More session comments...

Sloan-C sponsored a forum titled Strategic directions for institutional support of blended and distance education. The session emphasized whether institutions are aligning DE and hybrid courses and programs with the institutional mission. Quality was also mentioned as a staple and something that programs should build and capitalize on. The positive branding of an institution can also assist in bringing in students. One panel member emphasized that you should not be ignorable. Make a splash and get others involved to support the causes of the program.

A questions that should be asked is administration is how we are recognizing the DE efforts by faculty. Course development, course implementation, and adoption of innovation all takes time and effort. Administration needs to recognize this.

Institutional DE strategy needs to focus of:

• Increasing student access
• Growing continuing education
• attracting students from outside the area
• improving DE teaching and pedagogy
• increasing the rate of degree completion
• get students through the program at faster rates
• enhancing the value of the institutional brand (this is especially helpful during times of natural disasters)
• increasing the diversity of the student body
• augmenting DE faculty recruitment and retention
  

A notable quote is to "Put the sidewalk where students walk anyway." In other words, communicate the way that students communicate, and provide resources and materials in ways that students use, not how administration uses.

Students were categorized as scholars, careerists, conflicted, and drifters.

When marketing DE, emphasize the savings in gas costs.

Lastly, adopt a service philosophy, with student as customer and consumer. There is too much competition that will take away our dissatisfied customers.


A number of free resources were mentioned throughout the conference. Most I have embedded in my other comments thus far. However, here are other resources not mentioned as yet:

• Free books
  
• The Wealth of Networks (Benkler, 2006). This book is freely available online or download, or available for purchase from Amazon. It was mentioned that the book is getting purchased even by those who have read all or parts of it online.
• The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Zittrain, 2008): Another book made freely available by the publisher, Yale Press, or for purchase through Amazon
  

• Peer rating systems for published works were mentioned. Instead of the current method of peer review that can take weeks or months, some alternative resources were suggested:
• knol.com : peer reviewed encyclopedia from Google
• technorati: a blog search tool
• google alerts: alerts subscribers of new blog postings, news and similar
• digg: user-submitted content that is rated for popularity
• twitter: a mini-blog. Used as a text-chat tool to inform others what is happening instantly. Each message you send is called a "tweet"

• Copyright source materials mentioned included:
• creative commons: allows authors to share materials legally.

• Other good stuff
• public knowledge project: open source scholarly research project
• scribd: site for self-publishing papers, books, research, whatever
• flatworld knowledge: open source (free) textbooks
• plos one: peer reviewed, open access scientific research