Students Benefit From Distance Learning Courses

Many a cartoon was built on the country bumpkin coming to the big city to make his or her future

. What many city slickers may not know is it was representative of a problem of the previous century. Country living has many a virtue, but they have struggled to give the same opportunities as their urban counterparts. Unless they are going into agriculture, most country kids graduate high school to few job opportunities in their local arenas. Even the colleges they need to advance themselves are mostly located in metropolitan areas. So they leave. Some call this out-migration.

This is thanks to recent technological innovations and more and more towns may have a solution: online education. Country kids can choose to earn their on line college degree through the e-learning programs and can improve their employment prospects. To top it off, benefits come from continuing to live in their home towns.

There innumerable studies proving online degrees give any graduates a leg up in the employment world. A number of corporate recruiters will testify online graduates have a matching skill set for a profitable worker, including good time management abilities, strong self-motivation skills, and technological know how.

This seems like an ideal solution to a big problem, except there's currently a glitch. Rural districts often are missing the one thing critical requirement for online educations: broadband access. They don't have the needed infrastructure to move from dial-up modems to high-speed web links. Most online schools require DSL or faster for their web tools to work efficiently. These tools include streaming video, real-time chat sessions and downloading textbooks in any kind of timely manner. Going broadband would allow students to work from home on the same level playing field as his or her fellow students, through telecommuting or web-based jobs instead of having to move to a new location.

Another factor making online education a natural fit for rural America is cost. Recent studies show virtual schools cost about 40% less than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, even though the price of advanced education is still considerable. This is particularly critical for rural areas, which tend to be economically depressed.

That's where another advantage of online colleges could come to play. Many rural students can work and then go to school after hours. They can also talk to the schools to see if they can get financial aid packages that could include grants, possible scholarships and even, thanks to Obama's latest educational initiatives, tax credits.

That leaves only one last obstacle. Many new applicants, especially rural ones, may not have the right tools for online education. They are not accustomed to communicating with fellow students and professors they haven't studied with face to face. That problem should be temporary. Social networks such as Facebook have become a fact of life. Further, millions of children are already taking either fully online or blended online/in person distance learning masters.

by: Natasha Bright

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