
Carrie Docherty, interim vice provost at IU Bloomington, presided over the dedication of Jellison Studios.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana University formally dedicated the $10 million Brian D. Jellison Studio Classroom and Studios at the Kelley School of Business, in a Sept. 9 ceremony that highlighted both how online education has evolved and the impact that the new facility already is having on the student experience.
Funded through a $16 million gift in 2020 from the Brian and Sheila Jellison Family Foundation, Jellison Studios are providing Kelley online students with the experience of being in a live classroom for faculty instruction and interaction with their peers. The studios also will offer on-site and online students with new ways to learn, making their time in the classroom more valuable and dynamic.
Carrie Docherty, interim vice provost for strategy and innovation at IU Bloomington, thanked the Jellison family, not only for their gift for the studios, but also for their support of Kelley’s Brian D. Jellison Living Learning Center, which moved to the newly renovated McNutt Residence Center this fall.
“The investment in Jellison Studios offers a fresh, future-focused dimension to a Kelley education,” Docherty said. “It offers a tangible expression of IU’s commitment to offering an education that equips our students to help lead the ever-changing world they will enter as alums. And it shows us why Kelley continues to lead the way as a top school of business.

Brian D. Jellison. Photo courtesy of the Jellison Family Foundation
“I cannot overstate the importance of the Kelley School to Indiana University and our campus – as well as to our partners here in Indiana, across the country and all over the world,” she added.
Brian D. Jellison, a 1968 IU graduate, created the foundation with his wife, Sheila, and their three daughters before he passed in November 2018. In addition to being a loving husband and father, he also is remembered as a passionate leader and mentor to many, both inside and outside of Roper Technologies, where he was CEO for 17 years.
Studios keep Kelley on the ‘leading edge’
In his remarks, Ash Soni, interim dean of the Kelley School, the SungKyunKwan Professor and a Kelley faculty member since 1981, provided a history lesson on how instructional technologies have gone from projecting images on a screen to today’s use of interactive videotelephony platforms such as Zoom.
“We’ve come a long way since the days of the overhead projector. I’m old enough to remember when that was considered innovative classroom technology,” Soni said. “When we first started developing online courses, we did live classes using what was basically a text-based chat room. We only had a limited number of characters to make a point.
“Think about it, it was like teaching a class using Twitter, except that Twitter is more advanced because of the number of characters,” he added.
In 1999, Kelley became the first top 20 business school to launch an online MBA – Kelley Direct — with a class of 14 students. This past year, more than 700 students graduated from the school’s online programs. “We have always been at the leading edge in online education and to this day we’re still the very best, with multiple No. 1 rankings,” Soni said. (more…)