ASU kicked off its online MBA program in January 2004 but the ASU W.P. Carey School of Business has been in the online learning business for about five years, working with big-name corporate clients such as 3M Company, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Intel, and others. "We realized that the way we were delivering the online degree to corporate clients might appeal to individuals who are not coming to us through a corporation," said Faculty Director of ASU’s online MBA program M. Johnny Rungtusanatham. The program is cohort based and thus far has enrolled 48 students this past January and another 55 students this past July. "Our aim is to always bring in about 50 individuals," says Rungtusanatham. "We are cautious, in a sense, about growing the program and, in time, we believe we should have about 200 first-year and second-year students."

ECU launched its online MBA program in 2000 and currently has about 112 fully online students, plus another 95 students taking both online and face-to-face MBA courses. ECU students have the option of earning an MBA by taking a combination of online and face-to-face courses. Rick Niswander, ECU’s dean of graduate business programs, said that one of the reasons for moving to an online delivery dealt with ECU being located in Greenville, NC, with a population of 65,000 and the nearest major city being Raleigh, which is 90 miles away. The online MBA helped to "expand the base from which we can draw," said Niswander. "The face-to-face side is flat, and the online side has grown. One of the reasons for that is that the online courses, to some extent, cannibalize the face-to-face. If someone was an hour away, they may have chosen to drive to campus, but now they don’t have to."

As noted on its Web site, when the MBA from Kelley Direct Online Programs at Indiana University was offered to the public in the 2000-2001 academic year, KD accepted and enrolled 15 students. Since that time, there has been a 100% growth rate each year resulting in just over 140 accepted and enrolled students in 2003. According to Richard Magjuka, chairperson, Kelly Direct Programs, there are currently about 950 to 1,000 students enrolled in all of Kelly Direct’s online programs, which includes a public online MBA program; a variety of corporate online MBA offerings; a Master of Science in Finance; a Master of Science in Global Supply Change Management; a Master of Science in Strategic Management; and three business-related, graduate-level certificate programs. "We do not convert existing courses into online courses," said Magjuka. "Our faculty create courses for an online delivery, and we provide course development grants the first time they teach a course for us. One thing I am proud of is that the school provides a new course development grant every time a faculty member teaches a new course. We pay them $5,000 each time they teach a new 3-credit course."

Regis University is the granddad of all "fully online" MBA programs in the U.S., having launched in 1993 and currently enrolling some 2,200 students. Ed Cooper, who helped develop the program as former dean of graduate programs at Regis and who is currently a professor in the online MBA program, said that one of the relatively new features of the Regis program (started three years ago) is its "summer intensives," where online students can visit the Regis campus for one week during the summer, from July 11 through 16. The summer intensives give online students a chance to take an accelerated course and meet Regis instructors, and other students, face to face. In addition to course offerings, additional seminars and presentations are held during the week. The summer intensives are an additional option offered to all students, but not required for online students. "They come in on a Sunday night and at the reception they are already working in teams," said Cooper. "They come in ready to go."

SU had an MBA program that began in 1977 that was correspondence-based with residencies. "In 2001 we put everything we could online," said Paula O’Callaghan, director of the relatively new Independent Study MBA Program (iMBA), which is now provided mostly online with mandatory week-long residencies offered at least three times per year, in the months of January, May, and August. A residency week begins on a Saturday and concludes after the last class the following Thursday. At the time of converting the correspondence-based program to online, there were 70 students in the program. Today the iMBA program enrolls about 170 students. O’Callaghan said that converting to online was not a difficult task but was labor intensive. "I found the hardest part was deciding how to organize the information on Blackboard. Once you have typed everything into one section, it becomes very labor intensive if you decide to move it, because files don’t transfer easily." The bigger challenge, however, was "convincing the faculty that we could do a quality job online and that they should invest any time at all converting their course materials," O’Callaghan added. "I’d say that in three years we have been successful, but it was painful. . . With us, faculty came to realize that iMBA students are the highest quality of students that we have, because these are people who would not otherwise have come to Syracuse. So it was really the quality of the students that helped turn around the doubters." SU’s iMBA students are mostly mid-level managers who, combined, come from very diverse backgrounds, including nonprofits, the military, the banking and finance industries, the computer industry, and the pharmaceutical sales industry.

High Quality Students at UCCS

The UCCS online MBA program went live in 1996 and currently has 220 students taking a combination of online and face-to-face courses and about 160 fully online MBA students. "Having the distance program has benefited the on-campus program tremendously," said Venkateshwar K. Reddy, associate dean for graduate programs. "The distance program evolved from the traditional program, but it gave a lot back to the traditional program in terms of technology. Faculty who prepare multi-media material for their online courses bring that back to their traditional classes." Regarding faculty buy-in to an online conversion, Reddy said that "when we started out there were few believers, but over time the non-believers became believers. They look at our students in the distance program and see that they are high quality. The faculty are deriving satisfaction from the work that our students are producing."

At UMUC, about 900 students are currently enrolled in its online MBA program, which launched in 2000, said Rosemary Hartigan, online MBA program director. "From 2000 to 2001 our enrollments nearly tripled and we continue to grow, and we have been dealing with the growth by adding faculty and new program directors." One unique feature about UMUC’s online MBA program is that new students must first pass an "AMBA 600 - MBA Fundamentals" online course before moving on through the remainder of the full program. AMBA 600 "is designed to provide students entering the MBA program with a common foundation in fundamental management concepts across a broad spectrum of subject areas." The course acquaints students with the online environment and technologies; helps students improve their research, writing and analytical skills; and ensures that students have a foundation in basic management concepts. "It gives students a chance to see if they really like working online," said Hartigan. "Sometimes they decide that they don’t like working online, or that they don’t have the time, or that they want to go to a face-to-face mode." Another unique aspect of UMUC’s online MBA program is that the curriculum was developed with an integrated approach, Hartigan added. "All of the courses are combinations of subjects. There is not just a marketing course, or a business law course, or a business ethics courses. Instead, we integrate those things throughout the curriculum."

Overall, I have to say that the gist of all the conversations I had with these online MBA program educators was similar throughout in that they all agreed that the market for students was still alive and well despite recent claims that the number of prospective students in the applicant pool has dropped in recent years (see opening paragraphs of cover story, "Creating an Online MBA," and "Why the Decline?" story). They also tended to agree that getting faculty on board to teach online was, and still is, a challenge. However, once faculty taught online, their doubts about this mode of delivery vanished.

ASU: http://wpcarey.asu.edu/mba/online/index.cfm

ECU: www.business.ecu.edu/grad/internetlearning.htm

Indiana University: http://kd.iu.edu/

Regis University: www.mbaregis.com

SU: http://whitman.syr.edu/MBA/iMBA/

UCCS: http://business.uccs.edu/

UMUC: www.umuc.edu/grad/mba/