Citation:
Humes, L. R. & Abel, R. J. (2006). Transforming Quality into Scale: An Interview with Paula Peinovich, President of Walden University. A-HEC In-Depth 2 (3). January, 2006. from http://www.a-hec.org/research/in-
depth_articles/peinovich0106/peinovich0106_toc.html

Introduction

Walden University has literally written the book on distance learning. For the past 35 years, this virtual graduate institution has remained true to its mission of offering advanced degrees online to professionals who work to make a difference in their communities.

Rooted in its legacy as an experimental learning community, Walden is an outstanding example of the fact that a rigorous education can be achieved online. And in the last four years, the institution has increased its student body by more than twelve fold and its faculty eight fold without sacrificing the quality of its educational offering. In this interview, Walden President Paula Peinovich outlines several of the factors that go into creating and maintaining a successful distance learning program.

Interview

A-HEC: Walden University is an accredited, for-profit graduate institution known for the quality of its academic standards. How have you managed to achieve that distinction?

PP: We were formed at a distance 35 years ago. The simplest answer is that we’ve been working at it for 35 years. And as we have expanded over the last four years, we’ve found that in a distance-learning environment, the academic standards of institutions are typically formed by professional consensus of the faculty. In face-to-face environments, that kind of consensus is achieved in many implicit ways. Faculty come to common understandings by working side-by-side, through dialogue around classroom issues or in faculty meetings. In a distance-learning environment, however, we find that we have to be very explicit about what our standards are. We’ve recently developed a governance system that allows the faculty to be engaged with setting and implementing the standards in very influential ways, in spite of the fact there are more than a thousand of them and they live all over the country. We have faculty involved in faculty governance all the way up to the board of directors. We’ve been very explicit and we’ve also been very process-oriented. The setting of standards is done through our governance system, but the maintaining of those standards is done through a process orientation, making sure that our academic processes are widely understood and are followed and that faculty participate in those processes.

While we have grown in numbers, we also have grown in quality. We have, as do all institutions of higher

Copyright 2006 Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.