Imagine being able to take college courses or pursue a degree on your own time, at your own pace and from just about any place that you want.

Thanks to the Internet, it's something you don't have to imagine - it's real.

Technology has made it possible to take a variety of college courses and even obtain bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from legitimate universities via the World Wide Web.

"E-learning" has dramatically caught on for thousands of people, from full-time students living in dormitories, to students who've often been "disenfranchised" from attending traditional college campuses. For people with disabilities or mobility challenges, it can mean unlimited access to learning and information from all over the world - without the hassles of making their way across a campus every day.

"There are 300 properly accredited schools that offer not just courses, but entire degrees, where you literally never need to leave the home to do it," John Bear, author with his daughter of Bears' Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally, says. "The amazing thing to me is it's really possible. If we were talking almost 25 or 30 years ago, there would be almost no options."

What is E-Learning?

In an educational revolution that's still evolving, colleges, universities and two-year colleges everywhere are scrambling to create their own online campuses. Other institutions have turned to private companies such as Blackboard.com or Convene.com, which organize and operate the schools' online element. Online course formats vary, but many use similar concepts and software to distribute information. E-learning also means you can, for instance, live in Florida and take a course from a college in California.

Rob Helmick is co-founder of eCollege.com, a Denver-based company that operates online programs for 205 universities, including Rutgers, the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania. Helmick says a typical online course "is going to have 14 students, and it's possible that one or two students will be from overseas.

"Each week you'll have a set of things you're supposed to do during the week," he says. "You might watch a video - online - and have a reading assignment from the book you bought online that was delivered to your house. You might have to write a two- or three-page paper, or go to a threaded discussion."

Course announcements, calendars and some reading material are posted online. Students keep notes and make entries in an online journal, where the instructor can log in and make comments.

Students and instructors communicate mostly by e-mail, and students are also required to participate in threaded discussions, in which one person posts a comment and others can respond to it at any time. Instructors can hold office hours in chat rooms, making themselves available to students at a designated hour.

Many classes still require textbooks and other reading materials that can, of course, be purchased online and sent directly to a student's home. Other class materials, such as videos or multimedia presentations, can be downloaded and viewed at the student's convenience.

Ultimately, a degree earned entirely or partially online is no different from one earned at an "on-ground" or "brick and mortar" campus.

"Typically it's the same teachers teaching the same courses. It's the same price, it's the same admission criteria, and same graduation criteria," Helmick says.

"The only differences are you don't have to fight the traffic, you don't have to fight the parking and you don't have to fight buildings that may not accommodate people in certain situations."

In addition, an eCollege.com client's entire campus gets "Web-ified," meaning virtually all student services are available online, including admissions, registration, financial aid, academic and career counseling, and even bookstore services, Helmick says.

Course exams - usually open book - can also be taken online, although a few instructors prefer to give proctored exams at certain points in a semester. Helmick says only 2 percent of eCollege.com instructors give proctored exams, but even then students don't have to go on campus to take them. Many local libraries and businesses offer proctoring services, often for free.

Convenience and Responsibility

The benefits of taking online courses are many, but convenience and responsibility for one's own learning are especially remarkable, its proponents say.

Scott Stevens, 41, both teaches courses and is working toward a doctorate over the Internet. Stevens, who has spinal muscular atrophy, commuted to a traditional campus earlier in his teaching career. But a heavy teaching load and long days became too much and adversely affected his overall health.

Now, Stevens, who lives in Caro, Mich., teaches business-related courses online for Baker College in Michigan, Lakeland College in Wisconsin, Upper Iowa University and Davenport College, which has campuses in Michigan and Indiana. Meantime, he's pursuing a doctorate in applied management and decision sciences online from Walden University in Minneapolis.

Stevens says online education is improving with rapid advances in technology.

"It's getting better all the time, it's growing all the time. The environments are becoming richer. When I started it was only text-type environments, like an e-mail type of thing," Stevens says. Now, with the ability to deliver multimedia presentations, online teaching allows an instructor "probably a little more ability than in a regular classroom."

Advocates also agree that an online learning environment forces students to participate, and thus take more responsibility for their education.

For example, many courses require students to log in to threaded discussions a certain number of times per week. There's no hiding in the back of the virtual classroom.

"In a classroom, or in a lecture hall where you may have 200 students, not all of them are going to participate," Grace Hu, public relations specialist for eCollege.com, says. "We are actually able to track the student participation in an online course. The professors love it because they're getting a lot of feedback from their students."

Stevens agrees, saying "the students take a bigger role in their own learning process. They can't just pass it, and just sit back and be a receptacle. They have to actually participate in the process, and I think because of that they get a little more out of it."

Lack of face-to-face contact - the obvious missing element in an online course - tends not to be a factor for most students who've had positive online experiences. To address the issue, Helmick refers to a testimonial from a student at eCollege.com. A 51-year-old working mother returning to school says she got to know people better online than in regular courses and that "people seem to speak with less inhibition when you cannot see them."

