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A recent study on online education in the United States for The Sloan Consortium which is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and is based on responses from over 1,000 colleges and universities found that online course and program offerings have entered the mainstream. (Sloan Consortium. Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. Sloan Consortium. http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey05.asp)
The study also found that the overall enrollment in online courses was up from 1,980,000 in 2003 to 2,350,000 in 2004 and that the growth rate surpassed the projections for the general post secondary student population by the National Center for Education Statistics by a magnitude of 10 times their projection. (Sloan Consortium. Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. Sloan Consortium. http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey05.asp)
Core Faculty Tend to Teach More Online Than On campus Courses
Another interesting piece of information that came out of the study is that online courses have a higher percentage of core faculty (the main professors and instructors of the colleges and universities; the specialists) teaching the courses than in traditional on campus courses. (Sloan Consortium. Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 – Southern Edition. Sloan Consortium. http://www.sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/southern05.asp). This was true at my university (Royal Roads University) as I remember that a lot of the core faculty for my Bachelors of Commerce Degree were teaching the online bachelors degree courses. In fact they hired new, non-core faculty to teach the majority of the on campus courses that I attended.
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