Editorial

Stages of Organizational Capability
When I begin a conversation about distance education with a new acquaintance or a new group, I nearly always find it necessary to dedicate my attention in the first few minutes to working out what perspective my partners bring to the conversation, particularly what type of organizational structure they assume. For example, my response to a question about, let us say, learner support or course design, will be prefaced with a different introduction if I know I am discussing the question with a group of visitors to the United States from a foreign national open university than if I am discussing the same question with faculty in a U.S. dual-mode community college or a professor advocating blended learning in a conventional university. I am particularly sensitive to the importance of such empathy at the time of writing these lines, because I am on a visit to Guangzhou in China, where, among other things, I have been learning about a recently introduced project that engages 68 universities in a national system of expanding higher education in what has already been a successful distance education system. The scale of what is intended when some of my friends here talk about distance learning would be almost incomprehensible to most U.S. educators. It was as I thought about how to explain some of the U.S. practices at the International Forum on Distance Education held at the South China Normal University that I decided a chapter prepared by Dr. Zane Berge (in press) for the second edition of Moore’s Handbook of Distance Education would be helpful, in particular his citation of a model developed by D. A. Schreiber.

As I said at the forum—and now I suggest for wider consideration—when we think about development of distance delivery in an organization, it might be useful to think, in Schreiber’s (1998) terms, of the “developmental stage” of the enterprise. According to Schreiber, institutions can be seen as existing at one of several stages of organizational maturity, or capabilities, with regard to the delivery of distance training and education. With some paraphrasing of my own, these can be said to occur in four stages, as described in the following paragraphs.

Stage 1: Separate or only sporadic distance learning events occur in the organization. I suggest this stage of development is characterized by initiatives and issues being defined primarily in technological terms. Many, if not most, so called e-learning and blended learning initiatives in which professors add some learning at a distance to programs based on a conventional campus distribution of resources fall into this category.

Stage 2: Distance learning events are characterized not only by the organization’s technological capability but also by an administrative infrastructure. At this stage, “when distance education events occur, they are replicated through an interdisciplinary team which responds to staff and management needs and makes recommendations regarding the organization and management of distance learning among the workforce.”

Stage 3: The organization not only has procedures and technology in place but has also established a distance learning policy that guides systematic planning of the application of these technologies and procedures. In this stage, the procedures and processes in place to facilitate the identification and selection of distance learning programs are stable and predictable.

Stage 4: Finally distance training and education has been institutionalized in the organization to the extent that policy, communication, and practice are all aligned, so that the institution’s mission objectives (Schreiber refers to “business objectives”) are being coherently addressed. “The business unit has established a distance education identity and conducts systematic assessment of distance training events from an organizational perspective.” I describe this as the stage at which distance education has become in integral part of the institution’s culture. This includes a general sophisticated understanding of the requirements for quality design, delivery, and learner support. A significant and defining characteristic of this fourth stage in an organization’s distance delivery capability is reliance on effective strategic planning. A strategy guides cultural change and the essential resource reallocation on which success depends.

As Berge explained, many problems can be traced to an organization’s attempt to implement its distance education programs beyond the level of its organizational core capabilities and the core competencies needed to support those activities. This occurs, particularly, when there is lack of strategic planning. It can hardly be overstated that not all organizations, perhaps not even most organizations, should strive toward the most advanced stage of integrating distance education because this may not be appropriate to conducting their institutional mission. There is nothing wrong with an organization’s distance training and education program being a relatively simple one in the developmental hierarchy—that is, a series of events or one or a few separate programs.

Successful quality program implementation relies principally on good strategic planning and sound project management. Regardless of whether the organization develops to a more integrated stage of distance training or not, what matters most is that the appropriate level of capacity for distance education is strategically planned for at the respective organizational level, and that the allocation of resources matches that level of capability.

Michael Grahame Moore
Editor

References
Berge, Z. L. In press. Managing and planning distance training and education in the corporate sector. In Handbook of distance education, 2nd ed., ed. M. G. Moore. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Schreiber, D. A. 1998. Organizational technology and its impact on distance training. In Distance training: How innovative organizations are using technology to maximize learning and meet business objectives, ed. D. A. Schreiber and Z. L. Berge, 3–18. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.