Distance Education Universities
In my work Ihave cover two distance education universities, OU and JIU. On this page i will talk more about OU on the next page you will find more on JIU. The difference between OU and JIU is OU actually has a campus but has no students there. The campus is in fact spread over 30 acres of land. OU has been around since the 1970s and has seen many students, however they are now because of the Internets capabilities able to open up to rest of the world and have already done so. OU being around for so long has been able to serve as a model for distance education programs for schools in California and Florida. OU has been popular with large corporations who want their employees to get on the job training. With OU trying to open its program to rest of the world there are some senseless prejudices being made. They are along the lines of "big deal, you pay a fee, they send you course materials, you send in an exam and they mail you your diploma." (The British Are Coming pg. 2) It is interesting how easy it seems to get an education, perhaps the people who think that should enroll in the program there, because I guarantee they haven\rquote t. Or perhaps they should take a look at the recent assessment done by a British government which rated The Open University 11th of 98 higher education institutions in quality of teaching. It seems to me that everyone who has something against distance education has had no part in it. The OU has primarily been there for older individuals; the average age of the students is 37. It is great for giving people a second chance who had to leave school for on reason or another or had not previously able to enroll in higher education. Just to give you an idea of the accessibility of it there are currently 125,000 undergraduate students enrolled there and 40,000 graduate students. The oldest graduate ever was 94 years old. It is not likely that that man would have been able to internet actually attend a real university and it is nice that no matter how old you are, you can still learn and make the accomplishment of getting a degree. Or as said in "A Complete Guide to Correspondence Schools" "home study provides more opportunities for men and women everywhere to find peace, happiness, and a sense of personal fulfillment." (A Complete Guide to Correspondence Schools pg. 81)
Here are some web sites that gives extensive information on several distance education programs http://www.cisnet.com/~cattales/Deducation.html
http://www.uidaho.edu/evo/distglan.html
Here is a locally based web site from the University of Delaware that helps one search for anything distance education related. http://www.udel.edu/serf/
Corey, / Anthony, / Al, / Mike.
The British Are Coming http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+site+85721+9+wAAA+distance%7education
Fleming, Alice "Complete Guide to the Accredited Correspondence Schools." Double day & Company Inc. 1964 Garden City, New York.