Unit 4          Management of Distance Education

Objectives:

• To understand who the distance learners are and how to provide services to distance learners.
• How to develop a marketing plan to reach the distance learner.
• To understand the levels of decision-making in the development of budgets for distance education programs.
• To understand the daily operations of a distance education program.
• To understand the need for course and program evaluation.

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Commentary

This is the most extensive unit.  I have segmented the unit into the subunits. We are going to cover who are the students you will deal with, how to market to them to get enrollments, how to provide them services and how a distance program operates.  We will talk about how to develop a budget for a program and finally how to evaluate/assess the success of a program.

The Distance Learner

Marketing Plans

Budgeting a distance education program

Daily Operations

Assessing the success of your program

As an administrator you will need to know if your program is working or not.  You do this by evaluating the courses and programs.  I’m sure you know about formative and summative evaluation.  To sum it up quickly, formative evaluation is done during the process and summative evaluation is done after the process.  As a distance education administrator you need to evaluate both the courses you offer and the functions of the program.  Doing Web based forms is becoming much easier to do.  Back them with a database to collect the data and you can easily report on the items you evaluate.  This is such a vital step in a planning process and often one that gets ignored as it can be time consuming.  It is well worth the time.  It will help validate the efforts you expend into a new distance program.

I have done a paper on assessing an online program.  And if I may brag a minute, I won a national award for this paper.  You might like to review the article.  (warning – if you plan to print it, it is 46 pages long). 

The assignment for this unit is to make a budget for a distance program.  If you have a project you would like to budget out, please feel free to do so.  Otherwise, make up a dummy program, like I did in the example.  Remember the key things to cover in direct and indirect costs.  Don’t make this harder than it is.  It should only be a couple of pages.  Please email the budget to me by August 4.

Sources:  

Bates, A. (1995). Cost-Benefit Model for TeleLearning. http://research.cstudies.ubc.ca/nce/index.html.  (Site no longer active)

Bentz, R. (1999). "Maximizing your Marketing Dollars". Presented at the DETC Marketing Workshop. October 24-26, 1999. Scottsdale, AZ.

Jewitt, F. (1998). Case Studies in Evaluating the Benefits and Costs of
Mediated Instruction and Distributed Learning. http://www.calstate.edu/special_projects/mediated_instr/proposal.html. (Site no longer active)

Moore, M. G. and Kearsley, G. (1996). Distance Education A Systems View. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Ram, S. (1999). "How to develop an effective marketing plan." Presented at the DETC Marketing Workshop. October 24-26, 1999. Scottsdale, AZ.

Rumble, G. (1997). The Costs and Economics of Open and Distance Learning. London: Kogan Page and the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University.

Scheiderman, E. R. (1999). "Web-Based Marketing from A to Yahoo". Presented at the DETC Marketing Workshop. October 24-26, 1999. Scottsdale, AZ.

Trasler, J. (1999). "Developing a global vision what's beyond the USA." Presented at the DETC Marketing Workshop. October 24-26, 1999. Scottsdale, AZ.

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