Claudio Castro, formerly a senior education advisor for the IDB, is now president of the advisory board of Faculdade Pitágoras, a large Brazilian enterprise that offers education directly to 15,000 students and also franchises support services to 260 additional schools. Pitagoras recently signed a partnership with the University of Phoenix, a leading U.S. provider of online higher education. The joint venture will create a Brazilian higher education institution that will offer four-year undergraduate education in 50 planned campuses throughout Brazil.

Castro has written extensively on technology in education and on efforts to reform Latin American universities. He is at work on a book examining the applicability of community college concepts in Latin America.

IDBAmérica:Can Internet-based distance education really replace the university classroom?

It depends on the kind of instruction and the kind of students you are talking about. There are two critical issues: the age and the educational level of the students, and the length or duration of the study program.

There’s no way that you can get young students who barely completed secondary school to take a long course at a distance. They simply will not have the necessary discipline and focus required to do that much unsupervised work. Also, when you are talking about a four-year undergraduate degree, the socialization process is very important. Being with classmates, working together, getting feedback and reinforcement from professors–all of that is essential.

So any long-term degree is going to require mature students and a methodology similar to the Open University in England, where students meet in person at least twice a week. Otherwise, you will end up with an incredibly high dropout rate (above 95 percent dropout rates are not unknown).

IDBAmérica:So is it unrealistic to think of education exclusively via the Internet?

Yes, but at the same time there are some things you can do very well online. The Internet is ideal for short extension courses and continuing education. A course on how to sell real estate, how to program computers in C++, how to do transcendental meditation, basically anything–so long as it’s short.

The Internet can also be used effectively for traditional university courses, but only if you can afford the methods like those practiced by the University of Phoenix. UOP is supposed to have one of the lowest dropout rates in distance education, but they only work with mature students and they invest very, very heavily in tutoring through e-mail. They have classes with only 12 students and the instructor pays extremely close attention to each student. If you are one day late turning in an assignment, you get an e-mail or a phone call asking what is wrong.

So there is evidence that a longer Internet course can work, but it requires either additional face-to-face contact as in the Open University, or very intensive e-mail tutoring as in UOP.

IDBAmérica: How do you think this phenomenon will develop in Latin America?

First, there will be an explosion in online continuing education and extension courses, because these are easy to do. This will grow in the unmanageable and chaotic way in which NGOs have grown in the region. The problem will be that you won’t necessarily know what you’re getting. So you’re going to need some filters, some quality control mechanisms so that you can determine the value of what you’re buying.

On a smaller scale, the same thing will happen with university programs. There will be a lot of offerings, most of which will be honest, uninteresting and unexciting, just as the majority of higher education in Latin America is honest, uninteresting and unexciting. There will be a minority of initiatives that are very good, and a minority that are plain dishonest. Most of it will be a mirror of the mediocrity that we already see in Latin American higher education.

IDBAmérica: Could universities from the United States and Europe draw students away from Latin American institutions with these offerings?

Potentially, yes. I think UNext (a company that is preparing an ambitious offering of professional courses based on material from elite U.S. universities) has a killer strategy, because even people who don’t know anything have heard of Yale, Harvard or Stanford.

But I don’t think they threaten Latin American universities, because UNext for now is only offering extension courses and is focused almost entirely on the corporate education market. In Latin America universities are only marginally in the business of offering extension courses.

If they want to offer regular university degrees, foreign institutions are going to have to meet very stringent accreditation requirements in most Latin American countries. In Brazil, for example, where they are just beginning to think of accrediting undergraduate distance programs, these programs are being subjected to a lot of scrutiny. But of course, in most cases they will have to translate the courses into Spanish and Portuguese.

But if you want to offer extension courses, most countries don’t require any kind of accreditation. The key there is having a brand name or a reputation that people trust. So I think foreign institutions are going to make the most inroads by these types of short courses, not four-year degrees.

IDBAmérica: Given that you expect so much competition, what will it take to succeed as a provider of Internet-based education?

Quality and scale. Hundreds of institutions are already developing distance courses, but most are spending less than $1,000 to prepare each course, with predictable results. This is basically a cottage industry. But if you spend $100,000 to prepare a course with world-class production standards, then you may be in a position to sell it to thousands of students. This is the lesson of Telecurso . They spent $1,000 per minute on their programs because they wanted the image quality to be as good as the best commercial programming and they wanted the scripts to be as good as the Discovery Channel. As a result, they have a huge audience.

So you go big, you multiply your costs by 100 and you multiply your students by 1,000, and you end up with very inexpensive education per student.

The other key to attaining scale is partnerships. Even a giant like UNext is betting on joint ventures with strong local institutions in each country. In most cases these local partners will be private, because the public universities will not have the management flexibility that you need to launch something like this.

Finally, large for-profit ventures will probably have an advantage over non-profit ones, because if you want to do something really serious you need a lot of money. And very few NGOs can get a check for $30 million from investors, as happened with The Marinho Foundation (run by Grupo Globo) that got a grant for that amount from the Federation of Industries of São Paulo.