Online Courses Growing, For Better or For Worse
Regardless of the disapproval from some academic officials, online learning is a phenomenon that is continuing to grow quickly and does not look like it will dissipate any time soon. New figures released by the College Board in tandem with The Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges concerned with the furthering of online education, indicate that online courses saw surprising growth last fall.
The report, titled “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006” shows that about 3.2 million students enrolled in higher education institutions took at least one online class in the fall of 2005. This figure was a 40% increase from the previous year, or an increase of about 850,000 students. The growth was unexpected because of the subdued growth reported by The Sloan Consortium for the prior year.
The 3.2 million students in the fall 2005 term was twice the figure reported in 2002, which was the first year that Sloan began keeping track of this information.
Online courses are defined as those that convey at least 80% of their content by way of the Web.
Jeff Seaman, CIO and survey director at Sloan, said that the growth was “higher in absolute numbers and higher in percentages than anything” the group had seen before. He called the growth “phenomenal,” and pointed out that the growth was for all types of educational institutions, including doctoral schools and for-profit schools.
For-profit programs have seen their share of cloudy days during the past two years. Pessimistic growth expectations drove down stock prices for these institutions. Other online learning programs have died out.
The majority of academic officials seem to be fine with this trend. About 62% of them said they thought that students learned just as effectively or more effectively online as they did in face-to-face classes. Almost six in 10 indicate that online learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” This optimism is higher than it was last year.
There is still a solid 38% of academic representatives who do not like this trend. This group indicated that online learning demeaned education.
Academic officials at private nonprofit schools were most skeptical of online education’s legitimacy, with about one in five saying that they did not see value in this approach.
The report also indicated that about 80% of students enrolled in online courses are undergrads. About 50% of these students are learning online through community colleges, and 13% are learning online through doctoral and research programs.
About 96% of big institutions (defined as those having at least 15,000 students) offer online classes, and about two-thirds of them have programs that are wholly online.
As almost all facets of daily life are seeping onto the Web, it is not surprising that education is following the trend. Face-to-face interactions are becoming rarer, and it will be interesting to see how this will affect graduates looking for jobs.
It is difficult to imagine major job interviews going virtual anytime soon, so will graduates with online degrees find these interactions difficult? Also, how will these graduates respond to office environments, where face-to-face and group interactions are key to success?
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061110/ap_on_hi_te/colleges_online
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online
