Late 20th century management educators are beginning to ponder some 21st century possibilities. Will the physical reality of campus bricks and mortar be supplanted by the virtual reality of video pixels? Will the vital signs of institutional viability-campus population, library volumes, Ph.D. faculty-lose their vitality?

Harbingers of Such a Future are Appearing

Prestigious schools like Duke and MIT are increasing the legitimacy of distributive education by investing significant resources to provide courses to distant students in the U.S. and overseas. Fuqua's Global EMBA at Duke graduated its first class and MIT's Sloan School offered its first credit course in accounting over the World Wide Web in fall 1997. UCLA's extension program offers 800 of its courses via the Internet through an exclusive contract with The Home Education Network (THEN).

AT&T, one of the world's largest companies and corporate educators, reportedly is offering at least 40 percent of its programs via the Internet. Other corporations say they are aiming to have at least half of their training on the Internet by the year 2000.

Florida Gulf Coast University, the newest addition to that state's university system, opened last fall with the specific strategy to serve 25 percent of its students via distance learning. The b-school is staffed and equipped so that students will be able to gain an MBA entirely through distance learning. The College of Business Administration at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is in the middle of its first year of an EMBA for physicians (PEMBA) offered through synchronous, interactive Internet classes.

Seventeen Western states, plus Guam, have signed on to fund and participate in Western Governors University, a regional, degree-granting university without walls.

LiveWare 5, a for-profit enterprise in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, less than two years old, is contracting with faculty from institutions like Yale, the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to transmit MBA-caliber courses to Fortune 1000 executives in nine countries.

Another enterprise, UOL Publishing, increased its revenues for on-line courses from $1 million to $14 million between 1996 and 1997.

No less a respected management theorist than Peter Drucker has predicted a dusky end to traditional institutions of higher learning. "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics," he said in the March 10, 1997, issue of Forbes. Telecommunications technologies such as compressed video, the Internet and cable are transforming education in the late 20th century as dramatically as movable type did five centuries ago. Drucker's forecast notwithstanding, most educators who talked with Newsline about distance learning's metamorphosis from extension program to mainstream pedagogy expect campus life to maintain its appeal for certain segments, especially younger students.

"I believe there will be a long-time need for a place for 18-to-22-year olds to go after high school to get their education," said John Gallagher, director of computer mediated learning at Fuqua. "There are way too many aspects of being physically on a college campus when you are that age that are not going to be replaced by replicating the classroom environment in your home."

The versatility of distance learning, however, is now offering universities-and many others-new marketing opportunities among population segments who may not have the time, money or desire to return to campus.

Seen face-to-face, the students who make up much of the distance learning community look quite different from those typically enrolled in a residential program. Some, such as those in Fuqua's GEMBA, comprise an elite group who, Gallagher said, "would never be enrolled in a daytime program at Duke." In the first graduating class there were 40 students from 19 different countries on four continents. They were an average of 35 years old, with 10 to 12 years of experience, in upper- and middle-management, with global responsibilities in their firms.

Anne Drazen, associate dean in charge of technology at MIT, said, "People out in business who need new learning experiences aren't going to want to move to Cambridge for a two-year course. The need for lifelong learning is something we understand the need for and we want to be in that marketplace. Once you get your master's degree you are not set for the rest of your life, and to have to come to a campus each time is not going to be the way it works."

John Seely Brown, chief scientist for Xerox Corporation, and Paul Deguid, a research specialist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, in an article in the July-August 1996 issue of Change magazine, expressed concern that wealth will determine which students can afford to spend time on campus and who will have to learn at a distance. "The more expensive, conventional campus, with all its rich and respected resources, is less likely to disappear than to become the increasingly restricted preserve of those who can afford it," they wrote.

Drazen views it differently. She thinks it is a matter of age, not wealth. Younger students want the campus experience, and the older students want efficient, concentrated learning.

Michael Stahl, associate dean and PEMBA director at Tennessee, said the mid-career physician-executives enrolled in his program are affluent enough to pay $40,000 for tuition, but simply too busy to spend more than four weeks a year on a campus.

