Education a click away: online offerings for adult education.

• Author: Horowitz, Alan S.
• Position: Onlineeducation

VICKIE Scott wanted to complete a college degree, about 25 years after first taking college classes. A full-time legal secretary in a major Salt Lake City law firm, she enrolled at Salt Lake Community College less than two-and-a-half years ago, transferred some credit hours from her earlier time at college, and completed her degree in June, much sooner than she ever thought possible. One thing so different now about college than when she first attended--and why she could complete the degree so quickly--is a function of technology, specifically the Internet. "I could take more classes at one time, because I didn't have to be in a classroom all the time," she says. "I'm able to use my free time, such as at night, during my lunch hour and weekends, to take classes. The flexibility online classes provide has been invaluable." While working full time, she's taken as many as three courses a semester, because one of those courses was always online.

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Her experience is not unusual. Vince Lafferty, director of distance education at Utah State University in Logan, notes: "Online education augments other classes. Before, [students] would take two classes. Now they take another one or two without leaving the house."

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In case you haven't noticed, there's a whole new world of online distance learning, including university education and corporate training, that has sprung up in just the past few years, and thousands of Wasatch Front residents are taking advantage of it.

It used to be colleges and universities consisted of buildings and grass where students and faculty intermingled. Arthur E. Levine, a professor at Columbia University, writes that this single model of higher education is now splintered into three. There are, what he calls, "brick universities," which offer only traditional classroom education. Salt Lake City's Westminster College is an example; it currently does not offer online classes.

Then there are "click universities," which offer only courses online and have no face-to-face classroom instruction. Salt Lake City-based Western Governors University, a private nonprofit founded by the governors of 19 western states, and Jones International University, a for-profit online institution based in Englewood, Colo., are examples.

Levine's third model, and the one he says is likely to be most popular, is a combination of the first two, which he calls "brick and click universities." They offer both...