The graduation ceremony marked the first time Command Sergeant Major Ronald Friday set foot on the University of Maryland campus. Like many students stung by high gas prices in mid-2008, Laurel Ranticelli enrolled in online classes.

Washington — More than one-fifth of all students involved in higher education in the United States — 3.9 million students — were taking at least one online course during the fall of 2007. According to a new report, students, faculty and college administrators agree that e-learning reduces or eliminates such barriers to higher education as distance, time, commuting costs, scheduling conflicts and child care. In addition, growing numbers of students already on campus are finding online courses can meet specific needs and complement their regular courses.

The report, Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008, which was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based on responses from more than 2,500 colleges and universities, found that the explosive growth of online education shows no sign of slowing as the number of online students has more than doubled in the last five years, growing at a compound annual rate of 19.7 percent.

E-learning can increase degree completion rates and decrease the amount of time students need to get a degree.

For example, Robert Schroeder, while an undergraduate student at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, enrolled in several courses online through the College of Lake County (CLC), a community college in the northeastern suburbs of Chicago.

He took two classes — principles of marketing and business writing — while living at home about 20 minutes from campus during the summer break after his first year at Ithaca. He took three more online courses — introduction to psychology, introduction to sociology and macroeconomics — during the fall and spring semesters while enrolled at Ithaca.

“I was a double major — journalism and sport media — at Ithaca College,” Schroeder said, adding: “The only way for me to complete both majors and study abroad, which was a major priority for me, was to take these online classes. Flexibility and cost were major concerns for me.”

In citing the flexibility and cost savings of online learning as key factors, Schroeder was agreeing with the overwhelming majority of online students, more than half of whom enroll in courses offered by community colleges.

Many online students have full-time jobs, are in the military, have families or some combination of the three. Studies repeatedly have shown that time and money are the major obstacles to higher education.

Public institutions are more likely to see online learning as critical to their long-term strategy, according to the report, and more than two-thirds of colleges and universities agree that there is now competition for students in online courses and programs. Course offerings are also now common in all discipline areas, with the single exception of engineering, in which relatively few institutions offer fully online programs.

The overwhelming majority of chief academic officers at community colleges say that their faculty accepts the value and legitimacy of online education, while slightly less than two-fifths of those at four-year colleges agree.

Schroeder said there was a definite difference in the difficulty of the courses he took online.

“The writing class was not difficult, mainly because it involved a lot of creative thinking and individual effort, concepts you don't really need an in-class experience to reinforce,” he said. Similarly, the psychology and sociology classes “really lent themselves to the online experience,” and Schroeder took advantage of compact disk programs that came with each textbook, online studies and other supplementary material.

“On the other hand, I found the marketing and macroeconomics courses to be tougher online,” he said. “Granted, these classes did have online discussion boards to ask questions, but without a classroom setting, you really were on your own to grasp some difficult concepts. I think classes like these that include distinct principles and laws governed by numbers are more difficult to learn on your own than a social science class, where laws and principles can be more easily interpreted and applied to your own life.”

Online educational institutions vary in the amount and kinds of support available to students, although the trend is toward more support. For example, you can connect to live tutors 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any computer that has Internet access when you become one of the more than 50,000 students enrolled with Minnesota Online, which offers thousands of online courses and more than 200 degree, certificate and diploma programs through 32 colleges and universities in the state of Minnesota.

Minnesota Online has won national and international awards for its innovative use of technology to support students, who have such online resources as a writing lab with online instructors critiquing and returning essays within 24 hours and online instructors available to work with students in real time.

Summing up his own experience, Schroeder felt the flexibility of being able to take his online courses at his own pace more than made up for the lack of interaction in a physical classroom. “I was able to take advantage of times when my Ithaca classes had lighter workloads to cram a bunch of work in and to get ahead.”

“Having the flexibility to complete course material at my leisure and not having to spend time going to class was really a huge positive in allowing me to take on such a large class load.” Schroeder said.

Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008 (PDF, 28 pages) is available on the Web site of the Sloan Foundation.