Stakeholder Statistics

Within the stakeholder analysis, all of the groups or individuals that have invested time and/or money are evaluated in this section. Each of their arguments or problems are discussed and they are also analyzed on how they come together for the major issue and this can help narrow down the top three audiences involved in the issue.

During the research of my issue, three audiences prominently stood out and were active within the academic conversations of the uses and skills associated with online writing courses for college freshmen: The college freshmen students themselves, the college professors, and the institutions from whom theses classes are distributed from. These three groups have greatly argued back and forth between the efficiency and costs of using online learning modules compared to traditional teaching within classrooms.

            Students feel motivated to use online learning due to ideas of trying newer methods, however they admit to being restrained from certain online work because of time management (Huynh et al., 2003; Kabassi and Virvou, 2004). Yet, results from experiments show that students develop greatly in critical thinking, research skills, and evaluation (New Media Consortium, 2007). However, less social interaction can be occurred and a higher withdrawal rate is proved. Basically, these college freshmen are stakeholders because they generally serve as guinea pigs for these online programs and they truly deserve to get the best teaching method to maximize all of their hard work.

            Instructors serve as stakeholders due to the potential of them losing their job or/and losing the face-to-face interaction teachers once had before.  However, professors are given a larger audience while teaching the same coursework as before, thus expanding more knowledge. Teachers also complain that they must become technologically savvy while planning the module’s coursework – which takes double the time for a traditional setting lesson plan (Zhang et al., 2006).

            Finally, the universities serve as another stakeholder because they are actually paying the monetary costs and must fluctuate between methods to maximize the college freshmen’s education. Larger secondary institutions, such as UCF, find it rather ideal for online writing courses due to the student population. However, smaller campuses cannot easily afford this method of learning and the increase in technology would also increase to the number of staff around campus. . This increase in technology generally requires a corresponding increase in support staff as well (Young, 2001). It was also noted that departments between schools and this becomes an inter-department type of conflict. As well as certain members of the staff being unwilling or unaccepting of newer teaching methods.

            Overall, these three groups truly give to the academic conversation of writing online courses. The solution will be found by incorporating all of the dislikes made by each and every stakeholder, or the most important, and hopefully a better result will come out of this project.

Works Cited

·      Huynh, M.Q., Umesh, U.N., Valachich, J. (2003). E-Learning as an Emerging Entrepreneurial Enterprise in Universities and Firms. Communications of the AIS, 12, 48-68

·      New Media Consortium (2007). 2007 Horizon Report, retrieved July 1, 2007 from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf

·      Young, K. (2001). The Effective Deployment of e-Learning. Industrial and Commercial Training, 33 (1), 5-11.

·      Zhang, D., Zhou, L., & Briggs, R.O. (2006). Instructional video in e-learning: Assessing the impact of interactive video on learning effectiveness. Information & Management, 43, 15-27.