Everyone wants a blueprint for managing their distance education program, but sometimes the best thing to do may be to throw away the old business model and begin thinking about new ways to deliver and share online courses.

Institutions of higher education nearly always feel a budgetary crunch, and this holds true for online programs. However, the costs of running a successful online program run far beyond the expected line items of salaries, technology, and marketing. Faculty turnover and attrition can bring a number of serious but unanticipated costs to a program, costs that are may be poorly understood due to a lack of research identifying these costs.

In an online learning environment, it’s easy for students to feel isolated or unsure of themselves, particularly if they’re adult students who’ve been away from school for a long time.

Well, it’s that time again: summertime, and thus more online instructors are on the road and that means your indispensible umbilical cord to the classroom will also be coming: the laptop.

It’s not easy to get unanimous agreement on anything these days, but on this most educators can agree:

What is the best way to train and support a beginning online faculty member? At some colleges, the only option is on site training held on the campus over a day, a weekend, or a period of days during the summer. These on-site workshops, while potentially very effective, commit the faculty members to time, travel, and often inflexible scheduling. However, Berkeley College, with campuses in New York and New Jersey, has designed an online faculty workshop and set of training and support tools to complement its other professional development offerings.

Helping faculty learn to survive and even thrive online is critical if we are to realize the potential of this new learning space. During a Magna online seminar awhile back, I made reference to a strategy that an institution can employ to help faculty save time online. I referred to a document created at Penn State’s World Campus as the “10 commandments” of faculty performance. Simply put, it is the articulation of what our organization expects from our online instructors in order to ensure a quality teaching and learning experience. Although this may initially sound like a “heavy handed” approach—faculty being told how to perform—I would offer another interpretation.

Hundreds of distance education administrators breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning in a recent online seminar that the vast majority of schools are already in compliance with the Higher Education Opportunity Act’s new rules on student authentication.

Part of being an online educator is teaching students how to conduct themselves in the online classroom. A survey of successful adult online learners provides an excellent resource for this advice.