The economic crisis has inspired plenty of people to hit the books in hopes that a degree or professional certification will help them land or keep a job or improve their lot in the job they’re in. (See “Not Too Cool for School,” April ’09 Urbanite.) The flexible hours and open-ended timelines have made online learning increasingly popular. In 2009, 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course. By 2010, that number had jumped by almost a million, according to Sloan-C, an online education consortium. The vast majority of those enrolled in online degree programs are what higher education experts call adult learners—anyone over age 24—who don’t have the time to commute to a campus or the ability to drop out of the workforce to go back to school full-time.

Byczkowski hopes her degree will allow her to move more freely into new job opportunities within the federal government. But recent controversy surrounding for-profit institutions that have fueled runaway growth by offering online degrees has cast a shadow over virtual learning. The question is how Byczkowski—or the millions of other online learners—can be sure they’re getting their money’s worth.

Many of the schools that embraced online technology in its early days were night schools or correspondence programs, like Strayer University, a for-profit school that began in 1892 as a small business college for working adults in Baltimore. Ditto University of Phoenix, which opened in 1976 catering to working people with its convenient locations in unlikely college towns like Timonium and “campuses” in high-rise office space.

“Online courses are in some ways an electronic version of correspondence courses that have been around a long time,” says Terry Cooney, interim provost at Towson University, who still has the lesson plans from the nursing correspondence course his grandmother took almost 100 years ago. “It’s not that the idea of distance education is brand new … We’re all looking at what the best uses are of [online education] as it evolves.”

Towson now offers four master’s degrees online, along with one undergraduate degree and three advanced certificates. But it is hardly the first state school to do so. University of Maryland University College, based in Adelphi, near Silver Spring, got its start in 1947 offering evening classes to military personnel returning from the war, then broadened its reach with courses on bases in Europe and Asia. Under that model, most of UMUC’s enrollment was overseas—until the 1990s, when the university became an early adopter of online learning. “We grew dramatically,” says Marie Cini, vice president and dean for the School of Undergraduate Studies. “We now have far more online students than face-to-face students, and our stateside enrollments are far greater than Europe and Asia.”

Today, UMUC offers 107 degree and certificate programs entirely online. Eighty-five percent of undergrads are taking online courses or fully online degrees. The majority of the graduate classes are mostly or entirely online.

The demographics of UMUC’s students have changed, too. Although the school’s roots are military, today, more than 40 percent of its students are civilians, and the typical age of an undergraduate student is early 30s. “We became very good at adult learning and being flexible and accessible,” Cini says, “and if you do that for a military student you know how to do that for any adult who has a complicated life.”

For the rest of the article, go to Getting an e-Ducation