up that video presentation, listen to the instructor talk about the cells, and at the same time they’re talking about it, the technology gives them the capability of taking a cell off the slide, enlarging it, and highlighting the different areas of the cell that they’re talking about as they instruct the students.

Q: How do you train your instructors to teach online?

Flora: The College has what’s called the Web and Instructional Technology Services [WITS] Department, and they’ve created some great instructor training modules that instructors can go through at their own pace online, where it talks about the online environment, the college in general, and then goes through the capabilities of our course management system, in particular.

We have a very stable faculty. We may bring one or two adjuncts a year, but other than that we’ve had the same faculty teaching for several years now. We’re very fortunate there. We have eight full-time professors in the AS program and we have twelve adjuncts.

The same training program is effective for adjuncts, but we also always pair them with experienced instructors so they always have that experienced instructor in the background to monitor what goes on in the course or to answer questions or help when needed. So it’s kind of a mentor relationship for the first couple of semesters.

#4 Faculty competence: First, and most basic, the faculty that are going to be teaching online must have the content background. But beyond that they have to get the appropriate training to teach online. They have to understand online pedagogy and they have to understand the technology they’re using. You need to be able to certify that the faculty have the appropriate skills. Then you need to constantly update the faculty on those skills. Finally you need to have a faculty evaluation system and use that information to feed back into the courses.

#5 Institutional integrity: Again, starting with basics, the institution must be accredited. Regional accrediting agencies are your allies in ensuring institutional integrity. They will help you look at what you say you’re going to deliver and what you’re actually delivering and help you make sure they match. Institutions must be rigorous in establishing outcomes for programs and courses and measuring their effectiveness—are you achieving those outcomes?

“You say you’re going to do something and you show that you’re actually doing it,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College. Here, too, a key point is to make this information easily accessible to students. “You have to be upfront about it and make sure that people know that you are going to be upfront about it,” Harris says.

#6 Excellence in student services: The guiding principle is that you have to recreate online all the services that are offered on the ground. You have to be sure that students can get online advice and counseling. You have to make sure they can get complete information about their courses in advance. The online registration process has to be efficient. Students must have access to library services online. Online tutoring services should be available. You have to be able to accomplish financial aid transactions at a distance. Since the students are using technology they have to have a help desk. Not only must you recreate the services that students could walk to on campus—in most cases you actually have to do a better job because often enough students have a difficult time connecting with services on-campus.

#7 Integrity in marketing: Make sure you’re giving a clear and accurate message about what you actually can and do deliver, so that you’re not making promises that can’t be fulfilled. As with other aspects of transparency, integrity in marketing has to do with providing relevant information on your website—what the graduation rate is, what the alumni say about the program, etc.

#8 Curricular quality: “We have to make sure that there is quality in the content,” Harris says. For example at my institution courses are reviewed by other faculty members both before the course is offered, and the first time it’s offered, and then it comes up for review again within at the most five years—it could be earlier.” This periodical review is necessary to be sure that outcomes are clearly stated and that the students are achieving those outcomes.

“The keys are disclosure, transparency, the ability to interact with students easily and the quality of the curriculum. So that we know what we’re trying to achieve and we regularly measure it.”

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

Michael Offerman, president of Capella University, who led the working group that shaped the initiative, said that “To meet the education needs of adult students, we must provide them with trustworthy and transparent ways to choose among many available options and to gauge the potential of each one to further their careers.” The goal of the program is “to lead universities and colleges toward greater accountability and transparency.”

Transparency by Design institutions began issuing annual reports that include comprehensive data for each course of study, including student demographics, completion rates, costs, student engagement, and knowledge and skills learned. Most important, Transparency by Design reports include outcomes at the program specialization level, allowing prospective students to assess how well a program will prepare them for their professional pursuits.

One of the requirements for implementing Transparency by Design is the development of a new set of best practices for participating institutions. “You want to make sure things are in place at the institutional level,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College, who has been instrumental in developing just such standards. “Collectively we went back and we looked at best practices that have been put out by other organizations for online learning and then we developed our set based on those,” she says.

Harris and her associates concluded that there were a few basic principles for institutions that really want to be transparent.

#1 Make distance education a central element of your mission: Distance learning really has to be central to what the institution is doing. If it is viewed as an add-on and not part of the central mission then very often it doesn’t get the resources that are needed to carry out a quality program.

#2 Accountability to stakeholders: Who are the primary stakeholders in a transparent institution? The prospective student and the enrolled student. “One of the reasons we feel it’s important to have accountability measures and to report on those regularly is because prospective students who are making a decision about where they want to go to school, where they want to take courses should have information,” Harris says.

