A History Of Online Schools

Nursing students if you are pursuing this online LPN to RN degree or taking some online continuing education courses,

Have you ever stopped to reflect on how far education has come since the development of the World Wide Web?

Online courses are everywhere. We’ve started to take them for granted and it feels like they’ve been here forever.

The fact is, however, that online degree programs have only been around for about a decade and a half.

And one of the earliest innovators in online education is a Cambridge-educated professor and entrepreneur named Dr. John Sperling. Sperling, now a billionaire, founded the University of Phoenix in 1976. It was a private, for-profit college designed to meet the needs of non-traditional students. Sperling saw that regular colleges were already catering to the needs of all those fresh out of high school who were going to college with the help of their parents—but catering to the needs of professionals who might already have a degree but were aspiring to one Career change, or who had part-time jobs and needed vocational training with part-time lessons?

The University of Phoenix offered evening classes and other educational solutions for working adults. And as the internet became more popular and sophisticated, Sperling saw another way to make education accessible and convenient for people who were already working for a living but wanted something more.

And in 1989, one of the world’s first online campuses was created by the University of Phoenix; In 1991, the Online Campus completed its first year.

Now there are literally hundreds of thousands of students attending the University of Phoenix online and they have Licensed Professional (or Practical) Nurse programs, LPN to BSN, RN to BSN and many other health courses.

And of course there are dozens of other online schools that offer many of these online nursing programs these days. But they owe much of their current success – and that goes for all online students – to the innovative vision of Dr. John Sperling.

Thanks to Ruby Nicholson