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Introduction
Education has traditionally promoted social mobility, broad economic growth and democracy. Its affordability and accessibility has waxed and waned depending on public funding levels, both actual costs and opportunity costs, as well as social norms (e.g., women and people of color were excluded in the past). Online education has reduced Higher Education’s cost and dramatically increased its accessibility; significantly reducing the barriers to entry as well as completion.
Regardless of the specific offering, online education is a disruptive technology (Christensen, 1997) that makes education widely accessible (Smith, 2014). This impacts the Higher Education industry; governments; global, national and local economies; families, employers and society in general. Higher Education is integral to productivity and innovation, at individual and collective levels. Thus, education’s shift away from scarcity affects the differential earnings and influence of all concerned. Online education impacts, and is impacted by, such shifting power structures, as well as globalization.
Objective
Blumenstyke (2018) said, “With the higher-ed landscape becoming increasingly dominated by big online operators, what are the (realistic!) measures of quality that they could be assessing and highlighting? Any other great examples of institutions that have found a way to demonstrate quality?”(Para. 15).
This book’s objective is to explore online education’s optimal design and management, so that more students, especially those traditionally underserved (e.g. low income, minority, LGBTQ, immigrant, non-traditional, rural, GED-holding, first generation college students), are successful. Additionally, we are interested in its socioeconomic, diversity and political impacts, and vice versa, political and regulatory impacts on online education. These implications involve individuals, organizations, and governments, and combinations of these.
Several journals focus on STEM, higher education, and online courses/programs, but few cover a full range of topics like a curated anthology of recent articles. In addition, granular research is scarce on specific online education demographic groups (e.g., military students, dual enrollment students, minority students, rural students, students with GEDs, first-generation college students, ...), and a call for chapters specifically focusing on some of these less-studied demographic groups can accelerate research and build knowledge regarding their success factors in online degree programs.
References
Blumenstyk, G. (2018). What the Rise of the Mega-University Might Mean for the Rest of Us. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-the-Rise-of-the/245165
Christensen, Clayton M. (1997) The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Smith, P. (2014). The coming era of personalized learning paths. Educause Review, 49(6).
Target Audience
University administrators and anyone else interested in student retention; government policy writers; and politicians interested in income inequality, promoting social mobility and democracy through accessible public education would find this a useful resource.
Additionally, there is a large EdTech industry including Code Academy, MOOC providers, LMS providers, personalized learning platforms, as well as employers and traditional publishers that are getting into online and personalized education. Leaders in these audiences would be interested in the empirical best-practices research presented in the book.
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