Registration

Opening comments and program overview

Setting the Environment and Common Understandings

What are your plans for developing and sustaining your online learning initiatives? What are your aspirations and expectations? What specific issues would you like to see addressed in this conference? What would you like to take home with you? In understanding your particular and critical needs, we will discuss some national trends related to developing online initiatives, applications of synchronous and asynchronous technologies, and fully online, blended, and Web-enhanced instruction. We will also discuss Title IV regulations and its implications.

Break

Online Academic Planning and Development (The What and Why)

Making the case for online academic planning and development that aligns with your institutional mission and goals can be difficult. In this session, we’ll walk you through the process for making high-level decisions about going online and the necessary data you should collect to inform those decisions. We’ll review some significant case studies of failed and successful online programs and what you can learn from them.

Networking reception (included in registration)

Continental breakfast (included in registration)

Choosing the Right Programs for Online Delivery

If you have the best program in the world and no one knows about it, then its success is in jeopardy. In this session, we’ll share best practices and proven approaches for leveraging your reach. Our discussion on identifying institutional strengths will focus on:

• Market research
• Advertising
• Promotion
• Marketing reach
• Branding consideration

Break

Serving Students

Who are our students, how do we want to serve them, and what are their needs and expectations? Is online learning a model that is more congruent with their lifestyles, and would it help them become more active learners? We’ll focus on the following as they relate to selective vs. open enrollment institutions.

• Changing demographics and educational expectations
• The generational norms and the Net Generation effect, Edupunks
• Student success
• Student satisfaction/ambivalence
• Retention
• Online student support
• Scope –- local, regional, national, or global
• Use of data analytics and modeling to support student success

Break

Faculty Engagement and Commitment

Faculty are vital to the sustainability of online programs. Understanding the faculty role in online academic planning and development is crucial to effective instruction, student engagement, retention, and satisfaction. Teaching online, particularly in the first few years, is perceived as more time-intensive than in a face-to-face environment. Therefore, institutions must deal with the opportunity costs of faculty involvement in this format. Discussions will focus on:

• Faculty culture, buy-in, participation
• Faculty incentives, recognition, rewards
• Online faculty development and support
• Faculty points of friction
• Course development
• Intellectual property
• The scholarship of teaching and learning in the online environment

Lunch (included in registration)

Faculty Engagement and Commitment (continued)

Break

Putting It Together Within Your Institutional Context (The How)

Online learning offers the opportunity to address challenges such as access, cost, efficiency, and timely completion. However, it also poses important transformational process issues that can impact your online academic planning and development. This session will illuminate problems you’ll encounter and ways to overcome them during your implementation stages.

Continental breakfast (included in registration)

Maintaining Quality and Accreditation Standards

You’ve built the program. Now, how do you ensure you’re meeting quality standards while adhering to accreditation requirements? In this session, we’ll share some important approaches for maintaining high quality across all facets of online program development and delivery.

Break

Measuring Success

Assessing and evaluating your program is the only way to empirically validate your success. How will you know if you’re succeeding, and what does success look like? What longitudinal data, trends, and formative and summative evaluation will you need to collect to measure your success? How can you harness data to make continual improvements? While tackling these questions, we’ll discuss the measurement of learning outcomes, how to ensure objectivity, and how such measurement plays into the planning and resource allocation process.

Program Takeaways

You will have the opportunity to share your takeaways and next steps with the conference instructors and your colleagues. We’ll also provide some thoughts about the future and where online learning may be headed.