e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: IPEDS

  • New IPEDS Data: Profile of online education in US / Fall 2012

    Last week I mentioned how the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) are now providing preliminary data for the Fall 2012 term that for the first time includes online education. Let’s look at a profile of online education in the US for degree-granting colleges and university, broken out by sector and undergrad / grad  degrees.

    IPEDS tracks information now about students taking exclusively distance education courses, students taking some but not all distance education courses, and students not taking any distance education courses. Please note the following:

    • I am using the terminology “online courses” rather than “distance education”. For the most part these terms are interchangeable, but they are not equivalent as “distance education” can include courses delivered by a medium other than the Internet (e.g. correspondence course). Part of the reason I stick with “online course” is that there is a growing use case where students local to a campus choose to take a course online, which is not really at a distance.

    Here is the new IPEDS data for undergraduate and graduate students and courses:

    Undergrad by sector

    (more…)

  • New IPEDS Data: Top 20 online US institutions by sector

    Update: The original version had incorrect totals for total enrollment including non-online students. I have removed those columns until I can verify that data. I apologize for the mistake and any confusion.

    The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. At long last they have started to include data fields for online education (technically distance education, the vast majority of which is online) starting with the preliminary data released through Fall 2012 term. Despite all of the talk about data and measuring online programs, we can only now start to get official information from a central source rather than relying on surveys or institutional data.

    As an example, let’s look at the top 20 online programs (in terms of total number of students taking at least one online course) for various sectors. Some notes on the data:

    • I have combined the categories ‘students exclusively taking distance education courses’ and ‘students taking some but not all courses as distance education’ into ‘total students taking online courses’.
    • IPEDS tracks data based on the accredited body, which can differ for systems. For example, the University of Phoenix puts all of their online students into the Online Campus while DeVry, Kaplan and Heald assign their online students a home campus. I manually added the DeVry, Kaplan and Heald totals, but I’m sure there are other examples where the data should be combined.
    • I have not been able to set up WordPress to both show these tables in a usable format while also allowing copy / paste / sort, so for now these are images.

    Public 2-Year Institutions – Fall 2012 (more…)