The word "transformational" has been quoted by educators in past issues of Educational Pathways to describe the overall effects of distance education at both fundamental and advanced levels of teaching and learning. At the University of Central Florida (UCF), the term transformational, as it relates to distance education, is also used to describe changes and strategic plans occurring at the institutional level.

The adoption of distance education at UCF has brought about significant changes in the way students learn and organize their education, as well as in the way faculty teach and organize their job responsibilities. Additionally, the proponents of distance education at UCF claim that distance education has significantly transformed UCF at the institutional level, causing a shift in strategic planning initiatives in unprecedented ways within its relatively short history. (UCF opened its doors as Florida Tech in 1963.)

Growth of Fully Online Programs and Blended Courses Brings New Efficiencies

UCF is a rapidly expanding metropolitan university in the bulging city of Orlando. As campus parking spaces become rare finds on any given day, UCF administrators have come to the realization that effective growth and management of fully online programs and courses (what UCF calls "W" courses for Web-based), as well as the effective growth and management of blended courses (what UCF calls "M" courses for Mixed-Mode) can help to infuse new teaching and learning efficiencies as well as save on valuable physical space well into the future.

A conversation with Joel Hartman, UCF’s Vice Provost for Information Technologies and Resources, reveals a contemporary mindset centered around the growth and management of providing an increased number of fully online programs and blended courses that ultimately have a considerable impact on the entire UCF campus, which has a population that is larger than many small cities. (UCF’s Fall 2003 headcount enrollment was more than 41,000, and its main campus covers 1,415 acres.) This impact, along with the strategic institutional planning it promotes, is backed up with solid data that has been collected and analyzed since UCF started offering distance education courses in 1996.

Information Technologies and Academic Programs Working Together to Form Overt Institutional Strategies

Hartman explains how an alliance between the Information Technologies and Resources Department and the Academic Programs Department has resulted in a synergy that is continuously moving both W courses and M courses into what he calls "overt institutional strategies." In particular, there are three initiatives that have come to the forefront "that are now highly strategic and are coming from our administration, the president and provost."

These three initiatives are:

1. UCF’s fully online programs are being designated as part of a key strategy for its regional campus initiatives and growth management. UCF regional campuses serve an 11-county service area within an 80-mile radius of the main campus in Orlando.
2. UCF’s growing number of M courses are becoming a key strategy for meeting the bulging campus’s future space and capacity needs.
3. To offer more flexibility and access to key courses, an increasing number of UCF’s general education courses will be moving to a fully online modality.

"We are forming institutional strategies that are being connected to our strategic plan and other high-level planning with specific goals and targets and resource allocations to accomplish these three objectives," says Hartman.

Hartman is also the university’s chief information officer. He has overall responsibility for library, computing, networking, telecommunications, and media services, as well as distributed learning activities.

For our purposes here, which are primarily focused on M and W courses, we spoke with three divisions under Hartman’s sphere of influence: the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE), and Course Development and Web Services (CDWS).

As noted on its Web site, CDL "serves as the Virtual Campus for the University. As the Virtual Campus, the Center brings focus to university efforts in distributed learning by providing administrative support for all distributed learning credit courses, degree programs and activities offered by the university."

CDL is responsible for five key areas:

1. Collecting data and preparing reports

2. Faculty and program development

3. Marketing distributed learning programs and courses

4. Learner support

5. Long-range planning

Hartman stresses how the production of accurate data and reports is key to addressing important issues, questions and concerns that may be based on anecdotal evidence rather than fact. "Our motto is lacking data, anecdote wins," he says. In other words, isolated incidents that people have experienced, seen or heard about can often grow into perceived truths that typically are not accurate. Therefore, you have to collect a large enough sample of data over a long enough period of time to offset inaccuracies and prove or explain real trends and developments. This is where the work of both CDL and RITE come into play.

Assistant Vice President and Director of Distributed Learning Steven Sorg and his staff are responsible for producing a reliable bank of information based on facts that can ultimately paint an accurate picture of the true scope and scale of UCF’s online learning initiatives .

