Since the advent of the World Wide Web as we know it today there has been a lot of development online. Businesses have moved to the Internet – in addition to their brick-and-mortar locations. And new ones have sprung up that exist only online. There probably isn’t a school, a college or university, that doesn’t have a Web site on the Web.
The fact is that soon after going to the Web many schools realized that by the time the 21st century arrived, a whole lot of people, including prospective students, would be searching for opportunities to further their education online.
In fact, it was certain universities that were responsible for the development of the HTML, or hypertext markup language, that runs the World Wide Web (WWW). If you are curious about the history of the Web, you may read up on it on the following site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
Regardless of how and why the Web was developed, by now it is clearly ubiquitous. That is to say, it is everywhere – you can actually say that it is quite literally the web that crosses all the countries in the world back and forth. There are many Web sites (or websites) on it that give away information of all kinds for free.
The information ranges from simple instructions relating to hobbies to serious information of a medical nature. You have to consider the sources, but there is practically nothing about which you cannot find information on the Web.
There is an interesting hierarchy in one of T. S. Eliot’s poems about information, knowledge, and wisdom. In the poet’s view, wisdom is at the top, knowledge is beneath wisdom, and information is beneath knowledge.
The fact is, though, that without accurate information knowledge will suffer, and without truthful knowledge, wisdom will be astray. So when today’s age is still at times called the Age of Information, you are not just whistling Dixie.
So what exactly is the distant learning phenomenon? As the name implies, it is a kind of learning for credit, for college credit, that the student can accomplish in the privacy of his or her home.
If you have a computer and access to the Internet, you can enroll in an online school, college or university, and take courses leading to an online degree. The degrees you can get are the same as you would get in a brick-and-mortar school: Associate’s Degree, Bachelor’s Degree, Master’s Degree, and even – in some cases – the Ph.D. (or other doctoral degrees).
Yes, distance learning has come a long way in recent years. If you know the name of any college or university, you can do an Internet search for it, and you are likely to find that it has a distance learning feature.
The advantage is that the cost is usually lower than actually attending a brick-and-mortar school. Not only is the tuition perhaps lower, but you don’t have to worry about getting to the campus, or paying room and board for living on it. So think seriously about exploring the possibilities of online schooling.