"We have students from all over the world, but the majority of our students at a distance live in Virginia," says Wilkinson. "About half of our enrollments (from a cumulative total of more than 41,000 credit enrollments since the summer of 1998) are on-campus students."

The total number of full-time IDDL staff has gone from one in 1999 (Wilkinson) to more than 15 who also work with a number of other units across the university that support IDDL’s efforts.

There are 24 degree, certificate and licensure programs being offered at a distance through VTOnline, most of which are fully online graduate-degree programs. According to some "fast facts" listed on the IDDL Web site, 91 percent of Virginia Tech students are satisfied with their online courses and 96 percent of online students rated VTOnline services the same or better than traditional courses.

Part of the reason for IDDL’s success relates to Virginia Tech being a "very wired university," with 90 to 95 percent of all the university’s courses having, at minimum, a syllabus posted online, says Wilkinson.

"There is support across the university for online education; we do a lot of cross-university collaboration. "One of those collaborations is with the Information Systems and Computing Department that provides "4Help" level-one technical support for all VTOnline students. Additionally, under the banner of University Services, there’s a well-designed online help section titled "Top Administrative Issues for Distance Learning Students."

There is also a unique Online Wellness Resource Center (OWRC), that provides students with an online wellness inventory test, along with information about maintaining proper physical, intellectual, occupational, emotional and social wellness.

On the financial side, Virginia Tech’s IDDL Enterprise Fund is a model incentive program approved by the Virginia legislator that is currently driving revenues obtained from online student enrollments back into colleges and departments to seed continuing efforts in distance education development (see page 3).

On the back-end, IDDL has gone from a home-grown course management system to WebCT to Blackboard. "Blackboard has been working well for us, but like any course management system, it has its key points and its drawbacks," says Wilkinson. "We always have our eyes out for anything that might be better."

IDDL also uses Centra collaboration software in many of its online classes. Centra brings together voice, video, data and graphics for delivering live, real-time interactions online. "We like Centra because it is a low-bandwidth interactive tool that works well in terms of support and in terms of providing faculty what they need to get the interaction they want in their classes," says Wilkinson. "Our business faculty are using it for student case-study projects, but we are also using it in our engineering classes, our computer science classes, our philosophy classes, our agriculture classes - it is pretty much across the board."

As an overall indication of IDDL’s rapid growth, the department has gone from maintaining two servers in 1999 to 21 servers. "We just implemented a whole new system that provides full redundancy," says Wilkinson.

IDDL has developed a tiered course management model, which, as noted on the IDDL Web site "is designed to promote scalability and flexibility of distance and distributed instruction. Additional benefits include the minimizing of faculty load while retaining the quality and rigor of learning experienced in face-to-face learning environments." The model is comprised, in part, of the following four components:

1. IDDL is responsible for leadership coordination, management and support of distance and distributed learning environments.
2. Program Director(s) and/or Department Chair(s) are responsible for insuring that the delivery of courses within the program of study are staffed with quality individuals.
3. Master faculty are responsible for standard duties incumbent of Instructors of Record as well as a range of duties associated with the design and development of an online course.
4. Distance and distributed learning instructors (DDLIs) are brought in to interface regularly between the master faculty, IDDL and students to inform appropriate parties of content, learner and course-related needs. "What we do is hire people from around the country who are experts in their fields, and each one of these folks takes basically a section of a course that has been developed by a Virginia Tech master faculty member," says Wilkinson. As noted on the IDDL Web site, "DDLIs are critical to the success of the model and appropriate orientation and careful selection of DDLIs must take place. . . DDLI responsibilities range from managing logistical tasks and providing content and technical expertise to lecturing, providing feedback and coordinating work-based and service-based learning opportunities."

Back in 1997, Virginia Tech identified 34 administrative and academic barriers to building its distance-education program. To date, all have been fully or partially overcome (see page 3).

Such accomplishment does not go unnoticed, as Virginia Tech’s distance education program has been recognized with a number of prestigious awards, including an eLearning Design Award at the 2nd Annual Creating Effective Online Instruction Conference held at the University of Kansas, an Outstanding Educational Program Award from the American Distance Education Consortium, and an eLearning Success Stories Higher Education Virtual Learning/Collaboration Award from the International eLearning 2002 Conference and Exposition.

Couple such accolades with IDDL’s "holistic approach to eLearning" (meaning academic and administrative units working in full support of each other with the overriding theme that the whole of the teaching and learning experience is greater than the sum of its parts), and the prospect of meeting all of the distance-education-related goals of Virginia Tech’s 2001-2010 Strategic Plan is becoming a reality.