For example, Sorg composes and publishes a document titled "UCF Access, Quality and Efficiency through Online Learning," which is a part of a report about what kind, how much and where online learning is happening at UCF (see page 7). Each term this report is shared with the college deans and chairs. "The idea is to share with them a spread sheet in which all of the productivity data for each college is broken down by the different instructional modalities - everything from face-to-face to fully online courses and all the variations in between," says Sorg. "Since it is broken down by college, they can look and see in their own college what percentage of their activity is in certain modalities, what the productivity levels are, and where those productivities are being gained."

A more specific example of how data collection and report production can address key issues and concerns was demonstrated by a project in which UCF’s Data Mining Program and RITE collaborated on an analysis of 1.2 million student responses to course/instructor evaluations given over several years. These evaluations are comprised of 16 questions, eight developed by the state and eight developed by UCF. According to Hartman, UCF online faculty were concerned that these questions fit more closely to face-to-face courses than online. Plus, faculty who were novice online teachers, still learning to master teaching online, were concerned that they might get lower student evaluations than their face-to-face colleagues, and thus suffer the consequences. The analysis, however, proved that faculty who taught online were rated excellent 14 percent more often than faculty who taught face-to-face. Plus, all 16 survey items tracked identically to both face-to-face and online.

Hartman adds that, overall, helping to achieve success requires "collecting an enormous amount of information about activities and using that information to both inform others and for continuous improvement. We made a significant number of changes and adjustments along the way based on a variety of feedback that has helped the effort adapt and fit the institutional needs."

Faculty and Program Development

In the area of faculty and program development, CDL works directly with college deans and program chairs as a filtering agent and first point of contact that helps to decide where all programs and courses in both the W and M modes are eventually slotted within a development cycle. "I work with them to set up a time table for course development, rolling out a program online and getting faculty members into the cue for the faculty development program that Course Development and Web Services provides," says Sorg.

"I want to make sure that we can fulfill the commitments that we made, so if there is a degree program that has 10 courses that needs to go online, I am not going to bump them for an individual faculty member who just wants to put his or her course online. My priorities are for program development and the faculty who are involved in those programs, and, where it is possible, other faculty who want to put a course fully online or in the mixed-mode format.

"In all cases I confer with the department chair and confirm why this is happening, what is the strategic reason, what is the value, who are you trying to reach and why. This way I can get some gauge as to whether this is really something that has been strategically considered.

"We provide a lot of institutional resources to support online learning, and we don’t do that lightly," Sorg continues. "We can’t just waste that support. The demands are such right now that the requests for participation in the faculty development program far outstrip the financial resources that I have available to meet the incentive package that we provide them."

In the area of marketing, CDL provides some basic marketing services to its constituents, including brochure production, financial support for conference exhibits, production of an online learning guide, advertising in the UCF student newspaper and alumni publications, and maintaining the Virtual Campus web site.

In the area of learner support, CDL is the coordinating agent for ensuring that all representatives from the wide variety of student support services offices (i.e. admissions, registrar, financial aid, student advising, the book store) are fully on board in support of distance learners. Approximately three weeks into each term, CDL holds a meeting with all of these representatives to assess efficiencies. "We ask questions like how did the start up of the term go; how did registration go; were there any glitches, problems, or issues related to distributed learning students," says Sorg. "We coordinate this meeting so that the whole university and all of the support services providers keep in the forefront of their minds and planning that these students, who may never come to this campus, are part of their responsibility."

In the area of long-range planning, "part of what we do is assist the campus with growth management and enrollment management," says Sorg. "We will reach, as an institution, a point where we have as many enrollees on this campus as the infrastructure on this campus can hold, and that the physical surrounding community can handle - traffic, and housing, and all those kinds of things. That is why we are looking at things like how many classroom spaces are being saved by fully online classes (as well as blended courses) - the numbers of students enrolled in those. That all has a part to play (in long-range planning)."

Meanwhile at RITE, Director Charles Dziuban and Research Associate Patsy Moskal are responsible for "formulating and implementing research on effective teaching practices in higher education," which includes an ongoing Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation.

According to Dziuban, evaluating distributed learning has resulted in "a larger initiative involving the scholarship of teaching and learning. It has morphed into not only working with faculty who are doing distributed learning but, in general, at the university (including faculty who teach face-to-face)."

