A Health Check of Avondale's Distance Education Program: Where Have we Been? Where are we Going Next?

Avondale College of Higher Education has been offering tertiary courses for over 120 years. In the past two decades, this institution has extended its programs to include distance courses for students who opt to study online or are not able to attend on-campus courses at Avondale’s Lake Macquarie and Sydney campuses. While all of the institutions courses are evaluated on a regular basis, no formal evaluation had ever been undertaken of the distance education program as a whole. During 2017, a mixed methods research project was conducted to gather evaluative data from recent and current distance students using questionnaires and focus groups. The results of the study provide insight into the extent to which the distance education program at the College provides a space in which learning relationships can develop in online communities. Also, suggestions for future improvement and further research recommendations are provided. Findings of this study may be of interest to educators and administrators who incorporate online components in their curricula. Introduction Avondale was established in 1897 as a faith-based institution with a spiritually focused vision, mission, and motto. By the middle of the twentieth century the College had begun to diversify and offer degrees through external and affiliation programs, offering TEACHR ” “the study provide[s] insight into the extent to which the distance education program ... provides a space in which learning relationships can develop in online communities. TEACH Journal 12-2.indd 14 26/3/19 10:08 pm 14 | TEACH | v12 n2 v12 n2 | TEACH | 15 Educational Administration ” “the distance cohort of students had not yet been specifically targeted to elicit information about their unique experiences of studying via distance its own NSW government accredited degrees from 1974 (Avondale College of Higher Education, 2018). Distance education was introduced in the mid1990s with external affiliation, to upgrade education graduates from diploma to degree status. This was followed in 2000 by a blended Master’s program in three disciplines, and gradually, as the capacity for online learning was developed, more courses were offered in blended or totally distance mode. Since 2008, the number of courses offered online has steadily increased. While early versions of distance education courses at the College involved students enrolling either by on-campus or distance (online) mode, more recent years have seen a lessening of this divide; instead, distance and on-campus students are currently enrolled in the same units and often self-select which aspects of their studies they attend in on-campus or distance mode. This more flexible approach has enabled students to tailor their pattern of attendance to meet the demands of their complex lives. Currently the College offers five undergraduate courses, and eight post graduate courses by distance education using an online mode, and an increasing number of individual units are also offered online. Although Avondale has been offering distance education courses to undergraduate and postgraduate students for almost two decades, a comprehensive review of these students’ experiences had not been undertaken before the study reported in this paper was conducted. Like many other schools and universities, Avondale regularly administers end-of-semester surveys to gather feedback about the quality of the learning experiences of all students who complete on-campus and distance courses, and this feedback has become a valuable source of data in assisting the continual improvement of each course’s curriculum design and teaching methods. However, the distance cohort of students had not yet been specifically targeted to elicit information about their unique experiences of studying via distance. Since 25% of the institutions students choose to complete their entire course by distance and 40% of the College students currently choose to complete some of their studies in a distance mode, this large proportion of the student population at the institution needed to be consulted to ensure the quality assurance system of the institution was representative of all groups of students and to ensure the experiences of distance learners will become more integral to the institution’s direction. Background Because of the convenience of learning online, distance education programs and online learning technologies have become increasingly popular in primary, secondary and tertiary education over the last twenty years. The number of tertiary education students taking at least one online class in the USA in 2006 was approximately 3.5 million (Allen & Seaman, 2007). This number almost doubled to 6.7 million in 2011 (Allen & Seaman, 2013). In 2012, 62.4% of college and universities reported offering distance programs (Allen & Seaman, 2017). In addition to more tertiary students enrolling in online classes, Rovai and Downey (2010) report an increase in the number of distance education programs offered by higher education providers, including for-profit institutions. Indeed, institutions of higher learning are increasingly making distance education an integral part of their long term planning (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2014). The adoption of digital technologies has also increased within the school sector. Schools have been reported as integrating varied degrees of online technologies into their curricula (Neyland, 2011) and groups of educators meet regularly to share ideas about how to use learning technologies in primary and secondary education (Voogt et al., 2017). These trends mean that the issue of program quality is important, as colleges and universities are challenged to provide quality education to a growing number of online students. Many suggestions, guidelines and exemplars of online learning practices have been published previously in various formats such as Herrington and her associates’ (2007) guidelines for authentic course design, Mbati and Minnaar’s (2015) guidelines for facilitating interactive online learning programs and Salmon’s (2013) suggestions about how to design and moderate online learning courses. These guidelines are useful tools for those responsible for designing and teaching online courses which are frequently taken by students studying by distance and/or using online learning technologies. Over the last decade, many of these published guidelines have been consulted and used to guide the design and implementation of online courses for distance students at Avondale. For example, the institution’s Online Learning Policy [policy no. A.35] was modified during recent years to ensure student-centred concepts of learning that focus on engagement and authentic activities were integrated throughout the policy, replacing the use of teacher-centred terms such as “delivery” and “lecturing”. Furthermore, a set of benchmarks have been established, for professional development purposes, reflecting many of the principles and recommended practices from renowned online educators, to guide academic staff in their design of interactive activities in online, blended and on-campus courses. Known as the “Minimum Moodle Expectations”, these benchmarks provide detailed instructions about how to design TEACH Journal 12-2.indd 15 26/3/19 10:08 pm 16 | TEACH | v12 n2 v12 n2 | TEACH | 17 Educational Administration ” “this negative perception of distance education programs has been bolstered by a higher dropout rate among some distance education programs when compared with faceto-face programs learning resources, activities and assessment tasks that engage students in authentic learning across all modes of study. Throughout the history of distance education, various successes and problems have been reported. For example, Allen and Seaman (2013) report that in 2003 only 57.2% of educators “rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face” (p. 5). Nine years later, that figure increased to 77 percent (Allen & Seaman, 2013). So, while things have improved, these two studies by Allen and Seaman suggest that there is still a significant proportion (23%), who are less than impressed with distance education programs. And this negative perception of distance education programs has been bolstered by a higher dropout rate among some distance education programs when compared with face-to-face programs (Bell & Federman, 2013; Patterson & McFadden, 2009; Tyler-Smith, 2006). Academic leaders report that this higher dropout rate will impede the growth of distance education programs (Allen & Seaman, 2013). The lack of direct interaction with the lecturer may be a contributing factor in the higher dropout rates of online students. Lack of direct interaction between students and instructors, may allow problems which naturally occur in the course of any instruction to fester, and, if not addressed, these problems may undermine a distance education program (Simonson et al., 2014). Besides leaving the learner frustrated, not addressing the problems can further the perception of distance education programs as being impersonal (Perreault, Waldman, Alexander, & Zhao, 2002; Sunal, Sunal, Odell, & Sundberg, 2003). Addressing problems and assuring that instructors are providing clear channels of communication with their students is critical if the programs are to be successful. In general, distance education programs need to focus upon quality if they are going to continue to attract and retain students (Moore, Lockee, & Burton, 2002). The issue of quality is also important for schools offering some curricula components through use of online technologies, such as wikis in primary schools (Woo, Chu, Ho, & Li, 2011) and online collaborative modules in secondary schools (DeWitt, Siraj, & Alias, 2014). Whether full programs or program components are offered via online technologies, their quality requires monitoring, as do on-campus learning programs and ac