Chapter 11: Managing and Leading a Distance Education Organization

• Distance Learning Leader is a visionary capable of action who guides an organization’s future, its vision, mission, goals, and objectives. The leader guides the organization and its people who have faith in the leader, and have a clear understanding and acceptance of the organization’s worthwhile and shared vision and goals. A distance learning leader has competence in knowing, designing, managing, leading, and visioning distance
  education.
• Course Subsystem covers a much broader range of responsibility than the design and development of courses, although these are the primary functions.
• Student Subsystem is the processes of admitting students and managing and controlling their progress. These are broad generalizations; the issues are much more complicated. In practice, the quality of student support services available and easily accessible to a distant learner will play a major role in determining whether that student learns about the program, enrolls, and remains through to completion.
• Two Primary Functions for the logistical subsystem: purchasing and maintaining equipment, and employment and training of personnel.
• Distance Education Policy is policy development and implementation, as well as revision of existing institutional policies when appropriate, is an important topic to be addressed when an organization considers offering distance courses and programs.
• Intellectual Property Rights related to online courses and the media embedded within are a significant issue in distance education. The essential concerns are ownership of components of online courses and rights pertaining thereto. In other words, who actually owns an online course, or who owns the individual parts of an online course, and who has what rights to use what under what conditions?
• Work for Hire is at the heart of the intellectual property rights debate. Under work for hire, if an employee creates a work during the course of her or his employment, the copyright of the work normally belongs to the employer. The test of what constitutes a work for hire utilizes the principles of what is termed agency law.
• The Costs of Distance Education Distance education is expensive. The costs range from basic operation of the administrative office for distance education to faculty salaries to instructional design and technical support personnel to student support personnel to the delivery technology infrastructure. Personnel costs typically are the vast majority of the total budgets for distance education programs. The costs of delivering distance education and ensuring return of investment are foremost concerns of many distance education administrators.
• Data-gathering. The federal government tracks Internet access among the general population through studies reported in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Falling Through the Net reports. The National Center for Educational Statistics (2003) tracks trends in distance education in postsecondary institutions. The Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General also compiles information on state and accreditation agency controls over distance education programs.
• Digital Divide was defined by the Digital Divide Network (2004) as the gap between those who can effectively use new information and communication tools, such as the Internet, and those who cannot. The Digital Divide thus is a much broader concept than the relatively simple matter of access.

 

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http://wiche.edu/telecom/Accrediting%20-%20Commitment.pdf

 

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