Chapter 7 – Management, Administration, and Policy
A 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. (Simonson, 2004, p 48).
When you look at the above statement it makes you stop and think for a moment. The role of the administration is not as easy as you may think. The administration within any organization has a lot of responsibility. They need to make sure all of the goals within the organization meet what they are actually doing. As a Fithian moves from a traditional fact-to-face training program into a distance or online training program there are a lot of areas that the management and administration will have to keep in mind. We, at MBC group, are ready to help you organize all of these areas and look at them while still keeping your training needs, vision and goals in mind at all times.
The first item that management must address is the planning process. Before we design and implement all of our courses for Fithian we will need to help the management look at several different areas and address our findings. Some of the areas that we will be looking at include the compatibility of the distance education learning program with your institution’s values, goals, and mission statements, the readiness of the technology infrastructure within Fithian and what will need to be changed to support it, readiness to support faculty teaching online course and programs along with support to students. We will also be looking at the plans to market the courses and what quality control standards are in place or need to be put in place for the courses. Most importantly before we market the programs what will be the tuition rates and fees that you will be charging in comparison to a financial analysis of what the on-going costs will be (Simonson, et al, 2009, p 328-329). All of these items will be addressed as we sit down and plan out the final details before we implement our programs.
As suggested by Magjuka, Shi and Bonk in their research there are six factors that we must all consider when planning and developing online programs and courses. We must keep in mind (1) the vision of the organization and their plans, (2) curriculum, (3) staff training and support, (4) students services, (5) student training and support, and (6) copyright and intellectual property (Magjuka, et al, p 2).
Within these items in mind, they also give us ten design and administrative issues that we will sit down with the Fithian administration to address as we continue our planning and implementation process. These ten issues are:
We believe that once all of these questions have been answered and addressed by the management, that the programs that will be developed will be on the way to being some of the best in the country. However, these are still some additional issues that we must make sure to address specifically, most importantly, the issue of copyright.
Intellectual property and copyright is an issue that all educational institutions must address and be aware of. We want to make sure that everyone at Fithian is aware of what the current copyright laws are and also make sure that they are kept up to date on any copyright law changes. We believe that by first educating the teachers on the laws that they can then better education their students on what is legal and what is illegal. Also, it will make the teachers better aware of what they are doing and if it is legal or not.
Copyright laws are changing and keeping up on what we can and can not do is a struggle for everyone. We believe that the management should make sure that they are aware of what the law is and then educate the faculty. By doing this, the faculty will not be able to say the “didn’t know” that what they were doing is illegal. Yes, we know that most educators know what is in the TEACH Act regarding educational use, however this does not cover everything that teachers may do within their classrooms. We believe that everyone involved in the online training that we will be developing should be aware of what is covered and what is not covered. We also want them to know what they have to do and what we have to do in order to obtain permission to use copyrighted materials that are not covered under the TEACH Act (Simonson, et al, 2009, p 315).
We believe that as Mayberry so eloquently stated in his article Fail to Plan – Plan to Fail that “its necessary to examine what you need to do to avoid project pitfalls and keep all systems on track.” This is what we at MBC Group plans to do. What want to take the time to plan and look at all of the issues and then create an online learning program that will fit all of the needs of Fithian Internation not only for the present time, but that will be able to adapt and change as you grow and expand.
References
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.
Mayberry, E (2004). Fail to plan - plan to fail. Retrieved October 16, 2008, from ASTD Web site: http://www.astd.org/LC/2004/0704_mayberry.htm
Simonson, M, Smaldino, S, Albright, M, & Zvacek, S (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education: Fourth edition. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
Simonson, M. (2004). Distance learning leaders. Who are they? Distance Learning. 1(3), 47, 48.