GATE was founded by Glenn R. Jones in 1995, "because a global accrediting body did not really exist," he says, adding that "GATE started out with site-based universities, but now is more focused on electronic online education."

The Alliance held its sixth annual conference in October 2001 in San Jose, Costa Rica. Nearly 100 "serious people (from 20 countries) who have a keen interest in the quality of education that goes across national borders," attended the conference, says Jones.

Thus far three institutions have successfully gone through the GATE accreditation process - Universidad Regiomontana in Monterey, Mexico; Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) in Tomsk, Russia; and Monash University in Australia. The entire accreditation process, which usually takes about one year and includes a self-study dossier and visits to the campus under consideration by a review panel, is an $18,000 dollar investment that is typically amortized over a five-year period, which is also the term of the actual accreditation.

GATE-accredited institutions can display the GATE logo at their websites and inside their marketing materials. "Particularly in Latin America, credentialing is so important," says Wyatt. "To be able to have the GATE logo on their literature and promotional material, or anything they use for student recruitment, is extremely important."

The GATE accreditation has also proved to be important for TPU. At the October conference, TPU’s First Vice Vector Alexander Chuchalin prefaced his remarks about GATE by explaining that the Russian higher education market is "highly competitive," with 300 new universities founded in Russia since 1999, bringing the total number of universities in the Federation up to 900. "An institution must be recognized not only locally, but globally," he said. "Most of the leading universities in Russia acknowledge that they must address the international market in order to grow. In the future, this (GATE) accreditation will help TPU be more recognized globally."

"All of our products are global products," says Jones. In line with that statement is one of the newer products under the Jones education umbrella, the Jones e-global library.

"What we did was develop an online model that mirrored an on-campus academic library," says Dority. The e-global library is moving along a continuously evolving development process, with an ultimate goal of building a complete multilingual, multi-cultural, one-of-kind, virtual international library. Initially built for JIU students, who happen to come from a little over 100 countries, e-global library is also being promoted to small higher education institutions, public libraries, secondary education schools and corporations who want to provide electronic resources to their online learners.

Thus far, six primary components have been incorporated into the project and are fully operational. They are bibliographic instruction, research assistance, access to an annotated collection of electronic books and other full-text content materials, access to databases, document delivery services, and reference assistance.

A growing team of 50 contract academic librarians with various subject expertise have been putting together e-global library’s expanding compendium of electronic resources for online learners. "As we continue to build out the content, I’m anticipating we will have about 100 librarians not just from the U.S. Related to our goal of internationalizing the product, we will be working with librarians from all over the world," says Dority. "It’s a huge undertaking."

Another valuable component of e-global library is its electronic government resources collection, which is currently comprised of 350 websites that have been culled from the vast array of U.S. government websites, with documents organized by topic. It represents about 135,000 full-text documents, including data sets, white papers, industry analysis, research reports, import/export trends and trend analysis, census data and more. This resource is particularly popular with business students, Dority says. Plus, resources from international government agencies are currently being added and should be completed during the first quarter of 2002. Additionally, a nation-by-nation focus is in the wings.