What types of online courses are preferred by these successful institutions? Web support of face-to-face instruction? Fully online? Hybrid?

One of the most startling findings of the study concerned the predominance of the move to fully online delivery of courses and programs and the connection to success. Remember that the study did not have any preconceived bias toward delivery format. It was up to the institutions involved to inform us of their use of e-Learning, their measures of success, etc. In reading the “Thwarted” Study, one would believe that the most predominant format that would have achieved successful adoption would be what the “Thwarted” Study refers to as “enhancements to traditional courses”, such as use of PowerPoint, or, simplistic use of Course Management Systems for what the Sloan reports refer to as “Web Facilitated” and what this study refers to as “Web Supported”.

Figure 12 illustrates that there was a predominance of fully online courses in 53% of the institutions, with web supported course predominance coming in at a distant 21%.

This was an intriguing result because common sense would dictate that there would be more pervasive use of the simpler approach. To analyze this we looked at additional data. Figure 13 shows all of the types of e-Learning supported at the participating institutions. While fully online course were still in the lead, we were relieved to see that hybrid and web supported courses were only a few percentage points behind.

We believe that the answer as to why the sample for this study featured a dominance of fully online came with the type of student primarily served via the e-Learning initiatives or market segmentation. Please refer back to Figure 4 in section VII, which illustrates the predominance of focus on the adult learner, where fully online courses are preferred for the convenience factor. Our preliminary conclusion is that along with a strong focus on the adult learner comes an accelerated move to fully online courses. Our participant sample was also somewhat biased towards a focus on commuting students at their campus locations:

• 32% served mostly residential students at their campuses

• 47% served mostly commuting students at their campuses

• 21% served an approximately equal mix of both types at their campuses

As shown is Figure 13 above, 89% of the participant institutions have gone the next step beyond the fully online course and implemented fully online programs, where program refers to an academic program of study. A key finding of the study, is that a majority of the institution participants, 71% implemented what we will refer to as a “programmatic approach” to moving online. This approach involves an intentional focus on moving all or most of the student’s experience in a program to the online format.

The study looked at the common practices involved in the programmatic approach to moving online. Respondents were presented with a list of sixteen processes and asked to rate how successfully they had been able to implement each one. As with the analysis of student and faculty support services, Table 7 indicates the prevalent features and Table 8 indicates the opportunities and risks.

Table 7. Predominate Features of Programmatic Process

Seven programmatic processes (B) were implemented by the predominance of the participants. These processes represent best practice in moving programs online and the ramifications of these on the transformation of a program to higher quality is significant. A review of the list of seven shows a strong emphasis on achieving a very clear and definable objective that provides a framework for measurement. We would conjecture that the ability to measure progress, academically or otherwise, is much more challenging in a course-focused approach.

Nine processes represent potentially under-utilized strategies that should be considered. A very interesting result is that unlike the faculty support services, there were no programmatic processes that represent implementation risks and challenges.

Table 8. Programmatic Opportunities and Risks

Is there any relationship between the programmatic approach and success? The short answer is a very strong “Yes”. The following data contributes to this conclusion:

In summary, focus on getting complete programs fully online, which we refer to as a “programmatic approach”, as opposed to single courses fully online or web-enhanced courses, greatly increases the chance of perceived success and quality.