Distance Education: A New Way To Learn

When I first found out that you could get some nursing degrees via distance education, I was a little surprised - I mean, don't they have to learn how to put stitches into people, give injections, stuff like that? I knew a girl with diabetes who learned on an orange, but that didn't strike me as a particularly good way of teaching future medical professional. I wasn't looking at it right - nothing new for me! Nurses who take advantage of distance education are typically the ones who've finished all their practical courses and are just learning new things like epidemiology that don't require hands-on experience. And nurses aren't the only ones. Distance education is the new way to serve people who have continuing education needs. Lawyers, teachers, librarians, anyone who just needs to have continued learning can take advantage of distance learning opportunities. Most people with at least an associate's degree can get a bachelor's or a master's degree through distance education. MBAs Online One of the most successful distance education programs currently running is the University of Phoenix's program for earning your MB

A: Most people in the program have already been working for years, and just want to get an MBA in order to move up in their career field. It's not cheap, and it requires hard work, but an MBA acquired online is just as good as an MBA acquired at a traditional educational institution. The Benefits of Distance Education Instead of driving fifty miles to your college to take a class, you can get up, pour a cup of coffee, and sit down in your ratty old robe to attend class. You don't have the face to face contact, but most distance education programs do have formally scheduled classes, conducted in online chat rooms. Your teacher has office hours. You have assignments you must complete and turn in on time. It's just like class, but without the requirement of being physically present. Distance education is sometimes cheaper than traditional education, though not always. You can get financial aid to help cover it, and you can get scholarships. One of the greatest things about distance education is that you can take a class at a university a thousand miles away - for instance, my dream is to attend the University of Iowa's creative writing program, known as one of the best writing programs in America. That's two thousand miles. But they're offering some distance learning now, and they'll probably offer more in the future. Instead of knowing I'd have to uproot my entire family or abandon them for two years or more to attend my dream program, I now can look forward to the day I can sit in my kitchen stirring spaghetti and attend class at the same time. And educational institutions aren't limited to offering education only online; many have discovered that they like the convenience of online classes, but also the personal feeling and social interaction of face to face classes. So there are classes at major universities that are conducted primarily online, but that have some face to face classes periodically, every week or two weeks. Low residency master's degree programs are particularly benefiting from this; they can have their graduate students come to the campus for a couple of weeks a semester, and conduct all other learning experiences from a thousand miles off. Distance education, in short, is changing the way education is done. And it's changing it for the better.

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