Matkin: A university has to understand some basics of the online learning business. Without that understanding, they really can’t develop a good comprehensive strategy. . . I’ll start in by asking do you really want to simply enhance classroom instruction using web technology, or do you actually want to serve people entirely at a distance? People really get confused about those two things because they say, well we are doing all this neat stuff for our classrooms, so let’s go ahead and do it for distance. We have the infrastructure people, we have the servers and so on - we’ll just do it at a distance. It doesn’t work that way. You need to have completely different kinds of strategies, different student supports, different marketing, even different products when you are serving people at a distance as opposed to just enhancing classrooms. The first big mistake is they say we will just sort of morph ourselves into distance education; the second one is that they really don’t understand the difference between walk-up and IP (intellectual property), and they don’t understand what strategies are associated with those two elements, and they don’t understand the differences. (The "walk-up" model, according to Matkin, is where an institution introduces faculty to a course management system and then basically gives faculty the go-ahead to freely create their online courses. The "IP" model is where the institution invests time and dollars into creating and designing carefully thought-out and uniformly organized online courses and programs.) If they are thinking about the IP model, and how much it is going to cost to develop a good course, the instances of overestimating that are about as many as the instances of underestimating that. This is only the character of some of the basic decisions or understandings that universities must have. There are also organizational structures. For example, how do you organize it, and who does it report to? What products do you choose to offer and why? What are the institution’s capabilities at present? When do we have to create a new unit, and when can we use an old unit? All these things are strategic understandings that have to precede the development of a strategy.

Oaks: When we started our program we went into it with the philosophy that having really strong support services for students was going to be as important as having really good courses. And we found that to be true. It’s been one of the strengths of our program. . . In the beginning there was a feeling that if you had good courses, that was all you needed, but student services - especially for adults who are away from campus and are nervous about coming back to school - are very important. The average age of our student is 36/37 years old; they’ve been out of school for a long time. They are pretty nervous about coming back. If you don’t have good services for them, it’s really hard for them to get in and complete the program and feel successful. We were able to expand some of our services so that we had people available on the phone (toll-free), and then we also developed a lot of our services online. If you look at our website, you can see some of the services that are available to students. We even have a student government for our students that is [conducted] online. We’ve had it for seven years. They do all their voting online; they hold their meetings online. It’s been a very successful part of our program. . . As far as we know, it’s the first traditional institution with an online student government.