What a fantastic process you have developed. I am a retired VP Academic Affairs; Psychology Prof and in the very beginning of the distance learning movement I was overly excited to be at the forefront. Fortunately, I had a mentor who slowed me down a bit. Instead of making all of my mistakes for basically no good reason, I teamed up with a couple of other schools to increase our student population and we did a research project to try to find out if there was a way to design an instrument or controls that would give us a greater retention rate and success rate in our classes.

We learned some of the same things you did, but we were all at the community college level (not Harvard) so we were limited on how much we could charge per credit hour. We did charge a deposit to register for the class as there was a large packet of materials and that served as our delineator. Also, while we did have people trying to enroll from all over, we determined that we needed to limit enrollment to within 50 miles of any of our sites. That covered a very large area as we each had multiple sites. Our reasoning? We wanted at least one face to face each semester.

We had, over time, great success. Our task was not near as great as yours.