Time Canada
By Chris Turner
True to its name, Canadian
Virtual University (CVU) has no campus, no faculty buildings, no student
union or football stadium. . . . What CVU does have is a syllabus of
more than 2,000 courses at 13 universities across Canada, ranging from
institutions such as the University of Manitoba and the University of
New Brunswick to less corporeal entities like British Columbia's Open
Learning Agency, which brings education to rural areas. CVU offers its
cornucopia through "distance learning"-a combination of old-school correspondence
courses and newfangled online study. In practice, this means students
anywhere in the country or the world can spend years at higher learning
without once laying eyes on their instructors.
Never before has such an abundance
of postsecondary education been brought together in a single institution.
Each offering can be put toward 250 different degrees and certificates
from CVU-affiliated institutions. CVU - barely a year old - offers 30%
of its courses in French and boasts Canada's largest executive MBA program,
with more than 1,000 students enrolled.
"This allows students to mix
and match," says Dominique Abrioux, president of Athabasca University,
the Alberta-based, distance-only institution that is the chief building
block in CVU's online sprawl. When Abrioux took the helm of Athabasca
in 1995, it was a small cluster of facilities 150 km north of Edmonton.
Distance learning was considered the dim cousin of "real" classwork.
But then the Internet exploded, and Abrioux scrambled to stake out a
prominent spot for his school in cyberspace. "The past seven years have
been a complete transformation of the business," he says.
No kidding. Even Harvard has
added an online element to its curriculum. And once obscure Athabasca?
"We've doubled in size in the past four years," Abrioux notes. . . .
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