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The purpose of this research study was to develop a reliable and valid survey instrument for assessing the satisfaction of part-time faculty teaching in continuing higher education at Brigham Young University (BYU). This article describes the reliability and validity of the instrument that may be used by other administrators and researchers interested in evaluating part-time faculty job satisfaction at their respective institutions. The researchers hypothesized that dimensions of overall job satisfaction (adapted from the Herzberg model) would be measured by subscales on the survey instrument. The factor analysis provided empirical support for eight dimensions. The failure of two subscales in the factor analysis (status and job security) and one subscale on the test of internal reliability (challenge) will necessitate a revision of applicable survey questions. (Contains 2 tables.)

This study investigated the professional development needs, preferences, and practices of secondary school counselors in Utah. Participants included 226 secondary school counselors who responded to a 20-question survey instrument. The respondents revealed that most of them exceed minimum licensure requirements for professional development but also spend significant amounts of personal time and expense to do so. The counselors also identified obstacles with, and preferences toward, professional development that they experience in the increasingly complex and sophisticated school environment. Findings will inform professional development policy and practice in the state and also provide a basis for future research. (Contains 2 tables.)

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) has available for research a large data warehouse of enrollment and graduation information from 1993 to the present for nearly all postsecondary students in the United States. In this most recent academic year, 18 million currently enrolled students alone were added to the database. Some of the following research questions were answered by administrators at the Brigham Young University (BYU) Salt Lake Center using this data warehouse: How many of the students actually graduated? How many institutions did they attend before they graduated? How long did it take for them to graduate? This information in the hands of a distance and continuing educator can help inform strategic planning, marketing, and retention efforts for their institutions.

This article is a follow-up to a previous article, "Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus," published in this journal (vol. 17, no. 4, winter 2015), wherein a seventh best practice to increase course offerings and increase enrollments at an extended campus is presented. This best practice seeks to identify those areas of greatest student demand in which courses are not consistently offered across all four university semesters. Once identified, these gaps in course availability on the main campus can be filled by offering the courses on the extended campus. [For "Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus," see EJ1085163.]

The need for a reliable strategic planning framework for distance educators and their institutions has never been greater than it is now. Increased government regulations, accreditation standards, and competition are converging with decreased funding from federal, state, and private sources, and administrators require better strategic planning. A strategic planning model known as the Balanced Scorecard has met with widespread adoption and sweeping success among the business community, but, surprisingly, has not been widely adopted among institutions of higher and distance education. In this article the authors share what they have learned about this strategic planning model through a review of the available literature and their own early efforts to introduce it to their institution, the Division of Continuing Education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the best practice of using "big data" reports to help distance learning administrators better understand their own programs and represent them to stakeholders. The authors examine five reports: (1) the number and percentage of graduates from the main campus who also take classes at the branch campus; (2) an understanding of how enrollment patterns can aid in decisions to cancel or retain classes; (3) an analysis of the number of non-matriculated students who eventually matriculate; (4) a comparison of the number of students who retake classes at the branch and main campuses; and (5) the correlation between courses offered and courses required for the main campus majors and minors. The reports are designed to answer specific questions and to dispel inaccurate assumptions by creating data to use in evaluating programs and their effectiveness.

This is a "best practices" article focused on sharing six new academic scheduling strategies recently employed by the BYU Salt Lake Center to optimize course offerings and increase enrollments. These strategies are generalizable to other academic programs that help extend academic programs at a distance, including online courses. The Center is an extended campus in Salt Lake City, Utah situated 46 miles to the north of the main campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The distance between the flagship university and its Center pose unique challenges in relation to course and enrollment optimization. Some of these strategies are made possible with the help of new software tools recently licensed by the university to help mine "big course and enrollment data" (current and historical) of a large university with 30,000 students.

The researchers of this study selected four pragmatic research questions that distance learning administrators with high-enrolling Independent Study courses, similar to those that Brigham Young University offers through its Department of Independent Study, may be interested in exploring. These questions included: (1) When tutoring services are made available in a high-enrolling Independent Study course, how much will they be used (demand)? (2) Would students be willing to pay for the service (sustainability)? (3) How will students prefer making contact with their tutor (logistics)? and (4) Does it appear that an on-demand tutoring service could scale with a growing distance education program (scalability)? The researchers selected a college algebra Independent Study course (Math 110) with its students for this quasi-experimental study. Math 110 had more than 1,400 enrollments the year prior to the study. The course consists of 17 lessons, 2 mid-course exams, and a final comprehensive exam. All of the exams are of the Speedback type, utilizing multiple-choice and matching questions that require the students to work through problems before selecting answers. All students (N = 331) who took their first Math 110 mid-course exam between October 2004 and January 2005 were included as participants in this study. The 51% (168) students who took the exam during December or January comprised the treatment group. All of these students were invited, at the time of their first exam, to utilize Independent Study's free Math 110 tutoring service any time they needed additional support for six months following the date of their first exam. As the tutor worked with students, he recorded the date, time, duration, and nature of each interaction; he also submitted students' frequently asked questions and his responses to a electronic knowledge base. The students were also asked at the end of their final exam whether or not they would pay an additional $30 fee for the help of a tutor if they were to take another Independent Study course similar to the Math 110 course they had just completed. The research question of primary significance in this study was how much students would use the tutoring service--the result was that only a quarter of the students chose to use it. Further, the tutor was able to help most students more efficiently than expected because of the emerging knowledge base that contained answers to previously and frequently asked questions. Thus, the amount of time spent by the tutor helping students and answering questions was lower than expected. The second research question focuses on the financial sustainability of the service. The findings for this research question seem to suggest that tutoring services for high enrolling courses may be sustainable for at least the following three reasons: (1) the majority (58.9%) of respondents reported a willingness to pay a $30 tutoring fee; (2) actual demand for tutoring time was less than expected; and (3) unexpected efficiencies gained through the use of a knowledge base. The results to the third research question revealed students' interest in communicating with their tutor via asynchronous email. Results to the fourth question regarding scalability is best addressed within the context of the previous findings. Specifically, the small demands per student on tutor time demonstrate the practicality of providing a tutor for high-enrollment, core-subject courses like Math where one tutor can serve thousands of students.

Today's distance education administrator, frequently with an expertise in another academic discipline, is also supposed to be a distance education scholar. This expectation results from the recent interest in distance learning that nearly all institutions of learning and disciplines of study have shown. More research, studies, journals, and essays about distance education also exist than at any other time. A distance education administrator and an education research librarian at Brigham Young University have teamed up to identify ten pragmatic research strategies to help new, busy, and even a few experienced distance education administrators stay current in their field and successful in their applied research. All distance education research strategies identified were required to pass a distance administrator test for pragmatism, user-friendliness, and efficiency. The ten research strategies that will be covered are accessing library expertise, books from your or others' library catalogs, academic journals, databases, current awareness services, subscription services, distance education Web portals, associations, listserv/discussions, and use of research assistants.

The decision to increase distance education enrollment hinges on the factors of pedagogical effectiveness, interactivity, audience, faculty incentives, retention, program type, and profitability. A complex interplay exists among these scalability concerns (i.e., issues related to meeting the growing enrollment demand), and any program's approach usually requires trade-offs. At Brigham Young University's Department of Independent Study, administrators have recently evaluated the effectiveness of their highly automated distance education classes, determining that more interactivity requires a trade-off with the accompanying demands. This article provides perspectives on these issues and then proposes four models that increase interactivity while allowing for some scalability.