This is the story of how a regional consortium of six private colleges and universities, in response to growing logistical obstacles to traditional forms of collaboration, initiated a process of experimentation with videoconferencing and on-line forms of technology-based collaboration. This effort has developed into one of the world' s larger and more active distance learning and educationalresource-sharing networks. It is also the story of the growing realization that strategic relationships can strengthen educational programs and opportunities and that technology greatly expands the pool of potential partners by eliminating geography as a selection factor.
As with many instances of organizational change that yield new ways of organizing basic services, new capacities for production or new sources of morale, the emergence of the one-hundred-one-member Community of Agile Partners in Education (CAPE) out of the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) includes elements of luck, false starts, entrepreneurial personalities, transformation, and continuity. From the point of view of the founding LVAIC consortium members, this process must not be seen as the repudiation or replacement of traditional forms of collaboration for which physical proximity is essential. Just as new technologies rarely supplant older technologies, the LVAIC consortium is as active as ever, supporting a wide range of academic and fiscally oriented services for its members. Even so, its members, individually and collectively, have permanently increased their actual and potential set of collaborators through CAPE.
As economic pressures increase, smaller institutions will learn to use technology to collaborate in an agile fashion, or they increasingly will feel pressure to retreat to "core competencies." Small departments with few offerings will be