Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. Here are excerpts on the subject from a New York Times article. The same technologies of “distance learning” are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds. At the University of Florida, for example, resident students are earning 12 percent of their credit hours online this semester, a figure expected to grow to 25 percent in five years. Across the United States, online education is exploding: 4.6 million students took a college-level online course during fall 2008, up 17 percent from a year earlier, according to the Sloan Survey of Online Learning. A large majority — about three million — were simultaneously enrolled in face-to-face courses, belying the popular notion that most online students live far from campuses, said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the survey. Many are in community colleges. Very few attend private colleges; families paying $53,000 a year demand low student-faculty ratios. Colleges and universities that have plunged into the online field, mostly public, cite their dual missions to serve as many students as possible while remaining affordable, as well as a desire to exploit the latest technologies. At the University of Iowa, as many as 10 percent of 14,000 liberal arts undergraduates take an online course each semester, including Classical Mythology and Introduction to American Politics. Online education has made undergraduates like Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9:35 A.M. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm, he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network. The curtains were drawn in the dorm room. The floor was awash in the flotsam of three freshmen – clothes, backpacks, homework, packages of Chips Ahoy and Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries. __
