Attachment to President’s Directive on Academic Program
Development and Educational Technology

While your efforts should focus on coordination and extension of the
Distance Education program of the University of Alaska and its MAUs,
processes and technologies should simultaneously enhance faculty flexibility and
the development and delivery of on-campus offerings.

You have the concurrence of the Chancellor of UAF and the Executive
Director of the College of Rural Alaska, to designate the CRA Center for
Distance Education (CDE) to function as a facilitator of cross-campus distributed
work groups using on-line web-enhanced tools. CDE should act as the statewide
focal point for the development and coordination of distance delivery processes
and procedures, for recommending relevant technologies to the CITO and his
ITC, and for assisting the MAUs and their faculty and staffs to enhance their
distance delivery and educational technology training and implementation
programs, with the provisio that there shall be no reduction in the level of
service and support provided to CRA. To carry our this charge the CDE Director
should chair a Distance Education Steering Board, comprised of representatives
from each campus throughout the UA system, to be appointed by the chancellors
no later than 21 October 2004. This Steering Board will deal with day-to-day
implementation and operational issues, and utilize work groups to address issues
and recommend solutions. With the assistance of the CDE Director and his
Board, you will provide to me for discussion at the 11 November 2004
President’s Cabinet, the terms of reference and functional charge to this Board.

You should form an Educational Technology Team led by members of
your staff and the CITO, with MAU representatives from appropriate functional
areas, to ensure that policies and procedures associated with distance education
are aligned with on-campus support and delivery, and with other academic
program development and student service efforts. The Chair of this team should
broadly oversee and support the efforts of the CDE Director in his statewide role.
With the assistance of the Chair of this Team, you will provide to me for
discussion at the 11 November 2004 President’s Cabinet, the terms of reference
for its operations and a set of overarching principles and guidelines for its
efforts; these should include as a minimum
-promoting efficient collaborations across MAUs;
-developing robust, efficient and consolidated distance delivery (e.g.,
course management) systems, while ensuring that most instructional design and
distance delivery resources be located at campuses close to faculty, and (with the
exception of the historical relationship of CDE with CRA) that courses
developed for distance delivery remain the property of their academic programs;
-promoting faculty development at each campus to explore the integration
of learning theory and instructive practice using advanced educational
technology and distance techniques;
-encouraging statewide distance delivery across MAU boundaries through
fair and equitable cost-sharing incentive practices; and
-prioritizing distance program development to meet needs identified by
the State Distance Education Consortium and MAU academic priorities as
defined by SAC.

As an initial priority, you should direct the efforts of the Team and Board
to ensuring that current distance delivered programs, and in particular the
Nursing and Allied Health programs, are significantly improved. In addition, an
early goal for CDE and the Board must be to redesign the UA Distributed
Education Gateway to enhance it as a visible, active clearinghouse of system wide distance education offerings, and to recommend steps to adopt a single
sign-on feature for the UA course management system.

You should plan on short-term supplemental funding for FY05 and FY06
of $350K/year, plus on-going base general fund of $400K/year stating in FY06,
as the planned initial commitment to UA’s educational technology enhancement
program. Prior to release of this funding (beyond an initial $100K FY05 to
facilitate planning), you will provide to me, for discussion at a President’s
Cabinet, both near term priorities and long term programmatic emphasis and a
budget plan for FY06-FY09, including a business plan for funding strategies to
augment state general fund resources.