Preliminary Exploration Of Operation Mechanism For US Virtual University

Virtual university is a new form of US contemporary long-distance education development since the mid-1980s. Its emergency makes life-long education from concept to reality, it also makes high vocational education to be an accessible service to every citizen, some evidences show that virtual university will become one development mode for university in the future. Especially with the increasingly development of globalized education and industrialized US education, US virtual university is comprehensively developing with various of advantages that are not featured in traditional universities, such as: the application of advanced education concept, advanced capital operation and commercial management technique, advanced virtual technology. University of Phoenix acquires unparalleled achievement in aspects of ways, such as: Marketing positioning, cost control, student employment, teacher training, education quality control etc. This research aims to preliminarily explore the operation mechanism of virtual university by using University of Phoenix as an example, and use its useful experiments for reference to impel the reformation and development of long-distance high education of institutions in China. A brief outline of the chapters will be shown as following:Chapter one"Introduction"mainly discusses the existing researches on virtual university at home and aboard; it also introduces the research methodology from those works are employed in this work; the key words from this work are defined as well. Chapter two"Overview of US virtual university"introduces the origin of US virtual university, the whole circumstances and a few of representative universities. Chapter three"The introduction of University of Phoenix"introduces the general of Phoenix University, education characteristics, technology, operating mode etc respectively. Chapter four"The analysis of operation mechanism factors for Phoenix University"analyzes three main factors: student, teacher, course in operation mechanism and briefly answers the interknit and relationships between those three factors. Chapter five"The content of operating mechanism for Phoenix University"describes the most representative contents that represent the features of Phoenix University, which are marketing positioning mechanism, cost control mechanism. Chapter six"Assessment of operation mechanism for Phoenix University"concludes its characteristics and assesses the achieved goals of operation mechanism. Chapter seven"Recommendation"gives some suggestions with aims of the problems from institutions of long-distance high education, which includes three aspects: goal establishment, lean thinking and diverse development.