The Future Belongs to the Online Campus

The Future Belongs to the Online Campus The Future Belongs to the Online Campus Considering attending night classes to earn your insurance prelicensing requirements? Consider these first: Just ten years ago most American colleges and universities had no such thing as “online education” or anything close to a program that provided training online. By 2005, according to a survey conducted by the Sloan Consortium involving 2,200 colleges and universities, almost 3.2 million students were enrolled in at least one online course. By 2009, 44 percent of all postsecondary students were taking most, if not all, their courses online. By 2014, a few months from now, that number is projected to reach a stunning 81 percent. There’s no denying the fact that today online education has become the predominant method of delivering postsecondary education in the United States â€"from doctoral programs to continuing education (CE) courses, such as those offered by 360training.com, a primary source of online compliance and certification courses for contractors, insurance and real estate professionals, and other professionals in different industries.   This became apparent in the Sloan report, which had also revealed that not only were students as satisfied with online instruction as they were with classroom instruction, but also the educators themselves, who thought that online education was critical to their respective institutions. In an article for www.independent.co.uk, writer Amol Rajan envisions a time not too long from the present when all postsecondary instruction will be done online, which seems likely, considering present trends. “We are entering an age where online courses could spell the end of traditional universities,” he notes in his article. Already, primary- and secondary-level schools are increasingly going digital in the United States and in other parts of the world. The “Star Trek” schools, as Rajan calls them, are rapidly paving the way for the quantum leap to going fundamentally online at all levels of instruction. And if it’s any indication how earnest the trend is, Khan Academy, a nonprofit forward-looking educational institution that has already made available online an estimated 3,400 world-class tutorials for free, boasts today a worldwide student population of 10 million. The academy’s success has not gone unnoticed beyond the education community; the world’s most famous college dropout, Bill Gates, has taken to calling the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, the world’s favorite teacher. The level of success that online education can attain, of course, depends on how well designed the online programs are, a quality that Khan Academy and major online education providers such as 360training.com are well aware of. For the latter that specializes in training the workforce and providing solutions for corporate training quality, program design must be well targeted, too, to ensure not only student and career success, but also compliance with certification requirements.