What staff and faculty issues arise in distance education?

Effective selection, training, and monitoring of design and instructional staff may be the most important factor in the success of distance education programs. Recruitment should focus on matching designers and instructors to the needs of the program and its students. Orientation should provide experiences that inform all staff about the distance learner and foster commitment to the process of distance teaching. Instructors with no distance teaching experience will need instruction in the medium or media being used, and assistance in learning how to develop and sustain a dialogue with students at a distance.

The management of staff working in design and delivery teams can be challenging, since many educators are unfamiliar with working under these conditions. Course teams must be set up and time and output schedules planned to ensure that promised courses come onstream in time. The course team's weekly work of writing study guides, preparing video and audio scripts, making tapes, and planning assignments, projects, and teleconferences must be managed. And important staffing issues arise for an institution using part-time staff, relating to what proportion of part-time staff it should use, and how it should supervise their work and control its quality.