Online education: many schools offer internet classes for students of all ages and interests.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: EDUCATION

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When Scott Harrison decided to step away from the clinical side of nursing to pursue a second degree in health services administration, at first he arranged his schooling around his full-time nursing job at Providence Alaska Medical Center. He took classes during a long lunch break or whenever he could squeeze them in, relying on his colleagues to cover for him while he was racing back and forth between the hospital and the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) across the street. Ultimately, he says, he had to choose work over school because it became too much of a hassle to work full-time during the day and take classes.

For Susan Erickson, going back to a college campus to get her bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Management after 21 years of raising four children and managing a family would have meant leaving her home in Hoonah, a small Southeast community of 860 residents, uprooting her family and completely disrupting her lifestyle as a mother, wife and fulltime customer service agent for a local airline. Under these circumstances, she says, going back to school did not make practical sense.

For both of these students, the Rural Alaska Native Adult (RANA) Distance Education Program through Alaska Pacific University (APU) presented an online degree program that offers many advantages that the traditional classroom approach could not begin to compete with, including greater scheduling flexibility by not being required to go to a campus for instruction, being able to take tests and complete homework assignments according to their personal schedules, financial benefits from not having to give up jobs or pay for additional living expenses while being away from home, and being able to maintain their personal, cultural and social lifestyles while realizing the dream of increasing their marketability and income. It was about finding a program that allowed them to continue to do what they are doing, says Beth Sullivan, director of Distance Education for APU and the RANA program administrator.

Originally started in 1999 with the idea that APU would provide education for rural and Alaska Native communities that did not have access to regional campuses, at first RANA offered only one degree in business administration with an emphasis on health services. Today, Sullivan says, the program of 80 undergraduate degree-seeking students reflects that the fully accredited program is also popular with working adults who are as close as two blocks from campus, but who are interested in going to school without geographic limitations: 60 percent are non-Anchorage residents coming from communities all over the state and the remaining 40 percent are from Anchorage, Girdwood and the Mat-Su Valley.

Since its inception, RANA has continued to develop new undergraduate degree-completion programs and now also offers a bachelor's in business...