SPRINGFIELD - In 2008, the University of Illinois plans to open the virtual doors to its Internet-based global campus.

The $20 million venture is the university's attempt to tap into the lucrative and rapidly growing market of students taking online courses to fill their education needs.

Like its bricks and mortar counterparts in Chicago, Springfield and Champaign-Urbana, officials hope the online school will serve as an educational hub, eventually offering students the opportunity to earn a degree without ever entering a campus classroom.

According to a U of I report, about 3 million U.S. students took at least one online course in 2005, generating $5 billion in revenue.

But while Illinois' flagship university system looks to capitalize on this trend, many of the state's other public universities don't plan to follow suit.

High profile online flops at Temple University, New York University and Columbia University illustrate failure can be costly. For example, Columbia spent $15 million on an online program that folded

With this thought and their own tight budgets in mind, public university officials across the state are operating with more modest ambitions.

Chet Gardner, special assistant to U of I President Joseph White, said the risks in plugging into the online education boom are considerable, but so are the rewards. He added that U of I's global campus will provide increased enrollment and, therefore, more tuition money.

"The one difference the global campus will provide is that we will have the capability of admitting all qualified students," he said. "Last year, over 23,000 applied for the 6,500 seats in the freshman class, and even though a large number of students met requirements, they weren't admitted."

But because of the risks of a program like global campus, other state schools are meeting the demand for online learning by combining technology with traditional teaching methods in "blended courses."

Mary Shelden, who oversees online courses in arts and sciences at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, said each of her department's online courses includes traditional elements like strict schedules and face time with the teacher.

"The reason is because it's better in terms of student attention and performance," she said. "We just want to follow what the research has shown in terms of keeping students engaged. And that research has shown that a face-to-face component and a scheduled curriculum is the best way to do that."

Will Hine, dean of the School of Continuing Education at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, disagreed, saying exclusively online courses can match the quality of their classroom counterparts.

"What we've seen here and all of the research shows that it's very much the same quality as more traditional campus courses," he said. "We started these courses about five years ago, and every year we continue to see growth in the demand."

But Hine acknowledged quality can become an issue if schools begin hiring sub-par faculty to meet the demands of a growing population of online students.

Illinois State University in Normal also offers a blended format using existing faculty, but officials there say the system is less rigid. At ISU, individual instructors and department heads decide what proportion of each course is online.

For that reason, tracking how much online technology is used by the school's professors is almost impossible, said Sue Deason, assistant director of ISU's Extended University.

"Well, that is the question of the hour, how many are blended?" she said. "So many instructors include a great deal of technology in their courses, but we have no way of knowing."

Several of the state's universities, including Illinois State and Northern Illinois, offer programs in which students who have achieved a two-year degree can complete their bachelor's degree online.

Western Illinois University in Macomb is one of the few to offer a start-to-finish undergraduate degree in which students never have to enter a classroom, and it's been going on for 35 years.

"The Board of Trustees Bachelor of Arts program, which is basically a general studies program, started through correspondence," said Rick Carter, the program's director. "It's primarily online. We still have a few correspondence courses, but online courses keep increasing and eventually that will be the only way to accomplish the degree."

Western's targeted students are those who require the flexibility to work their class schedules around their lives, Carter said, adding that online courses are the most logical way to serve this group.

Carter said online programs are not being pursued at Western to boost revenue.

"I applaud the U of I for their initiative," he said. "But being a state institution, we have not taken cost as a positive or negative for the program. Our primary motivation is serving a specific group."

With so much emphasis placed on the flexibility of the university, some educators worry schools are bending too much toward the needs of the student, leaving a quality education in the lurch.

But Gardner, of the U of I, said such worries will be sorted out by the students themselves.

"We could have made the argument that the quality of a U of I education would suffer when UIC was established or when UIS was established," he said. "But the consumer is very knowledgeable; they know the difference between a low- and high-quality education."

Blackwell Thomas can be reached at blackwell.thomas@lee.net or 789-0865.