Evaluating three years’ use of a virtual university

Clyde Virtual University (CVU) was one of Europe’s first virtual universities. It was founded in 1995 and has received two rounds of funding from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. The CVU project has created some innovative course material and has been cited by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as an example of best practice. This paper describes a summative evaluation of CVU which took place after three years operation and looks critically at the strengths and shortcomings of using the Web to deliver higher education in the West of Scotland.