Elements of Quality Online Education cation

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Business Issues in Online EducationHere are some attributes, putting educational quality aside, which emerged. Beyond interviewees’observations based on business they have generated, there is no hard data to back-up the assertion thatthese product attributes translate into certain dollar value to customers. This should be viewed as a partial,emerging list:• Time to market (i.e. the time it takes to develop and implement the educational product):From the customer’s standpoint this would include the ability to be efficient and flexible inadding new degrees and programs.• Scalability.• Standardization across geographies (e.g. national financial services company is able to offer auniform educational product to its employees no matter where they are located, or nationalprofessional accreditation body requires courses for all medical residents).• Access (as defined as one of the five pillars of Sloan-C).• Demonstrated quality control (e.g. through standardized assessments).• Brand (e.g. premier name).One final note about discovering value: Marketing textbooks stress the importance of marketsegmentation. Because online education may be viewed as a still new and evolving technology, theclassic segmentation into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards is probablyrelevant. Discussions did not reveal a sense of whether or not institutions understand how far into thesesegments their market has penetrated. They may have understood it, but that information did not emerge.More than one interviewee decried the “lack of appreciation” of marketing by colleagues, and otherinterviewees described marketing as one of the challenges they faced; there was interest in obtainingbenchmarking data and for best practices to be shared.C. Marketing CommunicationsA number of interviewees interpreted questions about marketing as being about their marketingcommunications activities, exclusively. Generally, there were levels of marketing communications effortsconsistent with the three models of the marketing process defined at the beginning of this section. Forexample, one public institution has both a university-wide organization supporting exclusively onlineeducation as well as a campus-wide academic outreach organization that does promotion (self-reportedlyapproximately 15–20% of its budget). Nonetheless, five online programs interviewed on that campusshowed their own approaches to marketing communications. Three related that they did no or littleactivity (these are a math program for rural students, a for-credit continuing education in dairy science,and a masters program in library science). Their marketing activities were mostly limited to word-ofmouth,and advertising in professional journals. The other two programs (continuing education inveterinary practice, a new program; and an online master in education, an established program) reportedhigher levels of marketing activity, using a combination of methods such as outsourcing and marketingwith ASTD. The program that did extensive outsourcing reportedly spent approximately 20% of itsbudget on this. Three of the five programs talked about marketing as a challenge.While it was clear that central units which drive online education play an important role in working withindividual programs, there may be little communication among the programs themselves, associated withdifferent schools or faculties, who may or may not communicate with each other.166
Business Issues in Online EducationPerhaps because of the extraordinary variety of online educational activity, there no “rules of thumb”about marketing communications that could be discerned as applied across all programs. But a few issueswere raised that were of concern to multiple institutions:• Because of the proliferation of online programs at some schools, a challenge posed is how tobalance between “point” marketing of programs and marketing of an entire institution.• Rising levels of customer sophistication in the use of online search tools means thatmarketing communication techniques need continue to evolve.• Not a concern, but rather several institutions pointed out the marketing communications valueto them in their having won major awards for quality online education (e.g. Sloan-C).VII. THE ROLE OF EXTERNAL COLLABORATORSAND COMPETITORSA. CollaborationEvidence of collaboration at four levels can be broadly defined as follows:1. Collaboration among programs within an institution: These collaborations took variousguises, from shared marketing to shared use and re-use of courses across different onlineprograms.2. Collaboration among similar programs across multiple institutions: Examples of this arecollaboration among library science programs, and collaboration among medical schools forthe purpose of providing graduate education to medical residents.3. Collaboration at the institutional level across multiple programs at multiple institutions:Typical of this are the university-system-wide online programs at some state universities.Levels of collaboration can vary from mainly marketing activities all the way to revenuesharing.4. Collaboration between educational institutions and industry, professional or governmentorganizations: These may be collaborations between a single institution and industry orindustry groups. Examples include outsourcing of technical and support infrastructure,providing education for corporations, and affinity marketing. Or they may be collaborationsbetween several academic institutions and an industry or professional partner, such asoffering workers in an industry the opportunity to complete educational degrees by sharingcourses across multiple educational institutions.1. Sharing RevenueInstitutions are developing models for sharing revenue (tuition and fees) externally among institutionsthat engage collaboratively in online education. Under model 2 above, there is the example of theconsortium of library school programs that are sharing “virtual seats” at no cost or reduced rates. The ideabehind this is that courses can be offered, and student demand met, in cases where the individual programcould not offer or fill the course on its own. Under model 3, a large state university is in the process ofworking out a model of accounting for inter-campus revenues so that online courses can be used bystudents common to all institutions in the system. Questions they are considering include how to split thetuition and fees stream into one channel that would go to one institution to cover student support servicesand another channel which would flow to the campus offering the online course to cover the academiccosts.167
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Elements of Quality Online Educatio
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This book contains information obta
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Sloan-C has its administrative home
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IntroductionINTRODUCTIONFrank Mayad
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Introductionworkshops and publicati
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How can Online Pedagogy Improveon F
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A Constructivist Model for Thinking
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Engagement in Online Learning Commu
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Higher Education, Blended Learning
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Elements of Quality Online Education cation

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