The ASU Feasibility Study: Testing Whether Air University's Online Curriculum Could Live Inside a University's Own Systems

by Lexa V., 27 September 2026

By 2019, Air University's eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education was straining against the limits of its own IT infrastructure. That infrastructure had been built for a slower moment in online learning, and it was falling behind the pace of the tools around it. Air Command and Staff College, eSchool's home organization, tasked a team to find a way past that wall by testing something no Air Force schoolhouse had tried: folding eSchool's online curriculum directly into a research university's IT environment, rather than going on building and maintaining the Air Force's own.

What it was. Over the second quarter of 2019, the award period of 1 April to 30 June, an eleven-person team ran a feasibility study on integrating eSchool's online curriculum into Arizona State University's education-technology systems. The team drew on eSchool faculty and staff, joined by two officials from the Air Staff's information-technology directorate (SAF/A6), and worked under an Air Command and Staff College unit commander. It configured six sample eSchool courses inside ASU's system, built the interfaces to move student data and grades between the two schools, and validated the connection during an intensive one-day design-and-test event at ASU itself. Access to ASU's tools proved the case quickly. Even a narrow slice of that platform, four tools out of roughly a hundred and twenty available, was enough to show that eSchool's courses, running inside ASU's environment, could gain real capability the Air Force's own systems couldn't match.

None of it could go further without clearing security. Working with Air Education and Training Command headquarters and SAF/A6, the team completed a favorable cybersecurity review, the approval that had to be in place before any student data could cross between the two systems. The team closed its ninety-day test window by capturing its lessons learned in a report to the Secretary of the Air Force, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, and ASU's president. Alongside that report, the team worked with the Air Force's installations and legal offices to advocate a plan for an intergovernmental support agreement, the legal vehicle that would let the partnership run at real scale. To develop it, the team stood up an "AU Tiger Team," pulling in judge advocate, contracting, financial management, and IT expertise.

What Mike did. Mike was one of eleven officials named on the team's award citation, listed under eSchool's distance-learning office alongside the team's lead, eSchool colleagues from across the school's distance-learning offices, the two SAF/A6 officials, and the unit commander who oversaw the effort. The citation credits the team collectively, not any one member by name, for configuring the six sample courses inside ASU's system, building the interfaces that moved student data and grades between the two schools, and clearing the cybersecurity review that had to be in place before any of it could go further. Mike's name sits on that record alongside the other ten.

From there, the team carried the case to the top, Mike among them. Courses of action, built on what the ninety-day test had shown, went directly to the Secretary of the Air Force and to Air University's commander. The Secretary approved the team's approach and offered funding support to carry it forward.

The impact. The favorable cybersecurity review and the Secretary's approval turned a single quarter's feasibility test into policy. What opened the quarter as an experiment, a test of whether an Air Force schoolhouse could run its own coursework on a university's infrastructure, closed it as an approach the Secretary of the Air Force had personally signed off on and backed with funding. That was the opening the team needed to take the partnership from a six-course pilot to the intergovernmental agreement it was already building the legal case for.