Distance students at the University of Phoenix and Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), a 26-campus private school based in Monterrey, Mexico, are similar. The average on-line student at Phoenix has an annual household income of $70,000, said Brian Mueller, vice president for distance education at the University of Phoenix. Jaime Gomez, ITESM's dean of the graduate business school, characterized distance students there as mature, self-motivated and sophisticated, with 95 percent already having professional experience.

Responding to New Opportunities

The concept of distance learning is not new. A century ago, university extension programs were designed to respond to the learning needs of rural Americans.

Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at the Center for Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University, observed in a recent paper that although the educational purpose has remained constant, remote learning in the cyber century bears little resemblance to those extension programs.

As recently as a decade ago, distance education still was considered a second-best learning alternative for students who physically were unable get to a campus. "Distributed learning" called up images of remote sites such as military bases, ships at sea or the hinterlands. Today, learning sites can be a mix of many places-corporate offices, classrooms, factory meeting rooms, public libraries, facilities specially designed for remote learning, homes, planes and trains-even the beach.

No longer is inaccessibility the primary driver of distance education. Demographic trends are creating both a larger lifelong learning audience and a larger college-age cohort. New technologies not only satisfy existing communications needs, but also create a vacuum for new uses and new users. Education, like health care, now is beckoning entrepreneurs who see untapped markets. And decreases in public funding are prompting non-profit institutions also to look for new revenue streams.

It remains to be seen which institutions and organizations will emerge as the most effective in responding to the demand. But with technology pervading all of the places people live and work, the question for the university is not whether it has a sufficient remote audience to reach out to, but rather where will it seek its audiences, with what courses and programs.

"Distance learning gives the ability to create a cohort literally from anywhere in the world," Gallagher said. "It gives you the ability to identify niche markets and address the needs of those markets and be absolutely excellent at that." A school in Canada now can offer MBAs in aviation and agriculture, he said, because it can accumulate students from anywhere in the world. "There is no way those people could find that in a local university."

Some schools, like Florida Gulf Coast, Colorado State, ITESM and Duke, will provide major programs via telecommunications and/or the Internet. Others may be more conservative.

Milton R. Blood, director of accreditation for AACSB, believes that at least in the short-term future, the best opportunities in distance education won't have to do with courses, but rather with the sharing of resources within courses.

For example, Harvard may not want to deliver a course via an educational technology company like Baltimore-based Caliber, Blood said. But, the University of Baltimore might assemble a panel of congressional staff and send a three-hour discussion about a new tax code to accounting courses anywhere in the country.

"It's a tremendous opportunity for sharing scarce educational resources in packages like that," Blood said. "It requires less effort than developing and transmitting a course, but it allows for valuable academic offerings of all kinds."

Just like every new wave of change, with distance education, some schools will be the innovators and initiators, some will be the recipients. How distance education becomes integral or peripheral to a school will depend on a number of variables.

In Green's paper, he maintains that current enrollment patterns and institutional resources make it clear that "the largest 400-plus institutions will play a much larger role in serving the growing distance education market than the smallest 1,400 or 2,000 campuses."

The schools that do not take the lead in diffusing information through technology are likely to become purchasers of educational products. "We will be able to provide to other colleges and schools some of the things we have created," said Daniel E. Costello, business dean at Colorado State University. "We already have inquiries from schools about some of the core foundation courses. They say, 'We don't really want to do those, but could we buy them from you?'"

Most b-schools today are looking at the possibilities of distance education, Blood said, but haven't committed themselves to it firmly. "Some will get involved with something they call distance learning, which for them is opening a branch campus. Others will talk about distance learning as satellite transmissions to Singapore," he said. "What comes under the name of distance learning can vary so much from one school to another, and how it fits into different schools' missions and resources will differ so much from school to school, that it is difficult to get a handle on it. The options for delivering education are increasing, and how schools take advantage of that is really going to differ."

The most powerful motivator for management education's involvement, say educators, is the corporate demand for learning that is fast and flexible. A lack of speed, Costello said, is driving corporations to look beyond both the campus-based programs and their own corporate training programs, which used to take six to eight months to create and package.

"They are dealing with change and the need for information in a just-in-time sort of way. What they want to do is create information and use the distance technology to deliver information to the shop floor or the office as it is needed. They want a simple way of doing that," Costello said.

