Categories of virtual campus

From Researching Virtual Initiatives in Education

This page describes the current (June 2009) approach to categorisation.

There are five axes of categorisation of a virtual campus programme/initiative.

Contents 1 UNESCO categorisation of initiative 2 Political level of initiative 3 Existence of initiative 4 Internal scale of initiative 5 Academic level of initiative 6 Distance education initiatives

UNESCO categorisation of initiative

We aim to classify each virtual campus as one of the following four types derived from the UNESCO categorisation:

1. Newly created institution
2. Evolution of existing institution
3. Consortium
4. Private provider

We also distinguish the special category of

• private nonprofit provider

such as the charitable or religious university foundations in many countries.

Political level of initiative

For any initiative which lies above the level of one or a few institutions, we consider whether it is a:

1. National initiative - from one country or a region, state or province within that country
2. Multinational initiative - from a few countries acting together
3. International initiative - from a supranational body such as the EU, World Bank or UNESCO

Existence of initiative

A number of initiatives do not now exist. For these we distinguish between

1. Ceased e-Learning Initiative (CELI) - one which came to a planned end
2. Failed e-Learning Initiative (FELI) - one which went bankrupt or had to be closed

Internal scale of initiative

We have a four level scale;

1. Notable E-Learning Initiative (NELI)
2. Major E-Learning Initiative (MELI)
3. Giant E-Learning Initiative (GELI)

There is an indication given of the scale of these in terms of benchmark measures but what is more important is to give an informal sense of the scale.

Academic level of initiative

We classify this as

1. School - these are not covered in the current Re.ViCa wiki
2. College
3. University college
4. University

It is often quite difficult to distinguish between some of these levels.

Distance education initiatives

A few of the initiatives focus on distance education. For these we note if the institution is an:

1. Open university

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