Accountability to prospective students includes providing adequate information about the program, what it contains, and who’s teaching it. But it also includes measuring what happens to students who go through the program. Harris’ group looks at things like graduation rates, retention rates, what alumni say about the program, and measures of student engagement, with the aim of making this information readily available to prospective students.

#3 Responsiveness: In practice this means nothing more or less than good customer service, so that when there are issues and questions students can get quick answers. Responsiveness in the academic process means that faculty respond quickly to a student, so that a student who’s learning online can get an answer to a question or feedback on an assignment within 24 to 48 hours, depending on the institution’s policy. Administratively, responsiveness means that if there are questions about grades going out, about registration, about fees being paid the student will get very quick response either by email or by telephone.

Click here for Part II of this article.

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

What’s more, distance faculty may not be aware of the degree of presence they need to have in a course, and may effectively just “sit them out,” rather than provide appropriate levels of input to the course. Isolated teachers can also find that they have missed opportunities for professional advancement, not being surrounded by colleagues and associates who can train them in the pedagogical application of new technologies. The missed professional development opportunities may eventually frustrate them, interfere with their career development, and cause them to leave the institution.

Technology also can create challenges. That’s why at Canada’s online Athabasca University, the faculty are shown that there is a pedagogical grounding for the use of the new technology, and it’s not just technology for technology’s sake. A survey of faculty there revealed that faculty weren’t very interested in new technology but if it increased their effectiveness as instructors they would make the effort to attend training sessions. The lesson seems to be that to keep faculty up to date you have to focus on the pedagogy, and why the technology supports more effective pedagogy.

According to the survey, faculty said some of the biggest obstacles to teaching online are:

• Dealing with difficult students in an asynchronous environment.
• Knowing how to use a variety of instructional methods online.
• Motivating students to stay engaged with their learning.
• Understanding how to use the learning management system.

To read this article in its entirety, download our free report: Best Practices for Training and Retaining Online Adjunct Faculty.

Q: How can we turn teachers who were initially reluctant recruits to teaching online into regular consumers of the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field?
Shelton: First of all, I believe that support specialists are critical factors in the success of online education. We are the distance education experts, not the faculty, and we have more time that we can devote to searching for resources. It is our job to provide as many tools and resources as possible to support excellence in teaching and help the teachers remain current as well as efficient. Actually, I believe that by providing the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field and making them easily accessible often encourages those instructors who are reluctant because we are assuring them constant support and reminding them they are important to us and to the online classroom.

Some of my best success stories are regarding instructors who we bring in ‘kicking and screaming’ but leave our office with a positive outlook and with much less trepidation. As faculty support specialists, we should also try to make it fun during the professional development opportunities. For example, during our annual online faculty workshop, in a drawing, we give away prizes such as flash drives, iPods, and Flip video cameras which are items that can help them as online instructors. For those faculty who cannot attend, we mail them the resources and archives of the workshop.

Q: What are some motivating factors we can offer our best instructional designers and support specialists in addition to salary to make them stay with the program?
Shelton: One of the best incentives would be to provide professional development opportunities which help them remain more confident in their support of faculty teaching online. Offering opportunities to work from home and offering flexible work hours can be good incentives as well. I also try to remind my staff of how important they are to the overall process. Sometimes, those behind the scenes are less noticed, but in reality, instructional support staff can be critical to online success.

Q: What are the most important things we can do to help the faculty’s first online experience be a positive one?
Shelton: Teaching online is different from teaching in the classroom. Prior to the first online teaching experience, it is important to help the faculty understand those differences. We provide ePedagogy training for every first time instructor which offers tips and tricks for teaching online such as methods for saving time and keeping their email inbox down to a minimum. Instructors need to understand student expectations as well as institutional expectations, such as how often they are expected to be online with the students.

Q: Do you have to train your technical support people in the interpersonal aspects of support, the “human factor”?
Shelton: I am fortunate to have an incredible team of online course developers and don’t really need to spend time training on the “human factor.” They greatly respect our faculty and are patient with their learning process. We always tell the faculty, “There are no silly questions, so ask away!” I do sometimes need to encourage them though because it can be frustrating when our timetable doesn’t always match the faculty’s timetable and expectations. But being flexible, understanding and focused on the ultimate goal–which is excellent faculty support–is the most important thing we can do, because we are partnering with them to deliver quality online education.

“The problem is that many instructors try to emulate what goes on in the face-to-face classroom without carefully considering learner characteristics or learning conditions,” says Steven Terrell, professor in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at Nova Southeastern University. “Either they’re not aware of the multitude of new tools that are out there that can support different learning styles and course objectives, or they may be aware of them but don’t know how to use them or don’t have the time or money to be able to use them.”

Terrell recommends beginning with the learning objectives before deciding how to support the learners in reaching these objectives. These objectives may very well be identical to those in a comparable face-to-face course, but the way these objectives are addressed needs to suit the nature of the online environment and the learning preferences of a diverse group of students.

