APPENDIX

Virginia Community College System

Distance and Distributed Learning Committee

Position Paper on the Status and Future of Distance Learning

in the Virginia Community College System

Approved June 3, 2005 by the DDLC

            The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) mission statement specifies that the state’s 23 community colleges will provide superior quality programs and services that meet the workforce development and educational needs of the citizens of the Commonwealth.  Strategic deployment of the many distance learning delivery methodologies now available to educators is an integral way in which the Virginia Community College System has, and can continue to implement that mission in a manner that provides both access and expediency to the community served by the colleges within the Virginia Community College System.  

The Chancellor of the VCCS has outlined several ambitious goals designed to address the workforce and educational needs of the citizens of the Commonwealth in a document called Dateline 2009.  This Dateline 2009 Strategic Plan, when read in concert with the Chancellor’s current goals and the 2001 Strategic Plan for Distance Learning in the VCCS,  clearly indicates that community colleges will collaborate to achieve remarkable growth in distance and distributed course offerings.

Some examples of specific Dateline 2009 goals that are related to distance and distributed learning include:

Enrollment:  The VCCS will serve at least 16,000 new students by 2009.

Workforce Training:  The VCCS will provide workforce training programs for 225,000 individuals annually, an increase of nearly 80 percent–from 125,000 to 225,000.

Transfer to 4-Year Colleges and Universities:  The VCCS will triple the number of graduates who successfully transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

Dual Enrollment with High Schools:  The VCCS will triple the number of high school students who take college courses and receive college credits, raising the number from 14,000 to 45,000.

Examples of specific goals of the Chancellor that are related to distance and distributed learning include:

§  Expand distance learning towards the goal of serving 100,000 students by 2009. 

§  Provide superior electronic tools that enable colleges to enhance students’ ability to communicate and connect to educational offerings remotely. 

§  Continue to enhance electronic services to promote student success, including on-line tutoring and advising, and completed implementation of new library system. 

§   Continue to enhance the VCCS information technology and telecommunications platform, particularly related to improving the course management system and moving towards implementation of the personnel and management information systems modules. 

§   Enhance collaboration between and among colleges. 

§  Consolidate and upgrade help desk and customer support services. 

§  Continue deployment and enhancement of the VCCS enterprise software applications to meet system goals and objectives. 

§  Conduct a study to determine if high schools would benefit from VCCS hosted course management systems or extending Internet or Internet2 connectivity from the VCCS to high schools. 

§  Create a library of internet and other technology-based career and professional development courses/programs. 

§  Develop a matrix of shared technology services and standards and determine the

degree of successful implementation system-wide.

The VCCS Distance and Distributed Learning Committee (DDLC) strongly supports the goals related to distance and distributed learning outlined in these documents.  The membership of the DDLC is committed to working with the Vice Chancellor for Academic Services and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services toward achievement of these objectives.  While strongly supporting the use of distance learning technologies to achieve the goals of Dateline 2009, members of the DDLC also recognize and acknowledge that there are several specific organizational and technical obstacles that hinder those goals from being implemented.  The purpose of this document is to clearly identify those obstacles in order to focus the efforts of the DDLC on addressing them.  We believe that through the clear identification of organizational and technical obstacles to implementation of the distance learning aspects of Dateline 2009, the DDLC membership can assist VCCS personnel, the VCCS Technology Council membership, and personnel at the 23 colleges that comprise the VCCS, to work more efficiently together in our attempts to reach the objectives.

The DDLC pledges to commit to taking the lead, in coordination with other appropriate VCCS governance groups, in developing proposals to address the issues identified in this document.  By leveraging the resources of all VCCS colleges, working together, we affirm that distance and distributed learning methodologies can contribute immensely toward the achievement of Dateline 2009. 

Virginia Community College System Distance Learning Values

The DDLC hereby affirms three organizational values that must pervade distance learning course delivery within the VCCS:

1)     The provision of distance learning programs, courses and services are an integral method of implementing the mission of the Virginia Community College System. 

2)     Academic quality is of paramount importance.  VCCS colleges will continue the longstanding tradition of demonstrating quality assurance in distance and distributed learning programs and thereby serve as a world class model for academic quality in the delivery of distance and distributed learning. 

3)     Students and faculty require sufficient support services to promote greater access and success rates in distance and distributed learning.

Primary Incentives to Employing Distance Learning for Program and Course Delivery.

The membership of the DDLC asserts that, from the perspective of individual colleges, there are at least three primary incentives to provide programs and courses using distance and distributed learning delivery methods for citizens of the Commonwealth.  They are:

1)     Distance learning allows citizens to access programs, courses and services that otherwise would not be available in their service region. 

2)     Distance and distributed learning methods provide greater convenience for citizens to overcome constraints of time and place.

3)     Beyond greater freedom from time and place constraints, distance and distributed learning methods provide a myriad of benefits for students, including the ability of faculty to address their diverse learning styles, the opportunity for a greater number of participants in content discussions, and more  opportunities to balance work, family and collegiate obligations.

Current Distance Learning Methodologies Used by VCCS Colleges.

