There’s no question that faculty and administrators have different perspectives on distance education, but there has been little research on the ways in which these differences play out. To better understand the interactions between these groups, Claudine Keenan, a doctoral student in the University of Massachusetts higher education leadership program and executive assistant to the provost at Richard Stockton State College in New Jersey, compared the language used by faculty and administrators at three institutions that had recently launched or planned to launch complete (degree or certificate) online programs.

Keenan, who has taught online since 1996, used interviews and document analysis (including print and online documents) to monitor the dialogue about distance education at a community college, a doctoral institution, and a small, private liberal arts college.

“I was looking specifically for programs that had launched within the last two years or that were in the planning stages. I wanted to catch the conversations while they were still new,” Keenan says.

Keenan interviewed adjunct and full-time faculty who were involved in these programs as well as those who were not, IT staff members, CIOs, and the top academic officer in each case.

A common concern for students

Although people in each category had different ways of expressing their opinions about distance education, there were many similarities across the board. “Everybody is concerned about students and express that in their own language. Administrators spoke about students in terms of enrollment growth and retention, student satisfaction as a customer-service function. They used aggregate numbers, whereas faculty spoke about student interaction and access. They talked about how they’re reaching more students and how they’re having deeper conversations with students. The faculty members’ language was much more personal and anecdotal, and the administrators’ language was more data driven. When a faculty member talks about having access to more students than ever, he or she is saying the same thing as an administrator—that our enrollment is growing.”

Similarly, faculty and administrators both spoke of student (customer) satisfaction. However, this idea played out differently depending on the person’s position. For example, one faculty member said, “It’s like I can see what they’re thinking. They’re writing what they’re thinking on these Listservs, chat boards, and other technologies.” Observing the same phenomenon, an administrator looks to this kind of interaction as a selling point or a factor that improves student retention.

Institutional differences

Although her sample size is not large enough to make any generalizations, Keenan did observe some differences among the different institutions types. For one, she had a difficultly finding a complete online program at a small liberal arts college that met her criteria. “I found that many of the online programs that have been announced in the last three to five years seem to be professional programs such as business and health care. We’re not finding online literature programs, for instance,” Keenan says. (Because the liberal arts program was difficult to find, Keenan is still analyzing the data, so much of this article focuses on the associate college and the doctoral institution.)

Keenan expected to find faculty resistance to distance education in the doctoral institution but didn’t find any because only one full-time faculty member is involved in the program, and none of the full-time faculty members were required to participate. As for concern about the quality of the program, the program director immediately allayed those concerns by clearly articulating the reasons and benefits of staffing the program with adjuncts. The program does not use adjunct faculty to reduce costs but rather to bring in national experts who hold full-time positions in their respective fields.

Friction in the two-year school

In the associate college, on the other hand, there was some friction. To accommodate student demand, many faculty members at this college were asked to teach distance courses. Another contributing factor to associate college faculty members’ participation in the distance education program is the greater flexibility in the range of teaching roles found in associate colleges.

From her previous experience, Keenan expected to observe substantial resistance to distance education among faculty members, but she found little of that in her study. As a faculty member and consultant, Keenan attended many faculty senate meetings in which some faculty members were openly opposed to distance education, believing that it was inferior to face-to-face instruction.

One possible explanation for Keenan not observing this resistance is that study’s methodology. Perhaps a nonparticipant who was opposed to distance education just didn’t feel compelled to talk to a researcher. Or perhaps research that indicates that there is no significant difference between the learning outcomes of distance education and face-to-face education has dispelled some of those misgivings.

Areas of tension

Although not unique to distance education, faculty and administrators in this study disagreed about class size. “The administrators felt that class size could be bigger but wanted success, so they went with what faculty members recommended,” Keenan says.

The other main area of tension was technical support. Faculty and administrators both agreed that 24/7 technical support is appropriate, but budgetary realities often made support beyond regular business hours to be unattainable. “Faculty recognized the reality of it. One faculty member said, ‘If it comes down to the difference between hiring evening [technical staff] and another faculty member, I’d hire another faculty member,’” Keenan says.

Although faculty members generally understood the compromise on technical support and there was no major friction on this issue, they still viewed it differently than administrators. From the faculty perspective, 24/7 technical support “is worth every penny” and “helps us get our job done,” whereas from the administrators’ perspective it is “very costly.”

One of Keenan’s goals for this study was to try to bridge the differences between faculty members and administrators. With these differences in mind, Keenan offers the following advice in developing a distance education program:

• Have faculty involved from the beginning. “Faculty members [in this study] really appreciated the opportunity to be present at the outset of the plan. In one case [the associate college], faculty members brought the proposal forward themselves. They knew students weren’t able to complete their degrees in four or five years because they couldn’t make it to class. The faculty members enjoyed being in the driver’s seat for that one. The faculty members at the other institutions enjoyed being at the table, being present for the discussions where administrators were planning these types of programs,” Keenan says.

• Communicate regularly. “Talk to each other early and often. The concerns that faculty members expressed about class size were expressed early enough that it was largely written into policy before it became a contentious issue, and I’ve seen it institutions outside this study where the train has left the station and they are over enrolling with 60 students per section,” Keenan says.

Contact Claudine Keenan at ckeenan@educ.umass.edu.

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