Critical Design and Administrative Issues in Online Education
This article discusses the decision making process of online program design and administration by looking at the Kelley Direct (KD) online degree program at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. They discussed key questions about this program including What critical administrative problem situations and issues has KD encountered in its program history?, What have been some of the essential curriculum and program design issues?, How were decisions made among various programmatic options?
There are ten design and administrative issues that have been encountered by KD. These issues are: 1-Which student group is to be served? Is online education a substitute for part-time or residential education or is it a supplement?, 2-Will the online program be treated differently than the current program? For instance, will there by a special online learning related designation on the diploma? Will the program need to hire a separate faculty?, 3-To what extent will this program provide a blended educational experience? When and how frequently will the residential component occur?, 4-Will faculty be allowed to teach in-load or is it overload or a mixture? 5-Should a school put more of its design effort and investment dollars into course templates and interactive courses, or, instead on training individual faculty in online pedagogy?, 6-To what extent should there be a standard template for teaching in an online program?, 7-To what extent should courses yield interactively on the basis of the course design or should we rely on faculty to lead interactivity?, 8-Should you build proprietary teaching tools or purchase commercially or decide to go OpenSource?, 9-How to select a CMS? and 10-What is the role of corporate partnership and university alliances?
It is also discussed that with all the new technologies being discovered and created that they have created challenges to administrations when it comes to managing the distance programs. It is the overall hope of the authors that the issues discussed with give insights for administrators that are looking at creating or adapting online degree programs at their institutions.
Magjuka, R, Shi, M, & Bonk, C Critical design and administrative issues in online education. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, VIII, Retrieved October 16, 2008, from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter84/magjuka84.htm.