Academic Administration Blog - Magna Publications

E-Learning Security: Problems and Solutions

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

For Yair Levy, associate professor of information systems at Nova Southeastern University, interest in e-learning security started the day he heard a department chair justify mandating proctored exams in a lab environment because, if an e-learning student took one remotely, he wouldn’t “know if there is a dog behind the computer.”

Concerns about authenticating the identity of those completing assignments have often followed this type of assessment. Levy has seen populations of “super quizzers,” who finish exams quickly with high scores, indicating the possible use of a ringer to complete the test. He likens e-learning security to protecting one’s bank account, with one important difference: although the owner will assiduously protect a bank account user name and password to avoid losing control over their funds, some users will willingly give up...

A Strategic, Integrative, Goal-Driven Approach to Teaching Evaluation

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Evaluating teaching can be an anxiety-inducing endeavor for both the instructor and the evaluator. The problem: “There’s not a lot of general agreement on what constitutes effective teaching evaluations,” says Mark Smith, chair of the English department at Valdosta State University.

Smith was dissatisfied with the way his department evaluated its faculty members’ teaching, and over time he has developed a model that reduces some of the common shortcomings of teaching evaluations.

In conversations with colleagues and through his own experience, Smith has found that teaching evaluations tend to be...

Managing Online Programs: 5 Steps to Success

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Managing online programs is an important endeavor, and one that takes a great deal of contextual understanding and preparation. Stella Porto, of the Graduate School of Management and Technology for the University of Maryland University Campus, has written and presented on this topic. She has the following recommendations for those hoping to improve their managerial acumen:

1. Understand Your Place in Context

The first task for an effective online program manager is understanding his or her place in the institutional context. These contextual issues will impact the…

When Academic Deans Partner with Enrollment Managers

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

One of the repeated themes throughout higher education thus far in the 21st century has been interconnectivity. Increasingly the silos that have long separated academic disciplines according to their individual methodologies and emphases have vanished with the rise of inherently interdisciplinary fields such as biotechnology, social entrepreneurship, nanotechnology, and biomedical engineering.

In addition, the two volumes of Learning Reconsidered explore ways to break down the barriers between academic and student affairs to help undergraduates develop important attributes, including leadership, critical thinking, engaged citizenship, and cross-cultural understanding (Keeling, 2004, and Keeling, 2006).

Likewise, the gap between admissions and faculty is closing. The old attitude that many faculty members...

Understanding Copyright and Ownership: A Primer for Distance Education

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

“Fair use allows me to copy anything for my class in any amount.”
“Anything a student creates for my class belongs to me.”
“I can use anything in my distance education class the just as I do in a face-to-face class.”

If you have heard faculty members express these opinions (or if you have held them yourself), that is a signal that your campus needs an additional look at copyright and intellectual property issues. If so, Frank “Fritz” Dolak, Copyright and Intellectual Property Manager and Special Assistant to the Dean in the Copyright and Intellectual Property Office at Ball State University may be just the expert to help. In his work on this issue, he helps distance education...

Supporters and Critics: Both Are Essential to Change

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

When Juliette Bell became provost and vice president for academic affairs at Central State University in 2009, she had several ideas about how the institution could be improved. Specifically, she sought to restructure the university’s academic colleges to increase enrollment in STEM programs and establish a University College to improve student success rates.

The university had a traditional structure that consisted of three colleges: the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, and the College of Business and Industry. The engineering programs were located within the College of Business and Industry, and the science programs were located in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We found that many students who were looking for engineering programs did not recognize that we had engineering, because...

The Process Approach to Blended Learning: Learning Beyond the Classroom

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Nate Cottle, professor of human environmental sciences at the University of Central Oklahoma, uses the process approach to learning as delineated by William Horton (2006) in his online and blended courses. Cottle spoke to Distance Education Report about using this model. “Learning isn’t something that has to be confined to the classroom, and so as I teach blended classes, I think the more I can involve the students in learning and the more contexts I can involve them in, the more they’re going to learn,” he said. “The idea is to get them to slowly digest the information in different ways and to engage in different activities so that by the time the course comes to an end, they can apply the knowledge they have learned. That’s the ultimate goal: to get them to...

