Kansas University is embracing the online higher education revolution.

Beginning this fall, students will be able to take enough online classes to complete a Bachelor of General Studies degree from the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences without setting foot on campus, said Paul Atchley, associate dean for the College’s new online and professional education program.

The School of Business will launch an online MBA program, and KU’s School of Education will offer 14 masters and certificate programs, said Sara Thomas Rosen, KU’s senior vice provost for academic affairs.

In addition, on-campus students will be able to take a larger variety of online classes to achieve a bachelor of arts or sciences degree, which Atchley calls a hybridized curriculum.

And as an added bonus, students who dropped out of college still needing just a handful of classes will be given a chance to take online classes and finish their degrees.

In short, there’s an increasing number of online options for differing situations, with even more options being added this year.

“Online can be an effective way to teach,” Atchley said. “The curriculum is flexible and can be tailored to a variety of students with a variety of interests and needs based on their previous education background.”

The BGS program is a degree completion program. Students generally have about 65 credit hours already, Atchley said. The program targets millennials born between 1977 and 1997 who are expected to change jobs on average 20 times over the course of their careers.

“The kind of things we teach in a degree of liberal arts and sciences are these very flexible skills that will translate to any task that you are given,” Atchley said.

Many colleges are moving to offering online classes to students.

One of them, Arizona State University, as part of its 2015 mission and goals plans to enroll 100,000 online students.

Atchley said 50 students are currently enrolled in KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences online program. He expects that number to grow, but KU’s goal will not be as high as ASU.

“We are going to be as large as we can be and still remain true to our mission,” he said. “We are the flagship university of the state. In my opinion and the opinion of many of my colleagues that size (100,000 online students) takes away from those other missions the university has.”

The pool of available students just in Kansas is large, Atchley said. At a recent continuing education conference in Manhattan, a speaker said there are more than 900,000 students with high school degrees who have some college or no college, Atchley said.

“There is a lot of room for us to serve the state and others,” Atchley said.

Rosen said KU is “marketing coast-to-coast” but many students are coming from the Midwest region, and there is clustering around the Interstate 35 corridor.

“This is about staying relevant but mission-centric,” Rosen said. “It’s about access to higher education for students who might not be able to have access to higher education.”

The length of the courses that KU offers online are shorter. Campus classes are usually 16 weeks; online courses are eight weeks. The online programs can offer five to six semesters a year, on campus there are three semesters a year.

“When we started building these programs, we noticed there were literally hundreds of students that left the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with four or fewer classes to complete because life happened,” Atchley said.

“They have to work their education around that.”

KU also is offering a new program called Plus 12 for students who didn’t quite finish their degree, with a four-class sequence online to complete the degree for a cost of about $3,000. One of those four classes is a careers class.

KU is attempting to locate about 300 students, which is no easy task, Atchley said.

“A lot of the work this next year is going to be essentially ‘Rockford Files,’ trying to go find these students wherever they are and tell them, ‘look we have this great program to help you complete your degree,'” Atchley said. “I just really hate to see those students kind of get left out in the cold because they have invested literally thousands and thousands of dollars and lots and lots of time.”