Designing online faculty support system for open and distance learning

The main purpose of this study is to scrutinize an online faculty support system for open and distance education. This research utilizes two theories: Andragogy (as a learning theory), and Theory of Interaction and Communication (as a communication theory). In this study, Andragogy helped the researcher to understand how to collaborate with the faculty as adults in an online support system whereas Theory of Interaction and Communication provided the researcher with background information about the interaction and communication dimension of online environments in open and distance education.This is a qualitative case study. The participants were the faculties who have the extensive online teaching experiences in their professional lives. This research has four main stages: During the first stage, a theoretical matrix was developed based on the foundations of Andragogy (as a learning theory), Theory of Interaction and Communication (as a communication theory). This matrix helped the researcher to generate and develop questions for a semi-structured interview survey to collect data from the individual face to face interviews. During the second stage, after analyzing the data from the individual interviews, the researcher developed another open-ended semi-structured survey based on these individual interviews to collect data from the focus group. During the third stage of the study, the researcher developed a questionnaire from the item pool created from related literature as well as the codes and main themes from the face to face interviews and the focus group interview. During the fourth and final stage of the study, the questionnaire was delivered to the faculty who had several different duties within the open and distance education system.The findings that emerged not only fulfilled faculty expectations for an online faculty support system, but also the problems faced by carrying out activities of distance education. It is expected that these findings will help distance education designers eliminate and solve the problems effectively in distance education area.The findings show that faculty members want to learn more about the benefits of an online faculty support system. On the other hand, the participants get strongly the face-to-face training sessions of this support system. According to the result, an online faculty support system should be designed as a blended form including both face-to-face and online sections. The participants also highlighted that faculty involved in distance education should get awards, promotions, etc. Besides, the participants strongly mentioned that the contents of an online faculty support system should be designed based on different learning styles, and also a need assessment analysis should be conducted to find out the institutional trends of distance education. The research result also shows that the age of faculty is one of the major resistances not to utilize distance education. Besides, the findings underline that to provide faculty with sustainable and functional distance education, program evaluation approaches should be utilized by the University. On the other hand, a user-friendly approach should be adopted for an interface design of online faculty support system. Finally, the findings show that the institution should support distance education and its applications as well as clearly mention distance education concept at the institutional strategic plan.The results show that the findings gained from study will help and support not only faculty but also instructional designers in distance education.