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Featured Articles on OnlineEducation.com

As part of an ongoing commitment to provide students with clear and comprehensive guidance on online education and degree programs, OnlineEducation.com offers a broad range of informational resources on relevant topics in the field of higher education. These articles are meant to complement our rigorous research and reporting on specific online degrees, on trends in online learning, and on careers in fields linked to particular academic programs. The features section includes general interest stories, in-depth reports, and practical guides that delve into a wide array of subject areas, extending beyond online education, and reaching out into the larger world of knowledge and scholarship.

OpenAI’s New ChatGPT Edu for Universities: Will Students Benefit?

In May 2024, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a new ChatGPT version designed for colleges and universities that would like to provide artificial intelligence capabilities for their students, faculty, staff, and researchers. Following the company’s early 2024 deal with Arizona State University, the new platform amounts to another one of the company’s first forays into the higher education marketplace.

Overwhelming Online Course Demand Reshapes Community Colleges in California

A recent feature published by the Los Angeles Times demonstrates how the demand for online courses is transforming significant portions of the higher education landscape across the United States: “The demand for virtual classes represents a dramatic shift in how instruction is delivered in one of the nation’s largest systems of public higher education,” writes

Performance-based Admissions: Online Ed’s Most Disruptive Trend in Decades

Imagine that the entire process of enrolling in a university’s degree program only required 30 minutes, from start to finish—from a student’s typing their name into an online form to downloading their first lesson’s coursework.

Preparing for a Lucrative Career: Online STEM Education

Many traditional universities have created online versions of their STEM programs, enabling interested students to learn at their own speed, with some flexibility of schedule. View a list of STEM careers with positive employment outlooks and examples of online programs training professionals to meet the forecast demand.

Privacy Concerns in the Age of Expanding Online Education

A robust federal privacy legislation should be a floor, not a ceiling. The U.S. is one of the only democracies—and the only member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—without a federal data protection agency.

Public Confidence in Online College Programs Continues to Improve: Survey

The American public now expresses substantially more confidence in online college degrees than in 2017, according to a new poll released in November 2023. More than four in five adults—84 percent—reported they now believe employers are more accepting of online degrees than during the pre-2020 era. Compared with six years ago, almost three-quarters of the sample said online education provides a “more reputable” means of obtaining a degree.

Reimagining Girls’ Education: Ways to Keep Girls Learning in Humanitarian Emergency Situations

In August 2021, the Taliban took the capital of Afghanistan, and with it many opportunities for girls’ and women’s education. Over three months later, Afghan girls are still stuck at home, waiting for the Taliban plan to re-enter schools, while boys have since been allowed to return to their classes.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Apprenticeships

Companies are rethinking their approaches to apprenticeships for tech fields. Find out how some of these innovative educational models are being built.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Coding Boot Camps

Learn about how coding boot camps operate, what they teach, and why the demand for software developers will continue to grow.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Employer-Led Approaches to Closing the Skills Gap

The rapid evolution of work due to technology, innovation, and globalization has had profound effects on the labor market, but educational systems have not been able to keep up. As a result, many young professionals feel ill-equipped to enter the workforce.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: New Collar Jobs

By 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be two million vacant American tech positions. Given the rapid advancement of technology in the workplace, jobs will require an even more diverse mix of traditional skills and computer proficiency.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Public-Private Partnerships

The growing interest in public-private partnerships has been encouraged, in part, by governmental policies being put into effect. These are policies that propel reskilling and new collar job initiatives, and help prepare high school students for immersion in the new collar economy

Reskilling for Tomorrow: The Nonprofit Per Scholas Partners with Tech Companies

Learn about the innovative training nonprofit Per Scholas and how they support reskilling efforts in the American tech industry.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: The Reskilling Gender Gap

Women make up only 13 percent of engineers in the U.S. One of the few areas in STEM that they do outnumber men is in mathematics. But the average total earning potential of a statistician, math teacher, or professor is closer to the starting salary of a civil or mechanical engineer. This pattern is not confined within healthcare and STEM. It’s also observable in professions like sales, real estate, administration, and management, among others.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Who Should Pay for Workers to Upskill?

Learn about trends in employer-led upskilling, reskilling, and how the face of the job market has changed with technology.

Social Media Dos and Don’ts for College Students

Social media activity can impact the lives of college students with short- and long-term effects; online personas affect not only a person’s immediate circumstances, but also one’s future ability to secure a mortgage or job.

Social Work Month 2023: An Expert’s Advocacy Guide

Social workers are a vital part of our society, providing vital services to individuals, families, and communities. They support those facing poverty, homelessness, abuse, and neglect and assist people facing various other issues. Social workers also advocate for their client’s rights and interests in the political arena by working with local, state, and federal government bodies.

Socially Connected Professors on Twitter

Platforms like Twitter allow users to communicate with others beyond their direct connections. This sort of access allows even the most underserved student to connect with professors from schools like MIT and Harvard. This article explores the top twenty-three socially connected professors on Twitter.

Staying Competitive: How to Upgrade Your Employability Online

There are myriad professional training and certification courses available online, many for free. Professional certification can be one of the most effective ways to improve your employability and ensure career growth in the long-term.

Strategies for Winning Scholarships

As higher education costs continue to rise, scholarships are becoming increasingly important for many university students, especially those who want to minimize or avoid student loans. However, these days, winning scholarships can seem like a daunting challenge.

Strategy Guide: A Playbook for Online Student Success

During the past two decades, online education has democratized access to learning, specifically with respect to geography and time. By illustration, a farmer in the American heartland may be hundreds of miles from the nearest university, but she can still enroll in an MBA program; or a nurse may have a demanding work schedule at a local clinic, but he can simultaneously pursue his graduate degree in nursing at an institution located six states away.

Student Debt Relief: How “Plan B” Relies on This 1965 Law

In late June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden Administration’s student debt relief plan, holding that the program lacked authorization under the 2003 HEROES Act. Biden’s program would have wiped out $430 billion of debt by canceling at least $10,000 of federal student loans for qualified borrowers with incomes under $125,000 per year. It didn’t take long for the President to unveil a new strategy at a White House press conference only hours after the ruling.

Student Guide to Phishing Attacks

Hackers and scammers use a continually evolving set of tools to break through computer security. One of the primary modes to get access is phishing, or sending fake emails from speciously reputable companies in hopes of gaining access to credit card numbers, bank accounts, or other sensitive information. This guide helps students identify and respond to phishing attacks.

Student Preference for Online Learning Jumps 222 Percent In Only Two Years

Educause’s October 2022 survey of 820 university undergraduates across America found that student preferences for online learning had soared by a sensational 222 percent since before the pandemic. But oddly enough, that newsworthy figure appears nowhere within the language of the report.

The $335,000 ChatGPT Skill Savvy Online Students Need to Know

Anyone who interacts with an AI chatbot to elicit desired responses from that system engages in their own form of prompt engineering, which some have described as the most valuable computer skill in history. As shown in this guide, some prompts are more effective than others. Online students who can optimize their prompts by applying the principles, best practices, and tips we suggest will likely obtain more useful results from AI systems in less time.