Chapter 5. Administrative Issues in Online Education 

It is easy to provide course material on the web and claim that it is online education. However, 

it is a far more demanding challenge to develop and administrate online colleges. An 

administrative system should be able to handle students, teachers, courses, and course 

material. An online college may have to handle thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, 

and a large number of courses with password restricted web pages, discussion forums, 

distribution lists, class rosters, and student presentations. It may also have to provide 

administrative systems for the dispatch of textbooks, handling of tuition and examination fees, 

and organization of local examinations. These services constitute a major challenge for many 

traditional institutions. 

A very simple example of administrative tasks that could be handled on the web is presented 

below: 

<12> Administrative use includes enrolment and students contacting the administration to 

find out their examination results. 

Institutions that plan to offer large scale and professional online education need an 

administrative system which is integrated with the web. To accomplish this, institutions may 

follow several strategies. The simplest strategy is probably to collaborate with an institution 

that already has a functional administrative system. Another solution, which requires more 

technical competence, is to develop an in house system based on common Internet services. 

The third option is to purchase a standard system for online education. These standard systems 

are continuously being improved, but they may still need much local adaptation. They may 

only meet some of the administrative needs, and they could place some pedagogical 

limitations on the courses. 

No Web based Administration 

A discouraging, but important observation is that a number of institutions do not use the web 

for administrative purposes: 

   The internet is used for presentation and communication only <13>. 

   All except administration. Administration will be developed in 1999 <5>. 

   The primary use is communication with students; we do not use the web for 

administration <57>. 

More elaborate statements also confirm a lack of web based administrative systems: 

   <35> We use the web for course administration, but this still causes quite some problems. 

We have decided not to use commercially or otherwise available software tools, e.g. Top 

Class and others. It is very difficult to find a good compromise between administration 

software and course software. Thus, for the time being not much have been done to 

develop an administrative system. 

   <44> The www is used for all of the above except administration. The presentations on to 

the web are a valuable tool for a faculty who s objective is to teach the technologies used 

for this. Students can observe and try a number of very cutting edge technologies on the 

www presentations. 

84