Lessons from afar

Remember “e-learning”? In the late 1990s it was widely thought that a sea change might be underway in education as more and more of it drifted online. In 2003 both the limits and potential of the internet for business education are becoming clearer. Many people do indeed want to sit down at their computers and take courses at their leisure; but they also want to see their teachers in the flesh.

The market for online-only programmes is shaky at best. The more prestigious schools have had a hard time making them work: their reputations are not on the whole enough to overcome qualms about distance learning. When Unext, based in Deerfield, Illinois, founded the online-only Cardean University in 2000, it recruited professors from the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the London School of Economics (LSE) to develop course materials, but it has fewer than 500 students enrolled in its MBA programme. (By contrast, the University of Phoenix and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, ranked first and second respectively in the Financial Times's most recent survey of online MBA programmes, each have more than 10,000 enrolled MBA students.) Eduventures, a research and consulting firm that specialises in education, estimates that 350,000 students—only 2% of all students in college or above in the United States—are enrolled in online-only programmes.

Several ventures by top institutions have failed altogether. NYU Online, which offered versions of New York University courses, shut down in November 2001. Fathom, mainly sponsored by Columbia University, seemed even more promising: it offered free and paid-for material from such diverse sources as Columbia, LSE, Cambridge University Press, and the British Museum. But after spending $30m, Columbia wasn't seeing enough return on its investment, and in January 2003 announced that Fathom would also be shut down.

But less prestigious schools, not saddled with such high expectations, have more freedom to experiment. Take, for example, Auburn University, an Alabama school better known for its football teams than for its MBA programmes. Schools such as Auburn can use technology as a tool to reach students living further away and thus increase their national reputations. Daniel Gropper, executive director of MBA programmes at Auburn's College of Business, reports that Auburn's most successful executive MBA programme is a “blend” in which participants receive lectures on CDs and discuss class materials online, then spend a total of five weeks on campus. The online/offline mixture seems have to have satisfied both the college and the students: more than 90% of students complete the programme, says Mr Gropper, and two-thirds of them are based outside Alabama and Georgia.

Such hybrid programmes, mixing flesh and pixels, are on the rise, according to Bill Johnson of eCollege, which designs content-management systems and platforms for schools. Schools are also finding a blended approach useful for executive-education programmes. The University of California at Los Angeles's programmes for directors of community health-care centres, in addition to running for two weeks on the UCLA campus, feature intranets for participants to continue discussions after the on-campus session, as well as a web “primer” complete with quizzes. Henley Management College, in Britain, offers a series of online modules designed to supplement the mentoring that companies organise for themselves, while a small number of INSEAD's online courses can be taken with the addition of an “e-coach” to chat online and answer e-mails.

Could the market for programmes with online components expand beyond the United States and Europe? The World Bank has set up a resource guide, the Global Distance EducationNet, for those who want to implement distance-learning programmes in its client states, with advice on everything from technology to budgets. But with online programmes, access to technology becomes crucial: one of the reasons given for Fathom's demise was that the users' technology could not keep up with the demands of the courses.

One place, then, to watch for the possibilities of online executive education might be South Korea, where broadband use is widespread (about 68% of households are thought to have access). The KDI School of Management and Public Policy in Seoul has joined the World Bank's Global Development Learning Network, and will eventually offer both custom and open-enrollment programmes. Korea National Open University (which teaches only in Korean) claims to have “education-on-demand” offerings and hosted a 2002 conference for open universities in Asia on distance learning. Cardean, sensing an opportunity, created EducAsia, a separate business with offices in Seoul and Singapore, in early 2000; EducAsia now offers 52 courses on business topics, all in English (and four in Korean as well) ranging from eight to 30 hours long. Online education may have just found the perfect place to grow.