Elements of Quality Online Education cation

Business Issues in Online EducationBeyond these, we are interested in listening to "your story" in the hopes of better understanding what wemight do to provide you information.B.2 Version 2.0Trip interview guide v2.0Overview: Three goals of our study on the business of online education are:1) Learning what factors lead to success in on-line programs.2) Understanding what specific information/data we are likely to be able to collect successfully (viasurvey) that will be of use to the community who cares about the business of online education.3) Uncovering and sharing best business practices.At this preliminary stage of research we are very much still in “listening mode”. Hence we are trying tovisit about a dozen institutions to understand their own “stories”.A little more about each goal:1) We are trying to develop a model that explains program success (dependent variable) as a function ofbusiness factors and decisions (independent variables). We need to develop an understanding of whatvariables come into play, and how they might be measured. This breaks down into two parts: 1) what is“success” and how do you measure it? and 2) what are likely factors/decisions that contribute to successand how might they be measured. At this point in our research, we are casting the net wide to try touncover as many variables as we can. In particular, for each institution we visit we would ask: How doyou define success in your own context? How successful have you been? What factors or decisions havecontributed to or against your ability to succeed?2) Here are some possible examples of data we can try to collect and share about the business of onlineeducation for benchmarking and other purposes: Costs (absolute numbers or percentages: costs ofcomponents such as development, delivery, marketing etc.); Customer demographics (who takes coursesand why? service level expectations etc.); Marketing techniques; Policies (admissions, tuition, credit,partnerships etc.); Organization structures.3) So far in our interviews, the idea has emerged that we might collect and publish cases about businessespractices. Some topics already mentioned include: Affinity and B to B marketing, customer serviceissues, outsourcing, re-establishing oneself in a market you lost, use of full-time versus part-time faculty,the tension between traditional academic program control versus control of online degrees and faculty.What other ideas do you have for cases? Either best (or interesting) practices or key issues that you havefaced? Would you be willing to write a case?172