A distributed model for managing academic staff in an international online academic programme

Online delivery of programmes of Higher Education typically involves a distributed community of students interacting with a single university site, at which the teachers, learning resources and administration of the programme are located. The alternative model, of a fully ‘Virtual University’, which assumes no physical campus, poses problems of resource provision, recognition and accreditation. We describe here an intermediate solution, based on an established on-ground university, but in which both students and teachers are distributed worldwide. We discuss the issues of management, communication and quality assurance that are faced in implementing this fully distributed model. We describe the solutions we have applied in a wholly online programme of Higher Education which is delivered to over 2000 graduate students in more than 100 countries by a world-wide pool of instructors.