If corporations can partner with a university or hire a faculty member to bring together the teachers, technology and resources to create the right materials for employee learning, they will do that, he said. Their fear is that higher education and business schools are too slow to do what is necessary.

"Corporations always will send somebody to Stanford or Penn," Costello said, "but, otherwise, for the major part of their management staff, they are going to be looking for this just-in-time information to be produced."

Once certain schools, or for-profit companies, demonstrate their willingness to create and deliver the educational programs efficiently, CSU's dean predicts companies will develop sole-source relationships with them. And schools that offer both a high quality reputation and distance learning courses or programs most likely will be able to partner with anyone they want to. "I can guarantee you that Harvard is going to be in this in a big way. They are going to be promoting their faculty to do this," Costello said.

MIT gets three or four calls a day from companies or other universities that want to create some kind of partnership, Drazen said. "Being MIT and having faculty with specific expertise, people do tend to seek us out and want us to do programs," she said. "But the market is up for grabs at this point. We have to convince the faculty that if they want to do consulting or do stuff with real-world companies, this is a great technology for doing it. I think schools that are not focused as much on research and have more interest in the executive education market may be more primed to do it."

The University of Phoenix is designed to fit into this corporate student niche. "We actively seek partnership relationships with corporations," said Mueller. One of Phoenix's biggest partners is the AT&T School of Business, a worldwide operation that invests large amounts of money in developing the courses AT&T employees need. The relationship allows the university to review AT&T's courses and determine which ones will be accepted for credit in Phoenix's program.

"This encourages employees to enroll in both programs because they can accomplish company-specific learning and also use that toward finishing an academic degree," Mueller said. "This is very definitely part of our strategic plan and one that is a win for the university, the individual employee and the large company because the company is encouraging people to have access to higher education."

Colorado State, a university that has long been engaged with distance learning because of the state's large remote population, is shifting its emphasis to reach the corporate market. CSU recently created a strategy to focus less on its individual students and more on serving employee needs through companies.

An oil and gas company has contracted with the university to educate 100 employees in the MBA program and also to develop certificate programs. The school also is talking with Hewlett Packard, which has four manufacturing plants in the state and more than 100 employees enrolled at CSU. H-P is thinking about creating its own education program.

"The virtual corporate universities are developing very, very quickly," Costello said. "We can either partner with them and do the thing that we do well or we can let them take the market."

A non-profit virtual university that the Colorado b-school probably will partner with, Costello said, is the newly established Western Governors University, incorporated in January 1997. WGU has no classrooms at all. Its corporate headquarters is in Salt Lake City, Utah, and its academic office is in Aurora, Colo. The premise of the university is to allow the population of the 17 participating Western states and Guam to electronically link up to the learning of other institutions in a cost-effective way.

WGU's catalog of courses from traditional and non-traditional sources is on the Internet and students choose courses from there. Although WGU has barely begun operations, the long-term intention is to provide programs ranging from workplace certification to graduate degrees.

"They really are looking to broker programs to a great extent," Costello said. "They will create some of their own, but I think the thrust of the start-up will be programs already in place that they will offer through their system."

Growth of For-Profits

A large part of the growth of new for-profit distance learning enterprises has occurred because most campus-based management schools have been busy providing their programs and courses in the traditional ways.

Bruce Lerhman, the entrepreneur who created LiveWare 5, said his original plan a couple of years ago was simply to match companies with colleges that could supply educational courses for their employees. But, he said, schools were not interested in doing what they needed to do to supply the corporate needs quickly enough, so he decided to go directly to respected faculty members from well-known schools and match them up with companies.

The increasing emphasis on distance delivery has allowed a growing number of commercial operations-often small, but technology-savvy-to compete for the high-margin degree and non-degree executive education programs that b-schools have counted on for cash. EXEN, Caliber, LiveWare 5, Digital Knowledge Assets, UOL Publishing and EducTrek International are just a few of the companies that are jumping through the window of opportunity.

Some of the for-profits are bringing individual university faculty to corporations. Some are supplying educational software for companies to use in their own training departments. Others serve as technological translators and facilitators for distance programs that originate in the university. These entrepreneurs of distance education have the advantages of responsiveness and flexibility in dealing with certain corporate market segments. They can find out what is missing and supply it.