"The most significant thing for our university is how these online and hybrid course initiatives have actually changed the university itself," adds Moskal. "We have been monitoring this for seven years now, and we have seen how much it has impacted teaching, in general. Faculty who get involved don’t just teach Web courses or Web-enhanced courses, they actually tell us it modifies their approach to teaching face-to-face classes as well."

A lot of important research results and papers come out of RITE. For instance, inside a recent in-press paper titled "Three ALN (Asynchronous Learning Network) Modalities: An Institutional Perspective," the authors discuss the evolution of W courses, M courses and Web-Enhanced (designated as "E" courses), and how this evolution has impacted the university. Their findings "indicate significant growth accompanied by high faculty and student satisfaction."

Some of these findings reveal that:

• Students report high satisfaction with Web courses - both fully online (79%) and mixed-mode (85%).
• Students consistently report that they like the increased flexibility and convenience that the Web modalities offer them.
• Students in fully online courses rate them excellent 13.4% more frequently than their face-to-face courses.
• Faculty consistently report that they like the increased interaction with students that the Web modalities offer them.
• Faculty are highly satisfied with their fully online (87%) and mixed-mode (88%) courses and overwhelmingly indicate they would teach another Web course (94%).
• M courses produce success rates that are up to six percent higher than success rates for similar face-to-face courses. Success = achievement of a grade of A, B, or C.
• Women enroll in and succeed in online courses at higher rates than men.
• Minorities perform equally as well in online courses as they do in comparable face-to-face courses.

Finally, it is stated in this paper that, in part, ". . . our goal of becoming a premiere metropolitan research university can be greatly accelerated by courses that have online components. This realization is the cornerstone of our continuing efforts to transform and improve our institution."

Of course, there’s a lot more effort that goes into meeting the aforementioned goal. This is where the work of CDWS plays an extremely vital role. As noted on its Web site, "the mission of CDWS is to support teaching, learning, and research by being ‘all things web’ to UCF and its partners, helping UCF achieve its strategic goals with advanced applications of instructional and information technology. Services are provided systematically through professional development programs, consultations, projects, production, technical support, R&D, and other collaborative efforts."

CDWS is comprised of 37 full-time and 28 part-time employees who fill out 10 teams as follows:

1. Administrative - Responsible for budgeting, payroll, travel, accounts payable, accounts receivable, ordering of supplies and equipment, event planning, room scheduling and the distribution of departmental information to the campus community.
2. Advanced Systems - Develops web-based applications for UCF Web sites and online courses, and supports computer networks as well as troubleshoots intricate hardware and software problems. In addition, they perform research, development and implementation of the latest internet-based technologies.
3. Community and Communications - Responsibilities include comprehensive event management, marketing and public relations, relationship building, and research and data analysis. C&C facilitates communication between the unit, the university, and external constituencies in an effort to build partnerships and learning communities in advanced distributed learning and Web development research.
4. Digital Media - Graphic designers and artists who work behind the scenes to make the visual content of all CDWS projects aesthetically appealing. They work on online courses, the UCF Web site, department Web sites, CD-Rom & multimedia interfaces, and much more.
5. Executive - Comprised of a director, a coordinator of online teaching and learning, a coordinator of Web development and a coordinator of professional programs.
6. Instructional Design - Responsible for meeting needs in four areas related to providing campus support for courses and Web services: faculty interface, curriculum development, instructional materials design and development, and curriculum delivery. Instructional designers also work closely in cross-functional teams with graphic designers and programmers.
7. New Media Team - Responsible for conducting research and development of reliable and engaging instructional multi-media components based on the best practices implemented in games and simulations available in the market.
8. Techrangers - Student technical-support staff that must have a variety of job skills, including HTML and CSS skills, good interpersonal and communication skills, troubleshooting skills, and the ability to meet deadlines.
9. Video Convergence -Develops training, services and media components that benefit anyone involved in educational endeavors, and shares knowledge and research with faculty and staff, empowering them to create educationally sound components for their online and face-to-face courses.
10. Web Strategy - Responsible for maintaining and developing the main university Web site and campus portal. They provide support to the university Web development community through various efforts, including Web site development, project management, consulting and training.

