This year, after a two-year long-distance course, Mr. Meles received a master's in business administration from the Open University in London, England's biggest long-distance learning college.
Platforms like StraighterLine have long offered online distance learning courses for college credit (ACE approved, by the way), but Coursera is the first among the fast-growing congregation of MOOC platforms to receive accreditation.
While this volume will be of significant interest to distance learning universities and colleges, it will also be a valuable resource to traditional Higher Education Institutions, who are increasingly searching for innovative ways to reach and teach their students.
Student Melba is a regular customer at the centre, doing a distance learning course at a college in Gaborone.
It recently paid nearly $500 million to acquire eCollege, a United States company that supplies distance learning programs to commercial colleges.
Her progress is evaluated by a college prep "distance learning" school called Laurel Springs, from which she has always gotten straight A's.
All pre-service interviewees were full-time on-campus students, while all upgrading interviewees were studying on a distance learning basis, reporting to the college for a few weeks to attend introduction to modules or to sit exams.
Obscured by all this entrepreneurial activity lies a still more fundamental issue: As distance learning enterprises start competing with colleges and universities for students, tuition and faculty, will they not also progressively marginalize "brick and mortar" institutions, perhaps even rendering them obsolete?
In addition, the CPE was to oversee the formation of a "Commonwealth Virtual University" that would serve as a clearinghouse for all the distance learning opportunities offered by the colleges and universities of Kentucky.
Prizes were also awarded to the State of Ohio for its commitment to a global vision and system-wide international focus, and to the Reischauer Scholars Program, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), a college-level distance learning course aimed at high school students who don't have access to international education.
