Inside the digital classroom
Over one in four U.S. higher education students now takes at least one course online. That’s a whopping 5,828,826 students. And those numbers just keep growing: up by nearly a quarter of a million students from the year before. (That’s even more impressive when you consider that overall higher education enrollments dropped last year.)
Drilling down just a bit, 72% of all undergraduate and 38.7% of all graduate-level online students are enrolled at public institutions.
If you’ve ever taught or taken an online course, you probably know how much work and rigor is involved and how powerful digital learning environments can be. But online learning may still face some perception challenges among faculty. According to Babson Survey Research Group, just 29.1% of academic leaders report that their faculty accept the “value and legitimacy” of online education. In spite of this, 71.4% of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face instruction…and that speaks volumes!
Everyone’s educational road is different. Whether they’re taking care of families, following new career paths, or training for the Olympics, learners can rely on the accessibility and flexibility of online learning to help them change their lives.
Online education, like all education, is about real human beings: powerfully committed educators and students. We’d like you to meet a few of them.
This story originally appeared in our digital magazine, Degrees.