For example, Scott Kline, executive vice president for UOL Publishing, designer of educational courseware for corporations and universities, said he has been surprised at how important the convenience of an on-line course is to his customer base. Clients are willing to trade the live experience of a class for an on-line course that they can take when it suits their schedules, and pay the same price, he said.

Academic institutions, heavily invested in on-site facilities, equipment and personnel, and accustomed to having the majority of their customers on site, as well, cannot count on being able to surpass entrepreneurial organizations in flexibility. If campus-based schools are to gain a share of new distance education markets, rather than simply provide technological access to existing customers, they will need to discover the niche their institution can best pursue and then develop long-term strategies and investments for the pursuit.

Dealing With a Different World

The traditional logistical processes, practices and resource allocations that work in the campus-classroom-faculty office model aren't applicable with students who work at a desktop 6,000 miles from their professor and 500 miles from their closest classmate.

One aspect of education that is altered dramatically by distance learning is the idea that a university is the physical center of the educational universe. The need for traditional classroom space, libraries and other learning facilities, which customarily grew with the college-age population, may remain static or diminish at b-schools that offer courses both on-site and at a distance.

Consider the fact that some of the students enrolled in MIT's joint program of management and engineering schools link into the classroom from 12 remote locations, equipped with two-way audio and video. In most cases, the videoconferencing equipment is owned and maintained by the companies where the students are employed, said Drazen. The school has virtually expanded its size without adding either buildings or equipment.

The MIT students, at this point, do have to spend the first month of the joint program on campus, but if all they want is a certificate, they never have to return to the campus, Drazen said. The process of distance learning at MIT uses a pragmatic blend of communications devices. Students, working asynchronously, are mailed videotapes, then have on-line videoconferences with their professor to talk about what is on the tape. Professors also use the Internet to distribute other notes or materials.

Geography also loses its importance as an advantage or a limitation with distance learning. "It changes the whole geographic nature of the way that schools think about their markets and the way that they package their products and compete with one another," Gallagher said.

The 25 physicians enrolled in Tennessee's new PEMBA program live in 11 U.S. states. Except for one week each quarter that they spend on campus together, their regular contact is synchronous, two-way audio and chat window on the Internet, from nine to noon on Saturday mornings. With symposium software on their laptop computers, students can log on from the office, home, hotel room, the beach in Cancun or wherever else they happen to be at the time, Stahl said.

Dick Pegnetter, dean of the management school at the new Florida Gulf Coast University, pointed out that his school doesn't need any physical presence at all in its primary service area, the southwestern part of Florida. In addition, people from distant companies, like a prestigious New York financial firm, can be exposed to the school and its students even if they never leave their offices. "They essentially are going to have a connection to us and our students that previously wouldn't have been financially feasible," said Pegnetter.

Florida Gulf Coast also will explore partnerships with other schools, bringing in less standard courses, such as hospitality management, via technology, and thus filling out the school's MBA concentrations without adding programs.

The real-time routine of on-campus life also diminishes with most on-line learning. Although synchronous courses offered over two-way videoconferencing or Internet audio still demand that everyone gather at the same time, asynchronous courses don't have that limitation. The dreaded Monday morning class may now be postponed until Tuesday evening.

"One of the strongest appeals I see right now on the corporate side of distance learning," said Costello, "is that you really do have the ability to determine the place that you want to consume it
and the time you want to consume it."

While the convenience of time and place may improve with distance offerings, it doesn't mean there is less rigor. For example, the 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in on-line management and information systems courses at the University of Phoenix have to log on five of seven days a week. Attendance, traditionally ascertained by physical presence, is measured on-line by both the quality and quantity of the remarks students contribute to the discussion.

"It is not possible for you just to register your attendance by coming and sitting in the back of the classroom," said Mueller. "The only way we know you're there is by your interaction." He added that professors for these courses only are dealing with 11-12 students, compared to 100 that might be registered in a traditional course.

The Phoenix students take one course at a time, for five weeks at the undergraduate and six weeks at the graduate level. Each week, the professor downloads four hours of lecture notes and discussion questions. Students can access the lecture from anywhere in the world, using proprietary software, and participate in the session asynchronously. Students also E-mail their assignments and have the evaluated work returned quickly.

