A decade ago, attending a major university or community college was much different. Waking up early, hauling yourself out of bed after a late night of studying (partying), getting dressed, and making it in time to an 8 AM Psych 101 class was a drag. Being an off-campus student made this even harder, because of commuting, and often, rolling over and hitting snooze or turning off the alarm altogether happened all too often, having quite an adverse affect upon those dreaded classes based upon attendance and class participation. Thankfully, the Internet and daily exponential advances in home computer and broadband technology has made the commute for some college students become a simple push of the button or stroke of the mouse.
Today, many colleges and universities are enticing prospective students with the freedom that online classrooms provide. No more waking up early, getting your notebooks, pencils, and papers together, taking time to primp and dress yourself in a way to impress your instructor or classmates, and running across the quad in a dead sprint to make your class on time. Students are now able to roll right out of bed in the clothes they slept in and enter their virtual classrooms online, not worrying about traffic gridlock, inclement weather, or a multitude of other obstacles that prevented their pre-internet predecessors from making it to class. This online option helps increase enrollment of distance learners, virtually allowing an entirely new population of students immediate ability to attend and learn while providing advanced learning institutions new opportunities for increasing all important university coffers with newly acquirable tuition monies.
Another positive for universities that can be attributed to the increase in online enrollment includes attracting new teaching staff due to flexibility of hours and negating professor commuting as well. This helps cut university costs relating to professor commuting such as parking and gas allowances. Cutting salary costs allow more monies to be focused on essential programs that might be lacking diligent financial attention.
Because of the extensive advances in live broadband broadcasting technologies, online classes have the ability to be just as interactive as those classes held on campus. With an open connection to students' webcams, students and instructors are afforded the ability to converse, theorize, and argue points in real time and "virtually" face to face allowing for interchange of ideas across zip codes and time zones with no interruption whatsoever. Large Internet Broadcasting System providers like Whiteblox and others work diligently to ensure that colleges and universities have the tools they need to utilize these new and ever-changing technologies as they become available.
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