Virtual Classrooms

The nonprofit Education Design Lab's Community College Growth Engine gives community colleges a blueprint and resources to create short, stackable, workforce-oriented educational programs co-designed with employers.

Coinciding with an explosion of AI in the health care industry, higher education programs like the college of nursing at the University of Dayton and Wright State University are using tech to modernize their courses.

Intended to be flexible for students with social anxieties or full-time jobs, a district-run virtual school in North Dakota meets with every student family before enrollment to assess if online learning is right for them.

Cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania spend more money educating students than traditional schools — after removing the costs of maintaining buildings and transporting students.

As of last year, Texas had 24 full-time, public virtual schools in operation serving nearly 62,200 students. In 2014, the state had only a few virtual schools and less than 5,000 students in them.

Some critics of Pennsylvania cyber charters overstate how cheaply they can operate, while advocates overlook how much they receive for special-ed students and how much less they spend on buildings and transportation.

Through an agreement with the private online institution Western Governors University, the Community Colleges of Appalachia will soon offer competency-based degree and certification programs online.

Chama Valley Independent and Santa Rosa Consolidated school districts will work with the online learning company Stride to run a statewide, career-focused online school that launched in 2020.

Illinois Tech and St. Cloud State have partnered with Risepoint to meet prospective students where they are and provide online degree programs in fields such as business analytics, finance and project management.

Facing staffing shortfalls and unable to renew contracts of many teachers who have been on emergency permits for multiple years, a school board in Indiana approved a one-year agreement for 41 virtual instructors.

Fresno Unified School District had only 40 students enrolled in its online eLearn Academy before 2020. Now, its rebranded Farber School of Online Learning has become one of the largest online programs in California.

North Park University and the University of Illinois Springfield are expanding their workforce-focused virtual offerings, consistent with a trend in higher education to fill jobs by meeting students where they are.

A new consortium of four historically Black colleges and universities offers a variety of programs virtually. The new portal includes 23 graduate and undergraduate degree programs, as well as 35 certifications.

University System of Maryland students will have free access to Google Career Certificates in cybersecurity, data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management and UX design.

If Pennsylvania caps cyber charter school tuition at $8,000 for the 2025-26 school year, school districts such as Allentown and Parkland might save between $1 million and $4 million in reallocated state funds.

Citing workforce demand for professionals in these fields, as well as the importance of flexibility for students, the university will offer new online degrees with focuses including cybersecurity and business analytics.

A proposed new law would cap the amount Pennsylvania's cyber charter schools receive at $8,000 per student, potentially redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars from those schools to traditional public schools.

At the University of Minnesota, medical school students have been using a virtual reality experience to understand the perspective of a woman dealing with the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s.