Illinois Virtual Campus

The Illinois Virtual Campus (IVC) supports students seeking distance education courses and programmes from the 72 colleges and universities in the state of Illinois, US. Programmes include certificates, associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Courses are available in a wide variety of subject areas, including general education.

The Illinois Virtual Campus was established in September 1998 by a HECA (Higher Education Cooperation Act) grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education. In Spring 2008, Illinois colleges and universities reported a total of 192,277 enrolments in distance education, across 11,501 courses. Courses were delivered by internet (81%), stored media, e.g. CD/DVD (7%), interactive TV (5%), open broadcast TV (3%), and correspondence (4%). Of 192,277 enrolments, 173,140 were in courses delivered primarily or exclusively online.

Most online course enrolments in public colleges and universities were from students residing in the state of Illinois. Independent colleges and universities, however, had a majority of online student course enrolments living outside of Illinois (but still within the US.

The Illinois Virtual Campus should not be confused with the (unrelated) University of Illinois Global Campus initiative (launched in 2008).

The Illinois Virtual Campus web site is at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/

More details

IVC reports significant increases in the number of online course sections (14%) and enrolments (19%) from Spring 2007 to Spring 2008. This reflects the general trend since statistics were first collected in 1999.

A breakdown of institution types offering online courses for Spring 2008 is as follows:

• Community colleges: 4,164 online course sections (60,584 enrolments)
• Public universities: 1,042 online course sections (17,989 enrolments)
• Independent for-profit colleges/universities: 3,207 online courses (79,056 enrolments)
• Independent not-for-profit colleges/universities: 892 online courses (15,511 enrolments)

The Illinois institutions reporting the largest number of online course enrolments by sector were:

• Community colleges: College of DuPage (4,125) and Parkland College (4,094)
• Public universities: University of Illinois at Chicago (5,025) and University of Illinois at Springfield (4,047)
• Independent for-profit colleges and universities: DeVry University (78,333)
• Independent not-for-profit colleges and universities: DePaul University (6,571)

Detailed distance and online learning statistics for Spring 2008 are available at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/pubs/enrollPDF/Spring08.pdf

Reports

Interesting "snapshots” of distance education enrolments at five of the 72 IVC member institutions are available online at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/pubs/sharpen.asp (Spring 2007)

Distance education enrolment reports for all terms since Fall 1999 can be found at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu , in the Enrolment Report archives.

Read a detailed account of the IVC’s very thorough distance education reporting mechanisms at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/institutions/enrollment.asp

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