Online course growth

I was going to leave this in the comment of Angela's post about Sloan's recent report, but I thought it warranted a new entry.  I spent some time parsing through the data, and found a few interesting statistics.

First, an interesting comparison of online vs. face-to-face enrollments.

• From 2002 to 2009, the overall growth of the student body at institutions has increased less than 2%.
• During this same time period, the number of students taking at least one online course grew 19%.

In 2002 through to 2009, Online enrollments as a percent of total enrollments grew from 9.6% to 29.3%, a staggering growth!

As I work through Penn State's online course data from Fall 2008 through Spring 2010 (4 semesters), I'm curious if the data will mirror Sloan's report data.  A preliminary run at Penn State's data indicates:

• The number of online courses grew 52%
• The Number of blended courses grew over 3,000%!

Now, this might be due to a problem in record keeping, as the data warehouse only indicated 4 blended courses offered in Fall 2008.  Or...this could be due to a lack of Colleges identifying courses as 'blended' in 2008, even if the course was a mix of online and traditional instruction. 

Still...the numbers are eye opening, and I'm excited to continue exploring this data.