This paper does not promote any commercial or noncommercial data management system, but rather shares the lessons learned while developing a custom application for the general good of the profession. The internal site for employees began with a website engineered to be dynamic and entertaining, such as pop-up sites with daily safety breaks. The organizational website fosters a sense of community in a semivirtual organization. It is a knowledge management platform with storage and retention of institutional learning that ensures consistency and currency of information. The data warehousing effort began as a movement of all desktop databases to the web with the idea to assemble the data in one place, eventually building a decision support system with unstructured queries.
Rapid improvement is the answer.
We used production prototype, not life cycle, development process. We determined a common technology and a look and feel platform. We identified common database elements and created a database of record. Off-campus courses present difficult issues including curriculum integrity, instructional quality, and student support services. Accrediting organizations have adopted guidelines to provide universities with models for successful distance delivery.