In the area of faculty training, CDWS offers three unique courses that help faculty learn how to teach online:

1. Essentials - A self-paced course delivered fully online year round geared for faculty who choose to supplement their face-to-face instruction without reducing any regularly scheduled seat time.
2. ADL5000 - An instructor-led online course delivered three times per calendar year for faculty who will be teaching an existing M or W course. Addresses pedagogical, logistical and technical issues.
3. IDL6543 - A mixed-mode course delivered three times per calendar year for faculty who want to design, develop and deliver an original M or W online course. Combines face-to-face seminars, labs and Web-based instruction.

"When other institutions look at us, they probably think we are pretty spoiled in that we have so much (infrastructure) to deal with faculty support and provide course development support, but it did not start out that way," says CDWS Director Barbara Truman. "There were not any models of support out there when we were sort of trying to find our way in the darkness back in 1996."

Truman explains that the genesis of CDWS began with herself basically providing one-on-one faculty development. This grew into a model for course development support that was "not just going to teach the faculty how to use these tools and then hope they do well." Subsequently production support services had to be supplied "in a very systematic way for scalability and sustainability; real systems-thinking had to go into the design of the operation itself; that is the model we chose to go with." Then, in 1998, it was decided that Truman and staff would have to take on the mission of Web Services too. "This meant that we took over the University Web site and portal development and trying to empower other Webmasters to leverage our capabilities," she says.

All this resulted in Truman spending about 40 percent of her time hiring new staff, especially during the early years of building CDWS, "My role has changed so much since 1996 that even today we are examining some of the same questions," she adds. "Do we have the right combination of people, in the right teams, doing the right things?"

Her estimate for answering those questions: "We really need 60 full-time people and 52 part-time people. And I have not performed the math on a new unit total, but I can imagine the sticker shock."

Hartman, who is Truman’s boss, responds with "yes, the growth has been significant, and part of what we are hoping to do through these targeted and strategic initiatives is to try to obtain the resources to deliver. It’s typical in a service environment in higher education, particularly in these budget times, that you have to demonstrate need before you get money. There are two parts to the story. One part is significant growth and adoption, and therefore we are always kind of lean. The other part is success, which is leading to rapid adoption and the interest with senior administrators in using this as an answer to some institutional problems."

When Hartman discusses the big picture at UCF, he borrows from two social scientists, Everett Rogers and Peter Senge, referring to Rogers’ "Diffusion of Innovation" theories and Senge’s vision of learning organizations. Basically, Hartman summarizes what’s going on at UCF by talking about the notion of developing models.

"We have an instructional model," Hartman says. "For instance, Senge talks about mental models as a context for institutional change . . . It has to do with the development and transmission of mental models and their application - new ideas working their way through an organization. He speaks about the learning organization, which is an organization that has a lot of these new things floating through it. Rogers talks about it as well. There’s the bell curve with the early adopters and late adopters - that whole business - and if you think about those two in the context of what we have done, it sort of fits. We have built conceptual models, mental models, for every area of activity - course development, faculty development, assessment, instructional models, academic planning. Those models are put into play, and then we build organizational capacity to carry those models out."

In addition to CDL, RITE, and CDWS, some of the other organizational capacity pieces of the picture include Computer Services and Telecommunications, the University Library, and the Office of Instructional Resources (which includes UCF’s ITV network and classroom multi-media) - all of which are under Hartman’s authority. For instance, currently, 77 percent of all UCF’s classrooms have full multi-media capabilities, which helps facilitate, enhance and accelerate the development of M courses. Additionally, the library continues to grow its online resources for both traditional and online students.

"So there is a synergy there that again kind of amplifies our efforts," says Hartman. "All of these organizations do what they do, but all the pieces are connected together. Instead of having the online learning folks in an enclave over in the corner, they are actually a mainstream activity that plays out of the academic affairs office and works with the faculty and with the deans in a way that helps them meet their own objectives and, of course, the objectives of the students."

Dziuban, C., Hartman, J., Moskal, P., Sorg, S., & Truman, B (in press). Three ALN Modalities: An Institutional Perspective. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks.

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rite