Leadership Strategies for Coordinating Distance Education Instructional Development Teams

Introduction Boundaries between classroom-based, blended, and distance education are blurring. Contemporary classroom-based courses typically have a course website. Instructors’ editions of textbooks include PowerPoint lectures that can be either presented in a classroom or licensed for distance distribution. Students’ editions include etutorials and quizzes for independent learning. Classroom ‘contact’ hours are being reduced via the introduction of Web-based video lectures, online tutorials, discussions, virtual laboratories, simulations, and more recently, academic computer gaming (Naylor, 2005; Parchoma et al., 2007). Social software applications, Second Life, MySpace, and Facebook, along with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and e-portfolios, are commonly incorporated into learning designs across delivery modes (Wasson, 2006). Key administrative services, such as Web-based registration, assignment ‘drop-boxes’, grade reports, and transcript orders have been moved online. This “fusion of face-to-face and technology mediated learning experiences” (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, p. 5) is making it increasingly difficult to define distance education (de) and delineate