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Online education is becoming increasingly popular among both traditional and nontraditional students. Students gravitate to the flexibility of online courses, which allows them to work around jobs, family, and other responsibilities. While online program growth continues, these programs present several new challenges to educational institutions and their successful implementation requires a clear understanding of several factors that are at the root of these challenges. We propose 2 intuitive relational diagrams featuring roles and interaction among faculty, student, technology, and institution that could serve as a conceptual framework for developing successful online education programs.
INTRODUCTION
The popularity of online education is ever increasing with almost 4.3 million undergraduate students taking at least one distance education course (National Center for Education Statistics, 201 1) per year. About 0.8 million of these students took their entire program through distance education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Some factors related to this trend include student demand for flexible schedules, increased course availability, and increased student enrollment options. Online programs serve as a great opportunity for educational institutions to grow their educational programs. However, the success of an online program ultimately depends on the ability of the faculty and institution to provide quality online education (Allen & Seaman, 2006). Extant literature has emphasized on the importance of faculty, educational institution, and technology for attaining online education success. However, it has left out several key interactions between these entities from this discussion, in addition to student responsibilities (Finch & Jacobs, 2012; Mayadas, 1997; McLean, 2005; Thompson, 2003).
We believe that while these four components (institution, student, faculty, and technology) are necessary and important as single entities for delivering and utilizing online education, the larger risks and rewards for online education occur where these components intersect. This article attempts to develop a framework to aid in understanding the significance of the key interactions between these four components and their relevance to online programs by reviewing previous research in online education and bringing it together to represent a more holistic view of online education. Specifically, we develop two relational diagrams that could serve as the conceptual framework for online programs. Further, we discuss challenges in successfully achieving and maintaining the aforementioned interactions and provide examples from extant literature and our personal...