Three years after taking on the exciting challenge of developing student services for a virtual college with 50 locations throughout Maine, the recession caught up to me and many of my colleagues who were new to the U Maine System and were out of our jobs. Try innovating when your newer people are the first to be let go in difficult times. It happens repeatedly in higher education and it stifles much innovation along with many vestiges of the old paradigm. I went on to spend six more years as a distance education administrator and teacher, but in each case the forces of traditional higher education got the best of the distance education efforts. Of course, any historian of higher education could have predicted that such early starts would be reigned in by the prevailing view of the classroom.
History definitely repeats itself.
This outcome was unprecedented in the history of the Maine System and probably the nation. The thought of a virtual college was so threatening to the existing order that seven disparate university faculties rallied to nearly derail the project and slow it down dramatically. The operation is now part of the U Maine System Office rather than a freestanding virtual college. My next position was with a virtual university, but its new president was focusing on building new buildings and adding traditional academic programs by acquisition or curriculum development - strategies of our old analog paradigm, and definitely not done with a digital age in mind. I was on a short, two year grant, so it was easy to move on to the distance education division of a small private college.