Virtual campus

Overview

The phrase "virtual campus" became prominent around 1997, when various universities launched their versions of a virtual campus. It is often applied to a single university which has a virtual university “fringe” round a physical campus, but there are some totally virtual campuses, such as the Open University of Catalonia. Now there are at least 10 virtual campus operations in the UK and many more elsewhere. Increasingly a university may no longer use the phrase "virtual campus" while still in fact having one.

A modern synthesis

In Re.ViCa we aim to take virtual campus as synonymous with large-scale e-learning initiative. This avoids the issue of giving distance e-learning a privileged position over campus-based e-learning but begs the question of what is large-scale? Here we suggest some indicators which suggest large-scale - note that not all of them need to be satisfied.

An e-learning initiative in a university - or consortium of universities - is major if it has many (but not necessarily all) of the following characteristics:

• It requires at least one per cent of the institutional budget (this is a rule of thumb taken from Activity Based Costing theory that it is pointless to track from the top any initiatives below that level of expenditure)
• The person responsible (as the majority proportion of his/her job) for leading that initiative has a rank and salary at least equivalent to that of a university full professor at Head of Department level, or equivalent rank of administrative or technical staff (usually an Assistant Director) - and ideally that of Dean or full Director
• There is a specific department to manage and deliver the iniative with a degree of autonomy from mainstream IT, library, pedagogic or quality structures
• Progress of the initiative is overseen by a Steering Group chaired by one of the most senior managers in the institution (in UK terms, a Pro-Vice Chancellor)
• The iniative is part of the institution's business plan and is not totally dependent on any particular externally funded project
• There are strategy, planning and operational documents defining the initiative and regularly updated
• The head of the institution (Vice-Chancellor, Rector, President, etc) will from time to time in senior meetings be notified of progress and problems with the initiative
• The head of the institution is able to discuss the iniative in general terms with equivalent heads of other institutions - in the way that he/she would be able to discuss a new library, laboratory or similar large-scale development

History and detail

The concept of virtual university, now so ubiquitous, is in fact only around 11 years old in its current usage. By the phrase virtual university, we (and most people) mean a university which carries out much of its teaching, perhaps all of it, at a distance from the learner.

Even at an early workshop on this topic, at the EdMedia/EdTelecom conference in Boston in June 1996, organised at short notice by Robin Mason and me (both then at the UK Open University), the room was packed out. There was a workshop on virtual universities at Online Educa at Berlin in November 1996 and the topic featured largely in the Sheffield conference “Flexible Learning on the Information Super-Highway” in May 1997. Since then the topic has exploded, with conferences around the world featuring the concept, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else.

In the past, virtual teaching was carried out by posting text-books to the student, who read them and sent back assignments to be marked. Communication between the stu-dent and the academic was via correspondence – hence the phrases correspondence teaching and correspondence university. This approach in fact still happens in many institutions today, especially in less developed parts of the world.

In the early 1970s, the use of television broadcasting for teaching in Universities (ad-ditional to correspondence teaching) became popular, most notably in the UK Open University – originally called the “University of the Air”. Some TV-based universities still exist, but the tale of the use of broadcast TV in universities (including open uni-versities) has so far been one of a long broad retreat masked by a number of tempo-rary local advances. The paradigm of mostly correspondence and print (with perhaps a little TV) lasted many years, but from the early 1990s, under the impact of information technology in general and the Internet in particular, a new paradigm emerged. This is to use the Internet for all the teaching in a virtual university – thus courses would be “delivered” to the student with a PC at home (or at work – and sometimes in a learning centre) and the student would interact via e-mail and Web pages. Increasingly, people use the term e-university for this. In the past, many other terms were prevalent, each with their own nuancing – online university, net university, etc.

In an extreme model – pure-play, as it is called in the dot-com world – this use of the Internet would totally replace the use of text-books, correspondence teaching and tele-vision. While there are some institutions adopting this extreme view (which has the advantage of simplifying the logistics), it is most common to be blended, that is, to have a mix of old and new technologies, with the new gradually growing in impor-tance.

In the Gazetteer, which gives a list of e-universities around the world (and their Web sites), we give the following pragmatic description of e-universities:

Accredited university-level institutions delivering degree-awarding courses, with a substantial percentage delivered at a distance, with a substantial percentage of these using e-learning. If there is a face-to-face university at the core, we expect the courses delivered at a distance to come from a separately named part of the university, and to be referenced from a high level of the university Web site by such phrases as “Virtual Campus”, “Online Service” or some such.

Because of the need to fund the development of materials, and the fact that collabora-tion is easier and cheaper via the Internet, it became common to develop virtual uni-versity systems via consortia of universities. However, there is no firm evidence that this is a better approach in general than a single university doing the development, often called a virtual campus.

The phrase virtual campus became prominent in the UK around 1997, when various UK universities launched their versions of a virtual campus. It is often applied to a single university which has a virtual university “fringe” round a physical campus, but there are some totally virtual campuses, such as the Open University of Catalonia. Now there are at least 10 virtual campus operations in the UK and many more elsewhere. Increasingly, especially in the UK, a university may no longer use the phrase virtual campus while still in fact having one.

A number of other phrases have crept in over the years. A distance-teaching univer-sity is essentially a correspondence university. An open university is in strict terms a university which has an open admissions policy (i.e., anyone can become a student, although not anyone can graduate – students still have to pass the course) but increas-ingly this term is used to describe distance-teaching universities in general, and even those which are not open in this sense. It was for reasons of this sort that the European Commission theorists coined the phrase open and distance learning (ODL), basically to avoid making difficult distinctions.

And in the last few years, the phrase borderless education (rarely borderless university) has come into vogue, under influence from Australian work.

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