"Hi. This is Susan Smith Nash and I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about best practices for online and hybrid programs. This is part of the series of the e-learninge queen. Anyway, as a "faithful minion of the demanding queen," I'm here today to provide a satisfactory product. We'll get started. I just thought I'd talk a little bit about where we are in terms of best practices (benchmarking, etc.) for online and hybrid programs, which are a combination of face-to-face instruction and online and sometimes CD Rom--even PDA mobile media, and I'd like to talk a little bit about how some gaps are emerging even as standards start to be universally adopted after the publication of best practices for online and hybrid programs. Online programs are almost universally adopted that institutions did and they modified them to fit their individual needs and that seems natural,l but since that time academicians, students and online program administrators have started to identify gaps in the best practices, particularly as they apply to 100 percent online programs, as well as blended solutions, or even multidelivery methods where they're 100 percent distance, but they could be say audio-enhanced or media-enhanced. Nevertheless, benchmarks continue to serve a vitally important function as guides, and also as a useful point of departure for programs in schools.

I'd like to just list off some of the resources that are available free (which is nice) and have been more or less universally-adopted. The current benchmark studies and best practices have been established by Sloan C (Sloan C Consortium)--very excellent source. In fact, their latest publication is a 2005 report that talks about the mainstreaming of online -- pretty interesting. A good solid (almost ten years old) now but still a really solid survey is the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education best practices (WICHE), which I think is a cool acronym. Also, the ACE American Council and Education. They had one that was published in 2000 which was pretty useful. Also, the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC); what they have done is not only help institutions to determine if they are ready to successfully develop and deliver distance education in theory, they are there to help them figure out whether or not their strategy or plan to grow is effective.

Now, I have to say that many of the studies focused on the needs of adult learners and they’ve built on the following best practices, which include classics by Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles, and also principles of practice for alternative and external degree programs for adults. Now some of these studies focus primarily on undergraduate education, however, the principles do have a lot of applicability to master's level programs, less so to PhD, especially if its heavily research-oriented in terms of online learning. There are several categories and I've sort of broken it down, paraphrased them, and generalized them from the literature. I'm going to just follow that classification scheme, they're pretty useful in identifying strengths and weaknesses especially in conjunction with other best practices and benchmarking studies. They also give rise to possible gaps, and these are not always straight forward or easily remedied gaps, but they are ones that span several categories so it's kind of problematic to effect a quick fix or just even to do a simple intervention.

Let's say that the first one would be a committed institution. The learning organization must prioritize distance and flexible learning and in doing so must demonstrate support that is realistic, appropriate, timely and expandable for the future. Possible gaps: an institution might be trying to force fit a program to the mission where it doesn’t really fit. Also, there could be some other issues in terms of force fitting the programs to missions -- so they force fit the mission to the program and force fit the program to the mission. Also, revenue generation can be perceived as more important than other things.

Learner- friendly environment for students: this is a second category. students, faculty, and other users find the services provided by the learning organization easy to use, accessible, and thorough. The learning organization should provide online services such as Registration and Records, Bursar's, Library Access. Technology utilized should be up to date and appropriate for the users-- actual environments work. Patterns now here are some other possible gaps. There can be some ambiguous needs assessments so they don’t really know what is friendly to the learner. The program could always be sort of a half a beat behind the technology curve so that students aren't really able to engage in an effective way that accommodates all different learning styles.

Third category: quality courses, curriculum, and instruction. The learning organization has an academic and instructional plan which has been developed, reviewed and approved by teams consisting of teaching faculty, subject matter experts, governing executives, faculty members, etc. Instructional strategies adhere to generally accepted principles of online and distance instruction and rest upon a solid foundation of theory, practice, and experiental research, knowledge. Here is where you can have some big gaps in the quality of courses, curriculum, and instruction. In the eagerness to ramp up and be consistent, the instruction can fall down and be training instead of actual higher education -- and that happened by creating so called "cookie cutter" courses [with] too much rigidity and hence, unwittingly producing training Another big gap can be a lack of a plan or coordinated instructional strategy, and another gap comes when students and institutions (primarily institutions) try to jump on the latest delivery mode or bandwagon even when it's not appropriate and and as a result, at risk students are left behind even though on paper there is ADA compliance. Also another gap happens when there is just an egregious failure to conduct objective and periodic (in other words regularly scheduled) program reviews.

Another category is faculty support,capacity, training, mentoring, compensation. Faculty members teach and develop courses in areas where they have demonstrated expertise, experience and or leadership. When they are asked to instruct courses, faculty are provided support, training and guidance in a proactive manner. Compensation is fair and intellectual property issues are settled in a manner that is mutually agreeable. Here are some possible gaps:

1) a gap can occur when there is a failure to provide timely and appropriate mentoring and training
2) another gap occurs when there is a failure to review faculty credentials and evidence of growth (I mean, how many times do you see stagnation in faculty).
3) another gap is when flexibility actually isn't flexible anymore--it's like rigidity
4) another category is institutional infrastructure, partnerships and alliances. Economy because the investment in online programs can be prohibitively costly due to initial investment in infrastructure as well as ongoing investments and expansions, upgrades and change. Many institutions cannot afford the cost of embarking on a solo venture. It is necessary for them to partner and here's another interesting issue -- people won't partner because they are hung up on the whole intellectual property thing or they’ve paid big bucks for their infrastructure their learning management system and they kind of can't partner because their databases aren't compatible so it's kind of a pathetic situation. I mean technology is supposed to make things easier, and instead it makes people paranoid or utterly incapable. There, you have to say planning, planning, planning. So, for example if I'm a tiny, small liberal arts college and I just have face to face [courses] but all my students want online, then what do I do? I'd say the first thing I do is I start hooking up with a consortium to offer access to libraries-- that’s step one. Step two would be to hook up with others that are like-minded, where we complement each other, where we're not competing with each other, we're not competing with ourselves, so we have these really great ways to develop curriculum together to share credits. This is happening more and more and it’s a very healthy thing, although it's making people uncomfortable. One is the instructional intellectual property issue, and the second is who uses faculty?, how are they used?, are they overused, exploited. Those are issues that need to be worked out and the gaps can definitely occur. One is when the library partnerships arent really working so the students don’t really have access to good databases. One can be caught in a partner's political agenda (you know you get a partner and you go, whoops I didn’t realize they had a program that’s getting us in trouble or they've been sloppy in their research and there are medical ethics issues --who knows) It can go on and on. The other thing, too, is e you don’t really know if your partner is being unethical in terms of what they happen to be doing in other countries, unethical in terms of selling degrees-- becoming a diploma mill without realizing it -- or doing things that are kind of pushing the envelope in terms of bioethics. I mean just be prepared for some controversy once you partner; you know people have to partner so you know these are things to investigate. Keep your eyes open. So, I'm not going to read off this entirely dense but useful, I hope, bibliography of fabulous and excellent resources they range from siezing the opportunity, quality, and the extent of online learning in the US, to distance education in California Community Colleges-- benchmarks. Good stuff, so anyway, I would encourage you to go in and kind of click on some of the links take a look enjoy and email me comments. I would love to hear from you. Thank you very much for everything. I am Susan Smith Nash and I've enjoyed chatting with you today. I will talk to you soon"

Transcribed for ADA compliance from original site of podcast: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2005/07/best-practices-for-online-and-hybrid.html. This podcast was created by Susan Smith Nash, "E-Learning Queen." Her blog focuses on training and education, from instructional design to e-learning and mobile solutions.

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