Selected by Mimi Rothschild
More than 3 million enrolments in online courses in the USA are reported by American sources. The essay investigates the role of online studies within the American educational system and tries to find out more about the exact meaning of these extremely high figures. The research discovers astonishing facts and relations: Public schools offer more online courses (82%) than private schools, and 52% of all online courses are offered by 2-year colleges for the associate degrees (and only 8% for the bachelor). A majority of online courses fulfill the role as “remedial courses” that serve for “credit recovery” (U.S. department of Education).
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a department of the U.S. Department of Education, is a rich source of data on the American college system, the courses it offers, distance education and the students of America. NCES reported in the Statistical Analysis Report February 2002 “Distance Education Instruction by Postsecondary Faculty and Staff” (Ellen M. Bradburn, NCES 2000-155)(43) that the USA had an impressive 16.5 million students, of which 3.3 million enrolled in at least one online course, that 5.9 % of courses were being offered as online courses (Distance Education, DE) and that 6% of the teaching staff at colleges offered at least one DE course. This would indeed not only be a significant number of students in eLearning and of online courses but also of dedicated teachers.
In the NCES Report “Distance Education at Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions” (2003-017) Tiffany Waits and Laurie Lewis estimate that the number of “credit-granting” distance learning courses offered at various college levels is 118,000. However 76% of these courses are designed for undergraduates. They estimate that 2,876,000 students enrolled in online courses, 82% of which are undergraduates (I will explain the meaning of ‘undergraduate’ in this context at a later point). Hans Weiler (2005)(55) who was previously a professor at Stanford University and co-founded the Viadrina University is also of the opinion that “the U.S. Distance Learning market has expanded rapidly in the last few years”. Although he advises caution “the figures should be handled with care”, he is, nonetheless, clearly impressed by their magnitude:
“But the dimensions and growth rates are striking: from 1997-98 to 2000-01 the number of students taking DE courses more than doubled to 2.8 million; almost all public colleges (97 %) now offer at least part of their courses online; in 2004 approximately 3 million students availed of some part of this service, 600,000 for their complete course of study”.
In their report “Entering the Mainstream: The quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004″, carried out for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman reported that 1,602,970 students took at least one online course in 2002 and 1,971,397 in 2003. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which is part of the Department of Education has published projections which forecast a tremendous increase of up to 20% in the number of students by the year 2013. This figure is sure to frighten many European education policy-makers involved in tertiary education.