The Collegiality Assessment Matrix: Its Time Has Come

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Those of us who attend conferences devoted to administrative development are often amazed by the sheer number of sessions and presentations dealing with collegiality (or the lack thereof). We realize that academic disciplines thrive when diverse perspectives can be shared without differences of opinions becoming the basis for rancorous personal attacks and when colleagues work together harmoniously without succumbing to group think.

No matter how an individual faculty member may feel about collegiality, however, case law in the United States has continued to uphold its use as a factor in tenure and other personnel decisions, and the courts have affirmed that collegiality may be considered when making decisions about faculty employment, promotion in , merit salary increases, reappointment, and termination. Since the precise definition of collegiality is…

Running a MOOC: Secrets of the World’s Largest Distance Education Classes

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

What can distance education do that traditional classroom instruction cannot? Among other things, it can master time, space, and physical capacity on a scale impossible for a face-to-face class. The best example of this is the MOOC.

A MOOC, or “massively open online course,” is a distance education class that potentially involves hundreds if not thousands of participants, all joined for the purpose of studying a given topic. According to Wikieducator, a MOOC “integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources. Perhaps most importantly, however, a MOOC builds on the active engagement of several hundred to several thousand ‘students’ who self-organize their...

Collegiality as a Criterion for Personnel Decisions

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Tips for Converting to E-portfolios for Faculty Personnel Review

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

All retention, promotion, and instructional academic staff rehiring decisions at my institution depend on electronic portfolios drawn from a common source, as do all internal annual reports and some external reports. Like all large-scale transitions, adopting this system included some bumps. However, we now have a paperless process that allows for work to be reviewed from any secure Internet site.

With the benefit of hindsight, here are some recommendations regarding...

Understanding Prior Learning Assessment: A Key to the Adult Student Market

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Prior learning assessment is a hot topic in higher education today. With an emphasis on degree completion and adult learning, giving non-traditional students credit for their past learning is a critical part of helping these students achieve their goals.

According to Luke Dowden, Ed.D., director of the office of distance and electronic learning at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and executive director of the Center for Adult Learning in Louisiana (CALL), it is critical that universities understand what prior learning assessment (PLA) is, and what it is not.

“PLA is an opportunity to earn credit for college level learning,” he says. “It is not credit for work experience.”

This is an important distinction. While certainly most people learn while on the job, it is a question whether they...

Preparing for and Managing Academic Scandals

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Academic scandals can arise at any institution at any time, and a big factor in how well the institution emerges and moves on from a scandal is largely dependent on the way administrators handle the situation. In an interview with Academic Leader, Rob Jenkins, associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, talked about the factors that can exacerbate scandals and things administrators can do to help their institutions get back on track after a scandal.

Jenkins identifies six types of academic scandals—administrative, financial, sexual, academic dishonesty, degree and credential, and those involving students—all of which follow a common pattern. “If you follow these stories in the news, you can see in almost every one of them, the immediate response is denial. Then there’s the admission/nonadmission—an admission that’s really not an admission. That’s often followed by an apology that’s not really an apology. Then there’s some final acknowledgement where the [institution’s leaders] have to make some decision. After that there is...

3 (of 8) Keys to Marketing Your Online Program

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

The University of Southern Mississippi started completely from scratch when it began marketing its online programs through the Office of Academic Support. The office “originally had nothing to do with marketing,” says Amy Thornton, project manager. However, with online learning bringing in “a significant amount of revenue,” it was clear that the institution needed an office to help support 35 online programs.

