Approved in 1999 by the Swiss Parliament, the Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project debuted in 2000 with the goal of promoting an information society in Switzerland. The University of Geneva has been actively involved with building the SVC and the European virtual campus e-LERU, a two-year project in which eight European countries partnered to implement research-based education at a distance. These two cross-institutional virtual campuses brought together traditional universities having unequal experience in distance education. Focusing on the SVC experience, this report identifies critical characteristics of such multifaceted projects with the goal of improving their chances for success. The construction and funding phases of the SVC are complete, and the next phase will concern sustainability, which clearly represents a major challenge for virtual campuses. Radical changes in the higher education curriculum might be needed to improve the virtual campuses' chances for success. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure and 33 endnotes.)