Cardean University

Cardean University was set up as a new-build online university in the United States in 1999. It now seems to have closed in its current form though activity is being continued via a merger of the operation into Ellis College - see http://cardean.edu/.

It was the subject of a case study Report on UNext and Cardean University, written by Harvey Blustain and Phil Goldstein in October 2001 and updated by UKeU staff in 2004. See next.

Editor's Overview and Contextualisation (from the Report)

This is a very expensive undertaking. And the whole business model depends on making a huge up-front investment rather than a business-to-consumer model of selling individual courses. I don’t know that anyone will ever do it again, and they certainly won’t do it the way that we did it. ―Richard P. Strubel, UNext’s president and COO

These are the prophetic words, spoken in April 2001 (and reported in a press article of May 2001), which close the report on Cardean University (written in October 2001) forming the core of this chapter.

Cardean University is a start-up e-university. Unlike the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), the subject of chapter 7, it is private sector. Again unlike UOC, it has a con-sortium aspect in that it partnered with four prestigious US universities (and one in the UK, namely the London School of Economics). Unlike many recent e-universities (but it was more common at the time), it commissioned its own learning environment.

Recent Developments (since 2001)

Rather little has been heard of Cardean in 2003–04, in fact from mid 2002 onwards. Numbers of students are not publicly stated but were believed to be around 750 MBA students in September 2003. Even if, as alleged, they come from 90 countries, the absolute numbers are not impressive. By April 2003 one third of the students were from outside the USA, as compared with only 16% (out of the 464) in mid 2002.

Nothing recently would change the analysis in the report which suggests that Cardean did not “catch the wave” like UOC (see chapter 7) and UMUC (see chapter 12). Indeed, it has rapidly fallen behind not only the major US players (UMUC, Phoenix, Jones, etc.) but also many of the mid-range players (increasingly based at well-regarded conventional public or private non-profit universities).

On the positive side, UNext announced a partnership with the New York Institute of Technology in September 2003 (details in a later footnote). NYIT has substantial backing and plans to use the UNext platform to provide degrees to working adults worldwide; NYIT presently serves 1,100 online students.

On the negative side, UNext UK Ltd was dissolved in May 2003.

There are signs of stress evident – in particular, the reduction of the Cardean Web site to little more than a rump giving entry to the MBA programme, and a number of adjustments to materials suggesting an increased orientation to hybrid paper/online delivery at lowish data rates (see later footnotes). Even the arrangement for content development with a UK enterprise might be seen as part of a cost-reduction strategy.

The Cardean learning environment seems to be of limited functionality, and interestingly, Thomson/NETg did not follow up on earlier discussions to market this.

But hope springs eternal. In an article “New learning models under scrutiny”, the Financial Times reported on 2 March 2004 (http://news.ft.com/) that:

Last autumn, the New York Institute of Technology and UNext launched Ellis College of NYIT, an online school. Mr Rosenfield anticipates that the Ellis MBA, which uses much of the Cardean MBA material, will have 5,000-10,000 students in the next few years.

The present

The merger into Ellis College appears to be what happened. No further details are as yet known to our team.

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