The technological requirements of distance learning also are different.

In northern Colorado, Colorado State University is preparing to test the Internet courseware design for a distance EMBA, in spring of 1998, Costello said. Students and the professor will gather in an "advanced business applications lab," around an oval table with an open center. Each of the 20 stations has an embedded PC. Inside the oval, across from each person are two monitors positioned beneath normal eye level, so that vision is not impeded for the people seated at the table. These monitors offer channels for videoconferencing and data display. Between the monitors are four cameras that focus on individuals or the group during a discussion. The instructor has control of an overhead camera to add information to the system, but otherwise he or she sits at the table as an equal.

The instructor will not lecture, but rather bring up issues and cases for discussion. The course professor and instructional designer then will choose the desired parts of the class discussions and put those into a learning module, supplemented with text, video clips, charts or other visuals. This will be the software for the course to be used by on-line students in 50 states and 11 countries, Costello said. Students not able to be on-line will receive CD-ROMs.

At ITESM, with 25,000 students in 25 different cities taking courses via the Internet and teleconferences, graduate students have to have their own laptops, Internet applications, Lotus Notes and any other accessories required by the course or project. MIT students often use their companies' equipment, such as PCs, laptops or videoconferencing links.

When students are supplying essential equipment for a course, a university has to be mindful of how it improves its infrastructure. "We have to walk that fine line," Mueller said, "between continuing to add things we can offer in terms of educational materials on-line, versus not making it so high end and sophisticated that we eliminate people because their computers aren't upgraded to the point where they can participate."

Ensuring Quality and Desirable Outcomes

Finding practical solutions to logistical issues, such as equipment upgrades, materials distribution and staff deployment at remote sites, has to be integrated into the long-term planning process, educators say.

ITESM put a seven-point, long-term plan in place three years ago. One of those points is a strategy for a virtual university, Gomez said. "It is intended to become a university for universities and will affect not only distance education, but also the traditional processes."

All 26 of ITESM's campuses will be re-engineered in accordance with distance learning. "Learning might take place face-to-face, but it still will be designed on a distance learning basis-with the emphasis on learning, as opposed to teaching; interaction, as opposed to monologues; student-based, as opposed to professor-based," said Gomez.

Pegnetter cautioned that schools that don't approach distance learning with strategic thinking, and instead provide a grab bag of courses based on certain faculty interests, will put the burden on their students to come up with a strong program from the mix of what is available.

"It's an issue that needs watching," Pegnetter said. "Is there some strategic planning for how the pieces get put together and how the quality is managed within the university, or is it just serendipitous?"

A quality school, Gallagher agreed, has to pay as much attention to supporting and responding to the needs of distance students, just as it does to those in residential programs. Eventually, the greater technological requirements, strategic planning and organizational demands of distance learning are going to spill over into the campus-based operations, causing institutions to improve their internal efficiencies. "When we say that distance learning will have us thinking in different ways, it doesn't mean thinking to compensate for deficiencies," said Blood. "It may be there are real opportunities for things being done better in the whole institution."

Costello agrees. "The university can't just sit back and take the added revenues from increased distance enrollments. New models have to be developed to deal with all of this. I think it will truly have a trickle down impact on our traditional programs, because all of a sudden, we can package information. We don't have to stand up and lecture any more. We can spend quality time working with students in groups on problems and really enriching the learning environment."

But opinions vary on how much quality and prestige distance learning will achieve.

Brown and Deguid, in the article mentioned earlier, wrote, "the notion of the virtual campus underestimates how universities as institutions work, and overestimates what communication technologies do .... An on-line degree almost certainly will not command the same respect as its distant campus cousin."

MIT's Drazen, though, believes the customer may have greater regard for distance learning. "I think students think it has more value because they are able to stay in their lives and in their jobs. They have performed as well or better than local students on their tests," she said.

Students in Phoenix's on-line programs also are scoring at a slightly higher rate on comprehensive cognitive assessment tests given after a course than those on campus.

