How Did Online Schools Get Their Start? A History
There are already a lot of nursing students who are either enrolled in or have successfully completed an online continued nursing education (e.g. LPN to RN). But did any of them even bother to find out just how online education got its auspicious start?
Nowadays, online degree programs are so commonplace that people tend to forget that they haven’t always been around.
The fact is, online degree programs have only began to flourish in the last fifteen years or so.
Dr. John Sperling, a Cambridge-educated professor who later became an entrepreneur and is now a billionaire, was one of the pioneers in the field of online education who founded the University of Phoenix in 1976. It was a private for-profit college developed to serve the needs of non-traditional students.
Sperling realized that students fresh out of high school who had the financial support of their parents were already served by the regular colleges around, but what of those who were already holding jobs to support themselves or their families? Or those who already had degrees, worked full time, yet felt they still needed a career change? They would need classes that were scheduled differently than traditional schooling.
The University of Phoenix offered night classes and other educational solutions for working adults. And with the advent and eventually, the growing popularity of the internet and the advancement of its technology, Sperling discovered an added way of bringing education to individuals who needed to work and advance their careers at the same time.
Thus was born in 1989, the very first online campus in the world through the University of Phoenix. This online school produced its first batch of graduates in 1991.
Now, there are literally hundreds of thousands of students attending the University of Phoenix online, and they have programs for Licensed Vocational (or Practical) Nurse to Registered Nurse, LPN to BSN, RN to BSN, and many other healthcare classes.
And there are, of course, dozens of other online schools that offer many of these online nursing programs these days. But they owe a lot of their current success – and so do all online students – to the innovative vision of Dr. John Sperling.
Now that you’ve learned how online schools got their start, you might want to find out what online nursing programs are available and which online nursing schools offer these programs. Visit us at http://nursingschoolprograms.com to get this information and more!
