The Online (Distance) Learning Initiative at FDU is founded on the belief that each of our students should become facile with the Internet as a communication, collaboration, research and learning tool, that the Internet can be used to bring the world into the “classroom” through engagement with Global Virtual Faculty, and that all students should acquire the active and self-directed learning skills required by online (and life-long) learning. In this spirit, the freshman distance learning course, The Global Challenge, uses an interdisciplinary faculty and a largely online delivery to expose students to a range of global issues and perspectives. The sophomore level distance learning requirement is fulfilled through courses within a student’s college. Junior and senior level courses generally emerge from faculty interests and represent a range of disciplines, as well as a range of delivery modalities from fully on-line to blended. In addition to acting as free electives or general education credits, academic departments may choose to develop one or two of these courses as requirements within a major.

In such a broad-reaching initiative, we have worked to establish a systematic set of guidelines and policies, a process which is still in progress. In the pages that follow, we share some of the guidelines and policies that have framed our work with faculty and students and that may be useful to others.