Succeeding in Distance Learning

There's been some discussion about increasing our distance learning courses at UWB, so here's a good article by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness which surveyed over twenty higher education institutions in 2005 to come up with a number of best practices. Some of the best practices include:

• prevalent support services such as faculty helpdesk, course development help from a support center, student phone helpdesk, technical training for faculty, one-on-one instructional design consultations for faculty
• strong commitment by both administration and faculty to distance learning initiatives
• focusing on getting entire programs online rather than individual courses

The executive summary is at http://www.a-hec.org/research/study_reports/IsL0205/exec_summ.html and the entire report is at http://www.a-hec.org/research/study_reports/IsL0205/TOC.html