Babson survey of online education in the US -- online continues fast growth

The results of the tenth annual survey of online education have been published. Here are some key findings:

• Over 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year.
• Thirty-two percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
• Only 2.6 percent of higher education institutions currently have a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), another 9.4 percent report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
• Academic leaders remain unconvinced that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses, but do believe that they provide an important means for institutions to learn about online pedagogy.
• Seventy-seven percent of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face.
• Only 30.2 percent of chief academic officers believe that their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education - a rate is lower than recorded in 2004.
• The proportion of chief academic leaders that say that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at a new high of 69.1 percent.
• A majority of chief academic officers at all types of institutions continue to believe that lower retention rates for online courses are a barrier to the wide-spread adoption of online education.

The report contains many PowerPoint-ready plots and graphs. You can see some highlights in this infographic.