Good Practices (5:50)

Poley: There are lots of principles of good practice. They come from many organizations that have worked on those principles, including WICHI, ADEC, the Sloan Foundation. There are a number of excellent guideposts. On the other hand, the question of excellent policies to make these practices get implemented is a little bit more difficult. One of the critical things that I think is important is that it really starts at the top of most institutions. I come from a land-grant university, and I think when we have administrators who believe in the land-grant philosophy – that the learner is important, that outreach is important, that distance education is important – you’re going to have an easier time implementing those good practices.

If you have an administration that either has no experience with the learner – who might be at a distance or in a rural or remote area – you’re going to have a little bit more difficulty. So one of the things you want to do is to hire good administrators. On the other hand, I know that that’s not always available to faculty who want to encourage this type of development. If you sit on a search committee, you want to hire administrators who understand that.

The second part that I think is really important is that there needs to be a mechanism in place on every campus for strategic thinking and planning. This is one way of getting people together from various areas – people dealing with content, with communication and instructional technology, with instructional design, with the economics and the business planning. And in many senses, when you get people coming together in that fashion, they should be able to implement a strategic plan that can be implemented, and good policy will be critical in doing that.

One of the things that I find interesting today is that there are quite a few economic opportunities for institutions that we’re missing or overlooking, simply because we haven’t brought that team together to the table, or if we have, maybe they haven’t been empowered to the greatest degree possible.

So my sense is that implementation requires strong support at the top, and it requires excellent teamwork across the institution, if you’re really going to implement it.

Promoting faculty involvement in distance education is in some senses difficult and in some senses easy. In part you have to get the rewards and the incentives running in the right direction. There are a lot of things that motivate people. One of those things that motivates people is a challenging job, and we have a lot of creative, energetic faculty. So distance education often can be a challenging job. So if you have faculty who want to get engaged because they like challenging jobs, you can hook them with that.  A second part is to get your money flows in the right direction and the right places. I visit many campuses in my role as president of ADEC and I see that we’re trying to motivate people and we talk about that…we give lip service to it, but then we find that the tuition dollars coming from distance ed students all go to a different location than where the work is going on. So you find that you have faculty and support staff and technology languishing and you possibly have student numbers going up, and the money that is coming in or could come in is going to something completely different. You simply cannot grow out a program that way. I spent a number of years working in international development, and I learned that in that environment if you wanted to have excellent projects developed, you had to make sure that there were economic rewards. And I mean economic rewards to the program, and not the individuals, need to go to the people who are doing the work. That’s absolutely essential. And that’s very, very often overlooked at our institutions.

Another way to motivate people is to look at recognition. Rewards and recognition can be very powerful. Within ADEC, we try to have rewards for people who are doing outstanding and excellent work. This is one way to encourage people to be part of the distance ed work.. Rewards and recognition can happen from supervisors. People like to know that their department chair or dean knows what they’re doing and recognizes it. Sometimes it might be as simple as saying, “Gee, you did a great job with that.” And in other cases, it might be a monetary reward or a university-wide reward.

Another thing that I think that people who have not engaged in distance education may overlook is that often distance education is a team sport. It is not something that an individual faculty member can do. And so if you get motivated by being part of a team, by feelings of growth and learning and being in relationships with other people, distance education can be extremely rewarding. You have the opportunity to work with colleagues, learn from colleagues, and have colleagues learn from you. One of the ways I think we can encourage faculty into this environment is to give them this experience of a team. Because it is really impossible to do quality work in this environment without that team spirit.