Tested Practices Buoy University of Phoenix Online

Black Issues presents in Techtalk the first of occasional question-and-
answer sessions with prominent information technology leaders in higher education. In this issue, Brian Mueller, vice president and chief operating officer of the profitable University of Phoenix Online, discusses the for-profit higher education company's track record at running one of the nation's largest academic degree-granting online programs.
The company's roots go back to 1989, when it was launched to take teaching and learning practices pioneered by its campus-based affiliate entity, the University of Phoenix, to the online world. Of the 110,000 students currently enrolled in University of Phoenix programs, nearly 37,000 are pursuing degrees in more than two dozen undergraduate and graduate online programs.

BI: Why has the University of Phoenix been able to experience consistent growth in its online education programs?
BM: We have a number of advantages. One, we were designing our program back in 1989, and we called it an online program, but the Internet wasn't nearly as big as it is today. And so it was more of an off-line program as students would connect to our bank of servers to do their work. They would connect, and upload and download messages and assignments, and those kinds of things.
My point is that before the Internet really exploded, we were doing the experimenting necessary to figure out what the right model was. And so we went through that period of time where we lost money on (the online program), and we were willing to do that for the purpose of figuring out where we needed to be. By 1992, 1993 and 1994, we had developed the learning model that we knew would be successful in an online environment, so that when the Internet really started to explode we were in a perfect position to really be able to take advantage of that. People could take advantage of our programming, depending on which way you want to look at it.
A lot of other people were trying to react to the potential of distance education after the Internet explosion took place, trying to get into it fairly quickly and who had not thought through and developed a model that was workable and that met student needs. And, I think that, as much as anything, has been a reason for our success.