- Prior to 2012, the Babson Research Group was the leading source of information on online student demographics.
- In 2012, the Education Department started requiring colleges and universities to report out on their online student population.
- In 2012, 5.5 million students took at least one online course.
Further questions:
- I'm quite surprised that this information about online learners wasn't really of interest at a national level until 2012. Why weren't we interested until now?
- What does NDSU's online population look like?
Teaching implications:
I was quite taken aback by the number of students reported to be taking part in online education. In 2002, the Babson group reported that 1.6 million students (which the blog suggests is an overestimate) were formally learning online. In ten years almost 4 million people caught the online learning bug. What does that mean for the future of post-secondary education? We know that instructors are, for the most part, lacking any real training in how to teach by using evidence-based pedagogy in the face-to-face classroom, I imagine they receive far less for the online classroom. Due to the rise in the online student population, both in the past ten years and the predicted future, I would hope that we, as a community, see an increase in online education research and resulting evidence driven pedagogy.
Exactly How Many Students Take Online Courses?
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/exactly-how-many-students-take-online-courses/49455
I was also shocked that the government was not interested in online education enrollment all the way until 2012. They seem to have missed the boat by a decade. I've heard of the Babson group, but I thought it was a professional survey company, not a husband-and-wife team based out of a small liberal arts college. The online population at NDSU baffles me. This is purely anecdotal, but when I interact with students, many of them indicate taking one or even several online courses, even though they live on campus and online courses cost considerably more at NDSU compared to face-to-face classes. Some of that could be attributed to scheduling conflicts, but I also think many students perceive online courses to generally be easier (whether true or not). It would be interesting to find out why some NDSU students purposely choose the online route. Actually, it kind of sounds like a decent research project...
ReplyDeleteWhenever I talk with Dr. Momsen about online education, we always reach the same conclusion: all of us will likely be teaching some completely online courses in the future. It will simply come with the territory of being a teacher, so we best educate ourselves on how to do it right. Going off my past experiences with online courses, I think a common approach seems to be just taking all the material you traditional-style lecture about and posting it online. What was not real effective in the classroom becomes even less effective online. I'm not a total curmudgeon when it comes to online education. I think it can be just as effective as face-to-face education if well-executed. It's just that I so rarely see it well-executed. I would hope that training would increase as enrollment increases, but as you said, we encounter enormous difficulties bringing faculty over to evidence-based instruction for normal face-to-face courses, and I think we can expect the same with online education. Another possibility, however, is that faculty will be more aware that training is actually necessary when approached to teach an online course for the first time, since it will be a strange and new thing for some, and maybe they will be more willing to listen.