When it comes to education at the college level, most people envision a similar image on what it signifies.

College education is thought of as a group of people sitting in a classroom listening to their professor lecturing in the front of the class while the students attempt to write down notes from the PowerPoint presentation.

Many parts of that scenario are no longer true. College students are not only recent high school graduates, and even something so synonymous like the classroom is not necessarily involved in the teaching process anymore.

Schools offering classes online is becoming common. Online education is something that will become prevalent at Ashland University in the near future.

AU’s first step with online education begins with the College of Online and Adult Studies. This college will make it possible to get a bachelor’s degree from AU by taking only online classes.

Heading this online movement for Ashland is the new Associate Provost Todd Marshall. Marshall oversaw online education at Regent University and Spring Arbor University and has information science degrees, two master’s degrees and a PhD from Syracuse University.

“This trend really started aggressively in about 2002, 2003,” said Marshall. “Some schools have been doing online since the mid, early ‘90s.”

“It’s almost becoming a necessity for schools to serve those students,” Marshall continued. “Let’s say you have “100 students and they are all 18-22 years old. Let’s say of those 100, 30 are 18-22 years old. Are you still going to serve those 70 or are you going to say ‘Well, we’re going to focus just on the 30.’”

As pointed out by Marshall, age is one of the big factors on why online education is becoming a widespread practice for colleges and universities. College students are not just young people in their late-teens and early-twenties.

“These days, of all the students in the United States seeking a bachelor’s degree, something like 75 percent of those pursuing a bachelor’s are not 18 to 22 years old. They’re working adults,” said Marshall.

Those adults are people who had situations in their life that made it so they could not earn a degree sooner or would like to pursue their education further.

“That is the vast majority of bachelor’s degree students, people who are coming back later in life,” said Marshall. “If you look at online degree completion students, the typical demographic is female in their mid-thirties. That’s just the reality of the context in which we live.”

“A lot of them come in with 20, 30, 40, 50 credits already. We have to figure out how we can serve those students. How we can give them a quality, Ashland education with a focus on the individual but still meet their needs in that context?” Marshall continued.

High school students are also taking advantage of the online education opportunity.

“Demographics are changing in the US,” said Marshall. “In Ohio, there are fewer high school graduates this year than there were five years ago

Online education has been around since the 1980s, but starting to gain popularity I the early 2000s. Now, there are plenty of schools that have made getting a degree online a huge part of what they are.

“In those cases, they may have the same number of online as face to face, sometimes they may have 5-10 times more,” said Marshall. “They may have 7,000 on campus and 93,000 online. It depends on the school’s strategy and what the school really wants to do.”

AU is developing their strategy in correlation with offering online degrees.

“I would hope we get to the point where we have as many, if not more, online students than face to face students,” said Marshall. “If our programs grow in a normal, healthy fashion that would not be abnormal. There are many schools where that is the case.”

Marshall is a big advocate for online learning and sees this opportunity as a chance to improve education at Ashland.

“Ashland has a unique opportunity right now to move forward with its Online and Adult Studies,” said Marshall. “There are a lot of people out there who are not in the 18-22 years old category that say, ‘I need an education, and I want good quality education. I would like to have it from a private, liberal arts university. Where do I go?’ If we don’t even offer the program, they’re not going to come to us.”

What online education does, is give people who did not have the opportunity of getting an education, a chance to get one.

“As we continue to fill out the number of offerings we have, that’s naturally going to bring more students. Just because you’re not in the 18-22 year old range, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have access to a high quality bachelor’s program.”