Friday, April 01, 2005

Study: Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness

The Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness released their Internet Supported Learning study that examines factors influencing success achievement in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education. Take a look at the Executive Summary. It's a quick read and boils down the very interesting findings.

Each of the eight summary findings are excellent; however, two in particular interest me:

Summary Finding Three
"Successful institutions measure themselves in a variety of ways depending on what is important to them; quality is at least or more important than growth."

So, course quality before quantity is the important idea here!


Summary Finding Five
"The “secret sauce” of achieving success in Internet-supported learning varies from institution to institution, however, a “programmatic approach” with a commitment to fully online programs seems to be most critical"

So, institutions should discontinue the practice of developing an online course just because a certain professor or SME with expertise happens to be available at the time. Instead, they should focus on programme based course development so that students have a clear path to obtaining academic credentials entirely online.

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