Elements of Quality Online Education cation

Business Issues in Online Education“Need to provide courses to other programs that will incorporate them.”“Use a model of creating online courses across different groups that are used in multipleprograms.”“Get customers to follow a natural progression: non-credit then for-credit.”“A basic strategy has been to ‘web-ize’ most popular existing courses and programs.”“Key is class size.”A number of institutions have developed their own business templates and processes to plan for newonline courses and programs, including: a 5-year pro forma template, a program description/intake formand rate card [for development and marketing services], and/or a student services roles matrix. Anotherinstitution follows a model taken from the publishing industry. If institutions are willing to share thesetemplates and processes, they can be used as jumping off points for the development of cross-institutionalmodels and processes; they would be useful in constructing the value-chain of activities, costs and otheraspects of an effective business model.3. Student and Other Support ServicesThe business model for aligning student support services with online education appears to be evolvingand is an area of concern to those involved in a wide range of related activities. Comments illustrate someissues:“Revenue split [between program deans and campus] doesn’t really work well—doesn’t pay forsupport services.”“What is the business model impact in student support?”“What is “rationalizing student services role online? Who does what?”One large state institution is developing a matrix of student service roles by course/program type. It looksto rationalize the locus of responsibility for each of the following areas: tuition setting, marketing,recruitment, admissions, registration and payment, orientation, records and advising. At another publicinstitution, where online education is being viewed as a way to rationalize and share specialized upperdivision courses among campuses, there is discussion about how to separate the flow of tuition and feerevenue into student versus academic support dollars.Other support activities mentioned are: help desk support (both to students and faculty), other techsupport, other student retention support, alumni services, career services, data management, legal support,and financial aid. The overriding question is who provides these services, at what level, and what are themechanisms that fund them? For example, should online education at a given institution have a separaterecords and registration system (a legacy system) or not? To what degree is alumni or career servicessupport desirable? There is evidence from at least one institution that alumni of an online program havedemonstrated financial support by contributing to a scholarship fund especially for online students of theprogram. Financial aid is of particular concern in another way, too: one institution stated that if more than50% of their enrollments go online, the institution will lose assistance for financial aid.Listed below are three basic models for distributing tuition and fee revenue, at least among internal nodes(sometimes multiple models occur at the same institution):1. A unit charged with driving online education (e.g. outreach, external education, tech support)manages the distribution of online tuition and fees revenue, and takes some of this revenue tofund its activities. Examples of other units that share in the distribution of revenue are: the160