One of the theoretical points of departure of my study is the socio-cultural thinking, which highlights the importance of social interaction and cultural context for development and learning, as well as the importance of learning to use cultural tools and the learning in authentic contexts (Vygotsky 1978; Lave & Wenger 1991). One of the major challenges of the virtual university projects is the technology-mediated cooperation and collaboration between the teachers, tutors and coordinators at the cooperating universities. Another challenge is the use of pedagogical models and principles while they are designing and implementing the network-based courses, and giving guidance and support for students. The social foundations for collaboration has been studied (e.g. Gloria Mark 2001) and the institutional models for virtual universities has been analyzed (e.g. Robin Mason 2001), and the roles of teachers and students have been analyzed in several studies. The collaboration between the teachers, tutors and coordinators at the virtual university projects needs to be studied in order to develop guidance and tutoring practices and develop the use of pedagogical models at the virtual university. This case study has characteristics of an ethnographic research, and both quantitative and qualitative methods are used while collecting the data. The main objective of this research is to describe the characteristics of the pedagogical models being used and to analyze the practices and beliefs of the virtual university community which consists of the teachers, tutors and coordinators as well as of the students participating in the virtual university course. The present study focuses on the pedagogical models, including guidance and tutoring practices of teachers, tutors and coordinators at one of the subject- specific networks at the Finnish Virtual University. In this paper the focus is on the analyses of the guidance and tutoring practices. At the presentation the characteristics and challenges of guidance and tutoring practices at the virtual university course are described based on teacher's interviews, and on students' evaluations at a web-based questionnaire. The data is analyzed by content analysis and by statistical analysis. As the result of the study, the characteristics of the pedagogical models will be described, as well as the challenges for the practices of the teachers, tutors and coordinators at the virtual university project.