Online Universities Are Gaining Acceptance, Pollster Says

Interesting article in today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/

 

Any primate with something resembling an intact cerebral cortex would recognize that the only thing holding the higher education B&M edifice and supporting paradigms together is custom, self interest, and prejudice. This is not difficult. The economic realities pressing on this anachronistic, bloated and largely unnecessary drag on the public purse will overwhelm it, and hopefully sooner rather than later. Even now, with the immature technologies currently at hand, much of the cosmically inefficient system could be replaced.

 

Hi Lawrie - I like your site. I'm wondering if you have any stats about the (increasing) numbers of people opting for DL degree programs.

 

http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp

This site has almost everything you could ever want to know about DL statistics. Most interesting to me is that their research shows that there is little discrimination issues against DL, unlike a lot of the rhetoric found here would suggest (albeit spirited and impassioned rhetoric).

 

There's a bunch of data out there - growth rates are currently sustainable at about 10% - that's the impression I get. This is about 8 times as fast as the growth rates for B&M traditional programs.

Besides raw increase in online student numbers, here are the perceptions of "areas of interest" to two other principal stakeholders in the mix who are central to driving the market - providers of product and consumers of product , i.e., colleges and employers (the product being the graduates themselves).


the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) have a report online at the url below. Note the pie chart projected /expected growth as reported by institutions fall 2006 to fall 2007

http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp

“What are the Prospects for Future Online Enrollment Growth?
Background: Compound annual enrollment growth rates of over twenty percent are not sustainable. The demand for online among potential students is finite, as is the ability of institutions to grow existing offerings or add new ones. Where can we expect the additional growth to occur?
The evidence: Approximately one-third of higher education institutions account for three-quarters of all online enrolments. Future growth will come predominately from these and similar institutions as they add new programs and grow existing ones.
· Much of the past growth in online enrollments has been fueled by new institutions entering the online learning arena. This transition is now nearing its end; most institutions that plan to offer online education are already doing so.
· A large majority (69 percent) of academic leaders believe that student demand for online learning is still growing.
· Virtually all (83 percent) institutions with online offerings expect their online enrollments to increase over the coming year.
· Future growth in online enrollments will most likely come from those institutions that are currently the most engaged; they enroll the most online learning students and have the highest expectations for growth.
“
source Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C)
http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp


And this very interesting report from Zogby published earlier this year

“Four in five business leaders favorably view online degrees
ALBANY, NY - The more business leaders know about online degree programs, the more likely they are to find degrees awarded by them to be as credible as those awarded by traditional campus-based programs. This is the key finding of a recent Excelsior College/Zogby International online survey of business executives nationwide.”
Source Zogby International

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1482

 

Fantastic Lawrie. Thanks for all you're doing.

 

Distance learning is certainly becoming more ubiquitous and more integrated with B&M education. Many B&M classes have online components these days. And on-campus students will somtimes enroll in online sections when they have scheduling conflicts.

As far as entirely DL degree programs go, these seem to be heavily concentrated in the adult continuing-education/career-advancement area. There are countless DL masters degree programs in vocational subjects. Many employers not only accept them, they pay their employees' tuition for enrolling in them.

I don't see very any much movement at the doctoral/research level. I can't think of any DL doctoral providers that that are trying to emulate what Berkeley and Stanford are doing. DL schools rarely host research units and don't generate very much talk in the scientific and scholarly worlds.

I don't think that DL research success is impossible, even if we haven't seen it yet. One could even argue that DL offers advantages, such as the ability to bring together a virtual research community composed of specialists scattered all over the world. The day might conceivably come when advanced study of text-based humanities subjects like English and philosophy are heavily online, while B&M campuses specialize in things like the sciences and engineering.

On the bachelors degree level, I don't see DL threatening the "top-tier" B&M schools. The elite undergraduate programs at Yale, Cal Tech or Amherst offer full-time, full-immersion, high-intensity experiences that DL will be hard pressed to match. Where bachelors-level DL will be (and already is) much more competitive is at the more proletarian "regional" "lower-tier" level that attracts lots of part-time students who take classes at night.