Now that we have traveled the historical road of technology's role in supporting distance education, we need to take a look at what technologies and support structures are available to you - today - at your institution and how to make the best use of those resources. Resourceful instructional designers will have in their head or bookmarked in their Web browser, an inventory of campus, college, and departmental resources for developing and delivering a distance education activity.

Once you have identified your audience and done a content analysis, you can put together an inventory of technology needs specific to the requirements of your project. All the technology and technology staff support you need may be available in your department or college - if you are lucky. Developing a course and distributing it over a large geographical area are not a one-person or one-computer show. Most likely you will need support from campus-wide services or from other colleagues to put together a design team. You can put together formal teams with regular meetings, or informal teams where you know the right person or support service to call at the right time to develop content and deliver your course.  Make sure you are familiar with what is available for technology support, know who to call, the costs, and their competencies and whether they meet deadlines. These are important factors in your instructional design decisions.

A Model for Levels of Support for Distributed or Distance Learning:
Below is a simple model for distance, or distributed learning support at most institutions. Think about where your position fits into this triangle and where your other campus services fall. An instructional designer may have to draw upon support from one or all of these levels depending on the complexity of their project. The levels are clearly defined below the model.

Campus-Wide Base Level
This is the support area or services you use every day, probably without thinking about it. These services may include phones, data connections, e-mai,l and public Web servers, data security, data back-up, student information systems, administrative data systems, user authentication, and the list could go on and on. This mostly depends on the information technology culture on your campus and whether there is strong central funding or leadership for these activities.

Individual Faculty or College Many faculty and content specialists like to work "close to home" with people in their same discipline or just down the hall where they can drop in for help. They often do not think of looking centrally for assistance. Depending on the resources available to the college, department, or even individual faculty, there is usually pockets of technology and technology expertise all over campus. Because of the ever-declining cost of desktop media development software, digitizing hardware and video production equipment, these small pockets can often offer both quality and be very responsive to clients' needs. Once again visit your colleagues across campus working in these pockets of distance learning technology to see what they have, look at the quality of their product and give them call when you might need their technology or expertise. Then return the favor sometime.

Many faculty members with the skills and technology enjoy developing their own online course materials.

Jointly sponsored and developed workshops between a central support agency and colleges or academic departments can extend limited resources and foster joint ownership of the activities.

Centrally Supported or Facilitated These are services that fall somewhere in the middle for complexity and funding and are often collaborative or shared activities between central and college, or college and departmental levels. These services can include workshops, software training, learning management systems, or content management software / hardware and support, streaming media or Flash servers, TV studios, video and multimedia production, duplication services, teleclassrooms, videoconferencing, etc.

Special or Targeted
Some projects or clients may ask for or require very specific or high-end technology. For example, these activities may require technology for virtual reality, wireless or handheld computing, three-dimensional visual media, desktop-to-desktop videoconferencing and many other technologies that seem to pop up over the horizon and fall into your lap. There is always a group of faculty, or content specialists, ready to jump headfirst into the latest technological wonder. At any institution of higher-education, concepts like experimentation, innovation, diversity, and being on the cutting-edge are greatly valued.

Learning about learning management systems is next on our list.

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