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Foundations
of Distance Education
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Distance Education Today (continued)
Arthur Levine defined three basic types of colleges and universities that are emerging today (Levine, 2000):
- "Brick Universities" - traditional residential institutions
- "Click Universities" - new, usually commercial institutions, also known as "virtual universities"
- "Brick and Click Universities" - a combination of traditional and virtual universities
Jones International University is an example of a virtual/click university. Jones is the first fully accredited, completely online university and offering both bachelors and master's degrees.
International Data Corp. predicts that the U.S. e-learning market will grow to more than $14.7 billion by 2004. Much of the revenue comes from corporations paying to train their employees as companies save time and expense by eliminating travel (Forgrieve, 2002). After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, online training became even more attractive to many corporations.
Distance education is a "hot" topic in many educational publications and journals today. For example, in the Fall 2001 Educause Quarterly publication, three of the article titles had the words "Distance Education or Distance Learning" within the title. The titles were "Confronting Cost Issues in Distance Education, "The Death of Distance Learning?" and "Student Distress in Web-based Distance Education." There are also many organizations and conferences about distance education.
Below are some of the current national and international conferences and organizations devoted to the subject of distance education: