Like so much on the Internet, Web classes stumbled after being hailed as the next big thing in the late 1990s. The first movers, like the London School of Economics’ Fathom or NYU Online, failed–losing hundreds of millions of dollars– because students in the West prefer to attend class (and parties) on a real campus. But online or “distance” learning is now an established and rapidly growing industry, mainly in Asia and the developing world. Market analysts at IDC predict that the global market for corporate e-learning will soar from $8 billion last year to $26 billion by 2010. In the United States, 65 percent of graduate schools now offer online courses, available to students anywhere in the world.
The trend is opening doors for students from small villages in Ethiopia to the back streets of Bangladesh–where tiny Internet cafés are now the portals to first-rate education. In China, delegates from Western online universities, like Scotland’s Interactive University, can be found in small towns trying to snap up students for whom studying abroad would be too expensive. In Pakistan last month, the government teamed up with one of the world’s largest online education providers, U21 Global, based in Singapore, to launch an ad campaign promoting higher education to rural youth.
Besides switching focus to the developing world, online universities are working to make virtual classes more engaging. While early efforts simply posted recorded lectures and lecture notes, courses now offer chat rooms hosted by professors, instant-messenger office hours, flashy PowerPoint-style coursework and lectures formatted for iPods. It’s even becoming fun socially, says Derek Conlon, 42, an IT manager at one of the top investment-banking firms in London, who recently got his diploma from Oxford online: “It’s not like what I’ve seen on TV with fraternities, but I made friends with people from all around the world. You’re only an e-mail away.”
