[Islam-Online- Society]

Selma Maqsood's usual weekday consists of sending her husband off to the office, getting the kids up and ready for school on time, and then settling in on her home computer for most of the day. She agrees, there's not much in the way of social atmosphere, but that comes later in the day as the family returns one by one. And she is not alone. Selma has more than 12,000 classmates in her online university.

A couple of years ago, there were a few schools here and there that offered online degrees. Today, more than one-third of colleges and universities offer them. With three young children, it’s the only way people like Selma can keep up and even get ahead while they are out of school and the workplace. Watching lectures on streaming video and taking email exams, she is well on her way to her accounting degree.

It's not for everyone
The online college is not a threat to on-campus education. There is something about college lawns and interaction with peers and professors that simply cannot be recreated in the virtual world. And there are the usual electronic blunders - lost emails and computer crashes. Still, online education offers an otherwise unattainable goal for many. Online colleges are targeting these people - especially older students with jobs and families who otherwise might not get a degree.

In addition to traditional colleges going online, many more market-oriented approaches are also being tried. The University of Maryland University College has created a firm called UMUC OnLine.com to handle its online curriculum, consisting of some 430 courses. New websites, such as CollegeLearning.com work to match prospective students to online universities.

Some private businesses are taking a more direct approach. Eighteen months ago, Kaplan Inc. created some controversy by announcing the launch of the first online law school, the Concord University School of Law. Many were concerned about the effects of Internet isolation in education, including United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg worried that an adequate education in a field that relies so much on human interaction was simply not possible "online."

Michael Saylor, billionaire founder of MicroStrategy Inc. announced in March that he would spend $100 million creating an online education Web site. The site would provide free education to anyone who desired it by giving the public access to lectures and interviews from the world's "geniuses and leaders." Eventually, this could all lead to a degree - for free.

The skeptics are many, especially among academics. They point to the larger questions of how the Internet affects us as a society. Real-life experiences are a crucial part of any learning experience. Most schools are taking the Internet in their stride. "We're finding that more and more people are requiring courses that are any time, any place, so we're testing the waters," says the University of Virginia's director of educational technologies, John Payne. "On an experimental basis, I'm willing to try it, but I miss the face-to-face interaction," says one business professor. "I'd hate to think that it would become a totally electronic experience, where you never actually see a student."

Selma Maqsood has her own concerns. “I’ve been through school the ‘old-fashioned’ way as well. There are more obstacles and the exams are much more difficult because reference material is usually allowed. Still, the one plus of being able to be home with my family easily supercedes all the inconveniences.”

$$$
Schools stand to make big bucks though online education programs. They don't have to build dorms or classrooms, or provide many of the services of traditional on-campus education. However, tuition rates are usually the same for both. There is a high cost for creating online systems, and keeping up with rising online enrollments is also costly. Still, in the end, online equals more money.

Unext.com, a new online business university will have courses from many highly-esteemed schools, such as Columbia University, Stanford University and the London School of Economics. According to estimates, each of these schools will make some $20 million over a period of five years through this online venture.

Going Up…
Despite some of the flaws in online education, the number of online enrollees and online programs continues to rise. Maryland's University College has seen online enrollments double or triple each year since 1994. A survey of 4,000 two- and four-year universities shows how colleges are racing to offer more