From the Sloan Consortium comes the tenth annual survey titled: Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States.
The higher education eLearning survey is a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, and purports itself to be the leading barometer of online learning in the United States.
“The rate of growth in online enrollments remains extremely robust,” said study co-author Jeff Seaman, Co-Director of the Babson Survey Research Group. “This is somewhat surprising given that overall higher education enrollments actually declined during this period.”
Ten Key eLearning Report Findings include:
- Over 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year.
- Thirty-two percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
- 77% of academic leaders surveyed reported online learning outcomes to be the same, somewhat superior or superior to face-to-face in 2012.
- 45% of CAOs agree that it takes more faculty time and effort to
teach an online course than a face-to-face course. - Only 2.6% higher education institutions currently have a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), another 9.4 percent report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
- Academic LEADERS remain unconvinced that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses, but do believe that they provide an important means for institutions to learn about online pedagogy.
- Seventy-seven percent of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face.
- Only 30.2 percent of chief academic OFFICERS believe that their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education – a rate is lower than recorded in 2004.
- The proportion of chief academic LEADERS that say that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at a new high of 69.1 percent.
- A majority of chief academic officers at all types of institutions continue to believe that lower retention rates for online courses are a barrier to the wide-spread adoption of online education.
DOWNLOAD the Full eLearning Report
Source:
http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012
I’m surprised to learn, that 77% academic leaders feel that Online learning is on par or even superior to face-to-face learning. I felt it would be the other way round.