Our online learning requirement begins in the freshman year with the first required course, The Global Challenge. It is an interdisciplinary course that also fulfills a preexisting requirement as the first in a series of four university-wide core courses. After this first course the university core and online learning requirements are separate, but by linking these two requirements in the freshman year we both leveraged an existing course (although it was redesigned from top to bottom pedagogically and technically), and engaged a well defined group of dedicated core faculty. Students and instructor meet face-to-face for the first few class sessions, including one in the library that explores access to global information resources, and then the vast majority of the class is taught fully online. Significant resources were invested in the development of this course in order to produce a strong benchmark for our ongoing efforts, and in recognition of the economy of scale that would be achieved after several semesters.

The sophomore requirement is for a college-level course (we have four colleges within the university). Each of our colleges designed between one and three courses, all of which would fulfill existing general education or content-area requirements. Students choose one online learning course within their respective college. These courses include such titles as: Macroeconomics, Business in a Global Society, Nobel Literature, Environmental Biology, Film and Society, Career Women in Literature and Film, and The Life of the Mind.

The junior and senior year requirements include a broad range of disciplinary requirements and electives — mostly single section courses that faculty members either already teach face-to-face, or new courses that they want to develop.

While this transformational distributed learning initiative has broad implications on our own campus, it also offers a model for higher education to study. Global education and online learning are no longer merely provocative ideas that a few niche institutions need consider. Today virtually all institutions of higher learning need to consider their implementation in some form, even if not using them as guiding constructs.