Online college courses meet an obvious need of busy people - a way to fit a college education into a life which is already filled with family, work and other commitments.
The Internet has also provided the means to pursue an online college course - it doesn't matter where you live, you can sign up online, then access your preferred online course by the web, email, and webcast, with possibly one or two trips to sit the formal exams at the end.
Online college courses - everything is sweet then?
Well, it would be, if there were an easy way of locating the college which offers the course in the subject you want, online, and at a reasonable cost. But where do you start looking?
This is where the overwhelming amount of information available online, and presented to you by way of the search engines, becomes more of a problem than a benefit. You have probably discovered this for yourself already. You just want a list of colleges that offer the course you want, online. You don't need or want to scroll through a million results, and you know some college must offer what you need, but where is it?
The problem arises not just because of the volume of information a search engine might return for a search, most of it irrelevant, but because a lot of the pages which contain the information about online college courses you need is not even accessible to the search engines. The so-called 'invisible web' is available to human visitors to many web sites, especially educational ones, but not to search engine spiders. This is because many of the pages are not static, but dynamic, created on the fly from a database of information, such as a course timetable. This means that they will not appear in any search results. Or a web site may require that a form has to be filled in or registration required before information on college courses is made available - search engines will miss these sort of resources too.
In the old days, if you wanted information, you asked a librarian. If she didn't know the answer, she could direct you to the resources you could use to find it.
Likewise, to find information about the online college courses you want, you need some human input - a list of what is available, created by an intelligent human or a team of humans, who use their experience to group relevant sites.
Ideally this list would give you the names of colleges and the courses they offer to students to study online. Or it would give you a list of specialist resources covering only online education.
You may have guessed that we have created such a list.
Sometimes the old fashioned methods are the best, even for the busiest people.
Christine Havers writes about educational issues and opportunities. See her list of online college courses at educational-info-online.com.
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