Past, Present and Future of Online Education Infographic

Past, Present and Future of Online Education Infographic

The evolution of technology and of new learning experiences have always been closely related. As distance learning specialists affirm, the field of distance-learning had three main generations:

• Correspondence study
• Multimedia
• Computer-mediated

The Past, Present and Future of Online Education Infographic provides a brief presentation of the history of online education.

A brief timeline of online education

• On March 20, 1728, the Boston Gazette ran an advertisement offering long distance instruction. And so teaching outside the classroom had its beginning.

• 1728: Boston teacher offers instruction through weekly letters to anyone in the country.

• 1892: U. of Chicago is first educational institution to offer correspondence courses.

• 1922: Penn State broadcasts courses over the radio.

• 1953: U. of Houston offers course work on TV.

• 1968: Stanford University creates the Stanford Instructional Television Network.

• 1959: Plato is born, the first internet community. Hatched by two U. of Illinois profs.

• 1968: U. of Alberta (Canada) Dept. of Medicine offers online courses.

• 1984: The Electronic University Network, offers online courses using proprietary software for DOS and Commodore 64 computers.

• 1989: Phoenix rising. The University of Phoenix starts its online program.

• 1996: Duke University begins its Global Executive M.B.A. program which combines online technology and sessions on-campus and at various locations throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

• 1999: Jones University becomes first accredited fully web based university; Learning portals, including HungryMinds, Click2Learn, Learn2, eCollege, Blackboard, and others emerge on the landscape.

• 2000: CourseNotes.com launches with dozens of classes at the University of Texas. The service provides professor web sites, including online course documents, calendars, grades, quizzes and surveys.

• Jan. 1, 2008: The term MOOC is coined by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island.

• 2012: The rise of MOOCs, Coursera, Udacity, edX launch.

• 2013: The Open University builds its own MOOC platform, Futurelearn, with universities from the UK. More MOOCs: Open2Study in Australia and Iversity in Germany.

3 Types of Online Education

• 80-100% online courses have no face to face interaction with teacher
• 30-80% course delivered online: Traditional courses using web facilitated courses
• Blended or hybrid: Up to 20 percent of content delivered online: otherwise, traditional face to face classroom learning

10 Surprising Facts about Online Students

• 46% of students say their biggest motivation for enrolling in an online course was to advance their current career.
• 37% of online students were the first in their family to attend college.
• 33% of people taking some online course are studying business.
• University of Phoenix has the largest proportion of online students at 15%.
• 39% of online students fall between the ages of 18 to 29.
• 21% of online students pay for their education using personal funds only.
• 70% of virtual learners are female.
• 29% of online graduates earn $85-150k annual income.
• 60% of students taking an online course are employed full-time.
• 37% of online students indicate that they enrolled because of the accelerated courses, which fast-tracks students to a degree.

Top 10 most popular online degrees

1. Business Administration/management
2. Accounting
3. IT (Information Technology)
4. Criminal Justice/Law Enforcement
5. Finance
6. Psychology
7. Graphic Design
8. Health Care Administration
9. Nursing
10. Computer Science

K-12 Online

• 25 states have state virtual schools operating in 2013-2014.
• 29 states and Washington, DC have statewide full-time online schools operating in 2013-14.

There were an estimated 1,816,400 enrollments in distance-education courses in K-12 school districts in 2009-2010, almost all of which were online courses. 74% of these enrollments were in high schools. Online courses with the highest level of enrollment fall under the categories of credit recovery (62%), dual enrollment (47%), and advanced placement (29%).