The “US corporate market for Self-paced eLearning reached $5.2 billion in 2007” according to a report from Ambient Insight. This is roughly equivalent to the GNP of Burkina Faso, which used to be the most illiterate country in the world, or Cambodia. It is also the same amount that the Wall Street Journal reports the global airline industry could lose this year. Interestingly, the higher fuel costs that the airline industry’s losses are attributed to are one of the reasons students are choosing online programs. I wonder if students who make such choices for purely economic reasons – or who don’t really have a choice because they can’t afford the gas – ultimately embrace their online courses or, as the New York Times reports, prefer “on-campus study, ‘but with the price of gas jumping up, I’ll probably be taking more courses online now.'”
I earned my M.S. in a traditional classroom setting. I am completing my dissertation for my Ph.D. coursework, which was mostly online. I can tell you that I feel that the doctoral studies were as academically challenging as anything I have experienced in a traditional classroom. Online learning opens doors to educational opportunities that people may not otherwise have. Whether the conflicts are gas prices, distance, family, work, or other issues.
However, there is bad online learning just like there is bad traditional classroom learning.
Lisa, I think you are on the right track, economics are entering in students’ choices on whether to take online courses or not. The Director to the Graduate Programs in Education asked me whether we can start converting all the face to face courses to a hybrid format, just because she felt that students are worried about the long drive to school.
I believe that faced with economic uncertainty, students and families are forced to reevaluate choices they had previously made. This is especially the case for undergraduates seeking the “college experience,” versus graduate and professional students that are more focused on the education, while the classroom interaction is a distant second in their value decision.
I’m currently in a masters program for instructional design and I haven’t met anyone who has chosen the online learning setting due to economic hardships. Now this may be because they don’t want to admit these hardships; however, I’ve found that many people choose online learning because they can attend programs and/or universities despite the barrier of space and sometimes even time with asynchronous courses. In many circumstances if someone has the money to attend college, they most likely have the money to pay for the gas to attend these classes 1-2 times a week.