Having a marketing conversation with academic departments can be challenging

Marketing efforts grew by trial and error, and, along with online marketing and recruitment specialist Amanda Cascio, Thornton learned a number of lessons about how to effectively market online programs:

1. Use partners: The university contracted with both Blackboard and Intelliworks, a higher education CRM provider, to help communicate with students. Thornton says these contractors helped the institution look…

Motivational Interviewing: A Communication Strategy for Addressing Faculty Performance Issues

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Conversations with faculty members about their performance can be stressful for the academic leader and the individual faculty member, particularly if there are significant performance issues to address. While it may be tempting to be prescriptive and tell the faculty members what they need to do to improve, it’s best for the faculty members to target areas of improvement on their own (with some guidance from the academic leader). Debra Murray, Psychology Department chair at Viterbo University, and Glena Temple, dean of letters and science at Viterbo, recommend a technique called motivational interviewing in order to help faculty identify areas for improvement and buy in to an improvement plan.

Motivational interviewing is a technique that was developed in the counseling field to help clients overcome substance abuse and has since been adapted to help individuals change behaviors to improve chronic medical conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. This technique is considered a best practice in the field of counseling for situations in which the individual is angry or ambivalent. Murray suggests that it also may be appropriate in situations where an individual is anxious.

Liberated from Distance Learning Myths

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Every field develops its own conventional wisdom, beliefs that are so much a part of the consciousness that they are rarely questioned. Distance education is no different.

That is, unless you are Barry Dahl.

Dahl, owner of Excellence in e-Education, has made a name exploring and exploding some of the myths that populate the online education field. His thoughts may make you question the beliefs you always took for granted.

Myth #1: Completion rates for online developmental courses lag behind the on ground versions.

Many take it as an article of faith that, in order to ensure student success in developmental courses, these courses must be offered in a...

Failing Gracefully

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Make no mistake about it: If you serve long enough as a university administrator, sooner or later you will fail at something - massively, undeniably, and embarrassingly. Either the result that you intended from an initiative never came close to being achieved, or you'll have a new supervisor who feels you've wasted your time pursuing X when you should've been pursuing Y, or you'll charge off in a bold new direction only to discover than no one is interested in following your lead. Never having a failure isn't really an indication that you';ve done everything successfully; it's more likely an indication that you haven't been trying enough new ideas or endeavors. Certainly, you can fail by attempting to do too little rather than too much. But to fail miserably ... that usually entails the launching of a new, albeit ill-advised enterprise.

As you look at the academic leaders who are your peers, you'll probably also notice their administrative failures as well. But there are some key indicators of a person whose reaction makes the failure worse and sometimes clouds that person's entire...

Assessing Online Instructor Competency

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

With the rapid expansion of distance programs at large public institutions and the influx of new faculty that goes along with that, the question of the qualification of applicants for faculty positions has become central. Distance education programs have no time to spare for putting newly-hired faculty through training programs they may not need. Neither can they take the risk of putting unprepared faculty in the position of leading an online course or program. Today, more and more regional accreditation bodies require training and support unique to distance learning instructors.

Nibbled to Death by Ducks: Implications for the Department Chair

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“Nibbled to death by ducks.” The phrase, though nearly three centuries old, is still remarkably apt for the role of the department chair today. Our jobs are filled with little nibbles taken out of our time and attention; no individual nibble may be all that significant, but the accumulation of nibbles can lead to exasperation, frustration, and burnout. In order to manage the nibbling, I have found a humorous way to highlight all those little bites out of my time, which has helped me cope with the interruptions as well as train my faculty to be more conscious of how often they come to me for help.

As department chairs, we encounter many demands on our time. Which of these should count as nibbles? I prefer not to include scheduled meetings, regular or occasional, on the list. I also have not counted emails: I choose when to look at my email, so I don’t count it as an interruption; it is under my...

Uniting Blended Learning and Service Learning

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Blended learning and service learning are both growing trends in American higher education, but uniting the two can be a challenge. This is just what Sandra Poindexter, professor of computer information at Northern Michigan University, has done in her 200-level Systems Development course, a requirement for Information Systems majors. She has discovered methods for giving these students the opportunity to serve community clients as far away as Honduras without ever leaving their classrooms, virtual and traditional.

Tip 1: Understand the Definitions

As with any academic project, it is important to start by understanding the definitions in order to understand the parameters of any potential project. In a presentation on the topic, Poindexter defined blended learning as...

