A few blocks from the Foothills, just east of Stanford Avenue, lives a university president — but his students are thousands of miles away. Geoff Cox, a former Stanford administrator, is president of Cardean University, an accredited M.B.A. program with about 500 matriculated students.

Unlike many university presidents, Cox teaches a small seminar and frequently works from home. But then again, so do many of his students. In his seminar on business ethics, Cox supervises 11 students from six different countries. The students are taking part in a unique business school program with courses designed by faculty from Stanford, the University of Chicago and Columbia Business School, among others. Five faculty members from the Graduate School of Business helped create some of the few dozen courses that Cardean offers each term.

“Higher education is probably the single most important determination of quality of living,” Cox said. “It turns out the Internet is a very powerful medium for education.”

Cardean, part of UNext.com, was founded in 1999 — near the peak of the Internet bubble — to take advantage of Internet technology in distance-learning environments. Professors and university administrators were key backers of the program, and the founders were able to enlist the support of Stanford and the other schools. The chairman of the board, Andrew Rosenfield, was on the faculty at the University of Chicago’s law school for 18 years. Most of the administrators hold doctorates, and Cox holds a doctorate in philosophy.

Cardean’s vision was ambitious. The academics who founded Cardean wanted to do more than broadcast lectures over the Internet, so they came up with a model of interactive courses focusing on specific tasks that businesses actually have to accomplish.

In one course, students have to improve the image of a fictional hotel chain through a promotional campaign. The course consists of a series of tasks that take a few hours to complete. Students get realistic memos, short animation clips and lecture blurbs, but there is no consistent reading or hour-long lecture. Click on a term, and a definition pops up. Tools allow students to experiment with spreadsheets and graphs, changing the numbers in a way that is impossible in a textbook.

“There’s a huge amount of personal attention,” Cox said. “We can sort of coach them along the way.”

Ward Hansen, a lecturer at the Business School, helped design an Internet marketing course for Cardean. He sees interactive Internet courses as an important trend.

“The distance between online courses and textbooks will blur,” he said. “The concepts are useful in many classes, not just business classes, where hands-on data analysis is powerful.”

Hansen oversaw the design of the course, and Cardean faculty handle the teaching. He viewed the course as a powerful tool to help him improve his own teaching of concepts, and he uses some of the online units he developed for Cardean in Business School courses.

“From Stanford’s point of view, it’s been beneficial,” Hansen said.

However, Cardean’s designers say that the program — though designed by well-known faculty including several Nobel Prize-winners — is nothing like a real bricks-and-mortar experience.

“We don’t think that studying online is better than a residential program,” Cox said. “That said, lots of people can’t take the time to go to a normal school . . .The number one factor is convenience; they can [use our program] on their own time and at their own pace.”

Cox wants to expand the online program beyond a simple M.B.A. program and existing professional development courses. He sees an undergraduate degree program as a next step.

“Stanford is not the right comparison for a degree program,” he said. “About 50 percent of people who start undergraduate degree programs don’t finish. We want to serve a part of the population that’s not well served by traditional colleges and universities.”