Is Distance Learning Credible?  •   Accreditation of Distance Learning

Why Distance Learning

When colleges and universities first began incorporating distance education into their programs, they thought they were tapping into a new market of underserved adult learners who were too busy or lived too far away to come to a traditional campus. It often didn't occur to them that many of their traditional on-campus students would be eager to ease their schedules by taking courses online or would use distance learning to get into courses that had already been closed on campus. Now there are just as many on-campus students taking advantage of distance learning as there are off-campus students. At the State University of New York's Learning Network, 80 percent of the students study full- or part-time on a SUNY campus. At Arizona State University, only 3 percent of the distance education students live in another state. In Canada, Lori Wallace, a senior instructional designer at the University of Manitoba, tracked the demographics of distance education students for more than a decade and found that 66 percent of the students were taking concurrent courses on campus. However, all distance education students have at least one of these things in common:

• They are trying to finish a degree to get ajob orto advance to abetter one,

• Or they need certification for their profession ,

• Or they need continuing education units (CEUs) to stay current in their profession,

• Or they love learning and take college classes for personal enrichment, intellectual stimulation , socialization, or recreation ,

• Or they want achance to study with well-known teachers who have agreed to collaborate with certain distance learning programs or to complete a degree program at a prestigious college far from where they live,

• Or they are high school students wanting to get ajump on a collegeeducation,

• And they need the flexibility that distance learning offers because of where they live, their physical limitations, or the time constraints ofwork or family commitments.

This flexibility is why people elect to take courses via television, the Internet, or correspondence even when classrooms are just a few minutes away. Online courses are especially popular because students can log on day or night to check e-mail messages, discussion logs, and instructor assignments. Some online courses do require "attendance" at live chats, but this limits the school's market, so many online courses steer away from real-time activities that require a student to be somewhere at a set time.