Effective strategic decision making on open and distance education issues

Strategic decision making about education and open and distance education (ODE) issues requires analytic approach supported by a suitable method. The Analytic Network Process (ANP) meets all the requirements of decision making in higher education (HE), but it is very rarely used in practice because of its weaknesses. The weaknesses are related to the complexity of the method and demand on resources in the process of implementation. An upgraded ANP method that combines the ANP with the Social Network Analysis (SNA), which diminishes some of the weaknesses of the original ANP, is presented in this paper