cover image CYBERSCHOOLS: An Educational Renaissance

CYBERSCHOOLS: An Educational Renaissance

Glenn R. Jones, Glen R. Jones, . . iBooks, $14.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-7434-5251-9

In the United States this year, 2.2 million students will receive college-level credit without physically going to college. Course material will be delivered to their homes or offices by Internet. Discussions, assignments and exams will be done online. Some of these are courses offered by traditional universities, of which the University of Phoenix is the largest, some by accredited "virtual universities" with no on-campus instruction, such as the author's Jones International University, and some by unaccredited institutions. Such programs are not cheap; the author's statistics place them about midway between public and private bricks-and-mortar universities. For many students, however, especially those with full-time jobs or those far from campuses, the savings in commuting and the flexibility to make their own schedules make the total cost less than that of alternatives. This book summarizes the history and current state of the market. Taking a narrow focus, Jones discusses only professionally oriented courses in business, technology and health care leading to traditional degrees. The increasing need for skilled workers in developing countries and worker retraining everywhere has created huge opportunities within this segment. This is an updated edition of a work originally published in 1997, but more than half of the statistics are from 1996 or earlier, and many are from 1992 or earlier. In Internet time, that means a lot of the argument is ancient history. This book will be of most interest to someone getting into the distance education business and possibly someone considering online college courses for professional advancement. (Oct.)