Organizational Structures and Policies (1:17)

Moore: Distance education is a different way of using people – or it should be – a different way of using people in the various roles of teaching, and different and more efficient ways of using technology when the right organizational structures are in place. The quality of distance teaching is dependent on getting the organizational structures right, which itself is dependent on having appropriate policy and decisions being in place. I often say that the problems in education and in distance education are NOT primarily technological. They’re not even pedagogical – the teaching. They’re much more organizational, and, above all, they’re policy. And over the years that I’ve worked in distance education, I’ve found over and over again that we’re struggling to put technologies in place and we’re struggling to train people to put new pedagogies in place, but we’re struggling inside with oftentimes unfriendly organizational structures, and ultimately that’s because our policymakers haven’t put in place the policies that we need.