The Community Role and Challenges of a College Leader

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Strong and innovative leadership collaborations keep the college in the community landscape. Today, the president and the college’s leadership team are invaluable resources to states and to the nation—they educate the many talented people who work in our industries, businesses, and civic sectors. Chief executive officers address the overall balance of education at their institutions by looking at community advisory council input, educational trends, and state needs.

As technology, competition, and products change, the college leader needs to ensure that the institution’s teams quickly respond to these demands by creating new programs, practices, and organizational structures. Some universities struggle with the nimbleness needed to react to regional economic educational demands. However, in our knowledge-based economy, postsecondary education must seek to quickly align its offerings—curricula, innovation, and partnerships—with the needs of the marketplace. This requires adeptness with inspiration and communication with the faculty.

The college president and the leadership team should embrace the public agenda and need to be engaged in the community. This ensures that the college’s education policies, programs, curricula, and resources address current, emerging, and future economic realities. Forging strong contacts with...

Should You Be Offering Accelerated Programs for Adults?

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In 2006, the Louisiana Board of Regents took notice of a report that stated that online programs were growing fastest in the Southeast. “Where there is growth, there must be demand,” says Luke Dowden, Ed.D., director of the office of distance and electronic learning at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and executive director of the Center for Adult Learning in Louisiana (CALL).

The Board of Regents put together a pilot program with a community college and a four-year institution with the goal of developing a program that allowed adults to complete a class in five to eight weeks. That pilot turned into the Center for Adult Learning in Louisiana, which will begin its fifth year in the fall. CALL has four purposes: research, program development, adult learning campaigns, and sharing information and policy.

And through his work with CALL and his passion for serving the adult learner, Dowden has put together some keys to the success of delivering courses in an accelerated format to adults.

The 6 keys to successful accelerated adult programs

1. Understand the reasons why adults return...

The Academic Leader as Guru

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

To most people in the west, the term “guru” often conjures up a stereotypical image of a wise old hermit, living at the top of a mountain and dispensing cryptic but sage insights into the meaning of life. Indeed, those of us who have spent our lives in higher education have probably all known presidents, provosts, or deans who were nearly as inaccessible as if they had lived on a mountaintop, appeared briefly and often unexpectedly at formal functions to dispense a rare word of greeting or announce a new policy, and intervened with sudden intensity to overturn a decision or launch a new initiative.

But the widespread stereotype of the guru tends to exist only in the popular imagination, and those disengaged administrators we’ve all met almost never succeed as genuine academic leaders. In reality, “guru” is a Sanskrit term of profound respect that is nowadays applied to teachers of all sorts. In India today, a guru is far more likely to assist students in…

Keys to Successful Learning Assessment Systems

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Learning assessment systems are becoming more commonplace for colleges and universities. Driven by increasing demand for educational accountability by accreditors, governments, and families, these systems seek to measure student progress and translate the results into data that is useful for improving programs and ensuring continual progress. In a paper for the 2010 Information Systems Educators Conference (ISECON) ("Group Assessment of Learning: Test the Class, Not the Students"), researchers from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK, discuss needs for assessment that range beyond the demands of accreditors and other agencies. "One reason for this focus on assessment as an instrument of demonstrating 'added value' is the potential financial consequence of failure to improve learning," they write.

Catherine Kelley is the assistant provost at the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She notes that there are several challenges that higher education faces when trying to...

Changing a Department’s Culture

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The word came from the administration - turn your faculty into academics. It was a tall order. The relatively new department of occupational therapy at the University of the Sciences had a faculty that came primarily from clinical settings, not from academia. It fell to Paula Kramer, the department chair, to get her faculty involved in scholarship, an unfamiliar and daunting prospect for most of the faculty.

"The discipline is such that most people come from the clinic and go into teaching just because they're interested in it or because they're driven, or somebody has said they'd be good at it. It's not a natural progression, and we're not taught how to teach. We don't take the traditional [path] of, say, English or philosophy to learn how to be scholars," Kramer says.