Stevens says Internet courses put students on an equal level, and they get to know each other as they work together. "Generally people find common ground first before they find that somebody is a different race or gender or they're disabled, and they already have a working relationship." But convenience tends to be the bottom line for many students taking advantage of online learning. Helmick says the average eCollege.com student is 25 to 40 years old; 64 percent are female; and 67 percent work more than 30 hours a week.

"People that are working can log on at 2 in the morning and do the work for the day and talk to other people and do some asynchronous type of chatting," Stevens says.

People with disabilities can "take breaks as they need to. They can work for an hour and log off, come back and work for an hour, that type of thing," Stevens says. "For a lot of people, just the burden of being in a class for an hour and a half at a time, or three hours at a time, plus the commute is kind of overwhelming to them."

That convenience, coupled with assistive technology that allows people with a variety of disabilities to effectively use computers, means lots of opportunity for people with disabilities, says Stevens, who uses a power wheelchair, and voice recognition software for his computer.

"Those were things that were always in the way for disabled people before, and basically the technology is kind of removing all those barriers."

How to Get Started

To take an online course, you'll need some basic computer equipment and some basic skills, Helmick says. You'll need at least a 28.8 kilobits-per-second connection to the Internet (14.4 is too slow), and at minimum a Pentium, 166-megahertz computer, "about a $500 computer you can get at the used computer store," Helmick says.

You'll also need an Internet browser software program such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. You must be able to create text on a computer screen, Helmick says, adding that his company estimates about 7 percent of eCollege.com customers use disabled-enabled browsers - software adapted for use by people with disabilities.

Then, when it comes to finding the right courses, you should shop just as carefully as if you were picking an on-ground school to attend.

Bear, who, together with his daughter Mariah, has also written College Degrees by Mail and Internet 2000, says shopping around is crucial.

"In terms of the investment of both time and money it's a really big deal for people, but so often many just go into it taking the first one that goes along or, even worse, one that comes to them," Bear says, referring to fake college degrees peddled over the Internet and advertised by junk e-mails. (See "Studying at Fake U.," )

Cost is another factor to keep in mind. According to his research, Bear says, the cost of one college credit or hour ranges from $40 to $300, "and that has nothing to do with quality."

Stevens recommends deciding what field of study you're interested in or the specific degree you might need for a particular career. Then begin searching for schools that offer such programs. Sites like eCollege.com and Black-board.com have search engines and can be a good place to begin.

Many schools, as well as companies that run educational Web sites, offer online demo courses for prospective students.

What's Next: Shop While You Study

As with many other aspects of the Internet, commercialism is finding a niche with e-learning, too.

Courses or seminars are readily available across the Web, and many of them for free - usually in exchange for your attention to certain advertising or purchase of a related product such as a book or software. Online courses on everything from how to drive defensively to how to create and manage a Web site are already available.

At notHarvard.com, all courses are free and education is used as a marketing tool. This "edu-commerce" concept is based on the idea that instructors will generate new customers and build interest in their products or Web sites by engaging as many students as possible.

SmartPlanet.com offers hundreds of different courses and seminars on topics from an introduction to NASCAR to business etiquette in Hong Kong. Many courses are self-study, and most are offered free or low-cost, although some require or recommend books or other materials.

Other sites that combine learning with commercialism include Learn2.com, and HungryMinds.com. The latter calls itself an "online learning marketplace," and there, hundreds of courses are offered right next to an invitation to shop at sponsor Web sites where students might find related books or other items. Whatever a student's goal, e-learning is likely to make its way into the mainstream.

According to the International Data Corp., the number of college students enrolled in distance courses is going to reach 2.2 million in 2002. E-learning is currently a $4 billion market and is expected to be at $15 billion by 2002. Also by 2002, 85 percent of two-year colleges will be offering online courses, the company predicts.

But while the growth potential is staggering, nobody expects online learning to completely replace the traditional ivy-covered college campuses.

"I don't think it will entirely replace the brick and mortar colleges and I don't think we want it to," Stevens says, because there is so much more to the college experience.

Even Helmick admits the online format doesn't work for every student.

"For some people, it's great. It's not for everybody. About 75 percent of the population loves it," Helmick says.

The teaching tools and delivery methods will likely expand and diversify, and Stevens reasons that they might make their way into on-ground classes as well. The possibilities are limitless.

"We can have expertise that we didn't have available before. We can find somebody who is a leading expert in a certain area, like employment law, and have him teach the course to people in another state," Stevens says.

"I can go to any library in Europe and reference things that I never could otherwise," he says. "I can talk to a professor in New Zealand and chat. We can share teaching ideas and share what matters and what doesn't with people all over the world." 

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