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Best Online Colleges
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Picking the one that is Right for You
Picking the Best Online Colleges from all the distance education offerings available today, is key to a satisfactory online learning experience.
Colleges and universities with online offerings have increased exponentially over the last two decades, mostly due to the wider access and the increases in speed and bandwidth offered by the Internet.
As of last count , according to the US Department of Education , there are about 1900 colleges and universities offering distance education and training courses and degree programs over the Internet .
This has been a great equalizer, in that it has enabled significantly larger numbers of students to access college or university education, who would otherwise not have been able to do so for various reasons.
However with this large expansion of opportunity has also come the quandary of figuring out which are the best online colleges to pick as a fit for a particular individual' goals and needs . Given the plethora of online courses and programs being offered by the multitude of distance learning institutions, it is important to be able to cull through the various offerings in a systematic way and select the best online colleges to fit one's requirements. This Distance Education Planner, sets out a three step process for doing this:
Qualitative Screening: Making a "Long List" of online colleges using qualitative criteria.
Quantitative Screening: Making a "Short List" of the best online colleges from this long list, using objective mostly quantitative criteria.
Primary Research: Making the final selection from the Short List using available subjective and sometimes important anecdotal information - ie., talking to humans and getting information directly from them.
Qualitative Screening - The Long List
This section points you to qualitative information sources from which you can prepare a Long List of colleges and universities. This would be your starting point for doing a more thorough analysis to select the Short List.
Before, making a Long List of the best online colleges and universities, it is helpful to go through the exercise outlined in the Distance Learning Guide, to determine and articulate your personal needs and goals. If you haven't visited that page, it may be useful to do so now.
Preparing the long list will then essentially be a two step process:
Online College Review: Use the articulation of your personal needs and goals to clearly define your needs and preferences. These qualitative criteria would include: (i) Subject and Award: you should list online colleges that offer the subject or topic you want a study and the award levels that you may seek.; (ii) Synchronous or Asynchronous: This could make a big difference for you if you travel or if your work schedule cannot meet the schedule of the classes being offered. (iii) Physical presence: If in addition to online classes your physical presence is required for certain laboratory work, workshops seminars or other activities. Physical presence may also be required for examinations and test. This search and qualitative screening will yield the first list
College Accreditation: Once you have this first list the very next thing to check is if the online college or program is accredited. Accreditation may become an issue if you subsequently wanted to transfer credits to another institution or program.
It might also have implications for your job opportunities with prospective employers.
Quantitative Screening - The Short List
Once you have your Long List, the key next step is culling out the long list to a shorter list using available college rating information..
Some of this can be tedious but it is a critical task that the prospective student needs to complete in order to be able to make an informed decision and choice.
Online College Ratings: There are several quantitative criteria that can be used to narrow down the choice of online colleges and universities to a manageable a Short List ( no more than 2-5) of the best online colleges from which to make a finalselection. The three key bits of information that the student needs to take into account are:
Net cost: The first, although not necessarily the most important, issue that needs to be considered is cost. By net cost is meant - not what the boilerplate tuition and other costs are but what still remains to be paid after deducting any grants and scholarships that do not have to be repaid. This financial aid information is also an important consideration. While grant monies reduce the cost, any student loans or other obligations that are taken on and have to be repaid are really part of the cost and do not reduce it but rather increases it depending on the interest rate charged. Therefore it is important to evaluate the total financial package.
Graduation rates are also an important factor to take into account. While a student may drop out for many reasons some of which may have nothing to do with the quality of the institution or the online programs, college graduation rates, nevertheless this indicator may sometimes reveal a pattern which could be indicative of possible issues that need to be checked out. This is discussed in more detail on the college ratings page of this site.
Student Loan Default: You also need to know what the job potential and earning power of the graduates are for the subjects and award level , not only for fresh graduates but also over the longer term.
While this earnings data is not immediately available and is presently being compiled by the US department of Education. The student loan default rate can sometimes be a surrogate indicator of the type of problem that may arise when the earning power of the student, after graduation, is not enough to support the loan repayments in addition to other basic costs of living.
These three indicators are generally a good quantitative measure for the value of the investment that you are about to make. More information as to how to obtain this data and evaluate it, is provided by the US Department of Education in their college scoreboard site.
Final Selection - Primary Research
While data and analysis will provide some concrete guidance with which to make the choice for your best online colleges, the process would be incomplete without also taking into account the human factors involved .
At the end of the day, even if the method of instruction is online through the Internet, the parties to the instruction and interaction are still human. This is a factor that is often overlooked and can in the end, result in an unsatisfactory or unhappy situation or even contribute to the drop out rate.
For this reason it is important to also interview, where possible, some of the players who are going to be involved in your distance learning experience.
Reference Checks: This primary distance education research requires making a target list of people to interview or survey and also a list of issues that you might need further clarified.
These issues could involve things like (i) how accessible are the online faculty, (ii) how much online coaching or individual attention are they willing to, or generally do, provide; (iii) what happens if you start to fall behind? Are there online coaching classes ? (iv) how much interaction and discussion is there with other studenbts and peers in the online college classes. Some ideas on who to include in such a target call list and what to include in the questionnaire, are provided in more detail in this very important page.
An overall online college selection methodology involving weighting each criteria by how important it is to you and scoring these criteria based on information obtained from the above exercise is provided here.
Of course you do not have to use this methodology if the choices for your best online colleges are obvious from the analyses above, but still some of you might find this an interesting evaluation format that you might adopt for other things as well.
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Please feel free to provide any comments that you feel might help others such as yourself by going to our Discussion Forum or to the Comments section or if you wish you are welcome to submit a contribution for incorporation in this page with due attribution.
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