Increasing Access in Online Higher Education

Abstract

This paper investigates how access to higher education in the United States can be increased through further integration of online education. The search for opportunities to increase access to online education examined multiple prospective higher education contexts. A series of papers produced by participants in the 2005 Sloan-C summer workshop is synthesized and presented in this overview. Individual papers are included in the publication, providing analyses of specific opportunities.

An Online Learning Model to Facilitate Learners’ Rights to Education

“…Distance education, especially online learning, is one of the prominent areas that have greatly benefited from the advancement of new media and technologies, and as a result, has helped extend educational opportunities and rights to learners of various backgrounds. Distance learning has greatly extended access that would otherwise be unavailable [11,12,13,14,15,16,17], offered flexibility that meets the learners' needs [11,18,19,20,21,22], afforded multiple and alternative ways of learning that satisfy individual differences [11,23,21], encouraged independent and self-directed learning [24,25,26,27,28], facilitated reflective and higher-order thinking [29,30,31,32,33], and taken advantage of new media and technologies that are, or become recursive parts of learner's personal and professional lives [34,35,36,37,38].…”

Brics and Clicks

“…Bourne, Moore, Sener, Mayadas, and Ettinger [5] predicted that two billion people worldwide might be identified as learners, assuming that global access to education will eventually resemble the widespread access in the United States. The basis for the prediction is the estimate of one-third of the U.S. population taking part in education, from young children through adult learners.…”

“…Indeed, as articulated by a group of international and U.S. organizations, cross-border offerings should specifically assist developing countries and thus "promote global equity" [13]. Bourne et al [5] named economic barriers as a reason we might not see expansion in this direction; however, the amount of crossborder delivery of education will be appreciable, even if growth rates were to be modest. Certainly, the U.S. and the U.K. are host to large numbers of international students who travel for higher education, especially graduate degrees.…”