Last week’s article on online language learning apparently hit a nerve; not only was it widely e-mailed, but a number of individuals told me about other language courses that I had missed in my research. In addition, a few factual corrections to the story are in order. Starting with the latter, the free language courses at the BBC’s web site may not work in all countries. For example, the videos cannot be played in the U.S., but other elements of the program do work.

The purpose of higher education is to equip students for success in life — in their workplaces, in their communities, and in their personal lives. Yet though this purpose has remained constant for centuries, colleges and universities themselves are undergoing major change. The campus, the library, the refereed journal article, the classroom, and the traditional-age student — common features of higher education today—may be inadequate in describing higher education tomorrow.

At first blush, the university seems to be in greater demand than ever. Yet there are troubling indicators that the picture is not so rosy. And we're not talking just about the university endowment reductions caused by the current financial meltdown. A dismal 58 percent of entering freshmen actually graduate from the same college within six years.4 More and more students are questioning the "bang for the buck" as college tuition has risen in cost more than any other good or service since 1990, leaving students with $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States alone.5 Students around the world are increasingly choosing alternative models of higher education.

Google Enterprise President Girouard said Google will release Google Wave, the company's real-time collaboration platform, for all consumers and businesses in 2010. Google, which currently offers the open-source Wave platform by invitation only, has rolled the platform out to more than 1 million users. Wave lets users communicate in via instant messaging, and enables multiuser document editing and social networking all in real time on one user interface. As such, it is a sort of lively incarnation of many of the Google Apps programs. Girouard said parts of Wave will show up in other Google products, but it is unclear how this will take shape. For example, Wave and Gmail may be integrated. Wave could easily leverage the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs in Google Docs.

Bill Gates has recently announced in his 2010 annual letter that he will be offering grants from his foundations to further the usage of online learning. One aspect of online learning is the availability of video lectures online. Many free lectures from universities appear on such websites as AcademicEarth.org, whose goal is to “bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

Three-fourths of public colleges believe online courses are "critical" for long-term success. The 2009 Sloan-C report on online education confirmed what campus officials have seen during the country’s economic downturn: Americans are flocking to web-based college classes. The seventh annual study, based on responses from more than 2,500 colleges and universities and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, reported a 17-percent increase in online course enrollment, with more than one-fourth of U.S. college students taking at least one web-based class during the fall 2008 semester.

Those of us in the higher education field learned a lot during the 2000-2009 period, mainly that nothing stays the same. Things evolve at record speeds as technology develops, mindsets change, and trends take hold. Here are 8 of the biggest higher education trends I witnessed during the last decade:

1) Online Learning – A decade ago, the idea of earning a degree from your home computer sounded a little shady. Fast forward, and over 3.5 million people are taking online learning courses today, with most major colleges and universities offering online degree programs. The concept of “point, click, study” is officially mainstream.

For months last year, U chemistry instructor Michelle Driessen dreaded the lectures for her fall 2009 class, Introductory Chemistry. It’s not that she doesn’t love to teach. It’s just that she knew she’d be teaching in a room with no students. Such is life when you’re taping lessons for a new online course.

Mounds View Schools will soon be addressing how its offering this fall of 19 hybrid courses — those that combine online learning with classroom time — will affect costs incurred in teaching and other factors. District Superintendent Dan Hoverman said a conference he and other school officials attended recently at the St. Paul-based education technology collaborative TIES brought up points about how the shift may lessen costs for textbooks and other materials.

More and more Colorado K-12 students are leaving traditional brick and mortar schools in favor of online education. Colorado is one of 24 states to offer students the option of going to virtual schools full time - and last year enrollment numbers jumped to 11,641 students. That's according to an annual report released this week by the Colorado Department of Education. Pam Ice is director of the Department's Unit of Online Learning. She says last year's 12.5 percent increase in student enrollment is actually down from the previous school year.

In a recent first-hour class at Francis Howell Union High School, a class of 10 students worked on biology, history or business. Their teacher, Ed Nelson, wasn't leading the various lessons. Instead, each student sat in front of a computer, working through an online program on the course he or she needed to pass to graduate. The students at Francis Howell Union - an alternative high school - take the majority of their courses online.

