Online Education in US, 2014 – The growth in the number of distance education students is the lowest recorded over the 13 years

Grade Level:Tracking Online Education in the United States is the twelfth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. The 2014 Survey of Online Learning conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and co-sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), Pearson and Tyton Partners, reveals the number of higher education students taking at least one distance education course in 2014 is up 3.7 percent from the previous year. While this represents the slowest rate of increase in over a decade, online enrollment growth far exceeded that of overall higher education.

Key report findings include:

• The year-to-year 3.7% increase in the number of distance education students is the lowest recorded over the 13 years of this report series.

• Public and private nonprofit institutions recorded distance enrollment growth, but these were offset by a decrease among for-profit institutions.
• The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face remained unchanged at 74.1%.
• The proportion of chief academic leaders reporting online learning is critical to their long-term strategy reached a new high of 70.8%.
• Only 28.0% of academic leaders say that their faculty accept the “value and legitimacy of online education.”
• The adoption of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) is reaching a plateau, only 8.0% of higher education institutions currently offer one, another 5.6% report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
• The proportion of academic leaders who believe that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses dropped to 16.3%.

via Grade Level: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2014 – OLC.