By SARAH CARR The Chronicle of Higher Education June 8, 2001

Eleven universities in the United States and Britain have joined together to create and sell online graduate courses, forming one of the more extensive international distance-learning partnerships.

"We hope to provide a much higher-quality offering to students than could ever be offered by a single institution," says David Pilsbury, the chief executive officer of the collaboration, called the Worldwide Universities Network.

The network includes Pennsylvania State University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The British partners are the Universities of Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton, and York.

Graham B. Spanier, the president of Penn State, says the organization will initially focus on research collaborations among various graduate schools at the universities, but soon hopes to make online courses available "to a much broader pool of students and clients." The first programs will most likely be on such topics as public policy and oceanography.

Although all of the founding universities are public institutions in the United States and England, Mr. Spanier says he hopes that the organization will grow to include private colleges and institutions in a range of countries.

"This shouldn't be characterized as a U.S.-Great Britain partnership," he says.

Mr. Pilsbury says the courses and programs will be marketed under the names of individual universities or groups of universities, and not the Worldwide Universities Network as a whole. "We are not trying to be a global organization, but an alliance between autonomous institutions," he says. "We want to safeguard the autonomy and intellectual integrity of the participants."

So far, all of the financing has come from the universities, but the network's leaders are also bidding to participate in a British-government project called the e-University. The e-University, supported by $100-million in government financing, is an effort to offer distance education around the world.