Create a mission and goal statement for your university, which will drive the tone and purpose of your courses and degree programs. If you plan to specialize in a particular type of education or subject, then include that in your mission and goal statements.
Determine the costs associated with setting up the university. If you will not be engineering the website yourself, then you will need to design the interface of your online university, including the homepage, course pages and promotional materials. After designing the requisite materials, you will need to outsource their creation to web designers and marketers, from whom you can obtain price quotes. Depending on your budget, you can spend anywhere from $100 to $100,000 or more building the website's platform and associated marketing materials.
Create a business plan for the learning university. Though your goal is to educate, you must operate your university much like a business, ensuring that the operating costs of your learning university are properly covered by the tuition fees for the different courses that you are offering. At this stage, you will want to register your organization as a non-profit organization or a for-profit organization, depending on your business model and plan of operations.
Develop and create the degree programs for the university. If you are just starting off, it may be smart to offer specialized courses to begin with that serve a definitive niche instead of offering a wide variety of courses, which can be difficult to manage unless you have a large academic staff. The degree programs should include course structures that start off with base levels of knowledge and work up toward more advanced subject matter.
Determine the admissions standards for your learning university. Will you plan to allow any student who can pay the tuition costs attend? Will you require a minimum SAT or ACT score for admission? Ask yourself these types of questions to create the basis upon which you will admit students.