In two and one half years, WebCampus at the Stevens Institute of Technology has grown from offering three online courses to 60 online courses in 17 programs (16 graduate-level certificate programs and one master’s degree program).

Within 18 months, WebCampus reached the break-even point on its initial investment and has, to date, achieved a surplus of more than $1 million. Plus, in FY2002-03, WebCampus estimates it will generate about $2 million in tuition revenue and another surplus of $1 million. The number of enrollments at WebCampus currently totals 1,000, and enrollments have consistently doubled, or more, each semester during its short history.

"We expect 2,000 enrollments next year," says Robert Ubell, Stevens’s dean of online learning. "Even though we are very small and localized, our experience has been parallel with the big providers of distance education, such as the University of Maryland University College and the University of Phoenix."

Ubell and a very small team of two full-time, technical-support graduate assistants and a full-time customer service professional have managed to keep the WebCampus ship sailing smoothly. Stevens has recently advertised for an associate director to help lighten the load of the team. However, effectively maintaining such a small staff has definitely helped contribute to the WebCampus surplus.

Of course there are a number of other important factors that have helped to bring about the continued growth and sustainability of WebCampus. Number one is the way WebCampus works with its faculty, more than 90 percent of whom are full-time permanent senior or tenured Stevens faculty.

"We treat our faculty with a great deal of respect in terms of what it means to get an online course up and running," says Ubell. "We don’t think it is simply to migrate a course from face-to-face to online. We know it takes an enormous amount of intellectual effort, as well as a great deal of time, to provide quality education online."

WebCampus faculty receive supplemental compensation for both developing and teaching online courses over and above their typical full load. "We want to make it extremely attractive for our faculty to consider teaching online," says Ubell. Additionally, WebCampus has a model intellectual property agreement that resembles those typically used in scholarly publishing, whereby faculty transfer their copyrights related to just the online portion of their courses. "Everything else belongs to the faculty," says Ubell. "The ability to teach face-to-face, the ability to publish, the ability to lecture, and the ability to consult using the same material stays with the faculty." Stevens handles marketing and distribution of the online courses, and faculty receive a royalty, whether or not they teach the course themselves, based on the percentage of revenue generated by the online course. Plus, if the online course happens to be licensed elsewhere, such as to another institution or corporation, says Ubell, "the faculty member receives one-third of any income we earn."

In relation to course and faculty development, WebCampus has a very simple process in place for creating online courses and training its faculty. Essentially, a Stevens on-site training department, comprised of only 2.5 employees, teaches faculty how to develop asynchronous courses inside the WebCT platform, which Stevens licenses and hosts on its own server. WebCT is also used for enhancing face-to-face classes at Stevens. The two graduate assistants who work for WebCampus also assist faculty with mounting courses online.

"We don’t think, given our experience so far, that we need instructional designers," says Ubell. "The faculty want to do it all by themselves; they don’t want to get tangled up in design; they use the simplest and most easily managed tools, all of which are asynchronous." Ubell adds that WebCampus does not recommend synchronous technologies primarily because WebCampus students typically are unable to attend time-specific events. Plus, 20 percent of WebCampus students are international students, meaning time zone differences would not be conducive to offering any "live" class components.

"Courses are managed intellectually and pedagogically by the departments," says Ubell, adding that "our aim is to deliver exactly the same content online as we do face-to-face."

Based on retention rates at WebCampus, which range from 88 to 98 percent, depending on the online course, the relative simplicity of hosting completely asynchronous courses on the WebCT platform, without any bells and whistles and no instructional designers, seems to be working well.

Of course, keeping faculty happy and developing reliable online courses would all be for naught without students. And, of course, it takes a decent marketing program to help keep your online enrollments up to par. At WebCampus, they decided early on that one way to market themselves effectively and expeditiously was to hire an outside professional advertising and marketing agency to handle the ongoing development of their Web site and all of their collateral materials.

"Our marketing power is pretty sophisticated," says Ubell, adding that the WebCampus marketing budget is the second largest part of his budget next to faculty compensation, although it is significantly less than the overall cost of paying faculty.

In addition to farming out work to an agency, WebCampus does a significant amount of public relations and marketing internally. For example, an affinity marketing program Ubell has established with six internationally recognized engineering societies has resulted in an increase in enrollments, particularly from students located in foreign countries who otherwise would have been extremely difficult to reach. WebCampus also uses broadcast e-mails to promote itself to an opt-in internal database of prospects who have identified themselves as being interested in learning more about WebCampus.

In the public relations arena, Ubell has proven to be quite the media maven as evidenced by the extraordinary amount of free press WebCampus has received in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times and Publishers Weekly.

Another part of WebCampus’s internal marketing efforts entails having the two graduate assistants consistently update WebCampus listings with more than 100 search engines and education portals. One new development in this area deals with a relatively new company called Content Directions (www.contentdirections.com), which is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency. Through an agreement with this agency, WebCampus will be the first institution whose course listings on search engines will also have special pop-up windows that appear with deeper information about courses as visitors mouse over the listings.

Finally, to move into other markets that look promising, WebCampus recently entered the online non-credit professional training arena by partnering with one of the largest corporate training companies in the world, Provant, to be its exclusive online platform for project management courses. In this scenario, Provant produces the online courses and WebCampus provides the infrastructure to enroll students and deliver the courses online.

A similar arrangement has been made with Bloomfield College through an Advanced Technology Institute that is providing "fast-track," vendor-authorized online IT certification programs under the WebCampus infrastructure.

Last but not least, WebCampus is also making headway in the international arena through a recent agreement with the Beijing Institute of Technology and the efforts of Stevens Professor and China-native Hong Liang Chi and Stevens Vice President Maureen Weatherall to deliver three master degrees in China next Fall: one online, one taught by Chinese faculty under the supervision of WebCampus faculty, and one taught by WebCampus faculty in Beijing.

www.webcampus.stevens.edu