Main online distance Education Programs and Courses

The biggest drivers of growth in online courses and enrollment to date have been fully online programs from the for-profit sector and from online-only organizations created by nonprofit institutions. In both cases, these online programs are organized around a concept called themaster course. This concept of the master course, which changes the educational delivery methods of an institution, is perhaps the biggest differentiator between traditional, for-profit, and even nonprofit fully online organizations.

A master course gets replicated into multiple, relatively consistent sections in a repeatable manner. In this approach, instructional design teams—typically including multimedia experts, quality-assurance people, and instructional designers—work with faculty members and/or subject-matter experts to design a master course. Once designed, the master course sections can be taught or facilitated by multiple instructors, typically adjunct faculty. The faculty members who are part of the design can also be instructors for a couple of sections, but generally the sections are taught by instructors who were not part of the design team.

The master course concept changes the assumptions of who owns the course, and it leads to different processes for designing, delivering, and updating courses–processes that just don’t exist in traditional education. The implications of this approach are significant. These differences create a barrier that very few institutions can cross. So, how do institutions that want to provide scale and access deal with this barrier? The most common method over the past decade or two has been to create separate organizations that will implement the master course concept. The majority of for-profit organizations—at least the medium and large for-profits that operate at scale—are based on this concept, whether using online courses or blended/hybrid courses. The largest and best-known example is the University of Phoenix.  In the nonprofit sector, the online organizations typically fit within the overall system of governance, but the operations, budgets, and academic oversight are provided individually. Examples include Rio Salado College, University of Maryland University College, and Colorado Community College Online. University of Maryland University. These organizations often have more in common with their for-profit brethren than with the other institutions within their system.

Many of the failures of traditional institutions or statewide systems to successfully create, grow, and sustain online programs can be traced to organizational resistance from the rest of the system to the separate online organization.