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VTALUMNET LIFELONG LEARNING
INITIATIVE OFFERS FREE NON-CREDIT
ONLINE COURSES TO VIRGINIA TECH
ALUMNI
VTalumnNET is an innovative
distance-education, alumni-outreach
program at Virginia Tech.
As
noted on its Web site (http://alumni.iddl.vt.edu/about.php),
VTalumnNET "provides a virtual
gateway to lifelong learning for
Virginia Tech alumni."
The program got its start in
April 2000 with an electronic survey
sent to 37,000 Virginia Tech alumni.
Results of the survey revealed that
alumni were primarily interested in
taking online, non-credit,
self-paced courses in areas such as
management, finance, marketing,
gardening, computer basics and Civil
War studies.
VTalumNET currently offers 79
such courses, most of which are free
to Virginia Tech alumni who are
allowed to enroll in one free course
per year. There are also a number of
fee-based courses offered by
VTalumnNET that have open
registration and accept both alumni
and non-alumni.
"In a little under two years, we
have had more than 1,500
enrollments," says Director of
Virginia Tech’s Institute for
Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL)
Tom Wilkinson. Although the vast
majority of these enrollments have
been in the free course offerings,
Wilkinson explains that one of the
goals of the program is to
utlimately have it "sit on its own
bottom and pay for itself." |
