WHAT SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS ARISE AS YOU SCALE UP YOUR ONLINE OPERATIONS?

WHAT SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS ARISE AS YOU SCALE UP YOUR ONLINE OPERATIONS?

Even those institutions seeing their online programs scale up slowly, yet steadily, can’t seem to get the marketing resources they need in order to broaden their message to national and international audiences and ultimately bring in new revenues to support their efforts. Additionally, as Finney states, "in terms of problems and solutions, the volatility of technology, learning platforms and software are really the more difficult ones." Magid added that as an institution scales up its online learning initiatives, "you start running into constraints," one of which is "how do you leverage the skill-set of your faculty to further develop the online learning experience?" Another deals with balancing cost structures when your core resources are fully utilized and you have to simultaneously deal with opportunities for expansion that require immediate solutions. The answers to such tough questions, says Magid, could be in forming alliances with other institutions and the private sector, so that "you are not always doing everything all alone for clients; you are working in concert."

Kasta: We’re just recognizing now that as we are getting up into the thousands with our online registrations that we need more dependable, more robust servers; we need to have more 24/7 support - those are the two things that are catching us. We fortunately started in the design of our online courses with being aware of the fact that we were really putting the students on the instructor’s desktop. Some of them (faculty) are not happy with that. So we have devised mechanisms for having the students work in groups in every course and deflecting the amount of inquiries away from the instructor to the group of students. Invariably they will solve most of the problems themselves. So we are really excited about what we have done and what we are doing. We are also putting a heavy emphasis on the evaluation component of our courses - because we want to know that what we are doing is being well received by the students - and it is.

Almeda: One of the problems in scaling up for a program like ours is that our courses are instructor-led, and the instructors are very involved with the students throughout the course; it’s a very interactive process. So, that limits how much one can scale; if you are doing CBT (computer-based training), the sky is the limit, but when an instructor is engaged on a regular basis, there is going to be a limit to how many students each instructor can have. This can be addressed to some extent creatively by course design and other techniques, but in the end there is going to be a limit on what you can do. Also, a strategy that we have taken in regard to technology is to try to stay pretty agnostic, because I think if you go with a particular system, you can become wedded to it. Because technology has been changing so rapidly, that can be a strategic disadvantage. So I think being able to remain flexible in the face of how rapidly the technological changes have been occurring is really important. You don’t walk into a process or format that you can’t extricate yourself from.

Heeger: I think our biggest challenge quite honestly is managing growth and scale. We are probably the largest [provider of distance education in the U.S.]. I say probably because I never know exactly where the University of Phoenix is on enrollments. Last year we had about 63,000 enrollments, and we are on schedule to have in excess of 75,000 enrollments this year. That kind of scale is something that no other university and no other state university and no other non-profit university has seen. (UMUC currently has 15 undergraduate degrees, 15 graduate degrees, and 40 undergraduate and graduate certificate programs being offered online.) Managing that kind of scale is our biggest challenge, and we are doing well, but we constantly have to adjust our infrastructure, adjust our technology, manage our marketing, manage our 24/7 service capability, so that we make sure that scale does not overwhelm us. The real reason we are successful is we have done this for years and years. UMUC has been in distributed education for a half a century. . . So when the web came, of course you had to adapt to a new technology, but we really had a lot of the organizational infrastructure already in place, so that we could overlay the technology of the Internet and the World Wide Web quickly and become adept at online delivery relatively quickly. That has really accounted for a lot of our success. Most other institutions have had to struggle through starts and stops. Most organizations have to go through a long learning process to be able to manage things.