Reflection #2- Administration and Evaluation

This course has alerted to a variety of factors involved in the administration and evaluation of online programs. In particular, the articles on scalability provided me a much more comprehensive sense of the various factors (and tradeoffs) involved in growing online initiatives. Expanding online initiatives for example may result in limiting instructor interaction with students. In previous classes we have learned about the centrality of “social presence” and ways that the instructor needs to create community among participants. It does seem important to create highly interactive learning environments where participants feel vested and willing to take risks. That degree of interaction can be compromised in large programs that cannot sustain a small student instructor ratio. Of course, one of the central benefits to scaled-up programs is increased profitability, higher enrollments, and the ability to expand what may be a high-quality initiative for a larger group of learners. Those goals might be a central part of institutions’ strategic planning that are premised on developing online initiatives that are not just localized but broad in scope and create a greater impact. This notion of balance between connecting with individual learners and expanding programs to reach more learners, (but having less personalized contact) strikes me as a central dilemma many institutions need to deal with when thinking about administering and developing their online programs.