Trends in Online Education
Posted on Tue, Feb 09, 2010 @ 01:13 AM
A guest post by Shannon Wills:
There’s no doubt that the Internet has given us a host of benefits and made the world a much smaller place than it is. We are now connected to every nook and corner of the earth, and information is no longer exclusive to a privileged few. One area where the World Wide Web has made significant contributions is online education – what started out as distance education where students were sent their study material through post and took their exams remotely has now bloomed into a full-fledged business that allows people to earn degrees from the comfort of their home.
The trends in online education have been changing since the time degrees were offered entirely online – earlier, there was a stigma attached to these degrees with employers and society refusing to accept them as equal to regular degrees that were earned in traditional institutions. The existence and rampant success of diploma mills that churned out fake degrees for money also did not help any, with people hesitant to accept even genuine online degrees as the real deal. And this meant that it was only those who had no other option left who turned to online schools to pursue an education.
Today however, there is a vast difference in how people perceive online education, especially since prestigious institutions like MIT have also jumped on this bandwagon and started offering its lessons online through its OpenCourseWare project. So we see the difference in the kind of students who enroll for online courses:
• While it earlier attracted mostly stay-at-home moms who had no time to attend regular college and for older men and women who felt out of place on campus, online education today is the choice of busy career men and women who look to these degrees to help further their profession and climb up the career ladder.
• Also, because of the recent recession, online education has become the savior of those who need to learn new skills to find better jobs, those who do not have enough money to afford a regular college education, those who wish to hold on to their jobs and also earn a degree so that they can further their careers, and for those who have been laid off and who seek to use their time constructively and in a cost-effective way.
• Veterans and others from the armed forces are turning to online education to help them gain skills to re-enter the mainstream workforce and fit better when they leave the army because of injuries or other reasons. They are able to learn from any place in the world, and when they leave the armed forces, they have a degree that will help them go places in the work world and also help support their families.
There’s no doubt that online education will continue to evolve and grow, and one day, it will become the norm rather than the anomaly.
This guest post is contributed by Shannon Wills, she writes on the topic of Online Engineering Degree . She welcomes your comments at her email id: shannonwills23@gmail.com.