Blogroll
Distance Learning is an Economic Bonanza
August 29, 2009
Distance learning can easily put thousands of dollars into your personal economy each month if you are a college teacher. It isn’t difficult at all to start teaching one or more distance learning classes. In fact, it is as easy as turning on your computer and logging in to an online classroom. Aside from delivering information, online instructors set the emotional and intellectual tone for their classes. Add to this the prospect that a driven academic can teach as many as a dozen classes online at a time, and it is easy to understand that an online faculty position is certainly a prize catch.
Distance learning means knowledge delivered from a remote location to a remote location. Usually, but not always, this means using the Internet to deliver education. What was once the stuff of fancy is now a booming industry employing a growing number of college instructors. The next federal administration may want to increase the scope of distance learning to accommodate the coming spike in higher education student populations. The question arises as to why college populations will spike in the near term. It is simply that unemployment will spike, and historically, unemployed citizens, especially the younger one, flock to digital college campuses during downturns in the economy. There seems to be little doubt that this new electronic academic medium will be the oxcart by which this crowed of eager aspirants will carried into the electronic education age. Simply put, the laptop as college campus is simply too cost efficient for any academic governing board to ignore.
One is tempted to suggest that every new college student will be issued a spanking new laptop along with a login ID and a password when he or she enrolls in online classes. It is true that the next administration has identified two million Americans who could go to college, but for their inability to consummate the financial request paperwork. Apparently, the five-page, 127 questions form is too high a bar for these aspiring college degree seekers. There is little or no reason to quibble with this estimation because certainly the number of out of work citizens will zoom in the coming months and years, and what better place for them to spend their time than in an institution of higher learning. Surely, the state and the nation will much calmer if these individuals are busy with distance learning. Granted, the idea that colleges and universities are not catch basins for the nation’s unemployed might gain some traction with gray beards and academic malcontents, but they and their ilk can be safely ignored as they will soon be put out to pasture.
No, the future is coming, and with it comes online classes. If a prospective college student cannot navigate a five page questionnaire, the officiating bureaucrat can easily determine need by checking with the federal offices that record our annual income. In this way, the bureaucrat won’t be bothered trying to read semi-literate scrawls. It may be obvious to all and sundry, but in addition to the hordes of new college students on the way, there are tens of thousands of highly qualified college instructors in need of extra income. This is a marriage made in academic heaven. Public, private and for-profit institutions of higher learning will find this happy combination an economic bonanza, and the general public, meaning prospective students, will be simply delighted at the sheer amount of activity online classes will bring them in their pursuit of knowledge.