Students at Utah's colleges and universities will find more educational options than ever when they return this fall as schools increase the number of online and hybrid courses being offered.
They're benefitting from the growth of distance education, which includes online classes, interactive video conferencing (IVC), and hybrid courses that blend a classroom setting with a strong online component.
Cory Stokes, director of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Utah, said online enrollment has grown exponentially in the past five years.
Andrea Johnson, director of WSU Online, said Weber State has been offering online courses for 15 years and, like the University of Utah, has seen rapid growth. In 1997, there were 77 students enrolled in online courses. This fall there will be more than 12,000 students, which means that 38 percent of the student body will be enrolled in at least one course online.
At BYU, online courses have been offered for years in the form of "independent study," where students are not bound by a semester calendar and work under their own pace and direction to achieve academic goals.
Students also pay to take those courses in addition to their full-time tuition.
At Utah State University, Utah's only land-grant university, video conferencing allows students to attend USU classes in each of Utah's 29 counties. Through IVC courses, students are able to participate in classroom discussion and pose questions in real time to teachers despite being separated from their classmates by, in some cases, hundreds of miles.
