More than 1,600 NKU students took at least one online course last fall and 468 of those were totally online, Culbreth said. The university hopes to reach 2,500 students operating online for at least part of their course load, and add 20 percent more online courses each year, she said.

Students in online courses pay an extra $20 per credit hour for technical support, but they all pay the same in-state tuition rate. Culbreth said she compared grades on online students and those in traditional courses last year and they came our nearly the same.

The trend is the same at Miami University. The Center of Online Learning is in its third year with about 20 classes offered, and Miami hopes to offer an entire program that leads to a bachelor’s degree in nursing by September, with may of the courses offered at the Middletown and Hamilton campuses.

"We’d like to get several entire programs online so students don’t even have to come to campus," said Janet Hurn, a senior physics instructor at Miami’s Middletown campus and director of the online program. "When we develop a course, we want it to be a high-end quality course, not just, ‘Here’s a bunch of Power Points, now take a test.’"

Administrators say that’s the latest evolution in distance learning, converting courses from traditional curriculum simply put online to courses designed specifically for students the professors will never see.

Hurn, for example, teaches an online physics course with a lab. Students buy a lab kit and fill in results and graphs using Blackboard.

"It takes a lot of discipline," she said. "We do lose a few students who say that it wasn’t for them. There are so many tools out there now that you can offer a good quality course."

Culbreth said online courses should include lots of video and audio files and interactive lessons. Online message boards, so popular for social networking sites, are used for class discussion, with most students required to post a certain number of times and graded on the quality of those responses.

In Pennekamp’s and Fuerst’s masters program in educational administration, they didn’t follow the normal academic calendar but instead took individual six-week classes.

Fuerst said it allowed her to work mostly at night after putting her 8-year-old daughter to bed and finishing her preparations for the next day,

She said she liked working at her own pace but would have preferred having some face-to-face interaction with professors and other students.

She and Pennekamp graduated together from New Miami High School and then from Miami University in 1991.

They live within minutes of one another in Ross and only realized they were in the same UC program together once they saw each other’s names online.

Pennekamp said the distance-learning class is best for self-starters who have plenty of online experience.

"It forces people who aren’t as good at communicating to learn the appropriate way to do it," she said.

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