Best Practices for Administering Online Programs

Daniel Hillman, Robert Schudy, Anatoly Temkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Best Practices for Administering Online Programs is a practical volume for university teams seeking to manage effective online programs. Defining, designing, implementing, and updating online courses is a highly collaborative effort, particularly with limited resources and expanding student enrollment. This book unites the efforts of program directors, supervisors, department chairs, participating faculty, instructional designers, IT specialists, and support staff toward a common goal: affordable, accessible, and scalable online learning. Readers will find guidelines for fostering quality, faculty skills, academic integrity, learning objectives, course improvement, and more.

Chapter 1
Getting Started Online

This chapter is written primarily for administrators and faculty who are considering developing online programs, in order to help stakeholders understand important decision criteria. It may also be used by administrators and faculty whose institutions have been offering online programs and who want to better organize and administer their online offerings, and who may wish to better integrate them with their more traditional, face-to-face courses.

This chapter covers:

• Reasons for creating online programs.
• Making the case for developing an online program.
• Opportunities and challenges of online education.
• Advantages of online technology in face-to-face and blended courses.
• Defining the program and target audience.
• Assessing program demand.
• Overview of the course development process.
• The benefits of having a digital strategy.
• Identifying faculty.
• Choosing a learning management system.
• Choosing a transition approach.
• Identifying further resources needed for online programs.

Developing an online program is a major commitment, so proposed online programs should be carefully evaluated. Existing programs may also benefit from this strategic thinking. Key considerations include the market for the program, the use of online content in face-to-face and blended courses, and the role of the program in the institution’s digital strategy. More tactical considerations include choosing the scheduling, course development, and instructional models; these are covered in Chapter 4.

Reasons for Creating Online Programs

Institutions create online programs for many reasons. One is to enable students to take courses who cannot come to campus. Another is to improve retention by allowing students to continue when they move or travel. Both of these enhance enrollments and expand the institution’s geographic reach. Online courses can also support face-to-face programs by enabling more flexible study and by providing course content in multiple formats. Done well, they improve educational outcomes for many students. Sometimes institutions create online programs because competing institutions have them, and they seek to enhance their own institution’s reputation.

In many institutions, online education has grown organically. At first it was led by a few tech enthusiasts and early adopters, who built websites to support their face-to-face courses; some built websites that supported fully online courses. In the early days, this was technically challenging, because there were no tools to support online courses. Two innovations changed this: the development of learning management systems (LMSs), and the tailoring of content management systems. With these tools, the development of online courses is now much easier. In parallel with this, there was a dramatic increase in the acceptance of web-based online courses, which prompted many schools to create them.

Making the Case for Developing an Online Program

Online educational technology is used successfully in conjunction with face-to-face instruction, and academic leaders who are aware of this are more inclined to support purely online education (Schrum, Galizio, & Ledesma, 2011). Many institutions’ administrators and faculty believe that entering online markets will improve enrollments, so the leadership of these institutions may also be inclined to support online education. Properly done, online education can support diversity of student interests, readiness, and approaches to learning better than face-to-face education, and an institution may be able to use this to make programs more appealing to broader audiences and markets.

Building a high-quality online program requires a serious investment of faculty time and other resources. Therefore, best practice is to evaluate the costs and benefits and document them in a formal proposal. This proposal may be developed by an institution’s faculty and/or administrators, and supported by accreditors, business, or academic partners. It should contain:

• a conceptual description of the proposed program
• estimates of the costs of developing and offering the program
• how it fits in with or supports the institution’s digital strategy
• how the program will be marketed
• how it will be administered
• how faculty will be identified to develop and teach the courses
• market assessment
• an analysis of competing programs
• enrollment projections
• relationships to existing and planned programs
• instructional design, media, and other resource needs
• the contributions that the proposed program will make to the institution and its students’ success.

The proposal should be presented to an institution’s administrative leadership, because the program development process requires supervision and advocacy. When an institution has strong leadership and initiative, the programs are more likely to be successful (Portugal, 2006). Strong leadership provides financial resources, a supportive digital strategy, and encouragement to faculty and other stakeholders. While some programs can succeed without support from leadership, they are typically more difficult to launch and sustain.

Opportunities and Challenges of Online Education

Many faculty who have only taught face to face think of each lecture as a performance of scripted material, like a play, rather than a collection of scenes that can be prerecorded and edited, like a movie. One advantage of online education is that each part of a course can take the form or use the technology that is the best for teaching that particular material. For example, a course in accounting can explain a point in text, use an animation to illustrate and reinforce the point, and then include an embedded spreadsheet to have the students try it on their own, all on the same webpage. To allow time for each element to be presented in the form that suits it best, whether that is text, video, or something else, faculty must prepare the material well in advance, like a cinematographer setting up different camera angles and lighting to help tell the story. And, like making a movie, only the best takes are included in the final result.

This does lead to a challenge of developing online courses, which is that course material must be completed in advance, ideally before the course launches. This can be difficult for faculty, who are unaccustomed to such schedules. Students expect online course content to be of good textbook quality, and they have limited tolerance for typos, grammar errors, poor explanations, and other defects that could have been identified by editors and other faculty. Best practice is for course development to be completed several weeks before launch, to allow enough...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Getting Started Online
• Chapter 2 Faculty Considerations for Building an Online Program
• Chapter 3 Issues That Online Courses Must Address
• Chapter 4 Program Definition and Development
• Chapter 5 Program Administration
• Chapter 6 Fundamentals of Course Design and Development
• Chapter 7 Advanced Course Design
• Chapter 8 When a Course Is Underway
• Chapter 9 Addressing Unexpected Developments
• Chapter 10 Administering Course Revisions
• Glossary
• Index