“Think of all the tools available first and as you’re developing the course objectives, and say to yourself, ‘Alright, if I’m going to have this objective, how can I present the material to the students so that it supports a given number of learning styles?” Terrell says.

Learner characteristics are influenced by several factors, including:

• Locus of control: Is the individual student in control of the learning or are there external forces in charge of what the student learns?
• Task orientation: Is the learner able to stay on task without going too far astray?
• Level of motivation: Is the learner intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated?

Although he expected certain characteristics to have a dramatic effect on student success, Terrell found that there was no single preferred learning style that helped students to succeed in online courses. He speculates that high levels of motivation help dedicated students overcome some of their own shortcomings or those of the design of a course.

However, not all students have high motivation levels, and so the course needs to be designed to support all students and contribute to their developing intrinsic motivation. “The tools we choose should help a student become more task-oriented and more independent,” Terrell says.

Terrell provides several communication options for his students—email, telephone, chat, Skype and blogs.

“Wikis and blogs are very common these days. They’re really easy to set up and include in a class. They engage the students so they don’t feel divorced from the system. Some research shows that loneliness—the ‘it’s-me-against-the-world’ thing—drives away a lot of online students. Having communication tools readily available helps students,” Terrell says.

Terrell makes it a point to include a link to a digital library where students do further research. He also includes podcasts and learning objects that students can use and practice on as many times as they want.

Excerpted from Consider the Learn in Course Design, Online Classroom, January 2008.

Barriers to implementation
The literature that Mitchell reviewed is replete with studies and stories pointing out individual barriers to acceptance of distance education, and attempts to figure out what is the best way to deal with some of these barriers.

Up until now, the studies that have looked at barriers to distance education implementation have tended to view them from the technical or the administrative side. What Mitchell wanted to identify was more the “interest and values” sources of the problem. In looking at the literature from this perspective, there were four areas of difficulty that popped out:

• intellectual reluctance
• support
• cost-benefit
• change.

Intellectual reluctance is a lack of belief that online learning was a benefit to the teaching and learning process.

Support has to do with the perception that the institution values online learning enough to put in place assistance and resources to support faculty in their efforts. If that perception is not there, this is a major barrier to acceptance.

Cost-benefit refers to whether the faculty believes that distance education is worth the resources expended on it. Where do faculty place distance education in the priorities of institutional budgeting? “There are a lot of things that an institution could do,” Mitchell says. With faculty the cost-benefit factor is more a matter of values than money. Again that has to do with attitude and perception.

The study revealed two different levels of change — changes in individual faculty roles and institutional change. In Mitchell’s interviews with faculty, she found that they felt relatively secure in their tenure rights and other job security-related issues. They felt that they could use online learning on their own terms. But there was a higher level of insecurity associated with fears of institutional change. The faculty members felt less confident about how the institution would change, about how their environment might change with the advent of distance education. Mitchell and Geva-May found higher levels of conflict in direct relation to the degree that faculty felt they had no control over developments.

“We had many faculty who said, ‘No-one can force me to do this. I’m tenured.’ Nonetheless when these professors experience change beginning in their own departments they are concerned. They feel that the changes may not be beneficial for them and would ultimately add to their work load significantly.

Mitchell found that many times faculty felt that the decision-making process is not especially inclusive—they wanted to be more a part of the discussion. Mitchell points out that it may be simply that the faculty members had decided not to be included. Nonetheless, there was an impression on the part of faculty that change was being made, and they were not as much a part of it as they would like.

Practical applications for distance education administrators
How can Mitchell’s study help a distance education administrator? “The most important thing about working with change is to be aware that even though as an administrator you may feel you are being inclusive, it may not be perceived that way. And that you really look at how you are going to deal with that issue, so that faculty feel involved, not just informed.”

The key factor that Mitchell found that affected the level of conflict was the actual experience of online learning. There was a direct correlation between experience of online learning and acceptance of it. Mitchell explains that there are basically two schools of thought about faculty and distance education. “One is that you do get faculty involved, another is that if you do get them involved they’ll say that it’s too much time and effort, and they will fall by the wayside. What this research is saying is no, if you get them involved then your chances of actually implementing this are better.”

Excerpted from Is Conflict Inherent to Distance Education?, Aug. 1, 2007, Distance Education Report.

Cuyahoga is Ohio’s oldest and largest multi-campus community college with about 10,000 online students, many of whom were entering these classes with no idea of what to expect.

To address this problem, Karpus and the distance learning team at Cuyahoga created an online orientation program for students.

