Off-Campus Interactions

The success of your distance education course is closely tied to the quality of communication between you and the off-campus student. You are urged to communicate directly with your students frequently. Encourage—perhaps even require—your off-campus students to contact you.

Ample funds are provided to your department for reimbursement of any direct costs related to distance learning. Funds are disbursed by the department head who makes the final decision on their allocation. Some uses for these funds include but are not limited to: phone calls, copying of course materials, or computer software. We recommend that you communicate with your department head prior to the start of the semester if you are aware of specific purchases or services that you will need to have allocated from the DE department support funds.

Sets of mailing labels addressed to your distance students are available upon request. You will be notified 3 weeks prior to the start of the semester and asked to respond if you would like to receive mailing labels. Additional sets of mailing labels are available any time upon request.

Distance education faculty report varying degrees of off-campus student success in their course, and years of distance learning statistics clearly indicate a high correlation between the frequency of faculty-initiated contact with the distance student and the rate of successful course completion. Your distance students will fare better if all assignments, quizzes, and exams are returned to them promptly so that they can better gauge their progress and relieve anxieties. Students, especially at a distance, become frustrated and discouraged if they have to wait very long for feedback on completed coursework.

Faculty have consistently found that as their communication increases with their distance students other problems, such as requests for deadline extensions, greatly diminish while the student success rate greatly increases.