I graduated with my Bachelor of Art in English at the end of the 2004 fall semester.  Although the school I graduated from was a traditional four-year college, it offered many classes online — something that I took advantage of whenever I could while I was a student.

I had an awesome online learning experience.  The online classes I took were almost always excellent, but at the worst they were at least a lot less work than an on-campus class.  Since I always read the textbook for each of my classes anyway, rather than depending solely on the in-class lectures the way many students did, online classes meant the same amount of studying — just less time spent in class and commuting to and from class.  I took at least one online class every semester for all but one or two of my semesters — they made it easy to schedule shorter days on campus, and provided a nice change of pace from my traditional-style classes.

If I go back to school for my master’s degree, I’m thinking I’ll probably try a program that is 100 percent online this time, and enjoy the benefits of the online learning experience from beginning to end.  My sister is currently finishing up her MBA, and by this time she really regrets not looking more seriously at the online business degrees available — she had to move with a little more than a year left of classes (she is going to school part-time while she works full-time), and it has made life extremely difficult — she has too many credits to simply transfer to a different school unless she wants to repeat a great deal of them, so she commutes more than an hour each way between work and campus in order to attend classes.

There’s no doubt about it — online education is the way of the future.  Don’t let yourself get left in the past, lest you have to deal with the kinds of hardships my sister has experienced!