industry t h ought l eader ship
The Difference is in the Delivery By Dee Masiello, Dean, School of Continuing Studies
According to a 2013 survey of online learning completed by the Babson Group with support of the Sloan Learning Consortium, about 32% of higher education students now take at least one course online. Nearly 70% of higher education institutions report online education was critical to their long-term strategies, which compares with less than one half of institutions of higher education 10 years ago. To learn more about Dean’s Online Learning Programs, visit www.dean.edu/online or call the School of Continuing Studies at 508-541-1679.
Offering programs of study through online delivery allows institutions to serve wider populations of students. This is an important consideration in contemporary higher education when more than half of bachelor’s degree students are over the age of 25. Students hold full-time jobs, have families, and may themselves have children in school. In addition, travel schedules and commuting times create barriers to attendance. Given the competing demands, committing to regular classroom-based courses is simply not possible for many. Institutions need multiple pathways for degree completion that address these challenges and provide quality educational opportunities. For all of the above reasons, the flexibility of online learning has always been a primary driver of its appeal. Online programs today are more flexible than ever before. Consider that an “online student” could mean someone who takes a fully online course, takes the majority of classes online but some on campus, or takes a majority of classes on campus and only some online. Of course, with the proliferation of online courses comes the “quality” question. There have always been skeptics of distance education. In nearly 10 years of experience offering courses via online delivery I have heard every argument there is against online education. Very rarely are those concerns not based in a lack of understanding what “quality” means in this environment or how online learning will affect the role (and dare I say, relevance?) of the faculty.
Simply stated, online education does not and cannot exist without the subject matter expertise of academics, and the biggest indicator of quality for an online program is whether or not students receive the same education that they would in the classroom. A 2012 report from the Sloan Consortium on online education found that a majority (77%) of academic leaders rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face programs—up from 57% in 2003.
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