Brigham Young University’s Independent Study Program (BYUISD) offered through BYU’s Division of Continuing Education is by far the largest university-offered high school independent study program in the nation. This past academic year 2001-02, BYUISD had more than 43,000 enrollments in 211 distance courses ranging from grades 7 through 12. In 1997, BYU started converting many of these courses to web-based, and they now offer 98 web-based courses. According to James Rawson, administrator for BYU’s secondary education programs, enrollments in web-based BYUISD high school courses have grown from approximately 8,500 in 1999-2000 to 17,000 in 2001-2002. Rawson expects the upcoming academic will show an equal number of students taking web-based courses as students taking paper and pencil courses.

During 2001-02, at MU’s "MU High School", which is part of the MU Center for Distance and Independent Study, enrollments totaled 14,481. Fifty MU High School courses were offered online, which is up from nine online courses first offered during the 1997-98 school year. According to MU High School Principal Kristi Smalley, the school’s online course enrollments have increased from 437 enrollments in 1998/99 to 3,599 in 2001-02.

Other institutions are seeing less dramatic online learning enrollment increases primarily because they are in the early phases of converting their paper and pencil courses to web-based. UNL’s Independent Study High School, offered through UNL’s Division of Continuing Studies, began offering web-based courses in October last year and currently has 18 high school courses available online, with "several hundred" students currently enrolled in these courses, says Principal Jim Schiefelbein. UNL estimates to increase the number of web-based high school courses to 38 by this time next year and is currently developing a national campaign to market their online courses.

IU’s School of Continuing Studies High School, which had about 6,000 enrollments in 2001-02, put 25 courses online beginning last summer and has about 342 online enrollments. "We wondered if we offer a course in two formats: online and print-based, will that increase our enrollments, or will we just divide the pool up?" asks IU’s Joann Brown, executive director, marketing and communication. "We are finding that it does help enrollments; not dramatically, but they do increase."

UT Austin’s K-12 program, offered through the school’s Continuing and Extended Education Department, converted 48 paper and pencil courses since January 2001 and currently has about 300 online enrollments in its High School Diploma and Independent Learning programs. Plus, its University Charter School Online Campus had 650 enrollments during the 2001-02 academic year. UT Austin’s programs are part of a five-year plan, now at the beginning of its second year, to enhance and further develop its online learning offerings for high schoolers.

OU’s Independent Learning High School (OUILHS) has been gradually converting courses to the online mode since 1998 but only recently started to place a stronger emphasize on its online courses. "It’s been a pretty slow start for us," says Director Doyle L. Cavins. "Our emphasis up until the past six months or so has been on the college side." Nonetheless, OUILHS currently has 50 courses available online, with approximately 100 students taking courses over the web.

OUILHS is expected to grow through a stronger push to market itself through direct mail campaigns and more attendance at secondary school conferences. In particular, Cavins sees the market for independent virtual high school courses further developing in states with high drop-out rates, such as Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana. "I see it doing nothing but growing over the next several years."

Indeed, effective marketing and promotional activities are frequently mentioned as integral keys to success in online education at any level. Strong marketing is one of a number of reasons why BYU, for example, has such high enrollments.

"Most of our students geographically are located from Colorado west, including Alaska and Hawaii," says BYU’s Rawson. "But we are growing tremendously in other states like Virginia and Minnesota because we market heavily." Rawson and three other full-time professionals spend a lot of their time visiting school districts and state boards of education across the country to promote and ensure that BYUISD courses meet core requirements outside of Nebraska. "We cover every state," he says. "We go out and visit counselors, and we have a monthly letter that goes out to 3,000 high school counselors every month. We correspond with them, and we talk to them by phone."

At MU, where 50 percent of its student population is from Missouri, retired educators are helping to promote MU High School. "We have former teachers, principals, superintendents and cooperative extension agents go out and visit every high school in the state twice a year to stop and say hello to the counselors," says Von Pittman, director of the Center for Distance and Independent Study.

Independent high school student demographic information from all six institutions reveal a varied student population.

At UNL, Schiefelbein says the student body is evenly divided between males and females on average of 15 to 18 years old. "They could be performing artists, athletes, home schoolers, military dependents, or from missionary families. Other students are taking classes because of scheduling problems, remediation acceleration, they want to take courses that may not be available at their school, or they transferred and missed a sequence of a course and are trying to stay current with a class so they can graduate on time." Homebound students are another market segment, as well as adult learners who never earned a high school diploma.

"We have typical high school courses but atypical reasons why students are in our program," Schiefelbein concludes.

Regardless of who is attending university-operated independent high schools, all six institutions see their enrollments increasing steadily. Keeping up with educational technologies is high on their list of primary concerns, as well as maintaining a large enough staff to support students and beefing up their marketing efforts.

BYUISD is the strongest example of growth, having gone from 30 to close to 100 employees in seven years. BYUISD also recently upgraded its service staff from eight full time employees to 24 full timers. Rawson claims that 70 percent of students complete BYUISD’s paper and pencil courses and 87 percent complete the web-based courses. "Counselors ask us to put more courses on the Internet," he says. "They tell us that the students like them better; they study better; they learn more; their grades go up."