OnlineEd-Babson-OLC-Report-Feb2016

 

NEW! Online Report Card – Tracking Online Education in the U.S. — from the Online Learning Consortium

Excerpt:

Key report findings include:

  • A year-to-year 3.9% increase in the number of distance education students, up from the 3.7% rate recorded last year.
  • More than one in four students (28%) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year-to-year increase of 217,275).
  • The total of 5.8 million fall 2014 distance education students is composed of 2.85 million taking all of their courses at a distance and 2.97 million taking some, but not all, distance  courses.
  • Public institutions command the largest portion of distance education students, with 72.7% of all undergraduate and 38.7% of all graduate-level distance students.
  • The proportion of chief academic leaders that say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy fell from 70.8% last year to 63.3% this year.
  • The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the  same or superior to those in face-to-face instruction is now at 71.4%.
  • Only 29.1% of academic leaders report that their faculty accept the “value and legitimacy  of online education.” Among schools with the largest distance enrollments, 60.1% report faculty acceptance while only 11.6% of the schools with no distance enrollments do so.

 

Also see:

  • Babson bids good-bye to enrollment numbers — from Carl Straumsheim
    The 13th and final annual report on online education enrollments by the Babson Group shows how much the market has grown since 2002 — and how little it has changed.
    Excerpt:
    The Babson Survey Research Group is ending its influential report on the number of students who study online and how chief academic officers feel about the delivery method, citing a “coming of age” of the online education market. Yet the 13th and final annual report, released [2/9/16], shows that perceived skepticism among faculty members toward online education remains, and that many colleges continue to have no interest in online courses.