The acquisition of basic Information Technology and Communication (ITC) skills is considered a vital starting point for students in the first year of any University course. At the Economics Faculty, Bergamo University, Italy, a level one Informatics course is offered to all students, in order to achieve a uniform standard in first year students. It was also decided that the ability to work within a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) should become a core skill for any student beginning a degree course within the Faculty, thus serving as the basis for further development within subsequent modules of a degree course. The Economics Faculty decided to undertake both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the distance mode.