On-line learning, Mueller said, allows everyone to participate equally, unlike the classroom where three or four may dominate a discussion based on their verbal ability or their presence. "This is very much a setting where you are evaluated strictly on the quality of your comments and your ability to think. The two things that really differentiate it are the great deal of communication going on, not just between the students and the instructor, but among students. Also, we consider the learning to be very rich because we have professionals with lots of working experience in our programs, all able to happen in this environment," he said.

Florida Gulf Coast, Pegnetter said, does not assume that quality must be sacrificed because students are off site. "We would expect to have the same successful outcomes identified in all of our courses, whether they are being offered at a distance or with some special enhancements or technology, or they are being offered on site," he said. For example, he said, "If learning team skills is part of the course, then we're not going to ignore that for the distance students and provide that only for the campus students. That wouldn't be the same course."

When it comes time for a team to report to the class on its project, the remote students will be assembled at a site with videoconferencing capabilities and present their project synchronously to the class and professor through compressed video. "We are not distinguishing any quality differences between the programs that we use technology to distribute or those that are on our campus," Pegnetter said. The school still is developing the ways it will measure outcomes in distance learning.

One of the arguments against heavy diets of distance learning has been the loss of personal interaction among students and faculty. Several of those interviewed acknowledged that the social aspects of extracurricular campus life certainly are not available on-line. That is why the campus socialization experience for young students promises to maintain its allure.

But even so, the educators said they find a richness and depth to student-student and student-faculty interaction that may surpass what happens face to face.

Tennessee's Stahl believes that given the level of training, experience and insight the PEMBA students possess, they are a primary source of learning for each other. The synchronous, interactive distance technology that brings them together permits a sharing of knowledge and a development of new knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be happening among this particular segment of professionals.

ITESM's Gomez said a strict comparison between distance and campus learning isn't fair because the processes are too different. "But," he said, "we actually believe that distance learning provides a more enriching and enhanced way of learning." Gomez said education at a distance, as opposed to in a classroom, makes the process less oriented to the faculty's role of teaching and more oriented to the students' tasks of thinking and inquiring.

EMBAnet, an on-line consortium begun by a Canadian group, includes some 30 institutions, not only in the United States and Canada, but also in China, Japan, India, France and countries in South America. "We use this as a mechanism for collaborative learning so that our students have an opportunity to share ideas with other students throughout the world and our faculty have the opportunity to work with other faculty on potential projects for their students," Costello said. "I think it provides something the traditional classroom does not. It is a real strength in terms of putting students in touch with other peers in other countries and other industries and types of corporations."

Another aspect of distance learning that faculty members report, Phoenix's Mueller said, is that they are maintaining more long-term professional relationships with on-line students than with their classroom students. Students continue to E-mail questions and concerns to professors about work-related or academic issues even after a course is over. "That sense of community, even though it doesn't happen face to face, still is happening," Mueller said.

Faculty Adaptation, Training and Development

Not every faculty member in a business school will be engaged with distance education. Some will choose not to, and some will not be chosen.

"There is no question that faculty have to be more creative to work on distance learning courses," said Fuqua's Gallagher. "A great deal of energy is expended in supporting faculty. It's a new format, it's a new paradigm of teaching that says you can't stand in front of students and talk to them for four and a half hours a week."

Developing faculty to be proficient with distance education might eventually require adding another avenue for faculty, suggests ITESM's Gomez. "Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth category, in addition to teaching, consulting and researching, which is of greater complexity than the prior three."

The complexity comes not only from the need to develop new learning materials, and to work with instructional designers, but also to have a better understanding of the cultures that distance courses are reaching. Gomez said ITESM's professors have to travel to the countries where their programs will be downlinked.

"We need to make our educational processes culturally pertinent and relevant," Gomez said. "Any time we talk about international business and use acronyms, such as GE, Wal-mart, J.C. Penney, and many others, Peruvian, Chilean and Brazilian students are not familiar with them. Professors need to enrich substantially their management models to include the Japanese, German and Latin American. We need to know about Peruvian and Chilean companies and how they are doing."

Like ITESM's, Florida Gulf Coast's faculty know well in advance that distance instruction is a requirement. It is stipulated in every contract.

