| Wednesday, April 25
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Online education offers opportunities, relieves hassles |
Distance learning allows many people the chance to get a college education when circumstances like work, family, disabilities or the price of gas make it difficult to physically attend classes on a college campus.
For 43-year-old Janel Cotter of Bakersfield, Mo., the fact that Arkansas State University offers online education means that her school load is a little less stressful this semester.
Enrollment numbers for the spring semester show that Cotter is one of 1,823 undergraduate students enrolled in web and web-assisted courses on the Jonesboro campus. That is a 662-person increase compared to the 2006 spring semester when 1,161 were enrolled.
"It is a combination of more students and more course offerings," said Susan D. Allen, the former vice chancellor of Research and Academic Affairs. "Online education is here to stay, and it's going to become more and more interactive," she said.
The College Board, a non-profit association that connects students with college opportunity, along with the Sloan Consortium, an association of the nation's institutions and organizations that study the quality of online education, surveyed 2,200 U.S. colleges and universities last year. They found that almost 3.2 million students took at least one online course during the fall. This is up from 2.3 million in 2005.
Online courses are convenient for Cotter, a junior criminology and sociology major, who works 32 hours a week and takes care of her mother and two farms, which include cattle.
Cotter is taking an online social deviance class this semester, plus 13 hours on the Jonesboro campus, but last spring she took a biology course from ASU-Mountain Home. Because her father was sick, she said she would have had to drop it if there had only been a classroom option.
"It was very hard to finish my classes that semester. I was under a lot of pressure," Cotter said. "My father wanted me to finish school, so I lied to him and said it was my last semester." Cotter said she picked up her father from the hospital after she finished her final exam for the class. "I wanted to quit classes because I felt so much pressure and responsibility on a personal level," she said.Labels: education online |
posted by ^%&^
@ 10:45 PM
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