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Abstract
Search for ‘virtual university’ or ‘virtual campus’ on a popular search engine like Google and, in March 2001, we were rewarded with 71 600 and 58 700 hits. This in contrast to the situation just a few years ago. Apart from the increasing sophistication of search engines, this enormous number of hits arises from the mad rush to get courses online. Everywhere, policy analysts and university administrators fear being ‘left behind’ and virtual universities are being created and virtual components laced onto traditional operations in the name of distributed learning. Virtual universities don't respect boundaries and there is fierce competition and, when trolling for students, some things are emphasised and others hidden. Each virtual university has an opening (or ‘gate') page which is a text that reveals and conceals. The authors examined the gate‐page associated with 231 virtual universities (or virtual campuses). The authors were particularly interested in the extent to which virtual university iconography replicated the face‐to‐face campus or opted for the motifs of distributed learning. They then used discriminant function analysis to examine the extent to which Political Economy (Public/Private), Corporate Presence (Absent/Present), Institutional Configuration (Stand‐Alone/Consortia/Orange Peel) was associated with a difference in gate‐page iconography (i.e. aesthetic properties, use of traditional icons, use of distributed learning icons and discursive elements). The greatest differences were between gates of virtual operations where a corporate presence was absent or present. Although globalisation has smoothed out culturally constructed aesthetic preferences, gate‐page iconography is not just a matter of ‘Web design’.
