Abstract:

As the sport industry continues to grow at the national and at the international level, more and more American students are looking for quality trainings in the field. Online education seems like a viable alternative, providing flexibility and remote learning capabilities to students who are already involved in the industry with their local community, either voluntarily or professionally. But can online education provide sport administrators with adequate skills?
First, a corpus of expected skills from administrators in the sport industry must be defined. In order to do so, a review of literature from the business administration industry and the sport management industry is proposed. Such a review leads the authors to put together a framework defining general managerial skills, like interpersonal skills, informational skills or decisional skills (Mintzberg, 1990) and specific skills and areas of expertise set forth by the industry and its representatives (North American Society of Sport Management's guidelines, academic research including Zakus & al. 2007, Light & Dixon, 2007 among others).
Second, a comparative study is proposed. The Master of Sport Administration at Canisius College constitutes a case of a recognized and accredited on-campus program, which recently launched an online program. The pre-existing campus program remains and allows the authors to compare both opportunities and challenges when transitioning to online instruction.
This paper will discuss the differences between on-campus and online education from the teacher's perspective and point out challenges related to both pedagogy and education technology.