Connecting Students at a Distance: Designing and Implementing a Virtual Community

As the communication and information needs of academic programs with distance education components grow, outreachbecomes a greater challenge. As a result, academic programs need to expand their perspectives and offer a flexible, informative, safe, and connected environment to fit the new paradigm of “virtual” community relationships for participants. This paper discusses one recent case of developing an online community to serve the interaction, communication, and information needs of a group of library and information science program participants