Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Online College Courses Coursed to Double by End of Decade Due to Dire Economy

If you're looking for a place to put some lingering investment money, then look into the potential growth produced by online college courses. When jobs are down, higher education enrollment goes up. With the advent of instant mobile transfer of all forms of data through 4G wireless and advanced cloud computing, its obvious that online education is on an evolutionary track upward. What does that mean for the rest of us? It means there's an industry on the verge of an overhaul in need of investors, and we could be the ones backing it up.

Right now when you perform a web search for online colleges, you get an innumerable amount of lists and rankings on where's the best place to go and they mostly amount to the same series of options. None of which are considerably viewed as high-end academic institutions. Not that they should be necessarily. All I'm saying is that there's enormous room to grow in an otherwise stagnant industry.

Traditional academic institutions continue to control the majority of education, as they should. And by no means am I advocating for profiteers to take over online education. But there's business value in putting money into non-profit engines of economy. Jump start a new venue for online education, one that is leaps and bounds above the rest, and you can start churning out learned individuals who turn around and give back to the economy and ultimately become appreciative alumni.

It all sounds a bit fanciful, but hear me out. So long as unemployment continues to remain at a national average of 9 percent, and the unemployment rate of those under the age of 25 continues to stay at traumatic levels, college enrollment is set to climb. Combine that with the increased connectivity of the modern web, and it's clear that the potential for online higher education has yet to be completely attained.

So for those of you out there with limited ideas on where your money can be put, seriously consider researching any and all institutions that are educating individuals online, for pay or not. You're going to be investing in an industry that while not exactly one that is sure to earn you the most private wealth, is one that is sure to only grow stronger as the years go by. By acting now you can possibly be taking part in the early years of an academic approach that will go on to dominate the rest of the 21st century.

There's a market out there that will arrive in five to ten years that's going to ache for online academic resources. They're the Facebook generation and the kids today who have the luxury of having the whole world beamed into their pocket-sized smartphone. They'll be incredibly used to the learning constructs of the web, and will be much more open to the idea of learning online than previous generations have.

I'll keep saying it: online education is an industry primed to explode. Don't allow the way in which online education has been implemented thus-far influence the way you view its long-term role. Today it continues to exist as a cumbersome alternative to traditional academic environments. But give it another decade to soak up the benefits of instant video chat, mobile file transfer and access, and lure countless individuals away from traditional universities and see how much it changes.

Are we headed into a new age of academia? That depends on whether or not investors, such as yourself, consider online education a viable place to put capital. The market will be there whether or not the money to fuel it will be.

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