Yet his schedule made that all but impossible. "For a while, I was interested in an MBA, but I have three children and I travel a lot, and those programs required a significant amount of time after hours or on weekends," said Wagner, who is a quality and reliability manager at Intel Corp.'s Architecture Group (Portland, Ore.). "That's a catch-22. Evenings I am away on business travel, and going to class on weekends leaves no time for my family.

"My formal background was in physics and I had worked as an engineer, so I started feeling out of my league as far as business skills. I felt I needed some training. Within the last three years, my direct responsibility has risen significantly, going from managing a group of 15 individuals to a group of 280."

The solution came by means of a Web-based program at the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology. Studying online for a master's in science and technology offered Wagner the right blend of business and tech, along with the flexibility to view class sessions and communicate with professors and students at any time.

"Last fall, I took a class as a trial, having no idea how it would work," Wagner said. "I really liked the way the information was delivered, and the flexibility. I could dial in from a hotel room. Some material was on a CD-ROM, so I wasn't on the phone line to do everything. So far, I've gone through five classes, and I'm about to start a sixth. In every case, I've felt the experience and work were quite rich."

Wagner is taking part in a growing movement by universities to provide quality education using the Internet, a trend well-suited to practicing engineers. That's because in these early stages, more postgraduate than undergraduate degrees can be earned without physically entering a classroom.

"Some places offer degrees, but mostly for graduate work, not for undergraduates," said John Steadman, an associate dean at the University of Wyoming (Laramie), who is vice president of the IEEE-USA's careers committee, which includes education. "Graduate degrees are traditionally less structured, so colleges have less difficulty providing them using nontraditional delivery techniques."

Universities are taking many tacks to create virtual classrooms, including hiring outside providers. The school Wagner attends has linked up with Cenquest, a Portland, Ore., company that also helps the University of Texas at Austin and Adelaide University in Australia develop Web-based coursework.

In other cases, universities are creating consortia to handle the many challenges involved in providing accredited coursework that meets remote students' needs. For example, the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University have banded together to offer remote classes. Although it's difficult for a single university to create effective distance-learning programs, some educators believe that forming consortia will displace the need for outside companies."Will brokers be needed? I don't know," said Vern R. Johnson, associate dean at the University of Arizona's College of Engineering and Mines (Tucson). "But I can tell you that none of the three universities in Arizona would be able to do it alone. The collaboration makes it quite possible and desirable."

Soon, Johnson reported, the statewide Arizona Virtual Regents University "will be in place to help us. I expect similar virtual university partnerships to occur [elsewhere], removing the need for outside educational organizations to help. There is a huge and complex marketplace for this kind of education, and it changes every day."

Meeting the schedules of students like Wagner is no easy matter. Like any working parent, Wagner has to fit in study time as he can — often at 20,000 feet.

New spin on 'in-flight movie'

"I fly frequently from Portland to San Jose, and I do the case studies [which are loaded on CD-ROM] then. The flights down and back give me time to watch and review the presentation," Wagner said. "Seeing actors on a CD-ROM acting out a case study is pretty much what they do in a classroom when they bring in a videotape. Case studies are a great way to understand a concept."

Cenquest's marketing vice president, Belinda Adkisson, said that the CD-ROM approach is designed to make life simpler for traveling students and for those who commonly connect to the Internet with 56k or slower modems.

"The CD is really self-contained, it has the readings, the case studies, almost everything," Adkisson said. "The CDs are very specific to the course."

Though Wagner sees more pluses than minuses in his distance-learning experience, he's as realistic about its drawbacks as he is about the advantages.

"My struggles have been more with things like productivity. [For example,] not all hotel rooms are alike, and [Internet] connections might not stay on as long as I'd like," Wagner said. Another caveat involves the lack of face time with an actual, as opposed to virtual, professor, a fact that makes the academic experience a little abstract. "Because it's not face-to-face accountability, it's easy to put [assignments] off until the last minute," said Wagner.

Online universities replace those face-to-face communications with e-mail and chat rooms. "The interaction is still there; it's just through a different medium," Wagner said. "There is a chat room where you can correspond with other students, and through the message board/bulletin board you can have a dialog with the professor. He posts assignments there, and students make comments and everyone sees the feedback. That adds a lot."

Still, all those dancing pixels can be wearing. "I'm a heavy e-mail user, but [these] chat rooms and bulletin boards are unusual, even a bit odd," Wagner said. "Because of the delay in a chat room, you can carry on three independent conversations at once. That's kind of weird."

Yet the cyberconversations are crucial, and some even say that it's easier to talk with a professor electronically than to catch him or her during office hours. An additional benefit is that online students can use the bulletin boards to read interactions between students and professors — exchanges that often augment questions.

"When you're in an online class, you can see the comments from someone who lives in Australia or England, and they might have an entirely different perspective that can often be very enlightening," Cenquest's Adkisson said.

Also necessary for remote grad students is flexibility in arranging classes to suit their changing schedules. Most classes are offered each semester, diminishing the problem of having to take a subject the one time it's offered or miss it altogether.

"I have a plan with a heavy schedule, seven or eight credits, then a light cycle with three credits," Wagner said. "If I do that, I'll be done the summer of 2002. By going year-round, I can finish in a little over two years. Comparing notes with people in conventional programs, that's about the norm. When I add up the hours spent, it's no less time this way, and it's just as intense."

That effort will pay off well, Wagner believes. He is impressed with the quality of his program and pleased that the degree he is pursuing, master's of science and technology, is gaining popularity among academics. "I need to focus on technology management," he said. "It's nice to see traditional business training tailored to this environment. I'm getting the knowledge my superiors want."