One of the big concerns surfacing about Gov. Sean Parnell's proposal to offer merit-based scholarships to Alaska high school graduates bound for the state's universities and job training programs is a core curriculum requirement. There's some question as to whether the core classes that students would have to take in order to meet eligibility for the Governor's Performance Scholarship are available throughout the state, especially in rural areas where class sizes and offerings can be pretty small. The House Education Committee is going to look into that a bit on Wednesday morning with a round-table presentation by Alaska Education Commissioner Larry LeDoux. He'll go over existing on-line high school programs and talk about possible expansions that could make a wider variety of courses available to students anywhere in the state.

What do the three Northfield High School students all have in common? They’re all pursuing college through TORCH. The program, Tackling Obstacles and Raising College Hopes, offers post secondary education classes to minority high school students who might not otherwise have the chance to go to college. They are likely to be the first in their families to attend college. The three take online classes up to three days a week through Riverland Community College in Austin. The college also has facilities in Austin and Albert Lea.

Between layoffs and pay freezes, more and more people are seeking a college education. The problem is that many can’t quit their full-time jobs to go back to school. Others have been out of school for so long that they feel uncomfortable returning to classrooms full of 20-somethings. For these folks, an online learning or distance-learning program provides a perfect remedy. They can earn a degree without driving through the cold Missouri winter to a campus. Not to mention, they can set their own hours.

Summer learning programs in classrooms across Des Moines schools are being eliminated as the district searches for ways to save money in light of a budget shortfall. The district announced Friday that high school students will be offered online classes to make up most course work they fail this school year. Last year, teachers taught most of the makeup classes.

Online courses are either fee-based, free or a combination. Starter kits of fee-based programs may cost just a few hundred dollars, but the cost to reach higher levels of comprehension and speaking can easily be $1,000. While that may sound expensive, language company executives say it isn’t; college courses often cost many thousands of dollars to reach the same level. So, cost aside, how do you choose which program to use? The answer is that one size doesn’t fit all.

More students are opting to take online courses — so many that online enrollment through the UT TeleCampus increased by 30 percent between fall 2008 and fall 2009. The increase is almost double the national average increase of 17 percent in online course enrollment, according to The Sloan Consortium, a leadership organization that advocates online classes. The convenience of taking classes online has attracted younger students to enroll, said Darcy Hardy, the executive director of UT TeleCampus. For some students, taking online courses is more compatible with their busy schedules.

Students might be seeing one less scantron sheet at the end of the semester. Teacher and course evaluations are slowly transitioning into using online methods to get student input about classes, said Roger Sugarman, director of Institutional Research, Planning and Effectiveness at UK. The online evaluations were first used in Spring 2008 and 83 courses participated. That number jumped to 825 courses using the online forms in Fall 2009. Sugarman said the use of online evaluations is still just an option at this point because he wanted faculty to feel more comfortable before making the switch a requirement.

Dropping and picking up your children from school may become a thing of the past. Instead, instruction could come to your home. "A cyber school is a school where you don't have students inside of a physical classroom," says Gary Naeyaert from the Michigan Association of Public School Academies. Naeyaert says qualified educators would teach the same curriculum as in a traditional school, but learning would be done online. Naeyaert says this model best serves at-risk students. "Students who have already dropped out of the traditional school system or are in a situation where because of their personal life, or where they work, or what their family situation is where they just can't attend school from 8 until 3," says Naeyaert.

Online learning is growing at an exponential rate in this country at both the K-12 and college levels, and this pace is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. An article published in the Arizona Republic this week indicated that “more than 26,000 Arizona students took K-12 online courses last year.” Today’s student, both K-12 and adult, are often times looking for greater flexibility and choice as learners or in some cases may face geographic barriers to learning, which are fueling this dramatic change to the educational landscape. How is this impacting the Wickenburg Unified School District? How will it impact our district in the future? These and other questions are being pondered as we consider how to compete in today’s technologically oriented educational environment.