Taxonomy of higher education delivery modes: a conceptual framework

ABSTRACT

Even after the two decades of the Internet’s emergence, the higher education sector has not fully capitalized on the online platform’s efficiency. Online education has remained a small proportion of the overall course/degree program offerings at most universities. While the online platform enables cost and time efficiencies due to its inherent spatial and temporal flexibilities, it also creates efficacy challenges in meeting diverse learning and pedagogical needs. Before the coronavirus pandemic, online education was predominantly deployed in an asynchronous mode, resulting in a lack of effective student engagement, personalized learning, integrity issues, and market acceptance. The Covid-19 pandemic has compelled the widespread adoption of synchronous online education that can remove efficacy barriers of asynchronous online mode. Based on the efficiency and efficacy tradeoffs, a conceptual framework for classifying various higher education delivery modes is presented in this article. The framework can help higher education stakeholders choose the most appropriate delivery mode based on their diverse needs.

Notes

¹ Higher education is emphasized in this article, but the ideas and framework are easily applicable for tertiary education.

² Source: Collegescorecard.ed.gov data from the U.S. Department of Education

³ Source: National Center for Education Statistics data from the fall 2018 semester

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bhavik K. Pathak

Dr. Bhavik K. Pathak is the Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Accreditation and Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at the Judd Leighton School of Business and Economics at Indiana University South Bend. His primary research interest is on the impact of Internet technologies on business. Dr. Pathak has investigated how ICT-led technologies and business models, such as recommender systems, virtual communities, comparison shopping agents, and MOOCs/HyFlex education, impact retailing, electronic markets, and online education. He has been published in premier academic journals, including Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Retailing, Electronic Markets, and Communications of the AIS. Dr. Pathak serves as Associate Editor of Decision Support Systems. He earned a Ph.D. in operations and information management from the University of Connecticut.

Shailendra C. Palvia

Dr. Shailendra C. Palvia is Professor Emeritus of MIS at Long Island University (LIU) Post. At LIU, he was Director of MIS during 1997-2004. He received his Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Minnesota, and B.S. in Chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He has published over 150 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings including Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Information & Management, and Communications of AIS. He is Founding Editor (1999-2007 and 2013-2020) and currently advisory editor of the Journal of IT Case and Application Research (JITCAR). During 2002-2013, he chaired eleven annual international smart-sourcing conferences in USA, India, and South Korea. He was nominated by the LIU Post to receive Robert Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Award in 2012 and 2016. Dr. Palvia has co-edited four books on Global IT Management and one book on Global Sourcing Management. He spent four months of January to April, 2017 at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India as Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar. He has been an invited speaker (including keynote speaker) to Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and USA.