Aha! Online education is moving from the margins to the mainstream. Interversity, of course, started with the idea that learning online was, in many ways, as productive as learning in traditional situations.
Vindication! :-)
Students prefer online courses
Classes popular with on-campus students
Friday, January 13, 2006; Posted: 3:18 p.m. EST (20:18 GMT)(AP) -- Andy Steele lives just a few blocks from the campus of Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, so commuting to class isn't the problem. But he doesn't like lectures much, isn't a morning person, and wants time during the day to restore motorcycles.
So Steele, a full-time senior business major, has been taking as many classes as he can from the South Dakota state system's online offerings. He gets better grades and learns more, he says, and insists he isn't missing out on the college experience.
"I still know a lot of people from my first two years living on campus, and I still meet a lot of people," he says. But now, he sets his own schedule.
At least 2.3 million people took some kind of online course in 2004, according to a recent survey by The Sloan Consortium, an online education group, and two-thirds of colleges offering "face-to-face" courses also offer online ones. But what were once two distinct types of classes are looking more and more alike -- and often dipping into the same pool of students.
At some schools, online courses -- originally intended for nontraditional students living far from campus -- have proved surprisingly popular with on-campus students. A recent study by South Dakota's Board of Regents found 42 percent of the students enrolled in its distance-education courses weren't so distant: they were located on campus at the university that was hosting the online course.
Numbers vary depending on the policies of particular colleges, but other schools also have students mixing and matching online and "face-to-face" credits. Motives range from lifestyle to accommodating a job schedule to getting into high-demand courses.
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In fact, the distinction between online and face-to-face courses is blurring rapidly. Many if not most traditional classes now use online components -- message boards, chat rooms, electronic filing of papers. Students can increasingly "attend" lectures by downloading a video or a podcast.
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Arizone State's director of distance learning, Marc Van Horne, says students are increasingly demanding both high-tech delivery of education, and more control over their schedules. The university should do what it can to help them graduate on time, he says.
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Then there's the question of whether students are well served by taking a course online instead of in-person. Some teachers are wary, saying showing up to class teaches discipline, and that lectures and class discussions are an important part of learning.
But online classes aren't necessarily easier. Two-thirds of schools responding to a recent survey by The Sloan Consortium agreed that it takes more discipline for students to succeed in an online course than in a face-to-face one.
read more here
Of course, I don't for a minute think that most of the online classes schools are offering resemble what I have in mind when I think of online learning. Quite a few, maybe nearly all, are still transplants from the traditional classroom and still bear many of the social and intellectual markings of classroom-based education.