It's a Saturday afternoon, 7,000 ft. up in the Asir mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia. A breeze rattles through the date palms outside the village of Khamis Mushayt, where Dr. Barry Henderson, 52, is attending a corporate-finance class. The professor, lecturing through a streaming-audio feed over the Internet, is in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee. One of Henderson's classmates is in Turkey, another in the Napa Valley. They know one another mainly through e-mail, instant messages and online bulletin boards. But Henderson, a physician at a clinic for Boeing workers, doesn't mind. "How else could I get an M.B.A. if I'm 5,000 miles from a real classroom?" he asks. And the price is right: $48,000.

With worldwide student demand for M.B.A.s growing, dozens of schools, mainly in the U.S., have started offering coursework over the Internet. At Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, enrollment in the online M.B.A. program jumped from 15 in 1999 to 40 last year; 350 applicants are competing for 120 spots next fall. With many courses framed in a global-business perspective, the program is attracting students from abroad. Says Jim Slevin, 30, who lives in London and is a technology manager for the airport-operations firm BAA: "Getting an M.B.A. outside your home country forces you to think globally."

Most online programs require campus visits so students can take a few live classes. But M.B.A.s earned solely over the Internet are catching on too. The University of Phoenix, an online pioneer, granted 1,662 online M.B.A.s last year, up from about 1,000 in 1999. More than 4,300 students are now enrolled, with 620 on a "global management" track. Another online institution, Cardean University, was launched last year, using materials from the University of Chicago, Stanford and the London School of Economics. Students take courses at their leisure. There are no live classes, and assignments and texts are shared over the Internet. In April, General Motors announced that it would pay for any of its 88,000 employees to take classes through Cardean, and 46 other companies have signed on.

Despite the popularity, some executives express skepticism about M.B.A.s earned online. Says Tameka Wren, a recruiter for Mirant, an energy company based in Atlanta: "If it's just you and the computer, you don't have an opportunity to learn leadership." In the mountains of Saudi Arabia, though, Henderson isn't complaining. "It's a dream," he says, "for me to get an M.B.A."

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