The Online Degree Dorm Room

online degree programs psychology | Financial aid for online training

Posted by bposton on September 5th, 2007 — Posted in online degree programs psychology

Did you know that you can now get financial aid for online degree programs is available through the Federal grants system?

It’s TRUE!!

Here’s the deal.

Until last year, students who were enrolled in online degree programs had to spend half of their program in campus-based classed in order to qualify for federal student grants. But that “50-percent rule,” was repealled (YEAH!! )

So now all students enrolled in eligible online degree programs at accredited institutions in the U.S can get federal student aid in the form of federal loans, grants and work-study .

This is the real deal, folks.

Federal Student Aid, which is an office of the U.S. Department of Education, processes 14 million financial aid applications and distributes more than $80 billion to students through schools annually.

So start filling out those financial aid forms, and get the money you need for college, even if the classroom is at home!

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Engineering Degree Online|Group Helps Needy, Motivates New Engineers

Posted by bposton on November 2nd, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

Let’s talk about volunteering.

Yeah, I know. When you think of volunteering, you probably think of canned food drives, nursing homes and home building.

But there’s a group of techies out there called Engineers Without Borders-USA and they’re pushing volunteering to a new heights.

They’re working on projects like improving drinking water and building irrigation systems
for crops, Engineers Without Borders-USA has student chapters based at universities
across the United States, and their mission is to implement engineering solutions and inspire new engineers in the process.

One group of students from the University of Colorado is designing and building a water
system for a village in Rwanda. Another group of students from the Colorado School of Mines worked alongside the villagers of San Pablo, Belize, to install solar panels and electrical wiring in a school, a church and other community buildings.

These guys and gals have coordinated humanitarian projects all over the world,
including Thailand, Mali, Senegal, Peru and Afghanistan.

ASME, which provided partial funding for the Belize project, has teamed up with
Engineers Without Borders to promote the involvement of ASME members and student members in future overseas projects.

So give this a thought and look this group up at your school.

Ben

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engineering degree online : Indiana distance learning skyrockets

Posted by bposton on October 24th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

I read an article today that focused on the growth of distance learning just in the
state of Indiana.

Although the numbers here are specific to that state, I think they reflect the trend
across the nation - online education is growing fast and furious.

OK, so in Indiana alone, there were 104,000 student enrollments in distance-learning classes during the 2003-04 academic year, according to the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Nearly 90,000 of the enrollments were for online courses, which for that state is a 57 percent increase from the previous year.

If you took those students that were taking online classes under what would translate to a full time status, and put them all together in one place, they would phycially represent the sixth-largest university in the state - over 10,135 students. By comparison, Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne this year has about 11,000 students.

I’m pretty sure this is a nation-wide trend.

Distance education has been around in one way shape or form for over 100 years, but of course the delivery and quality of this type of education has changed drastically in the past few years.

This came about With the rise of the Internet, and now students can get degrees from prestigious universities in the comfort of their own homes.

Nonetheless, there still appears to be a sort of stigma with this term “distance learning” or “distance education”, which I guess is a throw-back to the correspondence courses Sally Struthers used to promote on late-night television commercials as a way to make more money.

Unfortunately, this stigma has been helped in recent years by the growth of online diploma mills, which essentially sell diplomas with little or no college coursework. A dark underbelly of this trend which can also be associated to the rise of the internet.

But the trend is good because local colleges and universities are trying to erase that stigma while they try to increase their enrollments and provide students a way to get a degree who don’t have time for a traditional college education.

So think about it. The person you sit next to at work, the waitress at the cafe, the solider in Iraq, or Afghanistan; there are people from all over the country taking online courses and getting their degree. And they all have at least one thing in common. A desire to improve their lives while maintaining their current lifestyle and schedules.

Ben

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