Although most of the literature surrounding distance education has been based on research to establish the pedagogical validity of distance learning compared to what has been called traditional classroom teaching or has been a prescriptive set of guidelines for the ideal distance learning course, another set of literature is beginning to permeate the field, a set of literature that describes the administration and management of distance learning programs.

The main issues this literature describes are:

• how to define the distance learning audience
• what needs to occur before the program can begin
• how is the program to be staffed and what are the responsibility (functions) of the staff
• how is a budget determined and allocated throughout the program year
• how are classes scheduled
• what types of accreditation are needed by the program to meet the audience's needs

To say that a great deal of ongoing effort is expended by the policy makes at WICHE in order to determine the audience they will be serving would be a understatement. The understatement takes two forms. First of all the organization spends a great deal of time analyzing reports from many many sources, and tries to generate some useful reports of their own that provide them policy guidelines. For an example, one of the reports they have on their policy clearing house is Profile of undergraduate students who work: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=98084
XXXXX. The second area of understatement is that WICHE does not only try to determine their audience, or student body, but it is proactive in creating a new student body. This clarification of their audience formation process is important because it points to the fact that the segmentation of this industry (distance learning) is still in its formative stage, allowing a single institution to play a significant role. Since the WICHE administrators realize this malleability on the part of distance learning as an industry they are shaping their curriculum to meet the needs of an older group of students who have more money than students who are fresh out of high school.

Before WICHE opened its doors (we need a new metaphor, here don't we maybe we should say before they opened their switches) to students, they had to have many programmatic aspects in place. They had to have secured adequate faculty, adequate technical staff, adequate technical facilities, and an adequate marketing program. Since WICHE is a collaborative effort between many states, there were several other planning issues that they needed to clear up before offering classes. One was the interstate accreditation issue which is discusses below in the accreditation section. The other planning goal this institution had to have in place was a rather complex and ambiguous one. The main planning need of this program had to have been scalability. To begin with there would have only been a few hundred students, but through word of mouth, on going marketing and program development the goal was to increase that total by a few thousand every year. To achieve this type of scalability very flexible and very reliable partnerships needed to have been in place. As well the other partners needed to be visionaries as well. For example, WICHE was involved in a strategic partnership called the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications. Multi-organizational support relationships like this one were crucial alliances that needed to be built into the planning.

An interesting aspect of staffing that occurs at WICHE is that special programs are in place to attract minority PhD students who plan to enter teaching, and who, I assume, have a particular interest in distance learning. The program, WICHE Doctoral Scholars Program, receives monies from foundations to work in partnership with the various collaborative universities so that they hire minority PhDed faculty. The recruitment of staff for the local managment issues seems to be by posting notices on the website, and probably as well in trade journals or other related industry press. An example of some positions that are advertised on the website are: Staff Assistant and Database Programmer & Web Developer.

Since I'm running out of words here, I'll focus the remaining space on the accreditation topic because from other things that I've read, this is going to be a big issue. One reason that it is going to be a big issue is because of two factors. One is economies of scale and the other is competition. I realize those are probably one single factor, but breaking them apart helps split out the economic and political aspects. One of the boons of distance learning is the ability to share across many many students an expert teacher. Say for instance that a highly specialized teacher of enzyme research were at the University of Austin. This person's expertise could be telecommuted to thousands of students with little effort. However, getting credit for her class might not be so easy. Some colleges may not want to give credit for the class because their classes would not be attended and they would loose revenue. As well, their whole program may become suspect compared to the University of Austin's. Politics and money are the main issues in accreditation. But WICHE was able to overcome some of these politics by being broad in a geographic sense. This removed much of the politics because you usually are or aren't a resident of a certain state. As well some agency aspects were set up to facilitate accreditation issues or questions. For example, the following information is the contact for accreditation issues if you're a student in Arizona (with an email link leading to an ASU email address):

ARIZONA
Certifying Officer for Arizona
WICHE Student Exchange Program
Arizona Board of Regents
2020 North Central, Suite 230
Phoenix, AZ 85004
Phone: (602) 229-2563
Fax: (602) 229-2555