By Frank Donoghue, Innovation – Chronicle of Higher Education
One thing for certain is that online education is here to stay. No matter what happens to Blackboard, online course management software programs are firmly entrenched in too many institutions (traditional and for-profit alike) for online learning ever to go away. The best place to learn more is to visit the Sloan Consortium’s Web site. That team has done comprehensive studies of online learning since 2001. Not surprisingly, the demand for online instruction has grown extraordinarily, and that demand seems to be increasing more rapidly than ever. The seventh annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning, published in 2009, reveals that “online enrollment rose by nearly 17 percent from a year earlier. The survey, a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group, the College Board, and the Sloan Consortium, is the leading barometer of online learning in the United States. Using results from more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide, the report finds approximately 4.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2008.” That’s nearly a third of the overall student population in the country.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/online-learning-good-bad-inevitable/29814
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