Up to this point we have covered a large territory with respect to what needs to be focused on to achieve success in Internet-supported Learning. It is also natural to ask where do institutions get stuck? What are the key challenges?

Section VII makes it clear that the substantial majority of successful institutions in this study have clear motivators in terms of the intersection of mission and the desire to provide better service to students. We can conjecture that most or alt least many elite private institutions get stuck right at that point. Since most of our study institutions did not fall into that category, we would not expect that issue to arise when asking where the greatest challenges were. To solicit input we again used the technique of collecting open ended responses. Figure 15 shows the grouping of those responses into eleven categories.

The top three categories, or 42% of the responses related to the source of the delivery material, that is, the faculty and the online learning materials and environments that are largely developed by them. This is despite the fact that most faculty are early adopters or others that are hand-picked as shown in Figure 16.

For these successful institutions these represent past challenges. However, in light of the analysis of prevalent and successful support services presented in section X and the best practices and innovations presented in section XII, it is clear that faculty support represents both an oportunity to create a better educational experience as well as a risk that can derail progress. The support services highlighted in section X as well as the details of the programmatic approach highlighted in section XI provide means to reduce the risk substantially.