The question facing universities looking to compete in the booming market for online higher education is not so much how to do it, but how to distinguish themselves from the rest. In this, Christian universities appear to have a built-in advantage. And many are seizing the opportunity to expand their footprint.

Investing heavily in online has already allowed some institutions to enroll many more students than they ever could have hoped to at a physical campus. Grand Canyon University, which enrolled about 3,500 students at its peak as a traditional university in the mid-1990s…now serves 36,000 students, about 90 percent of whom are distance learners.
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Meanwhile, online enrollment at the nonprofit Liberty University has boomed to 45,000 — nearly twice as many online students as the 25,000 that its late televangelist founder, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., prescribed as a goal only three years ago, and significantly more than its 12,000 or so on-campus learners.
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All of this is exciting for evangelicals, says Carlos Campo, the incoming president of Regent University, an institution in Virginia founded by the televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson that boasts 4,900 students, about 55 percent of whom are online.

“I think that evangelicals tend, very often, to look at numbers as being important,” Campo says. Being able to increase the number of Christian-educated graduates in the world via the scale afforded by online education, he says, is cause for enthusiasm in many evangelical circles.

The expansion of Christian online learning might be of particular interest to families that are leery of the secular education provided by the nation’s public schools, Campo says. “There’s a built-in market of folks who say, ‘Is there somewhere in the virtual sphere where I can send my child where they can transition directly from a home-schooled environment into a collegiate environment and never leave the home?’ ” he says.

But to what degree can a Christian university actually foster the same religious character in its online students as it can in its residential students?

The task is not as daunting as it was even five years ago, says Kathy Player, the president of Grand Canyon University. “Nowadays, with technology, you can bring in so much of what you do [on campus],” she says. For example, Grand Canyon offers its online students Bible study sessions with a chaplain through its learning-management system.

READ MORE: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/14/christian