A recent report reveals online community schools are now getting the highest enrollment in online education. The news was very impressive since it said that online education is now getting noticed by many people – even in third world countries of the world.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Babson Survey Research Group reported an enrollment of nearly 3.5 million post secondary students in Philadelphia in just one online class alone. Of this, the community colleges have the highest increase of at least 18 percent. The report was made during the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges in Philadelphia. The report also said that schools with two-year course offerings have the highest enrollment online with a record of as high as 1.9 million students. There are also 171,000 students of the country enrolled on baccalaureate degree courses.

Fred Lokken, associate dean of a distance learning institutions at the Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) said the past enrollments were incredible as students were really welcoming online education as one of the best possible ways to be competitive as the world embraces education of the 21st century. The students according to the survey believed enrolling themselves online was the best option to become more knowledgeable and competitive about modern technology which cannot be found in other third world countries, as well as the trends in modern educational systems in which they want to be updated with.

With this development, the school of the 21st century like online education could be a lot of surprises to educators and school owners. The enrollment, many community colleges in Philadelphia are saying, is one reason to believe that the surge in enrollments can be attributed to the eagerness of many international students to try online education. They certainly believe that with this system they can learn many things about the world as well as many developments of the online course they like to enroll. This same surge of enrollment is also experienced in Massachusetts and other developed countries of the world. The respond of international students is amazing and many online schools do not exactly estimated it would happen that millions of students could actually enroll in just one online class.

THERE are indeed lots of opportunities in distance learning. Today is the start of a weeklong spring break in various high schools, colleges and universities here in the United States and aside from enjoying movies and camping; I think today is also a high time to benefit from distance learning. One will never run out of programs to take with distance learning from agriculture to medically-related courses to economics.

Of course, there are lots of benefits associated with distance learning. First of all, distance learning is not as costly as a conventional university boarding education. Tuition is stripped to the minimal because you don’t need to pay for laboratory fees yet you are accorded the same degree as your counterparts enrolled in traditional education. You do not need to worry that quality of education will be compromised because even celebrities are enrolled in this kind of schooling.

With the economy of the United States becoming volatile these days and with ordinary people experiencing possible home foreclosures and unemployment, one must be thrift even in basic needs like college education. Distance learning is one solution to that. And as I’ve stated earlier, there are lots of degrees to choose from. It’s not just the monetary side that makes distance learning viable. There are other factors to consider.

For example, there is what is called as the Room 203 kind of education. Room 203 was institutionalized by Erin Gruwell, a teacher from California. Room 203 teaches cultural tolerance and is already replicated in many high schools all over the country. But this method of teaching is now slowly beginning to be incorporated even in distance learning education not just in high schools but in colleges as well. For example, if you are taking a course in agronomy, you will be taught to respect Mexican laborers if you are bent on having a career in farming.

On the other hand, if you want to have a career in journalism, you can also take a distance education program for that. Never underestimate a distance education program just because it is not an online one. In online education, you cannot save anything unless because the system won’t allow you to save anything. All files you receive in your student account page are automatically deleted by the administrator once you have logged out for the day while in a traditional distance learning program, you can keep the hard copy files all you want.

I am a newspaper journalist by profession here in Salamanca for nine years already but I have long craved to become a film director. However, I don’t like to be studying in a Spanish film school and studying international relations at the University of Madrid is quite expensive for me so I opt to learn through distance learning. I have been doing distance learning since 2003. And believe me or not, it’s more than filmmaking that I have taken as a correspondence course.

Even if correspondence course is old-fashioned, it provides me more advantage than studying in an online course. I still keep the notes and handouts that they send to me through mail. In an online course, you cannot retrieve your handouts from the Internet because a) you cannot save them into your disk; and b) you cannot login to your student account once you have graduated. Therefore, I still opt for traditional distance education.

While working as a newspaper reporter here in Salamanca, I started taking up short courses through distant education. The first one that I took was TOEFL or Teaching of English as a Foreign Language. It took me roughly 18 months to finish the whole thing but my English was polished. Even though I’m working as a newspaper reporter here, I have also been hired by none other than AP as one of their stringers here because of my honed English skills.

Then I proceeded taking up filmmaking. The genre of filmmaking that I admire most is neo-realism but before I took up that kind of course, I first took the course on filmmaking around the world. I soon learned that there are lots of lucrative film industries around the world. In fact, I learned that whereas Hollywood in the United States makes $3 billion, the Bollywood industry in Mumbai makes a whooping $4 billion or $1 billion more. Wow, my inspiration has never been Spanish journalists in the most honest sense of the word. My inspiration and idol here in Spain is Antonio Banderas. I want to duplicate his feat. Aside from being a popular actor in the United States married to no less than my celebrity crush when I was still a teen, Melanie Griffith, Antonio Banderas owns a chain of restaurants here in Spain. And the food there is good because they adapt to a strict Mediterranean diet.

I also learned that the South Korean, the Japanese, the Mexican, the Taiwanese, the Malaysian and the Thai film industries are prolific as well. South Korea just made its biggest budgeted movie ever last year, D War, with a Hollywood cast that includes Jason Behr of Roswell fame. Hollywood has long copied the Japanese film industry. One Missed Call is an adaptation of a Japanese horror film. Cloverfield is J.J. Abrams’s version of Godzilla wrecking Manhattan. Ugly Betty is the Hollywood adaptation of a popular Mexican soap opera. Thai movies are mostly based from horror stories. I also learned that the Philippines is a frequent setting for South Korean, Taiwanese and South Korean films and music videos while Morocco is a frequent setting for Hollywood films.