The Right Connections

New or improved, SOM courses offered online are better than ever - and
increasingly popular among students of all types.

By Paula Felps


In the early days of online education, The University of Texas at Dallas
School of Management (SOM) quickly recognized the promise underpinning the
delivery of courses via the Internet and other electronic means.
Technology could overcome time and distance; its versatility could provide
viable alternatives to some students who might otherwise struggle to
achieve their college goals.

"A lot [of our students] are professionals with full-time jobs, so they
are part-time students. If they're traveling or changing jobs, they might
be hesitant to enroll in a class," says SOM Dean Hasan Pirkul, Ph.D. "We
felt that we could give them the opportunity to take the same classes
[that they would get on campus] whether they were traveling or had to
relocate. We felt if we could meet the needs that other schools were
unable to meet, we would succeed."

That hunch - along with careful planning and execution - has paid off. The
School of Management's online programs rank among the world's largest 25
distance-learning providers of Master's of Business Administration (MBA)
curriculums, according to a Financial Times survey that appeared in that
London-based newspaper March 20. Altogether, nine United States-based
schools appeared in the list. Six of them, including The School of
Management, are accredited by AACSB International - The Association to
Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

SOM created one of the nation's first Internet-based management education
programs with its Masters in International Management Studies (MIMS) in
1996. MIMS changed its scope to become the Global Leadership Executive MBA
in 1999 (see "Optimizing Opportunity," Management, Vol. 4, No. 1, Autumn
2000, page 2, and "Managing the Distance," Management, Vol. 1, No. 2,
Spring 1998, page 24). Today the school offers four online master's
programs, three of which lead to MBAs. SOM also augments many of its
degree and non-degree programs with online options.

Enrollment in online classes now accounts for nearly 10 percent of SOM's
graduate credit-hour enrollment. This enrollment growth is part of a
national trend reported by the Sloan Consortium in Growing by Degrees:
Online Education in the United States, 2005, published last November.
Statistics gathered by the consortium show that between 2003 and 2004,
enrollment in U.S. online programs grew from 1.98 million to 2.35 million.
This growth rate is 10 times that forecast for the post-secondary level by
the National Center for Education Statistics. An association of
educational institutions and organizations, the Sloan Consortium - of
which SOM is a member - was created with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation to improve learning effectiveness, access, affordability for
learners and providers, and student and faculty satisfaction with online
education.

The success of SOM's online classes lies in more than flexibility. An
intricate partnership between instructors and course designers has
resulted in an online experience that emulates the "live" classroom
experience (see Cyberspace Innovators Make Online Classes Meaningful on
page 11). Dean Pirkul says that SOM wanted to do online classes only if
the school could offer substantive courses comparable in value to their
on-campus counterparts.

Where many institutions failed, the dean says, was in thinking that
teaching online would be faster, easier and cheaper than teaching in
class. SOM knows that quality online education is time-intensive, equally
as demanding as - and sometimes even more demanding than - in-person
instruction, and never to be short-changed financially.

But done right, online courses do give students another entry into the
halls of learning.

The stories presented here not only introduce SOM's online degree
programs; they also provide insight into the work that has gone into and
the benefits that can be derived from the school's various distance
learning curriculums.