Nevada Online Education: Accepted, Accredited, Respected

Before the birth of the Internet, the only alternative to traditional education institutions were correspondence schools. Because the mail-order courses they provided offered little interaction between the students and instructors, the quality of the education was generally considered inferior to that of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities.

Although that stigma transferred to online schools for a short time following their emergence, people have since discovered there's a world of differences between correspondence schools and their online counterparts. Estimates place the number of students enrolled in online schools somewhere in the neighborhood of five million. People getting an online education in Nevada are working on degrees to become medical professionals, chefs, lawyers, journalists, architects, psychologists, criminal justice experts, accountants and more. These days, just about every class offered by a traditional school can be taken online.

Stamp of Approval

The influx of students has prompted some of the country's top education specialists to give online schooling a closer look. Chris Wenger, director of online education for Fisher College, says, "The course description, content, and objectives are no different in online versus classroom-based courses." Judy Gust, a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Task Force, finds the typical online course to be "a quality, critical thinking and professional offering." And a report prepared by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group finds that most public institutions "believe that online education is critical to their long-term strategy." In other words, a Nevada online education is the real deal.

Adding to the validity of the growing support for online education are some of the country's most respected schools. Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Kent State are among countless accredited universities that have bellied up to the 21st century by adding Internet-based courses to their curriculums. And the instructors couldn't be happier about it. "Both chief academic officers and online teaching faculty said that flexibility in meeting the needs of students was the most important motivation for teaching online," the Sloan report states. Another benefit for the institutions that have gone online is their ability to hire some of the world's most respected educators, who were previously out of reach because they live in other parts of the world. The worldwide expansion offers online students in Nevada something they could never get in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting: the experiences of global scholars.

New Employment Opportunities

While there might have been a time when employers favored traditional degrees to those earned online, times have clearly changed. Realizing that candidates with traditional degrees aren't necessarily any more educated than those with online degrees, most companies have altered their hiring requirements to reflect the changes brought on by the online revolution. A poll conducted by the Sloan Consortium reveals, "Academic leaders do not believe that there is a lack of acceptance of online degrees by potential employers." And in a survey of employers from all over the country, Volt Inc. found that 91 percent would be willing to hire a candidate with an online degree.