"Strategically central to being able to carry this off," Pegnetter said, "is that everybody we hired either had a background or an interest in technology and distance learning. We have faculty who are excited about doing this, rather than having to find a few people who can champion it and take it forward and then hope that other faculty will get on board."

Florida Gulf Coast also has an additional dean, the dean of instructional technologies. Pegnetter said this position is critical to being able to build an infrastructure that integrates technology with programs. "The structure we put in place is that academic units and technological units work together. We are constantly sharing back and forth the technology they are encouraging and what we need in our programs," Pegnetter said.

Fuqua also has a centralized technology staff that works on the GEMBA program, as well as executive education courses and the EMBA. "The faculty all flow from program to program," Gallagher said. "What they teach is embodied in many ways in the materials of the courses they create and those materials move with faculty from program to program.

"They receive considerable support in mapping instructional objectives and materials into a form appropriate for distributed learning. Once in that form, it turns out that much of the time it also is appropriate for other programs," he said.

As faculty want to try out other ways of presenting material using distance technology to full capacity, CSU's Costello said, instructional design will become a whole field. "It is inevitable that this will happen because the faculty cannot and should not become totally experts in the technology itself. It would be a waste of their time to do that."

Already, packages such as Lotus Learning are being developed to help faculty members build whole courses and create modules designed for their distance classes, Costello said. A professor can use a "media center" to assign print or video clips for students. A collaborative module allows distance students to work in teams and an assessment module permits the faculty member to test what students learned in the process. "These things are coming about very rapidly," Costello said. "If we in education do not embrace this, others will."

Does distance teaching, and the new learning and preparation that go into it, merit extra rewards?

At Fuqua, faculty are compensated for the extra time it takes to develop a syllabus, prepare materials and structure a course for the distance format, Gallagher said, but after that they receive no differential reward. The quality of teaching in the distance learning area is not regarded any differently than the quality of teaching in the residential program.

What will the cost of embracing this new direction be for faculty members themselves?

Some articles have suggested that the need for teachers, like the need for bricks and mortar, will decrease as "star" faculty monopolize the airwaves.

Gallagher thinks the opposite is more likely to happen. "The ability to reach niche markets and put spin on subject matter areas should cause a flowering rather than a dying off of variety," he said. In addition, Gallagher believes the audience for management education, and therefore the demand for teachers, will substantially increase because instead of a market consisting only of those who can leave a job and come to a campus, it will expand to anyone who can carve out 15 hours a week to work on an MBA.

Costs, Revenues and Resources

Growing numbers of colleges and academic programs are like gold rushers, Green wrote in his paper on distance learning, hurrying to get into the distance action without a good map of the terrain.

"Technology-laden distance education is neither simple nor inexpensive," said Green. "It is best viewed as a business, one that involves real-and recurring-costs: money, time, personnel, content and a significant technological infrastructure."

Green cited some possible costs for instructional tools in a technology-laden world. It might take $20 to $50 for a work-study student or media specialist to videotape a lecture; $200 to $2,000 for 60 minutes of unedited classrooms video; $100,000 for 60 minutes of a commercial-quality video.

Even with the growth in use of the less expensive Internet, Green contends, the cost of establishing the resources for original instructional development is much more than seed money grants of $5,000 to $10,000. Putting together the interdisciplinary teams of content specialists, instructional designers and code writers is expensive and doesn't ensure a successful venture. "The campus experience over the past decade reveals that the dollars can be daunting and the return on investment highly uncertain," he said.

Budget outlays must cover more than the cost of enhancing existing structures or improving existing processes. To deliver the content of a course at a distance requires new investments in such things as upgraded communications systems, equipment, designers and technicians.

"You need to have parallel provisions in place to deliver programs in this different context and there definitely are costs involved in that process," said Gallagher. "There are both immediate and developmental, as well as long-range costs, in keeping that material or developing that material and delivering it."

But what is created for remote students likely will enhance what is available to the residential students. For example, video materials prepared for distance courses that summarize important points for review can be put on a CD-ROM and distributed through the library for campus students. "It is not that you are producing material that only can be used in one environment or another. They do flow back and forth," Gallagher said. "In a lot of ways it can infuse new breath of life and quality into the materials that are used in the daytime programs."

How to Make Sure It's a 'Real' MBA?