Although VCCS Colleges employ a wide range of distance learning technologies, the DDLC recognizes that there are currently three prevalent methods employed to deliver distance learning programs, courses and services.  Those methods are:

1)     Delivery of asynchronous programs, courses and services to remote locations anywhere, using Learning Management Systems or the Internet. 

2)     Delivery of synchronous programs, courses and services to remote locations anywhere, using web conferencing software.

3)     Delivery of synchronous programs, courses and services to specific remote locations via H323 compressed video technologies.

The DDLC also recognizes that many programs, courses and services are being delivered using hybrid methodologies which combine traditional on-campus meetings with one or more of the three methods listed above. 

Challenges to the Coordination of Distance Learning in the VCCS.

The DDLC suggests that the following challenges mitigate the ability of the VCCS to coordinate and increase the number of programs, courses and services to citizens of the Commonwealth via distance learning technologies.  Individual VCCS colleges are responsive to two often competing pressures.  First, colleges are motivated to serve the citizens of their service region by providing access to programs, courses and services that would otherwise be unavailable.  However, colleges are often constrained by funding pressures, largely driven by college specific FTE related funding.  As a result:

a.      Two competing factors impact FTE growth at VCCS colleges: Enrollment and Productivity.  Many colleges have discovered that the primary audience for web-based asynchronous courses is made up of their own students from their own service region who desire to access courses and services in a manner not constrained by time and place.  College administrators are motivated to offer such courses, so long as the enrollment numbers for distance courses equal or exceed the enrollment that can be generated in an on-campus course.  However, many disciplines are such that significantly greater enrollment productivity can be achieved in classroom settings than can be obtained by distance delivery methods.  Unless asynchronous distance learning courses begin to attract significant numbers of new students to VCCS colleges, there is little to no incentive for college administrators to offer asynchronous distance learning courses in those disciplines where significantly greater productivity can be achieved in classroom settings.

b.     Significant policy and procedural issues still exist in regards to cross-college application and enrollment procedures.  College policies that are enforced at one college (e.g. limiting the total number of credits students can take in a given semester) are difficult to impossible to enforce at multiple colleges.  Students still need to complete a significant amount of paperwork to be term activated at multiple colleges and policies honored at one college may not be honored at another (e.g. placement testing policies; residency determinations).  Statewide policy and procedures need to be developed to assist students in accessing programs, courses and services from multiple colleges while policies that address academic quality concerns need to be enforced across colleges.  Similarly, several DDLC members see joint faculty appointments across two or more colleges as a necessary future development.  Finally, different academic calendars across institutions negatively impact students that desire to take courses from multiple institutions. 

c.      The DDLC membership recognizes that there will frequently be a tension between the value of employing the centralized purchasing power of the VCCS to obtain and deploy new technologies, and the ability of the faculty at individual colleges to recognize the usefulness of new technology that they have not yet been exposed to.  The VCCS needs an organized procedure for pilot testing new technologies, software and LMS plug-ins.   The VCCS may also benefit from a flexible set of guiding principles to help determine when enterprise deployment is preferable to individual college deployment of new technologies. 

d.     The autonomy and independence enjoyed by the 23 individual community colleges that comprise the VCCS is a highly valued strength of the community college system in Virginia.  That value sometimes conflicts with the goal of providing citizens with state-wide access to programs, services and courses for which there is a pressing need.  The VCCS needs to provide state-wide leadership, in partnership with VCCS college presidents, to determine whether, when, and how key state-wide programs, courses and services will be delivered.  Criteria and processes should be developed for determining when distance learning offerings should be coordinated at the enterprise level, when academic policy decisions should be enforced statewide, and when concerns of local colleges supersede the value than enterprise implementation.

e.      Some institutions have developed distance learning partnerships through which distance learning programs, courses and services are provided from one location to remote regions of the state.  The incentive for the receiving institutions to engage in such partnerships include the provision of programs in their service area that otherwise would be too expensive to provide, as well as the ability to gain some FTEs by providing the liberal arts courses associated with those programs.  The delivering institution gains increased FTEs by expanding the service region of key programs.  If such partnerships are to grow, clear incentives need to be identified for both sending and receiving institutions.  For example, providing technical support and scheduling services for H323 classroom space at most colleges is challenging because of space and fiscal constraints at individual colleges throughout the system.  Although such partnerships are cost effective from a state-wide perspective, they are sometimes burdensome at the local level. 

f.      Technical support for students and faculty engaged in distance and distributed learning initiatives has improved in recent years.  However, the system would benefit from a minimal standards document that delineates expectations for help desk staffing at each college and at the VCCS, along with a clear and common job description for those positions that provide direct technical support for faculty and students.

 Dates for DDLC

 2005-06

1)  Friday, September 23, 2005 

                        Tech Council : October 4-5, 2005

                        ACOP: Oct 18-19, 2005

2)  Friday, November  18, 2005 

                        Tech Council : November 29, 2005

                        ACOP: December 13-14, 2005 2005

3)  Friday, February 3, 2006

                        Tech Council : February 7-8, 2006

                        ACOP: February 21-22, 2006

4) Friday, March 31, 2006

                        Tech Council : April 4-5, 2006

                        ACOP: April 18-19, 2006

5  Friday, June 2, 2006 

                        Tech Council : June 6-7, 2006

                        ACOP: June 20-21, 2006