With the help of the Internet, getting an education in a new field or to complete your degree is easier than ever. In fact, many individuals are completing their degrees while continuing to work. This is largely because companies may offset the cost of tuition but also because online education makes part-time education completion convenient and simple.

Individuals can find online degrees for just about every career imaginable. From more traditional degrees like psychology and English to more hands on types of training like education, online programs are available and utilized by a significant number of students. Online education also provides flexible learning schedules that allow you to learn at your own pace.

Online degrees are becoming more commonplace than ever and in many cases are of the same caliber as degrees from traditional institutions. This is largely due to the fact that most traditional institutions offer online programs and even some online degrees. As a result, domestic and international students continue to participate in online learning.

Online degrees used to be far and few between. Over time, online only institutions like the University of Phoenix and ITT have begun to attract more and more students who needed a flexible learning approach. With a broader set of offerings, more institutions providing online learning, and better internet connections, online learning is in full swing.

The best part of learning online is that anyone can now make the dream of education a reality. Gone are the days where you had to stop working and focus on education full time. That's not to say that while you are taking on online course you don't work hard. In fact, many online classes are more challenging than traditional ones.

But the fact remains. You can complete your degree or acquire a college degree from the comfort of your own home. A new degree can make you more competitive in the existing workforce or help you transition into a new career. Online schools are very focused on training and job placement, improving your chances of success.

Online schools also provide similar financial options as traditional institutions. Just as you would take out loans to attend a state or private college, online institutions offer similar financial aid packages. Although scholarship dollars are generally in shorter supply, private and Federal loans can help make your online education affordable.

If you want to complete your degree or learn a new trade, online education is a reality. At traditional institutions as well as wholly online schools, some of your learning will be done via the Internet. If you're not yet comfortable learning online, take a few web based courses or programs before you make the plunge into getting your degree online.

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Online education is very popular today, and a part of online education can be the CLEP test. For many reasons, people who have never been to college before would like to participate. With a tighter economy and job market, it pays to brush up on your skills and increase as many as possible, and so people choose online education for this purpose. Perhaps parents with children to take care of at home want to also get their college education, and with online classes it is possible to do both. Many people with full-time jobs want to advance in their careers, and the way to do that is by receiving more education. Online education makes it possible for you to study on weekends or after work. Those in the military services use online education as a way to pursue a college degree even when they are far away from a brick and mortar institution. One way that all of these people could move their online education forward is through taking CLEP exams.

A CLEP test is offered through a college or university, and it simply gives you the opportunity to earn college credit by passing a CLEP test in a specific study area. CLEP exams are available in thirty-four subject areas. CLEP exams are a perfect choice for people who have gained knowledge on the job, or through independent study, because you can sit for a CLEP, which usually takes about two hours, and earn the same number of credits as if you had sat through a quarter or semester-long college course. CLEP helps to save you both time and money in this way.

As a way to success in online education, if your goal is to earn a college degree, you will want to be enrolled in college. After this, check in with your college's academic counselors, who can tell you which CLEP exams are offered by the college, and when the CLEP test takes place.

Another way to succeed in online education is to plan ahead financially, to make sure you can finish the degree before your funding runs out. One excellent way to do this is through CLEP. CLEP exams only cost seventy dollars to take. If you compare that to the cost of credits at your institution of higher learning, you will see that it is much less expensive to earn some of your required credits through participation in CLEP.

Success in online education also comes through challenging yourself by exploring new academic areas. You do have to pass introductory courses in order to do that, however, so this is another way that a CLEP test can help you. By using CLEP for some of your intro courses, you can save both money and time, and spend your time on the courses that are more interesting to you.



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Many experts offer online learning programmes, either free or for a charge. A large percentage of these programmes comes in audio or video format. Let's break the myth about audio and video being the ideal learning media.

It is certainly true that different people learn best in different ways. For one, the ideal way might be hearing, for the other, seeing. In fact, the best way is through as many senses as possible, feeling being one of them - in this connection of course meaning writing things down.

If, however, we are talking about online learning or e-learning, as it is sometimes called, audio or video formats may not be the ideal. For a variety of reasons, text is preferable. Let's examine why.

Text saves valuable time

When you are listening to people speaking, you are forced to progress at the speed their speech dictates. Moreover, when people are speaking, they tend to use a lot of fillers, that is, umms, errs and wells which, while rendering the speech natural, slow down the speed of the discussion.

If your reading speed is normal or high, you can often read a page much faster than listen to the same text in spoken form.

A case in point: I recently came across a learning package distributed free on a company's site. It included three videos, each one an hour long. This means you would have to spend a quarter of your waking time just to go through those materials. If the content were given in text format, its "intake" would probably take just an hour. As a side note, I am not talking about a transcript, but the same content designed for text output in the first place.

Text is searchable

The point in learning materials is that you can go back to search for a particular subject you're interested in. This is totally impossible in audio or video programmes. Text also enables you to mark passages that are important to you, or create bookmarks for quick reference later on.

Text is compact

Particularly in view of e-learning, access to the materials is important. Audio and video files are usually very large in terms of megabytes. They are slow to download, prone to disturbances while downloading and quickly fill up your hard disk.

Text files, whether PDFs, DOCs or HTML, download in a fraction of the time required by audio or video files. Text materials are usually also better organised as providing content in written form requires a much more rigid pattern than audio or video. In other words, text is lower on filler than speech and a moving image.

Text doesn't cause accidents

A common argument for audio materials is that you can listen to them while commuting to work or on a car trip. True, but if the purpose of your listening is to learn something, it requires concentration. If you are focusing on understanding what is being said, it takes your concentration away from other, possibly more important things, such as following the traffic around you. Also, you cannot skip forward and backward to orientate in the surrounding material, as you can with text - a minuscule eye movement allows you to check what was said on the previous line or what is going to follow on the next line.

Text is portable

Text is easy to carry with you. Compared with audio or video, you don't need to carry a device to gain access to the material. A printout lets you scribble notes in the margins and highlight passages you find important. Your notes and highlights also turn the text into a sort of mind map, which helps quick recall when you are returning to the material for a second time.



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