1. Move from in-person to online orientation
Cuyahoga started by doing in-person orientation sessions in the classroom, but met with student complaints. “We had students saying ‘I signed up to take a web-based course, I don’t want to be coming to campus,’ Karpus says. “That’s when we started playing around with virtual orientation tools.”

2. Logistics
Karpus conducts the virtual orientation live, in her office with a webcam and headset. She records each session, so that it can be offered to students any time they log in. There is a link to register for in person sessions, but there is always a link to a recorded virtual session.

3. Convenient scheduling
Not only did the students want virtual orientations, they want them at times that were convenient for them. They don’t want them from 8:30 to 5 when they’re working, so Cuyahoga has taken to scheduling orientations in the evening and even on the weekend.

5. Keep students engaged
When Karpus runs a session she starts with a pre-formulated curriculum that’s about 40 minutes long. Then she opens it up to the students to allow some interactivity—she solicits feedback on any questions they may have, and what they didn’t understand.

“It’s important during a virtual orientation to have a way to see if they’re paying attention,” Karpus says. If she has a small group she can give them power to use the whiteboard. She’s also experimenting with a phone bridge, to allow students to call in during a session rather than just using text-based chat.

6. Show an impact on retention
Every public college and university is feeling the pressure to show increased student retention, student success and performance. Karpus is in the middle of a research project to determine if orientation makes a difference in a academic performance and online retention rates. She’s at the data-gathering stage, and she will be doing focus groups with students who go through orientation.

Excerpted from 10 Tips for Running an Effective Online LMS Orientation, Distance Education Report, May 15, 2008.

Here are just a few of his suggestions. To see the article in its entirety, download a copy of our FREE report, Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction.

1. An “early alert” system. If a distance learning student hasn’t been responding the first few weeks of the course the instructor can pass on the student’s name to this automated system. The student then gets an e-mail saying (in Nash’s words) “Hey we haven’t heard from you for a while – is there anything we can do to help you? Here are some services at the institution that might help you succeed.” The instructor follows up with a personal phone call or email.

2. An online tutoring program. Coastline instituted a program that included tutors available both on the phone and online, along with other student success services. “Those student who used it succeeded at higher rates than their peer group,” Nash says.

3. A student success course. “I would recommend a student orientation or a student success course,” says Nash. Coastline developed a three-unit student success course, called “Mastering the College Experience,” teaching learning skills, “life skills” and various aspects of college orientation. Enrollments are good and, in surveys, students have reported they feel more prepared to succeed after having taken it.

4. Learning communities. Nash calls this the tactic that has produced the best student retention rates. “The research recommends [learning communities] again and again,” says Nash. Coastline’s STAR Program is a group of cohorts that move through a program together. It’s an accelerated program so that students get their associate’s degree in eighteen months instead of two years. Classes are smaller and hybrid-style, split about evenly between face-to-face and online.

5. Focus on individual courses. Spotlight the ones that have the biggest problem with attrition. Focus on those while measuring results against the baseline. Pay attention to both the differences in course completion rates and the cost and resources it took to get there. Do a cost-benefit analysis, measuring return on investment.

6. Involve faculty. They are the key service providers. They should be involved in the needs assessment and in the planning because they’re going to have to implement it. You need their buy-in and advice, Nash advises.

Excerpted from 11 Tips for Improving Retention of Distance Learning Students, Distance Education Report, August 15, 2006.

Q: How do you create a bond to the institution with part-time adjuncts who are at remote locations?

Hardy: There are several ways to connect with remote adjuncts. Consistent and effective communication is one of the key aspects in creating and maintaining this bond. Providing an online community where adjuncts can connect with those at the institution, as well as with each other, is one method of building that relationship. Additionally, offering live events, such as webinars and chats, where adjuncts can actively participate and interact with staff and other faculty, is another great approach to bridging the long-distance relationship.

Hardy: Adjuncts provide an enormous service to institutions, particularly when course demand is beyond what the current faculty load can handle. It is therefore crucial to ensure that these adjuncts have the support necessary to be productive members of the team.

There are many aspects to creating an adjunct support program that do not require additional funds, just time and creativity. Once you are able to implement some of these programs and are able to show positive outcomes, you will have a good basis for requesting administrative support for a program.

Q: How can you tell when your adjuncts are running low on energy and inspiration?

Hardy: There are a number of ways that you can be “in tune” with your adjuncts, even though you may not be able to see them on a daily basis. For instance, if you find a lack of responsiveness on their part, or an increased number of student complaints, you may find that there is a breakdown in communication, perhaps due to a lack of enthusiasm or feeling of connectedness. Additionally, encouraging discussion through an online community can be a proactive mechanism to finding out how they are feeling, what kinds of support they might need, and areas with which they are struggling.

For more information on training and supporting online adjuncts, check out Hardy’s online seminar presented last fall, and now available on CD. Learn more.