The proliferation of distributed management offerings raises new questions about how credits, courses and programs will be recognized both in academia and in business.

Costello believes the range of educational programs now available through distance technology has made accreditation less important in the marketplace. He said his own school's accreditation isn't what attracts companies, but rather the fact that CSU addresses the issues of time and access. "I think we've got to be able to better tell people what difference it makes to be accredited," he said.

Because corporations are determined to obtain programs that are geared to meet the needs of their workers, that becomes the top priority, Costello said. "Companies don't have the ability to assess whether what they are receiving is at the level of quality that they should be getting. They are not able to discern the differences, and institutions of higher education have not done a very good job of marketing accreditation either," he said.

Recently, AACSB established a task force to explore issues of quality assurance and accreditation for courses and programs held beyond the campus. "Distance learning is taking so many different forms now," said AACSB's Blood. "We will look to see what are the key issues that schools have to deal with in developing quality distance learning programs, and provide any guidance we can to schools getting into that area."

Until the establishment of the task force, Blood said, AACSB had been working on an ad hoc basis with schools that were developing distance programs. The growth of this activity warrants guidelines so that every school doesn't have to start from scratch, he said. But distance technology and ideas for its use are increasing so rapidly that it would be a mistake to get too specific in designing recommendations. "We don't want to create anything that freezes everybody in place. We simply want to help people know where to work, where to give their attention," he said.

Another constellation of concerns centers on demonstrating performance: How to assess the learning taking place, both in terms of the success of the school's program and how to certify it through credits or degrees.

Florida Gulf Coast's b-school is eager to go through the process of gaining accreditation by AACSB, Pegnetter said, as soon as it gains standing with its regional accrediting agency.

ITESM also is glad to be a pioneer in looking for the criteria to accredit distance learning schools. "Distance learning enhances the accreditation procedure in a very provocative way," Gomez said. "The traditional accreditation process is based on face-to-face interaction. It is more teacher-oriented. This is more flexible and asynchronous. Perhaps the outcome may be similar, but the criteria need to be different."

Even though the market demand for distance learning opportunities currently may be exceeding the demand for accredited distance learning, Blood believes this will turn around.

"Will distance learning dilute the requests for accredited learning?," he asked. "No. I think the opposite. With more and more options available to students, the need for ways to demonstrate quality, the need for quality assurance is going to become even greater, not smaller. It will challenge us to expand, not retract, in how we go about looking at quality."

Blood believes that if learners want academic credentials for work they have done in various distance courses, the universities will have to know the content, the measurement processes and the outcomes of the course. Schools or vendors will have to have some way to answer those questions. "Traditional schools still are going to be the majority of degree awarders, "Blood said. "They will need a way to evaluate when students come and say, 'I've had an equivalent course.'"

For a while this process might be done on a case-by-case basis, but as distance education grows, large employers are going to want a more efficient method of knowing if their employees are taking credit-worthy courses.

"As more learning options are developed, the people who deliver them won't want to be degree deliverers," Blood said, "but they will want a way to demonstrate that what they are delivering is worthy of credit and acceptable in a degree program."

The American Council on Education (ACE) has developed a process for a course-by-course evaluation of corporate educational offerings to determine which are credit worthy. Blood said the inquiry about how AACSB will serve the management course market still is in its initial stage, but it is being thought about and discussed.

What the Future Holds

Distance education, unarguably, is playing a growing role in the development of managers. The tidal wave of communications technologies in business is requiring corporations to make use of them. The salability of distance products is motivating entrepreneurs to market them. The benefits of being able to transmit and receive information and engage in learning and inquiry with practitioners and academicians across miles compels educators to participate in the process.

Regardless of how the leaders and followers sort themselves out, a paradigm shift is happening in professional education, said Fuqua's Gallagher. Distance learning through technology is going to be the dominant model down the road. "There is just way too much advantage to being able to create a community of very high quality and like-minded people regardless of where they reside," he said.

Does this mean digitally compressed images and electronic classrooms ultimately will supplant the ivy-covered walls of the university? If they do, students in the cyber century will experience both a contraction and an expansion in the new halls of learning--a 12-inch window that literally opens onto the entire world.