Report on survey of ACODE institutional representatives at Australasian Universities

The purpose of this project, supported by the Office for Learning and Teaching (formerly the Australian Learning and Teaching Council), is to design and implement a framework that uses a distributed leadership approach for the quality management of Online Learning Environments (OLE) in Australian higher education. The third phase of the research for this project included an online survey of ACODE (Australasian Council on Open, Distance and E-Learning) institutional representatives at Australasian universities conducted during March 2012. A copy of the survey instrument that was employed is included as Appendix 1. The survey included items addressing:<div><br />• background/demographic information;<br />• respondents’ perceptions of importance of, and satisfaction with, elements of the proposed framework;<br />• respondents’ perceptions of the importance of possible interactions between elements of the proposed framework;<br />• respondents’ perceptions of the importance and effectiveness of distributed leadership at their universities;<br />• respondents’ perceptions of the importance, and evidence of presence, of a range of characteristics of distributed leadership at their universities; and<br />• respondents’ suggested strategies for building and sustaining effective institutional distributed leadership.<br /><br />A total of 46 current ACODE institutional representatives were publicly identifiable, and were invited to participate in the online survey. Those institutions for which an ACODE representative could be identified are highlighted in Appendix 2. This report presents the results and findings of the survey. In all of the following quantitative analyses, a statistical significance level of p < 0.01 has been adopted. This significance level indicates that the observed result is likely to occur by chance only once for every hundred similar respondent samples, and hence strongly suggests that any observed difference in mean ratings is a real difference. </div>