At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short lectures.
ErliBird launched in October 2012 and has now has about 30 Bay Area clients, including online-education company LearnStreet Inc. and Safe Shepherd, which removes personal data from sites that sell it against users' wishes.
But the idea of students cobbling together an entire degree from free Web courses, a prospect touted by some online-education evangelists, remains "kind of a silly nightmare, " said Edward Rock, director of open course initiatives at University of Pennsylvania.
This, he says, demonstrates that his former boss is betting on the future success of online business-education programmes instead of the top-ranked schools.
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To what extent will online education replace brick-and-mortar education in the next 10 years?
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Don't get me wrong: I have always been a fan of online education -- but with a few important caveats.
The education reporting award went to Colin Woodard of the Maine Sunday Telegram for reporting how for-profit online education companies are affecting the state's digital education efforts.
As more schools embraced online education, smaller, less well-known colleges and for-profit universities drove further innovation in the online education space.
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Strayer Education, a for-profit institution with online education and 87 campus locations that serves a 57, 000 student body, saw its stock drop 23% Monday.
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Formerly known as 2tor, 2U partners with top-tier universities to create best-of-breed online education programs.
When former California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner was reviewing health plan options in 2011 for his online education start-up Empowered, he picked a little-known company called SeeChange Health.
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Coursera, a five-month-old online education startup that has already signed up 1.35 million students, just announced that it would add 17 new college partners, upping its roster of schools to 33.
Sites like EdGate.com and Family Education Network aggregate learning content and offer free services geared toward parents in general, while sites like Homeschool.com, Homeschool World and Eclectic Homeschool Online target domestic education -- the latter two with a Christian slant.
Both during and after this restructuring in U.S. higher education, universities, governments, and companies in emerging economies will be able to tap low cost, high-quality online education to leapfrog the slow and painstaking process of developing educational capacity to meet critical national needs.
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Initiatives like the ED-X partnership between Harvard and MIT promise to give non-traditional students elements of a world-class education online, and for free.
The results of the survey in 2011 revealed that nearly two-thirds of those familiar with online education believe that a degree earned online is a credible as one earned through a traditional campus-based program.
The institution said figure was a "significant milestone" in its efforts to offer "free higher education-standard online courses to all".
Starting in 2013, the school expects to significantly expand its small graduate program, charge tuition for those students while creating online classes and adding more continuing-education courses.
In Malaysia, the industry-backed Insurance Info Programme since 2003 has provided easy-to-understand materials, online resources and financial education in schools to promote financial inclusion.
We should work to tap into the new technologies available to us that can help broaden and enrich public education, while avoiding efforts to turn over education to for-profit online schools which use the appeal of technology to sell subpar products.
The move also comes amid radical shifts to the education business, with online start-ups and top-flight colleges pushing more and more students to the Internet for low- and n0-cost education, and local school districts across the nation cutting budgets amid financial pressures.
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To be sure, more than 6 million students in the U.S. are now taking at least one course online, and 65 percent of higher education institutions say online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy, according to a 2011 report from the Babson Survey Research Group .
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Terry Nulty, CEO of ZDU, Ziff-Davis (ZD) ' online education unit, had Rosenthal's help building ZDU before Rosenthal joined Kaplan.
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In sum, if online education is going to become the land-grant college of the 21st century, some measure of uniformity and mutual understanding needs to be implemented for the benefit of students, professors and administrators alike.
Online education website Udemy and Retailigence, a location-based mobile marketing company, are notable graduates.
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What Salman Khan and his Khan Academy did for elementary and secondary education, offering world-class instruction online for free, will soon be replicated throughout academia.
It has a database of 800, 000 executives around the world who have filed an online self-assessment, together with information on their salaries and education.
In addition, according to Babson and College Board, 65 percent of higher education institutions say online education is now a critical part of their long-term strategy.
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The children's enthusiasm for these one-to-one online lessons, which are run by the Bright Spark Education company, is matched by the tutors themselves.
Although universities provide individual and team project-based learning that are still difficult to replicate online, a Masters education can be taken anywhere.
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