• Institutional commitment and resources
• Curriculum and instructional rigor with interactivity and regular communication between faculty and learners
• Faculty support services
• Student support services
• Evaluation of the course and programs
In the corporate world, the trainer needs to give consideration to how a training session fits with the rest of the training provided by the corporation and the corporation’s mission, goals, and values. For example, in a clinical setting, are the employees at the completion of the training able to safely use the electronic health record (EHR), or are there common data entry errors that are impacting patient care?
On a course-by-course basis, faculty may develop some activities that provide learner feedback to the professor. A student statement illuminating what the student learned from completion of the activity provides feedback as to what is working and what is not. For example, at the end of each 529blog entry, have the student identify up to three things that they have learned and why they found them to be important. As a final example, require the students to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 on how well they achieved each course objective and to support that rating with some data (an activity or a resource that helped them learn, a product that they produced, etc.).
Equally important to a well-designed and well-delivered course are the support services available to learners.
Student (learner) support services
Student support services are important to the achievement of learner outcomes, learner satisfaction, and learner retention. In planning for learner support services, the faculty may need to assess what support services online learners expect. Nelson states, “putting all student services online will not eliminate the need for support services specifically designed for distance education students.”52, p. 186 That statement is still relevant today. All learners, both on and off campus, must have access to the same resources, but they may be delivered in a different way.
Library
While most schools have online access to full text databases, interlibrary loans, and book borrowing, there is a wealth of other library resources of which the learner should be made aware. The following are two examples:
• Top Sites Blog contains a list of the top 10 free online libraries (http://topsitesblog.com/free-online-libraries). These online libraries contain mostly historical information but can assist students with their general education requirements as well as provide historical information about healthcare.
• Nursing on the Net: Health Care Resources You Can Use (https://nnlm.gov/training/nursing/sampler.html) includes a list of topics with links such as alternative medicine, drug information, evidence-based nursing, and mobile apps, to name a few. There is an extensive listing of links to resources under these categories. This site is maintained by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and is updated regularly.
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) publishes a set of standards for libraries servicing the distance education population, initially approved on July 1, 2008, but referred to as a “living document.”53 Guidance in the use of these standards may be found at the DLS website (http://acrl.ala.org/DLS/). In addition, a bibliography of recent literature on distance learning library services can be accessed at https://distancelearningsection.wordpress.com/resources-publications/.