چکیده (انگلیسی):

The nation’s social agenda for improving education and training has converged with national economic
forces (Hornbeck & Salamon, 1991). The emphasison lifelong learning of the workforce through
education, training and development, demands for ever-improving productivity and significant
technological advancements have required new tools to deliver education and training at a distance
when and where it is needed. With the emergence of online learning, organizations have reaped the
rewards of a well-educated and trained workforce. Yet, in surveys, educators reported that strategic
planning was not being conducted for online learning programs (Berge & Muilenburg, 2001; McNickle
& Cameron, 2003), and what planning that was done was deficient in areas such as policy (U. S.
General Accounting Office, 2003) and organizational culture (European Union, 2003). Sawyer (2005)
found that the leaders and managers of online learning programs (from the academic community,
business and industry, the non-profit sector and government) needed helpdeveloping and executing
strategic plans for their programs, people and systems. When evaluating whether to move content to (or
develop content for) an e-Learning program, deciding to purchase tools and/or content, internally
designing a new distributed learning system, or beginning to plan for the future, Sawyer (2005) found
that the state of the research at that time left the decision maker(s) to make critical choices based on
their skill (and/or desire) to assemble and analyze the necessary information that would lead to relevant
considerations being taken into account. One large area where the leaders and managers of online
learning programs needed help developing and executing strategic plansfor their programs was that
they needed a single source that could be located and leveraged to gain an insight into online learning’s
goals, benefits or problems to use as a decision aid or analysis tool. Until now, a comprehensive list did
not exist. Sawyer’s 2005 study was designed to present a comprehensive list of online learning’s goals,
benefits and problems that could be applied as a decision aid/analysis tool to aid in strategic planning.
This paper presents some of the key findings from this exploratory study which used the emergent,
inductive approach of content analysis to conduct a cross case analysis of 607 research reports
published over a two year period to establish the existence and frequency of the dependent variables
goals, benefits and problems. This analysis resulted in the identification of 61 goals that have been set
for online learning programs, 131 benefits that have been documented, and 371 problems that have been
encountered. Conceptual and relational analysis were concurrently applied to identify key concepts and
their semantic relationships which resulted in the development of a concept map that, when combined
with the content analysis, led to the identification of seven recommended online learning communities,
as well as a consolidated planning and decision aid to help decision-makers in their strategic planning
effort.