Despite this lack of teaching preparation, the faculty were 'natural teachers' who were "constantly trying to experiment with ...

Mobile Education: The Pros, the Cons, and the Unanswered Questions

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"If you look at the students on campus, a third to a half of them leaving class immediately pull out their cell phone. We think, 'if we could harness that, it would be a good thing.'" This scenario, identified by Albert Ingram, associate professor of Lifespan Development and Educational Sciences at Kent State University, repeats itself on campuses across the nation, and it is often the reason that distance education administrators contemplate adding mobile learning to their distance education offerings.

However, like all distance education technologies, the move to mobile devices has pros and cons, and incorporating these devices should be a decision made to support pedagogy, not simply to use a technology because of the coolness factor or the ubiquity of the device.

As an example, in the late 1990s, the author of this piece interviewed an educational device manufacturer who was enthused about the device's ability to take computing power out of the classroom into the field. One of the key attributes of the devices was...

Valuing and Rewarding Academic Advising: Models for Chairs and Deans

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The literature has made us aware of the importance of a student's connection with a faculty member, advisor, or other significant adult and its impact on academic success and retention of students. For first-generation students, this can be especially critical, as they require assistance not only in what to take and why, but also how to understand and negotiate this new and overwhelming environment. Universities employ a variety of methods and people to attempt to ensure that this connection be established and maintained. Advisors often fulfill this role for students in their first year in higher education.

Advising structures and systems vary widely from institution to institution and may include a combination of both faculty and professional staff. Despite the frequently cited notion that advising is an activity that should somehow be inherently rewarding, the people who fulfill these roles look for meaning in and recognition of their performance in advising. Instead, professional staff express frustration with…

Moving from Management to Leadership in Distance Ed

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Effective management of a college's distance learning program is essential. From managing student enrollment and establishing delivery modes to building a student support structure, there is enough work for a small horde - and that is how it should be.

As a distance learning innovator, however, continuing an existing framework is seldom enough. Times change, technologies change. Support people come and go. The result is a need for program change - calling for the DL professional's move from management to leadership.

Although the roles of a distance learning leader are many, three are paramount.

Planning for the Future. To a much greater degree than many areas of academia, distance learning is both a student and a technology driven field. Distance learning leaders constantly keep one eye upon demographic and generational changes among incoming students and another upon new and improved...

Effective Strategies for Hiring the Best New Faculty

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Colleges and universities have traditionally relied on search committees to select new faculty members. To ensure a successful new hire who can teach, publish, and serve the institution, search committees need a blueprint for their work; a set of strategies to lead them from the creation of the job advertisement to a productive on-site interview. The use of behavior-based interviewing (BBI), an interview style based on the premise that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance, can guide those who hire in every step of the selection process.

Context: The Difference Between Success or Failure in Distance Learning Programs

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What determines the success or failure of a distance learning program? Writing in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Don Chaney and Elizabeth Chaney, both of the University of Florida, and James Eddy, of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, contend that an understanding of context is crucial. In their article, “The Context of Distance Learning Programs in Higher Education: Five Enabling Assumptions,” the authors argue that “the marginal success and/or failure occurs due to program planner(s) not viewing the design, implementation, evaluation, and sustainability of distance learning courses and programs in the context within which the distance learning will occur.” They support their argument with five assumptions:

1. “The success of distance learning programs, on the individual level, is often a function of personal learning styles.”

The authors cite a number of studies that show that online learning is at least as effective as face-to-face instruction, and conclude that an amalgam of the two is probably best for...

Using Interest-Based Negotiation

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Leaders and professionals in higher education operate in a fast-paced, complex, and changing work environment in which they are frequently faced with diverse and often conflicting perspectives and opinions. And while having many different points of view fosters an interesting and rich learning environment, it also challenges leaders to understand these differences, negotiate agreements, and resolve conflicts. Given the complexity of work today, it is important that individuals, groups, and teams learn how to engage in dialogue, learn from each other, and negotiate differences while maintaining healthy business and personal relationships and effective teamwork.