“We’re sort of being given special exemption at the moment while the University considers how to deal with that requirement,” Kane explains.

Kane says the exemption was justified since students enrolled in the HSPH program must already have a doctorate degree, unlike other distance learning programs at Harvard.

“They’ve already been on campus,” she says. “This is their third degree.”

But Kane maintains that it is important to look at the residency requirement’s application to distance learning.

“I think they have legitimate concerns and I do, too,” Kane says. “I can see how this [granting of degrees without meeting the residency requirement] could get really out of hand.”

Where Harvard Stands

Despite Harvard’s widespread ventures into distance learning, the University has been cautious in its approach.

Harvard declined the invitation to join a distance learning alliance between Yale, Princeton and Stanford in February 2000. Princeton has since pulled out of the partnership.

At the time Harvard administrators worried that a hasty, large-scale initiative could take professors away from crucial time in the classroom.

And while the decision was made before Summers became president, he stands by it.

“The University’s decision not to rush headlong into [the alliance] several years ago has been very much vindicated by the difficulties that a number of much ballyhooed ventures introduced by other universities have run into,” he says.

Likewise, Harvard made no efforts to follow MIT’s announcement last April of an initiative to make lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments for all of its courses accessible online at no cost through the OpenCourseWare Project.

Instead, Harvard seems to be charting is own course in developing online educational approaches.

Over the last year, experimentation in distance learning has emerged across the University’s faculties, from the Harvard Business School (HBS) Interactive to the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

At the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) several initiatives are trying to tap into the distance learning niche.