New Policies
Given I do not work for an institution, I truly cannot answer this question. If I did work for an institution, though, I imagine one of the new policies regarding online delivery of courses and programs would be centered around faculty "office hours from x to x on M/W/F or T/Th" to answer questions via chat and/or telephone. For distance learners, I think it is important to be able to have a real back/forth dialogue with your instructor from time to time. Not only will it help ensure learning objectives are being met, but making yourself available to students also is likely to increase student satisfaction and retention. It is a policy I believe schools should consider.
I think there are many great policies that institution can have on the delivery of courses and programs online, such as honesty, accuracy, timing, fee or no fee, etc.
Tammy,
How are you. You have listened... so, you can answer :)
Dr. L
When I began my job as the Director of Online Learning a year ago at a Career College, there were no standards or guidelines for online course design or delivery and the program had been implemented for a year! So, after one instructor declared that forums were a waist of time, I felt it necessary to create guidelines and standards for online courses at our school. I researched our accreditation policies, which I found required documented standards. Researching best practices and guidelines/standards that other organizations had created, I created standards for design and delivery of online courses that also aligned with our accreditation agency and well and the National Education Agency. My management has endorsed it.
Most of the new policies involve the difference between traditional classroom behaviors and online student behaviors such as attendance, assignment submission, and class participation. Some of the challenges have been to allow felxibility for the student while maintaining a degree of program structure. Attendance is an important aspect of online learning, but is simply logging in adequate to be considered an attendance event, or should there be additional criteria? Should late assignments be accepted if they are turned in by the end of the course, or should students be restricted to the due dates, even if they can show a mastery of the topic? There are also policies and procedures for the instructors that need to be differentiated. For instance in the classroom situation there is little need to have a requirement for a minimum amount of contact with a student, but an online instructor may have to actively seek out student contact; consequently some minimum standard may have to be established.
I don’t own my own institution but I would think the first policy would be making sure that we are delivering quality education.
Policies are the Laws of the Schools. We usually start by modeling after laws that are already being used in other schools and as we either run into situations that we could have avoided or foresee a possible circumstance, we then create a new law or a new set of laws and devise a mechanism to have a response readily available for dealing with certain circumstances. New policies regarding online delivery deal with keeping the students engaged with the studying materials and with convenient timelines for the students but with consistent requirements.
We are now required to have at least one office hour a week. What that means is that I need to be able to respond instantly to my e-mail from any of my students during that designated hour. My sense is that it is not of much value. The students have not inquired about it and not one has used it in the five weeks since implementation.
We have a new policy regarding office hours and a process on how the office hours should be conducted by both the instructor and students. This new policy has actually helped increase online attendance when I hold my office hours, which I do now twice a week.
I am debating implementing office hours for our instructors. But instead of just email, I think we will create chat rooms. Student utilization of this resource is unknown, but i feel if the student has the option of contacting the instructor, it will alleviate some anxiety/ stress when they run into a problem. They will know exactly when and where they can find their instructor.
I encourage you to initiate both office hours and a chat room for your students. At our school we have established office hours twice a week and our students can communicate with instructors via email or chat. We have found out from student survey results that students feel this is a value added part of our process and it does in fact lessen anxiety when they have an issue that needs to be resolved.
I think it is the quality of the education that is given.
With the increasing attention to HIPAA the various campus intranet and extranet are being re-assessed and re-tooled to only allow persons directly involved in a chain to access chain information.
student-primary instructor/any alternate (TA etc)financial aid dept.- assigned counselor-dean of dept and dean only should have specific access to student information
With the changes coming from the federal department of education, it will be important for all institutions to clearly define a credit hour. The Carnegie Unit based on seat-time and estimated time out of class is not as directly applicable to online delivery where students learn at their own pace. It is also more difficult to monitor the "connected" time than it is to take attendance in a brick-and-mortar classroom.
Defining credit hours is a national discussion. How are your institutions defining online credit hours given the renewed emphasis that DOE is placing on credit? How does the Carnegie Unit apply or not apply to online learning? How might strict adherence to "seat time" by the DOE impact online educational delivery and 21st century learning modalities?
Thanks for your thoughts!
Mark York
I don't work for an institution, but I do instructional design for others. One policy that I think would be important to have is how often a student has to post and how many times they need to respond to others' posts. In depth discussions really enhance the learning experience for all involved, including the teacher.
For us it is instructor turnaround time for student discussions, office hours, and standard look/feel of course rooms. We are still working out some of the other issues and I am sure will be adding to these in the near future.
-Chris
Right now we do not have any online delivery.
We will be setting up a portal to our registrar system in about six months.
However, it has been my experience to at a previous institution to set up very clear policies such as log in IDs and passwords.
To maximize security passwords have to be changed every ninety days and must be six to 20 characters that include a upper case letter, number and #$*&^%$.
Another policy is to keep the course lean and mean. The fewer pictures, audio, visual links and uploads make the course easier to load and navigate through. It might make the faculty do a little more work, but there will be fewer complaints.
Right now we hold in class and online structure. Some weeks the students will have to complete modules online rather than coming in to the school for class. They can also use the online for extra credit. It is very beneficial if the student cannot make it to a class or the instructor is out of town, etc.
Hi,Tia,
Y our school's system for creating hybrid courses is one I had not heard of before. I can see how this level of flexibility could help keep students engaged. Is keeping track of attendance and participation a problem?
Hi, Steve, I concede your point about lean and mean creating fewer "problems," but I wonder if limiting delivery of multimedia is really giving the students the most robust learning experience? Making sure images, video, and other learning objects have a purpose and are not added just because one can is sensible.
