Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Congress Boosts OnLine Education
There is good news about educational opportunities for rural areas in this New York Times article, altough it doesn't quite say that. From the article:
"It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.
That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones. .....
The Bush administration supported lifting the restriction on online education as a way to reach nontraditional students."
The NYT isn't completely happy with this improvement, harping on it as a case of Republicans giving benefits to private for profit colleges. I think the reporter overplays this, since many public and not for profit colleges can take advantage of this change - and there are a lot more of them out there.
Far more important is the encouragement for all colleges to offer more online courses to more students. Current law has inhibited the growth of online education by all types of colleges due to the threat of loss of federal aid if more than half the classes were not given on campus. I recalll that being a concern at some community and state colleges as they explored offering a significant number of online courses to students in rural areas.
The real beneficiaries of this change are students who can't get to campus easily. That class of students includes both working adults and all rural residents. With the greatly increased availability of high bandwidth internet service, this legislation should help a lot of rural folks improve their education with the help of federal student aid. And, hopefully, will encourage more colleges to offer more courses online.
"It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.
That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones. .....
The Bush administration supported lifting the restriction on online education as a way to reach nontraditional students."
The NYT isn't completely happy with this improvement, harping on it as a case of Republicans giving benefits to private for profit colleges. I think the reporter overplays this, since many public and not for profit colleges can take advantage of this change - and there are a lot more of them out there.
Far more important is the encouragement for all colleges to offer more online courses to more students. Current law has inhibited the growth of online education by all types of colleges due to the threat of loss of federal aid if more than half the classes were not given on campus. I recalll that being a concern at some community and state colleges as they explored offering a significant number of online courses to students in rural areas.
The real beneficiaries of this change are students who can't get to campus easily. That class of students includes both working adults and all rural residents. With the greatly increased availability of high bandwidth internet service, this legislation should help a lot of rural folks improve their education with the help of federal student aid. And, hopefully, will encourage more colleges to offer more courses online.
