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Study: Online Education Continues Its Meteoric Growth 2010
"Online college education is expanding—rapidly. More than 4.6 million college students were taking at least one online course at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. That's more than 1 in 4 college students, and it's a 17 percent increase from 2007." "For the past several years, all of the growth—90-plus percent—is coming from existing traditional schools that are growing their current offerings," says Jeff Seaman, one of the study's authors and codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College.
Online Courses Lead For-Profit Learning Trend 7/1/98
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980701S0008
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Of the 60 new
distance-learning courses the
University of British Columbia in
Vancouver has added in the past
three years, 50 are also offered on the
Web.
Online classes, part of the growing
trend toward distance learning,
are helping the 90-year-old institution
redefine itself as a
networked, virtual university and one of
the leaders in using
information technology to reach students
outside its geographic
boundaries. "It's a result of our management
thinking strategically," said
Anthony Bates, director of distance
education and technology at UBC.
Bates spoke at the Institute for
Leadership in Distance Education, a
three-day conference this week at
Pennsylvania State University.
Bates said UBC's online initiative was
born after a budget freeze
forced the university to find new ways
to increase revenue.
But UBC, with a student body some 33,000
strong, isn't alone.
Peterson's, the college guide, lists
more than 800 colleges and
universities with distance-learning
courses. Five years ago, there
were fewer than 100. In many cases, they
are correspondence courses
or even delivered via satellite, but
more often, it means using the
Internet to teach students. For example,
Duke University recently
began offering an M.B.A. program on the
Web.
UBC offers classes through
video-conferencing, on CD-ROM, the
Internet, and of course, in its
classrooms. It also sells its
services to organizations that seek
custom training, and intends to
eventually turn a profit from these
activities. That has yet to
happen, although Bates praised the
online courses as a way of
"reorganizing the university for the
21st century."
The school offers distance courses in
the arts, agriculture,
forestry, and law, and is preparing
courses in dentistry and
pharmacy. It has a distance-learning
partnership with the Monterrey
Institute of Technology, a private
college with campuses throughout
Mexico, and is looking to franchise its
programs globally.
In creating virtual courses, UBC saves
money. "We were able to do an
online course at half the cost of
print," said Bates. In addition,
the virtual courses let UBC get more
mileage from its offerings, by
disseminating them through varying
media.
Murray Goldberg, a computer science
professor at the school, led the
development of [43]Web-CT, a software
tool that helps educators
create Web-based courses. The software,
which costs around $200 for a
site license for 50 students, is now
installed at 600 different
institutions around the world.
UBC's efforts are " very close" to the
ideal virtual university, said
Joan Calvert, coordinator of academic
computing at Central
Connecticut State University in New
Britain, Conn. "They have a big
jump on us, they are online and now
working internationally. The
ramifications of this will transform the
higher education model."
Professors Not Corporations Are the Biggest Competitors Against Universities for Market Share in the Distance Online College Education Marketplace
Professors turning entrepreneur and selling their courses in electronic and online formats is becoming a major challenge to the market segment sought by universities for creation of courses and degree programs to be sold on the internet to a worldwide clientelle. Professors are becoming aware of their course presentations as a program series that can be repetitively marketed by them over the internet which may become a major portion of their income.
Boola, Boola: E-Commerce Comes to the Quad
Source Date: February 13, 2000
We always thought our new competition was going to be 'Microsoft
University,"' the president of an elite Eastern university ruefully
remarked to a visitor over dinner recently. "We were wrong. Our
competition is our own faculty."
Welcome to the ivory tower in the dot.com age, where commerce and
competition have set up shop.
Several years ago, educators and entrepreneurs began to see that
millions of students and potential students might be reached, and tens of
millions of dollars earned, using the Internet to provide a higher
education. More than one-third of all colleges and universities in the
United States already offer distance learning, as it is called; by 2002,
four of every five are expected to do so.
Everyone, it seems, now recognizes that the 14 million or so students
engaged in some form of higher education make up only a small part of a
much larger market.
"Faculty are dreaming of returns that are probably multiples of their
lifetime net worth," said Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard Business School.
"They are doing things like saying, 'This technology allows someone who is
used to teaching 100 students to teach a million students.' And they are
running numbers and imagining, 'Gee, what if everyone paid $10 to listen
to my lecture?"'
Academics and their academies are already squaring off over who owns
the electronic rights to a professor's lectures and research. http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/021300internet-professors-review.html