Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Online courses increase in popularity.

This post comes from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Al Turgeon knows turf.

The Penn State University professor of turf grass management is world-renown, but students don't have to travel to University Park to learn from him.

Some of his classes are as handy as the nearest computer, whether it's in Pennsylvania or China, at home or in a war zone in Iraq.

Since Dr. Turgeon began offering Penn State's first online course in 1998, the Penn State World Campus has grown from the initial 15 students to more than 5,000 enrollments from all 50 states and more than 40 countries.

Penn State's not the only one with a burgeoning enrollment in online classes. Over the past decade, online education has been growing throughout higher education.

Nationwide in the fall of 2005, nearly 3.2 million students at degree-granting institutions were taking at least one course with at least 80 percent of its content delivered online, according to the most recent available survey by the Sloan Consortium, which helps schools improve online education.

That's nearly double the number doing so just three years earlier.

Two-thirds of the schools surveyed had at least some online programs. Click here to read the rest of this article.

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