Online Collaborative Training: An Entrepreneurial Venture through College and Professional Association Partnerships

Executive Summary The article reports the circumstances that evolved into a joint venture to provide an online training program for sport professionals that is the basis of an ongoing study. The program is a collaborative initiative among representatives from an academic institution and a nationally prominent sport professional association. The authors apply online instructional experiences, findings from the literature, as well as first-hand discoveries from previous studies to an existing intervention. The goal of the intervention reported in the article is to improve mean scores on sport professional certification tests. The authors conclude with a summary of applications, as well as implications for future collaborative initiatives among academic institutions and professional organizations in fields related to business education programs. Introduction This article discusses faculty activities that took place before and during the delivery of online courses aimed at preparing sport professionals for certification testing. The discussion is based on the researchers' many years of online teaching experience and lessons learned about enhancing student success in courses in online learning environments (OLE). The findings from a prior similar study recently completed by the authors were used to guide the development of the project reported in the article. The authors suggest proven techniques for OLE instructors to efficiently develop and deliver effective online courses. The article concludes with implications for OLE educators with a desire to engage in future collaborative education interventions with designated professional associations. It is the contention of the authors that the literature supports the development of entrepreneurial ventures between business schools and organizations, to include professional associations. Online Training in Colleges Business schools continue to adopt new instructional technologies, as more instructors are embracing the enhancement of student learning through the Internet (Driver, 2002). A study sponsored by a consortium of securities firms found that 2.2 million students enrolled in online courses as of 2002 and The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 60 percent of colleges and universities offered online courses in the year 2000 (Wild, Griggs, and Downing, 2002). In particular, online MBA programs are among the fasted growing majors across the globe (Kathawaia, Abdou & Elmuti, 2002). Despite these levels of program popularity, reports of traditional arguments for and against online learning in business schools continue to exist (McEwen, 2001). One study indicates that colleges and universities are attempting to develop broad scale approaches to introducing distributed learning initiatives, which often result in development costs in excess of traditional budget allocations (Hawkins, 2000). This finding may be an indicator of the competitive nature of OLE programs among colleges and universities. It has been suggested that factors associated with college management education are changing as new providers compete for market share in the form of corporate and Internet universities (Boyd and Halfond, 2001). While traditional institutions such as the State University of New York has networked its campuses to provide thousands of online courses; others such as the Kaplan Corporation are providing their own MBA and law degrees (Hankin, 2003). These examples suggest networked approaches being used to access larger numbers of online business students. One newly developed network is called Universitas 21 Global (U21G) with the mission to specialize in e-business courses within MBA programs (Lam, 2005). Central Queensland University (CQU) has been in the business of providing corporate outreach programs since 1971 and has completely transitioned into online delivery systems to provide business education to dispersed continental locations throughout Australia (Tennent, Windeknecht & Kehoe, 2004). …