It is all the rave in education, online classes, online labs and degrees earned without the student ever physically stepping in the classroom. A great education can be achieved through online training, or the student can wind up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with little to show from the experience. Online education offers the potential for a great learning experience and the potential to be a total financial nightmare.

How can you tell which is your most likely experience? There are two broad categories of questions you must answer before having a sense of whether an online education will fit your needs.

First you must determine whether you would be successful online student. Next you must determine whether the program, degree type and quality of the online program you are considering will meet your objectives. Let's tackle the requirements for an successful online student before evaluating the program potential.

Here are statements regarding successful online students.

Successful online students have consistent discipline meeting weekly class requirements with minimal prompting from an instructor on in class environment.

Successful online students will do extra reading or research to grasp concepts not immediately clear to them from their basic material.

Successful online student will have IM discussions regularly with others in their class and will carry their portion of the weight for assignments.

Successful online students will have the energy to put in 2 plus hours per day working toward their class assignments with more time usually needed on weekends.

If you can make the time commitment necessary and realize that even though the time commitment is more flexible the total time required for learning in no different than that required for an on ground class and can demonstrate the characteristics above, you may well be successful in that environment.

Next, the program and the institution make a difference. One school recently implemented an online cooking degree. There were lots of restaurant management courses put into the mix, but the real cooking skills were not maintained as the students moved into their online school portion. It is difficult to teach managing 4 cooks, 10 servers, and 5 wait staff moving through a hot kitchen online. Perhaps, medical sonography, computer repair and some other things I have seen recently don't need to be taught online. The question here is, will the industry you are entering

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about What you need to know when considering an online education?
We want to hear your view. Write now!