In your roadmap to success in distance education, you’ll invariably run into bumps in the road.  Program management can serve as your toolkit to keep things going as planned. In this lesson you will learn about program management issues in distance education. We’ll focus on principles of good practice and quality—fundamental principles that will guide us throughout. We'll examine several organizations' principles of good practice in distance education.

To begin, let’s find out about the American Distance Education Consortium's (ADEC) Guiding Principles for Distance Education:

• Design for active and effective learning by considering the needs and characteristics of the learners, nature of the content, appropriate instructional strategies and technologies, and desired learning outcomes.
• Support the needs of the learner by addressing things such as orientation, advising, technical and library support.  
• Develop and maintain technological and human infrastructure including policies for upkeep and support. 
• Distance education initiatives are sustained by an administrative commitment to quality distance education by integrating it into the mission, providing financial commitment, faculty development and rewards, training to support those involved, and marketing and management structures to promote and sustain distance education.

ADEC President Janet Poley will provide insight on the current issues surrounding program management in videos throughout this destination. In this first video, Poley focuses on the principles of good practice and quality, fundamental principles that will guide this destination.

Janet Poley on principles of good practice (5:50)

Click here for text-only version.

The ADEC Guiding Principles are found at http://www.adec.edu/admin/papers/distance-learning_principles.html. To summarize:

ADEC Guiding Principles for Distance Learning
Design for active and effective learning.
Support the needs of learners.
Develop and maintain the technological and human infrastructure.
Sustain administrative and organizational commitment.

Let's see what other organizations have included as good principles, starting with the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications.

Destination 10: 2 of 22