By Eric Schmidt

Paul Clarke tried twice to get his M.B.A. through what he calls the "traditional route," but the motivation wasn't there.

Clarke, a 43-year-old father of two with a full-time job as a medical office administrator for Kaiser Permanente,, said that after putting in 10-hour workdays, it was hard to concentrate in evening classes, much less get excited about learning.

But now, four classes away from his M.B.A from Jones International University which offers classes strictly online, he does most of his coursework from home, posts discussionboard messages on his lunch break and studies with his laptop on business trips.

"You can literally check into the classroom 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "This environment allows you to get in and interact with your classmates no matter where you are."

More than 1.9 million students were projected to be taking courses online in the United States by the fall of 2003 - 20 percent more than in the same period a year before, according to a 2002 survey by the Sloan Consortium, a group based at Babson College in Massachusetts that studies Web-based education. Eleven percent of all U.S. higher education students took at least one course online in the fall of 2002, according to the survey.

As the ranks of e-learners continue to grow, online institutions are using conventional safeguards as well as technology unique to the "virtual university" to monitor quality and provide an education they say is as good as one in a traditional classroom and in some ways better. A degree earned online is just as secure as one earned on campus and equally valuable in the workplace, several school officials said.

Students like Clarke are typical at JIU, where most of the roughly 3,000 enrolled on a course-by-course basis are working adults with a median age of 38, said Pamela Pease, university president. The school has no physical campus, but its administrative offices are in Englewood. The Internet makes the university international, with students from 75 countries and curriculum designed by professors from around the world, she said.

"It's all about flexibility," Pease said. "It's risky to drop out of the workplace, so most of the time people are interested in learning without leaving their jobs. For adults, time is very much a commodity - and they have too little of it."

That flexibility and freedom have led some skeptics to question the quality of online courses, suggesting their lack of direct supervision could be fertile ground for cheating and plagiarism. Pease disagrees.

"Unfortunately you probably see all the things that could happen online happen face-to-face, and maybe even more," she said. "A lot of people somehow concentrate on online as a special environment where people are more likely to cheat, but I don't think that's the case. In some ways we have a way of monitoring what's happening even better."

Unlike most classroom discussions, the Internet provides a fixed record through which professors can grade participation objectively, Pease said. University officials are upfront about periodically monitoring online classes for work quality and student-professor interaction, she said.

JIU requires students to sign a code of ethics and conduct that spells out policies on plagiarism, copyright and other intellectual property issues, she said. As a deterrent and enforcement measure, the university uses turnitin.com, a Web site that electronically checks assignments against a database of Internet sources and other students' work. Pease said she could count on one hand how many plagiarism cases JIU has seen since its inception.

With an international student body, document verification is also a concern because transcripts and other academic records often arrive without the official envelopes and seals common in the United States, Pease said. The university hires an outside expert to check the authenticity of these documents.

When JIU was launched in 1995, it was an "uphill battle" to get prospective students and employers to consider Web-based degrees, Pease said. But online classes turn out skilled employees who are familiar with the Internet and comfortable interacting with students and professors in other countries, she said, and companies now realize that is a triple bonus in a global, technological economy.

"It's all about what you learned," Pease said. "Our courses have a relevance so you can learn today and apply what you learned tomorrow. That's what's important to employers."

University of Phoenix also caters to adult professionals through a combination of face-to-face, online and "blended delivery" courses, in which students attend the first and last nights of class on campus and do the rest on the Internet.

These blended courses incorporate the best of both worlds by mixing online flexibility with face-to-face interaction, said Debra Abbott-Baldwin, senior vice president. They also parallel the business world - multimedia presentations, for example where successful employees combine computer research with personal communication. The future should not be a struggle for dominance between online and traditional classes, but an integration of both to provide greater access to education, she said.

Web-based learning fits the needs of the university's average student, who is 34 years old with 11 years of post-high school work experience, Abbott-Baldwin said. Of 186,000 University of Phoenix students at campuses in 29 states, about 91,000 take classes online.

Technology also helps ensure that students and faculty both do their part to foster learning, said Mary Martin, regional director of academic affairs. Attendance and participation are recorded electronically, and students must log onto their course Web site at least five days a week.

Administrators monitor online classrooms weekly to assess faculty on the quality of their course materials, assignments and feedback to students, Martin said. Classroom instructors are evaluated yearly using similar criteria. The university hires instructors on a course-by-course basis, so their jobs depend in part on these evaluations, Abbott-Baldwin said.

"We want to make sure that faculty members are very interactive," Martin said. "It's almost like we're doing a peer review of a faculty member each week they are on the online modality."

"In an online environment everything is archived," Abbott-Baldwin added. "In a classruom environment, that would not be practical or realistic. We can go in and monitor the quality of the discussion and every single contribution [students and faculty] make. We can be sure there's not just chit-chat going on, that it's a meaningful learning activity."

University of Phoenix gives an intense briefing on plagiarism and citing sources in its introductory classes, and it also enforces an honor code that prohibits plagiarism, cheating fabrication or helping other students do the same The rate of honor-code violations in online and blended classes is no higher than in the classroom, Martin said.

Moreover, working adults going back to school for new job skills are not the type of students likely to cheat in the first place, the administrators said. "Our students take things pretty seriously because they have some big goals down the road," Martin said. "When you're talking about a 19-year-old in college, their focus might be a little bit different."

"I think it's easy to cheat yourself in any environment because with education your dividend will never exceed your investment," Abbott-Baldwin said. "Anyone who is determined to cheat will cheat whether they're looking at their neighbor's test paper or having someone go in and take an online test for them. Then they go into the workplace and don't have that competency, and they lose their job."

Clarke agreed saying that with so many resources available to actually do the work, students like himself have better things to do than try to beat the system. "If you're going to spend $1,000 on a course to get something out of it, I can't imagine why you'd do that and not want to learn something," he said.