The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance

THE LANDSCAPE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION DELIVERY has evolved from the traditional classroom-based, instructor-led format toward one that is internetbased and learner-led. To manage a change of this magnitude in an era of fragile public funding, universities—and higher education oversight boards and state legislatures—have discovered the potential of inter-institutional collaboration to deploy rapidly new undergraduate and postbaccalaureate programs to meet emerging needs of the professions and to target professionals seeking education for career advancement and career change. Institutions are banding together in innovative ways to capitalize on their collective and interconnected technological and human capacity, and many states have formed statewide alliances for the purpose of delivering educational courses and programs to students at a distance. The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance for the Human Sciences (Great Plains IDEA) that is described in this paper is a consortium of ten human sciences colleges located in ten states that capitalizes on the talents of interinstitutional faculty teams to offer distance education master’s degrees and postbaccalaureate certificates. Institutional members of the Great Plains IDEA are Colorado State University, Iowa State University, Kansas State University, Michigan State University, Montana State University, University of Nebraska, North Dakota State University, Oklahoma State University, South Dakota State University, and Texas Tech University. The Great Plains IDEA was created by academic deans to serve a particular academic discipline within the partner universities. Such an alliance depends on the goodwill of the institutional representatives and the shared need for the programs rather than on a reallocation of institutional resources into alliance operations. While such alliances cannot be developed and sustained without support by the chief academic officers, they are initiated and led by disciplinary academic administrators. A program alliance is quite different from an institutional alliance. Among the differences are the following: