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From one of our sponsors
eLearners.com®
Cost,
Convenience Shape Boom in Online Courses
Enrollment in online courses is booming. It could be a reflection of the
economy, or it might be just a sign of the times, but more students,
professionals and those re-entering the workforce are turning to online college courses to give them an edge in the global job
marketplace.
Statistics on e-learning illustrate just how popular this path to higher
education success has become in recent years. The Sloan Consortium, an
institutional and professional leadership organization dedicated to integrating
online education into the mainstream of higher education, reported that 3.9
million people — or more than 20% of all higher education students in the U.S.
— took at least one online course in Fall 2007. That also equated to a 12%
increase over online course students in 2006. In the current recession, the
number of online students is set to rise as more people will need to continue
to work while trying to complete post-secondary education.
The lower costs
of e-learning make it more attractive to people who are faced with restricted
budgets. Keep in mind that the flexibility of e-learning allows most students
to retain full time jobs, helping to ease the financial burden. Also, commuting
expenses are essentially eliminated as most work is
done at home.
In fact, many
major universities offer online learning content, including lecture notes,
videos and reading lists, free. Though they rarely include college credit for
the learning effort, free online courses assist many with Prior Learning
Assessment criterion and other, similar standards. The list of schools
includes:
A more
comprehensive list can be found at iBerry,
a non-profit website featuring the Open Courseware Directory, a list of
publicly available online courses.
Outside of the
cost benefit, the convenience and flexibility factors that e-learning provides
over traditional brick-and-mortar learning have made online courses the perfect
solution to a number of problems that prevented many from getting college degrees:
Frequent moves and job changes have made it challenging for professionals and military personnel to enroll in a traditional program for higher education degrees.
There are many moms who started their college degrees but put them on the backburner to start a family. With a hectic lifestyle, these women are looking to get back into the workplace but may not have the skills and want to finish off their degrees. However, the challenge is fitting in locked-in class times with “mom’s taxi service,” after-school activities, and other responsibilities. Online courses provide “super moms” with the super power to do it all.
Those living in rural communities may have never considered on-site college courses due to the travel time involved or other logistical issues.
Today’s working professional or entrepreneur finds similar constraints due to an already jam-packed schedule that leaves little or no free time to fit in classroom learning. Often, full-time work hours do not coordinate with college course times, but online learning allows professionals to do their learning late at night, in the early morning, or on the weekend.
There are still
hurdles to overcome with online college courses, including how to increase the
comfort level for professionals and those re-entering the workforce in terms of
technology. Luckily, there are many online courses and resources, like eHow, to help bring computer skills up to
snuff.
In the early
days of online courses, credibility played a factor as many people were
concerned that accredited online degrees
would not be taken seriously by employers. However, a number of factors have
helped to enhance the reputation of online college courses. Now, online and
blended college classes— which combine on-campus with videotaped lectures and
Internet assignments and discussions — are no longer the exception; in fact,
e-learning seems to be the new wave of higher learning, with more than 70% of
public institutions and approximately 50% of private institutions agreeing that
online education is critical to their long-term strategy, according to the
Sloan Consortium’s latest report, “Staying The Course: Online Education in the
United States, 2008.”
About
eLearners.com®
The
eLearners.com website is one of several high
visibility, high-quality prospecting tools offered by EducationDynamics,
LLC. Since 1999, eLearners.com has been successfully connecting learners
to online education, including online degree and certificate programs,
specialized career training, and numerous online courses.